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Articles 1 - 30 of 34
Full-Text Articles in Courts
What Mcculloch V. Maryland Got Wrong: The Original Meaning Of 'Necessary' Is Not 'Useful', 'Convenient', Or 'Rational', Steven Calabresi, Gary S. Lawson, Elise Kostial
What Mcculloch V. Maryland Got Wrong: The Original Meaning Of 'Necessary' Is Not 'Useful', 'Convenient', Or 'Rational', Steven Calabresi, Gary S. Lawson, Elise Kostial
Faculty Scholarship
McCulloch v. Maryland, echoing Alexander Hamilton nearly thirty years earlier, claimed of the word “necessary” in the Necessary and Proper Clause: “If reference be had to its use, in the common affairs of the world, or in approved authors, we find that it frequently imports that one thing is convenient, or useful . . . to another.” Modern case law has translated that understanding into a rational-basis test that treats the issue of necessity as all but nonjusticiable; The Supreme Court has never found a congressional law unconstitutional on the ground that it was not “necessary . . . …
Judging Without A J.D., Sara Sternberg Greene, Kristen M. Renberg
Judging Without A J.D., Sara Sternberg Greene, Kristen M. Renberg
Faculty Scholarship
One of the most basic assumptions of our legal system is that when two parties face off in court, the case will be adjudicated before a judge who is trained in the law. This Essay begins by showing that, empirically, the assumption that most judges have legal training does not hold true for many low-level state courts. Using data we compiled from all fifty states and the District of Columbia, we find that thirty-two states allow at least some low-level state court judges to adjudicate without a law degree, and seventeen states do not require judges who adjudicate eviction cases …
“She Blinded Me With Science”: The Use Of Science Frames In Abortion Litigation Before The Supreme Court, Laura Moyer
“She Blinded Me With Science”: The Use Of Science Frames In Abortion Litigation Before The Supreme Court, Laura Moyer
Faculty Scholarship
While much of the work on amicus briefs focuses on whether such briefs affect Supreme Court outcomes or doctrine, much less is known about the content of these briefs, particularly how groups opt to frame issues as part of their litigation strategy. In this study, I leverage an approach to content analysis that has previously been used to analyze judicial opinions and use it to assess the frames used by amicus groups in a single policy area over four decades. Using an original dataset of amicus briefs filed in Supreme Court cases on the right to abortion, I test the …
Assessing President Obama’S Appointment Of Women To The Federal Appellate Courts, Laura Moyer
Assessing President Obama’S Appointment Of Women To The Federal Appellate Courts, Laura Moyer
Faculty Scholarship
A major legacy of the Obama presidency was the mark he left on the federal courts with respect to increasing judicial diversity. In particular, President Obama’s appointments of women to the federal judiciary exceeded all previous presidents in terms of both absolute numbers and as a share of all judges; he also appointed a record-setting number of women of color to the lower federal courts. In this Article, I take an intersectional approach to exploring variation in the professional backgrounds, qualifications, and Senate confirmation experiences of Obama’s female appeals court appointees, comparing them with George W. Bush and Bill Clinton …
Law Enforcement Organization Relationships With Prosecutors, Daniel C. Richman
Law Enforcement Organization Relationships With Prosecutors, Daniel C. Richman
Faculty Scholarship
Although police departments and prosecutor’s oces must closely collaborate, their organizational roles and networks, and the distinctive perspectives of their personnel, will inevitably and regularly lead to forceful dialogue and disruptive friction. Such friction can occasionally undermine thoughtful deliberation about public safety, the rule of law, and community values. Viewed more broadly, however, these interactions promote just such deliberation, which will become even healthier when the dialogue breaks out of the closed world of criminal justice bureaucracies and includes the public to which these bureaucracies are ultimately responsible. This chapter explores such organizational interactions and their value.
