Law Commons^™

Judicial Ethics And Identity, Charles Gardner Geyh

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article seeks to untangle a cluster of controversies and conundrums at the epicenter of the judiciary’s role in American government, where a judge’s identity as a person and role as a judge intersect. Part I synthesizes the traditional ethics schema, which proceeds from the premise that good judges decide cases on the basis of facts and law, unsullied by the extralegal influences of identity that make judges who they are as human beings. Part II discusses the empirical evidence, and the extent to which identity influences judicial decision- making in ways that contradict tenets of the traditional schema. Part …

Etika Hakim Dalam Kehidupan Sehari-Hari: Penggunaan Media Sosial Oleh Hakim Di Indonesia, Farrel Eden Surbakti

Jurnal Konstitusi & Demokrasi

With the development of technology which is rapidly making the community easier in communicating and searching for information such as social media. Social media itself has different characteristics and types and has advantages and disadvantages. The use of social media does not look at a person's status such as age, gender, religion, or profession. At this time many judges use social media to communicate and search for information and interact with the community. Judges in carrying out their obligations as bearers of the legal profession are framed by an institutional institution that is formulated into a code of ethics for …

Understanding Racial Disparate Treatment Of Juvenile Interpersonal Violent Offenders In The Juvenile Justice System Using Focal Concerns Theory., Suzanne Overstreet

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Disproportionate minority contact (DMC) is a salient issue that has been found at every stage of the decision-making process in the juvenile justice system (Hawkins & Kempf-Leonard, 2005; Kempf-Leonard, 2007; Bishop, 2005; Leiber, Bishop, & Chamlin, 2010; Leiber & Stairs, 1999). Existing research indicates that DMC influences adjudication for drug, property, and personal crimes (Fergusson, Horwood, & Swain-Campbell, 2003; Frazier, Bishop, & Henretta, 1992; Leiber & Jamieson, 1995; Leiber & Mack, 2003; Hawkins & Kempf-Leonard, 2005; Leiber, 2015). Because intimate partner violence (IPV) is a major public health problem and global concern (Djamba & Kimuna, 2008; Goo & Harlow, 2012; …

Judges And Mass Incarceration, Carissa Byrne Hessick

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

It seems to have fallen out of fashion to talk about judges as a source of criminal justice reform. Instead, the academic literature now focuses on the role that prosecutors and legislatures have played in mass incarceration. But judges have also played an important role in the phenomenon that has come to be known as mass incarceration. Perhaps more importantly, there are things that judges could do to help reverse that trend.

Judges will sometimes say our system is too harsh. But, in the same breath they tell us the decision to create such a system and the decision to …

Managing Mass Tort Class Actions: Judicial Politics And Rulemaking In Three Acts, Toby S. Goldbach

University of Miami Law Review

Judges take part in a variety of non-adjudicative tasks that shape the structure of litigation. In addition to their managerial functions, judges sit as administrative heads of court. They participate in civil justice reform projects and develop procedures for criminal and civil trials. What norms and principles ought to guide judges in this other work? In their casework we expect judges to be neutral and fair, setting aside politics and rationally following the law. Indeed, this article will demonstrate that there is good reason to insist on these qualities in both judges’ case-related and broader court-related reform activities. To test …

2022 Esther Clark Moot Court Competition Finals, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Circuit Personalities, Allison Orr Larsen, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

The U.S. Courts of Appeals do not behave as one; they have developed circuit-specific practices that are passed down from one generation of judges to the next. These different norms and traditions (some written down, others not) exist on a variety of levels: rules governing oral argument and the publishing of opinions, en banc practices, social customs, case discussion norms, law clerk dynamics, and even selfimposed circuit nicknames. In this Article, we describe these varying “circuit personalities” and then argue that they are necessary to the very survival of the federal courts of appeals. Circuit-specific norms and traditions foster collegiality …

