Law Commons^™

On The Study Of Judicial Behaviors: Of Law, Politics, Science And Humility, Stephen B. Burbank

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In this paper, which was prepared to help set the stage at an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Indiana (Bloomington) in March, I first briefly review what I take to be the key events and developments in the history of the study of judicial behavior in legal scholarship, with attention to corresponding developments in political science. I identify obstacles to cooperation in the past – such as indifference, professional self-interest and methodological imperialism -- as well as precedents for cross-fertilization in the future. Second, drawing on extensive reading in the political science and legal literatures concerning judicial behavior, …

Choosing Justices: How Presidents Decide, Joel K. Goldstein

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Presidents play the critical role in determining who will serve as justices on the Supreme Court and their decisions inevitably influence constitutional doctrine and judicial behavior long after their terms have ended. Notwithstanding the impact of these selections, scholars have focused relatively little attention on how presidents decide who to nominate. This article contributes to the literature in the area by advancing three arguments. First, it adopts an intermediate course between the works which tend to treat the subject historically without identifying recurring patterns and those which try to reduce the process to empirical formulas which inevitably obscure considerations shaping …

Leading The Court: Studies In Influence As Chief Justice, Joel K. Goldstein

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Chief Justice Roberts has now completed five years of what is likely to be a lengthy tenure in the Court’s center seat. The quality of his institutional leadership, like that of his predecessors, resists confident contemporary assessment to a unique degree among principal offices of American government inasmuch as much of what a Chief Justice does is invisible to all but a relatively few observers, most or all of whom generally remain discreetly silent about such matters. Nonetheless, history counsels that the professional and interpersonal skill which a Chief Justice displays may substantially affect the Supreme Court and the quality …

The Pragmatic Incrementalism Of Common Law Intellectual Property, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

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‘Common law intellectual property’ refers to a set of judge-made legal regimes that create exclusionary entitlements in different kinds of intangibles. Principally the creation of courts, many of these regimes are older than their statutory counterparts and continue to co-exist with them. Surprisingly though, intellectual property scholarship has paid scant attention to the nuanced law-making mechanisms and techniques that these regimes employ to navigate through several of intellectual property law’s substantive and structural problems. Common law intellectual property regimes employ a process of rule development that this Article calls ‘pragmatic incrementalism’. It involves the use of pragmatic and minimalist techniques …

Sex Representation On The Bench: Legitimacy And International Criminal Courts, Nienke Grossman

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This essay examines the relationship between legitimacy and the presence of both male and female judges on international criminal court benches. It argues that sex representation – an approximate reflection of the ratio of the sexes in the general population – on the bench is an important contributor to legitimacy of international criminal courts. First, it proposes that sex representation affects normative legitimacy because men and women bring different perspectives to judging. Consequently, without both sexes, adjudication is inherently biased. Second, even if one rejects the proposition that men and women "think differently", sex representation affects sociological legitimacy because sex …

Proposal For Drug Offender Stationhouse Deferral Program, Daniel T. Coyne

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No abstract provided.

Restructuring Proposal For The Criminal Division Of The Circuit Court Of Cook County, Daniel T. Coyne

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No abstract provided.

Regulatory Adjudication, Marcia L. Mccormick

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Calls for increased regulation are flying fast and furious these days. We use regulation in the United States to prevent harm that various kinds of activities might cause and also to create positive external benefits that those activities could yield, but might not without incentives. Most regulatory programs in the United States provide a blend of measures designed to create these positive external benefits, promote good practices in the industry, prevent harms, and provide those harmed with remedies. At a time in which we contemplate new ways to regulate to deal with the crises of the day and prevent the …

Child Custody Evaluations: Review Of The Literature And Annotated Bibliography, Barbara A. Babb, Gloria Danziger, Judith D. Moran, J. Mason Weeda, William A. Mack

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This review of custody evaluation literature encompasses a number of perspectives gleaned from the following: practitioners who perform the evaluations; the professional organizations that recognize the necessity to establish performance standards for practitioners; and the judges who depend on the findings and recommendations in the evaluations to assist with difficult custody decisions.

General agreement exists among practitioners about the components of a comprehensive evaluation (interviews of adults responsible for child care, interviews of children and their preferences, life histories, observations, psychological testing, document review, and collateral source data), though little consensus exists about the details of performance concerning a given …

Toward A Revised 4.2 No-Contact Rule, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

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No abstract provided.

Time Out, Stephen B. Burbank

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No abstract provided.

Setting The Size Of The Supreme Court, F. Andrew Hessick, Samuel P. Jordan

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As with any institutional feature, the size of the Supreme Court should be informed by a definition of functional goals. This article describes how the current size of the Supreme Court is largely untethered from any such definition, and it begins the process of understanding how size and Court performance might interact. To do so, it identifies a list of institutional goals for the Supreme Court and explores how changing the size of the Court promotes or obstructs the attainment of those goals. Given that the Court's institutional goals are numerous and occasionally in tension, there is no definitive answer …

Straw, Sand, And Sophistry, Stephen B. Burbank

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No abstract provided.

Do Cognitive Biases Affect Adjudication?: A Study Of Labor Arbitrators (With Monica Biernat), Martin H. Malin, Monica Biernat

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Labor arbitrators were presented with four cases to decide, each involving a challenge to discipline or discharge of an employee resulting from a work-family conflict. Arbitrators were randomly given versions of the cases in which the gender and one other characteristivc of the employee were varied. The results showed little evidence of direct gender bias in decision-making but did reflect bias against single parents and employees with eldercare, as opposed to childcare, responsibilities. Implications for other adjudicators, including judges, jurors and administrative agency officials are discussed.