Theorizing The Judicialization Of International Relations, Karen J. Alter, Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Laurence R. Helfer
Theorizing The Judicialization Of International Relations, Karen J. Alter, Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Laurence R. Helfer
Faculty Scholarship
This article introduces a Thematic Section and theorizes the multiple ways that judicializing international relations shifts power away from national executives and legislatures toward litigants, judges, arbitrators, and other nonstate decision-makers. We identify two preconditions for judicialization to occur—(1) delegation to an adjudicatory body charged with applying designated legal rules, and (2) legal rights-claiming by actors who bring—or threaten to bring—a complaint to one or more of these bodies. We classify the adjudicatory bodies that do and do not contribute to judicializing international relations, including but not limited to international courts. We then explain how rights-claiming initiates a process for …
Opposition To Abortion, Then And Now: How Amicus Briefs Use Policy Frames In Abortion Litigation, Laura Moyer, Alyson Hendricks-Benton, Megan Balcom
Opposition To Abortion, Then And Now: How Amicus Briefs Use Policy Frames In Abortion Litigation, Laura Moyer, Alyson Hendricks-Benton, Megan Balcom
Faculty Scholarship
Early in the debate over abortion, opposition to the procedure was primarily described in terms that reflected moral concerns about the protection of “the unborn.” Indeed, much of the media coverage and public discourse describing opposition to abortion since the time of Roe characterizes the movement as focused on securing rights for all human beings from the moment of conception (Huff 2014, 39). However, interviews with activists and movement leaders suggest that antiabortion groups have employed an array of public outreach strategies over time. As seen above, the former director of the antiabortion group National Right to Life …
The Distinctive Role Of Justice Samuel Alito: From A Politics Of Restoration To A Politics Of Dissent, Neil S. Siegel
The Distinctive Role Of Justice Samuel Alito: From A Politics Of Restoration To A Politics Of Dissent, Neil S. Siegel
Faculty Scholarship
Justice Samuel Alito is regarded by both his champions and his critics as the most consistently conservative member of the current Supreme Court. Both groups seem to agree that he has become the most important conservative voice on the Court. Chief Justice John Roberts has a Court to lead; Justice Antonin Scalia and his particular brand of originalism have passed on; Justice Clarence Thomas is a stricter originalist and so writes opinions that other Justices do not join; and Justice Anthony Kennedy can be ideologically unreliable. Justice Alito, by contrast, is unburdened by the perceived responsibilities of being Chief Justice, …
Trailblazers And Those That Followed : Personal Experiences, Gender, And Judicial Empathy., Laura P. Moyer, Susan B. Haire
Trailblazers And Those That Followed : Personal Experiences, Gender, And Judicial Empathy., Laura P. Moyer, Susan B. Haire
Faculty Scholarship
This paper investigates one causal mechanism that may explain why female judges on the federal appellate courts are more likely than men to side with plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases. To test whether personal experiences with inequality are related to empathetic responses to the claims of female plaintiffs, we focus on the first wave of female judges, who attended law school during a time of severe gender inequality. We find that female judges are more likely than their male colleagues to support plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases, but that this difference is seen only in judges who graduated law school …
Federalism As A Way Station: Windsor As Exemplar Of Doctrine In Motion, Neil S. Siegel
Federalism As A Way Station: Windsor As Exemplar Of Doctrine In Motion, Neil S. Siegel
Faculty Scholarship
This Article asks what the Supreme Court’s opinion in United States v. Windsor stands for. It first shows that the opinion leans in the direction of marriage equality but ultimately resists any dispositive “equality” or “federalism” interpretation. The Article next examines why the opinion seems intended to preserve for itself a Delphic obscurity. The Article reads Windsor as an exemplar of what judicial opinions may look like in transition periods, when a Bickelian Court seeks to invite, not end, a national conversation, and to nudge it in a certain direction. In such times, federalism rhetoric—like manipulating the tiers of scrutiny …
The Puzzling Persistence Of Dual Federalism, Ernest A. Young
The Puzzling Persistence Of Dual Federalism, Ernest A. Young
Faculty Scholarship
This essay began life as a response to Sotirios Barber’s essay (soon to be a book) entitled “Defending Dual Federalism: A Self-Defeating Act.” Professor Barber’s essay reflects a widespread tendency to associate any judicially-enforceable principle of federalism with the “dual federalism” regime that dominated our jurisprudence from the Founding down to the New Deal. That regime divided the world into separate and exclusive spheres of federal and state regulatory authority, and it tasked courts with defining and policing the boundary between them. “Dual federalism” largely died, however, in the judicial revolution of 1937, and it generally has not been revived …
The Value Of Precedent : Appellate Briefs And Judicial Opinions In The U.S. Courts Of Appeals., Laura P. Moyer, Todd A. Collins, Susan B. Haire
The Value Of Precedent : Appellate Briefs And Judicial Opinions In The U.S. Courts Of Appeals., Laura P. Moyer, Todd A. Collins, Susan B. Haire
Faculty Scholarship
This study of appellate advocacy examines factors that affect judicial treatment of precedents identified in litigant briefs. Although we find some attorney and party characteristics influence whether a court addresses precedent cited by a party, legal resources are not as influential in determining whether the court adopts a party’s use of a precedent. At times, ideological congruence between the circuit panel and the litigant can increase the likelihood that the court’s opinion will use a precedent in the same way as presented by the litigants. There is also some support for the importance of attorney experience. Even when their clients …
Diversity, Deliberations, And Judicial Opinion Writing., Susan B. Haire, Laura P. Moyer, Shawn Treier
Diversity, Deliberations, And Judicial Opinion Writing., Susan B. Haire, Laura P. Moyer, Shawn Treier
Faculty Scholarship
Underlying scholarly interest in diversity is the premise that a representative body contributes to robust decision-making processes. Using an innovative measure of opinion content, we examine this premise by analyzing deliberative outputs in the US courts of appeals (1997-2002). While the presence of a single female or minority did not affect the attention to issues in the majority opinion, panels composed of a majority of women or minorities produced opinions with significantly more points of law compared to panels with three Caucasian males.