Race And Regulation Podcast Episode 10 - Administrative Law's Racial Blind Spot, Daniel E. Ho

Penn Program on Regulation Podcasts

Administrative law has a racial blind spot, argues Daniel E. Ho of Stanford Law School. Judges have long set aside agency actions when government officials have failed to consider the differential impacts of their policy decisions on subgroups of business owners, park visitors, and even animals—but not when they have failed to consider differential impacts based on race or ethnicity. In this episode, Professor Ho traces how civil rights and administrative law have diverged over the past fifty years, as U.S. court decisions have removed issues of racial discrimination from administrative law’s purview. He concludes by discussing reforms that could …

Should I Stay Or Should I Go? South Carolina's Nonlawyer Judges, Christel Purvis

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Judges, Judging And Otherwise: Do We Ask Too Much Of State Court Judges - Or Not Enough?, Michael C. Pollack

Articles

Ask the average person to imagine what a judge does, and the answer will most likely be something right out of a courtroom from Law & Order — or Legally Blonde, Just Mercy, My Cousin Vinny, Kramer vs. Kramer, or any of the myriad law-themed movies and television shows. A judge is faced with a dispute brought by some parties and their lawyers and is charged with resolving it, whether it be a breach of contract, a tort action, a competing claim over property, a disagreement about the meaning of a statute, some accusation that someone …

Judged By The (Digital) Company You Keep: Maintaining Judicial Ethics In An Age Of Likes, Shares, And Follows, John Browning

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Just like lawyers, judicial use of social media can present ethical pitfalls. And while most scholarly attention has focused on either active social media conduct by judges (such as posting or tweeting) or on social media “friendships” between judges and others, this Article analyses the ethical dimensions of seemingly benign judicial conduct on social media platforms, such as following a third party or “liking,” sharing, or retweeting the online posts of others. Using real-world examples, this Article analyses how even such ostensibly benign conduct can create the appearance of impropriety and undermine public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of …

Think State Supreme Courts Will Save Abortion Rights? Think Again., Neal Devins

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Massachusetts Needs More Ex-Public Defenders As Judges, Sadiq Reza

Shorter Faculty Works

Four to one.

That is the ratio of former prosecutors to public defenders who sit on the seven-person Supreme Judicial Court, our highest state court.

On our 25-member Appeals Court, which sits one level below the SJC and is the final word in the vast majority of criminal cases, the count is worse: 16 to three. But two of those former public defenders also worked as prosecutors before reaching the bench; and two other appellate judges, while never formal prosecutors, worked in the Attorney General's Office (i.e., in other law enforcement roles).

This staggering imbalance of experience and outlook is …

Foreword, Stephen Wermiel

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

It is an honor and a pleasure to help the American UniversityLegislationandPolicy Brief carry on its fine tradition of scholarly inquiry into important issues facing the nation, the legislatures and the public policy arena. AULPB is an important forum within WCL for student authors to examine cutting edge, timely issues. It is also a focal point, beyond the bounds of the WCL campus, for authors to consider a broad range of pressing issues that combine law and policy questions.

School District Secession In Mobile County, Alabama: A Case Study Of Adaptive Discrimination And Threats To Multiracial Democracy, Sarah Asson, Erica Frankenberg

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Yahweh’S Benevolence Vs. Anat’S Malevolence: A Comparative Analysis Of Judges 4–5 And Col Ii 1–Col Iii 2, Michaela Misantone

Senior Honors Theses

The actions of ancient Near Eastern warrior gods are often depicted as acts of vengeance, greed, and brutality, serving selfish ambition and never-ending power struggles. These gods and their warfare ethic dominated the worldview of the ancient world in which the events of the Old Testament took place. The actions of the Hebrew God are often included, even emphasized, in discussions of ancient divine warfare today. There are supposed similarities between the actions of war gods like Anat from the Ugaritic pantheon and those of Yahweh from ancient Israel. Unfortunately, this has led to the present-day belief that the God …