Temporary Accidents?, Elizabeth Magill

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Review of Steven P. Croley, Regulation and Public Interests: The Possibility of Good Regulatory Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Interpreting The Fourteenth Amendment: Two Don'ts And Three Dos, Garrett Epps

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A sophisticated reading of the legislative record of the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment can provide courts and scholars with some general interpretive principles to guide their application of the Amendment to current legal problems. The author argues that two common legal conceptions about the Amendment are, in fact, misconceptions. The first is that the Amendment was chiefly concerned with the immediate situation of freed slaves in the former slave states. Instead, he argues, the legislative record suggests that the framers were broadly concerned with the rights not only of freed slaves but also of foreign-born immigrants in the North …

Fashioning Entitlements: A Comparative Law And Economic Analysis Of The Judicial Role In Environmental Centralization In The U.S. And Europe, Jason S. Johnston, Michael G. Faure

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This paper identifies and evaluates, from an economic point of view, the role of the judiciary the steady shift of environmental regulatory authority to higher, more centralized levels of government in both the U.S. and Europe. We supply both a positive analysis of how the decisions made by judges have affected the incentives of both private and public actors to pollute the natural environment, and normative answers to the question of whether judges have acted so as to create incentives that move levels of pollution in an efficient direction, toward their optimal, cost-minimizing (or net-benefit-maximizing) levels. Highlights of the analysis …

A Report On Chicago's Felony Courts: Executive Summary (Chicago Appleseed Fund For Justice Criminal Justice Project, December 2007) (Member Of Advisory Board), Daniel T. Coyne

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No abstract provided.

A Report On Chicago's Felony Courts (Chicago Appleseed Fund For Justice Criminal Justice Project, December 2007) (Member Of Advisory Board)., Daniel T. Coyne

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No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Judicial Expedience On Attorney Fees In Class Actions, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick

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Judges facing exogenous constraints on their pecuniary income have an incentive to reduce their workload to increase their private welfare. In the face of an increase in caseload, this incentive will induce judges to attempt to terminate some cases more rapidly. In class action cases, failing to grant an attorney fee request will delay termination. This conflict is likely to lead judges to authorize higher fees as court congestion increases. Using two data sets of class action settlements, we show that attorney fees are significantly and positively related to the congestion level of the court hearing the case.

Docketology, District Courts And Doctrine, David A. Hoffman, Alan J. Izenman, Jeffrey Lidicker

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Empirical legal scholars have traditionally modeled trial court judicial opinion writing by assuming that judges act rationally, seeking to maximize their influence by writing opinions in politically important cases. Support for this hypothesis has reviewed published trial court opinions, finding that civil rights and other "hot" topics are more likely to be explained than purportedly ordinary legal problems involved in resolving social security and commercial law cases. This orthodoxy comforts consumers of legal opinions, because it suggests that they are largely representative of judicial work. To test such views, we collected data from a thousand cases in four different jurisdictions. …

Early Panel Announcement, Settlement And Adjudication, Samuel P. Jordan

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Federal appellate courts have significant discretion to set the internal policies that govern the appeals process, and they have used that discretion to institute policies designed to combat increasing caseloads. This Article takes a close look at one such policy: early announcement of panel composition in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. In stark contrast to every other circuit, the D.C. Circuit announces panel composition to litigants in civil appeals well in advance of oral argument, and it does so at least in part to encourage settlement and control the court's workload. This Article concludes that although there are indications …

Amicus Briefs, Kenneth Lasson

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No abstract provided.

Edward R. Becker: A Man In Full, Stephen B. Burbank

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No abstract provided.

Bringing Jury Instructions Into The Twenty-First Century, Nancy S. Marder

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No abstract provided.

Cyberjuries: A New Role As Online Mock Juries, Nancy S. Marder

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No abstract provided.

Rhetoric Of Disputes In The Courts, The Media, And The Legislature, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

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No abstract provided.

The Tuna Court: Law And Norms In The World's Premier Fish Market, Eric Feldman

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Legal scholars have long emphasized the corrosive impact of conflict on long-term commercial and interpersonal relationships. To minimize the negative consequences of such conflict, members of close-knit groups who anticipate future interactions create ways of resolving their disputes with reference to internal group norms rather than relying on state-mandated legal rules. From farmers in California’s Shasta County to jewelers in midtown Manhattan and neighbors in Sanders County, the literature describes people who create norms of conflict management that are faster and less expensive than relying on formal law, and lessen the harm that conflict causes to their relationships. This article …

The Equality Paradise: Paradoxes Of The Law's Power To Advance Equality, Marcia L. Mccormick

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This paper, written for Texas Wesleyan Law School's Gloucester Conference, ¿Too Pure an Air: Law and the Quest for Freedom, Justice, and Equality,¿ is a brief exploration of a broader project. Every civil rights movement must struggle with how to allocate scarce resources to accomplish the broadest change possible. This paper compares the legal and political strategies of the Black rights movement and the women's rights movement in the United States, comparing both the strategy choices and the results. These two movement followed essentially the same strategies. Where they have attained success and where each has failed demonstrates the limits …

The Medical Malpractice Debate: The Jury As Scapegoat (Symposium), Nancy S. Marder

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No abstract provided.