Judicial Attention As A Scarce Resource: A Preliminary Defense Of How Judges Allocate Time Across Cases In The Federal Courts Of Appeals, Marin K. Levy
Faculty Scholarship
Federal appellate judges no longer have the time to hear argument and draft opinions in all of their cases. The average annual filing per active judgeship now stands at 330 filed cases per year — more than four times what it was sixty years ago. In response, judges have adopted case management strategies that effectively involve spending significantly less time on certain classes of cases than on others. Various scholars have decried this state of affairs, suggesting that the courts have created a “bifurcated” system of justice with “separate and unequal tracks.” These reformers propose altering the relevant constraints of …
Equality Arguments For Abortion Rights, Neil S. Siegel, Reva B. Siegel
Equality Arguments For Abortion Rights, Neil S. Siegel, Reva B. Siegel
Faculty Scholarship
Roe v. Wade grounds constitutional protections for women’s decision whether to end a pregnancy in the Due Process Clauses. But in the four decades since Roe, the U.S. Supreme Court has come to recognize the abortion right as an equality right as well as a liberty right. In this Essay, we describe some distinctive features of equality arguments for abortion rights. We then show how, over time, the Court and individual Justices have begun to employ equality arguments in analyzing the constitutionality of abortion restrictions. These arguments first appear inside of substantive due process case law, and then as claims …
United States V. Windsor And The Role Of State Law In Defining Rights Claims, Ernest A. Young
United States V. Windsor And The Role Of State Law In Defining Rights Claims, Ernest A. Young
Faculty Scholarship
The Supreme Court’s recent decision in United States v. Windsor is best understood from a Legal Process perspective. Windsor struck down Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”), which defined marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman for purposes of federal law. Much early commentary, including Professor Neomi Rao’s essay in these pages, has found Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the Court to be “muddled” and unclear as to its actual rationale. But the trouble with Windsor is not that the opinion is muddled or vague; the rationale is actually quite evident on the face of …
Federalism, Liberty, And Equality In United States V. Windsor, Ernest A. Young, Erin C. Blondel
Federalism, Liberty, And Equality In United States V. Windsor, Ernest A. Young, Erin C. Blondel
Faculty Scholarship
This essay argues that federalism played a profoundly important role in the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Windsor, which struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Arguments to the contrary have failed to appreciate how Justice Kennedy's opinion employed federalism not as a freestanding argument but as an essential component of his rights analysis. Far from being a "muddle," as many have claimed, Justice Kennedy's analysis offered one of the most sophisticated examples to date of the interconnections between federalism, liberty, and equality.
Rethinking Critical Mass In The Federal Appellate Courts., Laura Moyer
Rethinking Critical Mass In The Federal Appellate Courts., Laura Moyer
Faculty Scholarship
This article draws from critical mass studies of gender in other political institutions to inform an application to the US Courts of Appeals. The results demonstrate the utility of considering court-level aspects of diversity. As mixed-sex panels become more common within a circuit, both male and female judges increasingly support plaintiffs in civil rights claims, though the magnitude of the effect is larger for women. The presence of a female chief judge is also positively associated with pro-plaintiff decisions by men and women in sex discrimination cases.