The Ghost Of John Hart Ely, Ryan D. Doerfler, Samuel Moyn

Vanderbilt Law Review

The ghost of John Hart Ely haunts the American liberal constitutional imagination. Despite the failure long ago of any progressive constitutional vision in an increasingly conservative Supreme Court, Ely’s conjectures about the superiority of judges relative to legislatures in the protection of minorities and the policing of the democratic process remain second nature. Indeed, they have been credible enough among liberals to underwrite an anxious or even hostile attitude toward judicial reform. In order to exorcise Ely’s ghost and lay it to rest, this Article challenges his twin conjectures. First, the Article argues that there is little historical and no …

What’S The Deference? Interpreting The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines After Kisor, Liam Murphy

Vanderbilt Law Review

For more than three decades, the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines have constrained the punishment doled out by federal judges, limiting discretion that was once nearly unlimited and bringing standardization to the penological decisionmaking process. For twice as long, the Supreme Court has constrained judges in a different way—by requiring that administrative agencies receive deference when they interpret the meaning of their own regulations. At the convergence of these two domains sits “commentary,” or interpretive notes the U.S. Sentencing Commission appends to the otherwise congressionally approved Guidelines. In Stinson v. United States, the Court made clear that commentary should be reviewed and …

Law School News: Meet The Rbg Essay Contest Winners! 03-22-2022, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Remembrance, Group Gripes, And Legal Frictions: Rule Of Law Or Awful Lore?, Aviam Soifer

Touro Law Review

The rise of groups that honor and seek to advance their particular imagined or real pasts has seemed increasingly dangerous in the years since Bob Cover’s death in 1986. This essay briefly examines the challenges such groups pose to Bob’s hope, and even his faith, that law and legal procedure could be bridges to more just worlds. It may not be ours to finish consideration of how to distinguish the Rule of Law from Awful Lore—both composed of exactly the same letters—but we should continue that task, with remembrance, even within our troubled world.

Nomos And Nation: On Nation In An Age Of “Populism”, John Valery White

Touro Law Review

Robert Cover’s Nomos and Narrative points to the need to recognize a second, novel dimension for understanding rights. His concept of nomos, applied to competing notions of nation in pluralistic societies, suggests that the current dimension for understanding rights, which conceives of them fundamentally as protections for the individual against the state, is too narrow. Rather a second dimension, understanding rights of individuals against the nation, and aimed at ensuring individuals’ ability to participate in the development of an idea of nation, is necessary to avoid “a total crushing of the jurisgenerative character” of nomoi by the state, or by …

Filling Lower Court Vacancies In Congress' Lame Duck Session, Carl Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

In this midterm election year of 2022, the nation’s divided political parties are in a battle royale to win the exceedingly close Senate majority. One important explanation for the fight is that the party which assumes the next Senate majority will necessarily have considerable power to affect the confirmation of federal judges. For example, during Donald Trump’s presidency, Republicans controlled the Senate; therefore, the chief executive and the upper chamber proposed and confirmed fifty-four accomplished,
extremely conservative, young appeals court, and 174 district court, jurists. The Republican White House and Senate majority confirmed judges by rejecting or deemphasizing the rules …

Robert Cover And Critical Race Theory, Gabriel J. Chin

Touro Law Review

Professor Robert Cover is recognized as a leading scholar of law and literature; decades after his untimely passing, his works continue to be widely cited. Because of his interest in narrative, he is credited as a contributor to the development of Critical Race Theory. This essay proposes that in addition to narrative, some of his other, substantive works about race were also important precursors to a more sophisticated appreciation of U.S. race relations. Professor Cover is also entitled to credit for understanding racism as a pervasive system, and one which went beyond Black and White.

Bridges Of Law, Ideology, And Commitment, Steven L. Winter

Touro Law Review

Law has a distinctive temporal structure—an ontology—that defines it as a social institution. Law knits together past, present, purpose, and projected future into a demand for action. Robert Cover captures this dynamic in his metaphor of law as a bridge to an imagined future. Law’s orientation to the future necessarily poses the question of commitment or complicity. For law can shape the future only when people act to make it real. Cover’s bridge metaphor provides a lens through which to explore the complexities of law’s ontology and the pathologies that arise from its neglect or misuse. A bridge carries us …

Robert Cover’S Call To Teaching And Journey To Judaism, Randy Lee

Touro Law Review

As a teacher, Yale law professor Robert Cover never “dazzled,” “zinged,” nor “entertained”; he just engaged his students on a journey to the real and true that ultimately invited them to become the best version of themselves. As a Jew, Professor Cover wore an oversized skull cap, covered himself in a multicolored prayer shawl, and studied from a huge Talmud. He also, however, made everyone around him feel valued and welcomed and swept them up in a faith Professor Cover saw as wondrous and life-changing. This essay considers what the life of Robert Cover can teach us about what it …

How The First Paragraph Of Violence And The Word Killed The Law As Literature Movement, Brett G. Scharffs

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Institutional Mismatch Of State Civil Courts, Colleen F. Shanahan, Jessica K. Steinberg, Alyx Mark, Anna E. Carpenter

Faculty Scholarship

State civil courts are central institutions in American democracy. Though designed for dispute resolution, these courts function as emergency rooms for social needs in the face of the failure of the legislative and executive branches to disrupt or mitigate inequality. We reconsider national case data to analyze the presence of social needs in state civil cases. We then use original data from courtroom observation and interviews to theorize how state civil courts grapple with the mismatch between the social needs people bring to these courts and their institutional design. This institutional mismatch leads to two roles of state civil courts …

Cognitive Decline And The Workplace, Sharona Hoffman

Faculty Publications

Cognitive decline will increasingly become a workplace concern because of three intersecting trends. First, the American population is aging. In 2019, 16.5 percent of the population, or fifty-four million people, were age 65 and over, and the number is expected to increase to seventy-eight million by 2025. Dementia is not uncommon among older adults, and by the age of eighty-five, between twenty-five and fifty percent of individuals suffer from this condition. Second, individuals are postponing retirement and prolonging their working lives. For example, about a quarter of physicians are over sixty-five, as are fifteen percent of attorneys. The average age …

Court Review: The Journal Of The American Judges Association, Vol. 58, No. 4, Eve M. Brank, David Dreyer, David Prince

Court Review: The Journal of the American Judges Association

Interview

Stresses of the Job in Modern Times: Coaching Resilience in Judges, Peer-to-Peer, an Interview with Jan Bouch; David Prince

Articles

Prosecutorial Misconduct: Assessment of Perspectives from the Bench, Saul M. Kassin, Stephanie A. Cardenas, Vanessa Meterko, and Faith Barksdale

Limiting Access to Remedies: Select Criminal Law and Procedure Cases from the Supreme Court’s 2021-22 Term, Eve Brensike Primus and Justin Hill

You Can Change Judging and Justice, Thomas R. French

The Online Courtroom: Leveraging Remote Technology in Litigation American Bar Association, Tort, Trial, and Insurance Practice Section, J. Gary Hastings

Departments

Editor’s Note, Eve Brank, David Dreyer, and David …

A Tale Of Two Civil Procedures, Pamela K. Bookman, Colleen F. Shanahan

Faculty Scholarship

In the United States, there are two kinds of courts: federal and state. Civil procedure classes and scholarship tend to focus on the federal, but refer to and make certain assumptions about state courts. While this dichotomy makes sense when discussing some issues, like federal subject matter jurisdiction, for many aspects of procedure this breakdown can be misleading. When understanding American civil justice, two different categories of courts are just as salient: those that routinely include lawyers, and those where lawyers are fundamentally absent.

This essay urges civil procedure teachers and scholars to think about our courts as “lawyered” courts—which …