Judicial Innovation And Sexual Harassment Doctrine In The U.S. Court Of Appeals., Laura P. Moyer, Holley Takersley
Judicial Innovation And Sexual Harassment Doctrine In The U.S. Court Of Appeals., Laura P. Moyer, Holley Takersley
Faculty Scholarship
The determination that sexual harassment constituted “discrimination based on sex” under Title VII was first made by the lower federal courts, not Congress. Drawing from the literature on policy diffusion, this article examines the adoption of hostile work environment standards across the U.S. Courts of Appeals in the absence of controlling Supreme Court precedent. The results bolster recent findings about the influence of female judges on their male colleagues and suggest that in addition to siding with female plaintiffs, female judges also helped to shape legal rules that promoted gender equality in the workplace.
Slavery In The United States: Persons Or Property?, Paul Finkelman
Slavery In The United States: Persons Or Property?, Paul Finkelman
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Do U.S. Courts Discriminate Against Treaties?: Equivalence, Duality, And Treaty Non-Self-Execution, David H. Moore
Do U.S. Courts Discriminate Against Treaties?: Equivalence, Duality, And Treaty Non-Self-Execution, David H. Moore
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Competition In The Courtroom: When Does Expert Testimony Improve Jurors’ Decisions?, Cheryl Boudreau, Mathew D. Mccubbins
Competition In The Courtroom: When Does Expert Testimony Improve Jurors’ Decisions?, Cheryl Boudreau, Mathew D. Mccubbins
Faculty Scholarship
Many scholars lament the increasing complexity of jury trials and question whether the testimony of competing experts helps unsophisticated jurors to make informed decisions. In this article, we analyze experimentally the effects that the testimony of competing experts has on (1) sophisticated versus unsophisticated subjects' decisions and (2) subjects' deci- sions on difficult versus easy problems. Our results demonstrate that competing expert testimony, by itself, does not help unsophisticated subjects to behave as though they are sophisticated, nor does it help subjects make comparable decisions on difficult and easy problems. When we impose additional institutions (such as penalties for lying …
Gender, Race, And Intersectionality On The Federal Appellate Bench., Todd Collins, Laura Moyer
Gender, Race, And Intersectionality On The Federal Appellate Bench., Todd Collins, Laura Moyer
Faculty Scholarship
While theoretical justifications predict that a judge’s gender and race may influence judicial decisions, empirical support for these arguments has been mixed. However, recent increases in judicial diversity necessitate a reexamination of these earlier studies. Rather than examining individual judges on a single characteristic, such as gender or race alone, this research note argues that the intersection of individual characteristics may provide an alternative approach for evaluating the effects of diversity on the federal appellate bench. The results of cohort models examining the joint effects of race and gender suggest that minority female judges are more likely to support criminal …
Nothing But The Truth? Experiments On Adversarial Competition, Expert Testimony, And Decision Making, Cheryl Boudreau, Mathew D. Mccubbins
Nothing But The Truth? Experiments On Adversarial Competition, Expert Testimony, And Decision Making, Cheryl Boudreau, Mathew D. Mccubbins
Faculty Scholarship
Many scholars debate whether a competition between experts in legal, political, or economic contexts elicits truthful information and, in turn, enables people to make informed decisions. Thus, we analyze experimentally the conditions under which competition between experts induces the experts to make truthful statements and enables jurors listening to these statements to improve their decisions. Our results demonstrate that, contrary to game theoretic predictions and contrary to critics of our adversarial legal system, competition induces enough truth telling to allow jurors to improve their decisions. Then, when we impose additional institutions (such as penalties for lying or the threat of …
Administrative Law Agonistes, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Roger Noll, Barry R. Weingast, Daniel B. Rodriguez
Administrative Law Agonistes, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Roger Noll, Barry R. Weingast, Daniel B. Rodriguez
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
What Statutes Mean: Interpretive Lessons From Positive Theories Of Communication And Legislation, Cheryl Boudreau, Arthur Lupia, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Daniel B. Rodriguez
What Statutes Mean: Interpretive Lessons From Positive Theories Of Communication And Legislation, Cheryl Boudreau, Arthur Lupia, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Daniel B. Rodriguez
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
A Constitutional Amendment To Reform Kentucky’S Courts, Kurt Metzmeier
A Constitutional Amendment To Reform Kentucky’S Courts, Kurt Metzmeier
Faculty Scholarship
Responding to a confused patchwork of trial courts with overlapping jurisdiction, uneven justice around the state, and a growing backlog of appellate cases, voters in Kentucky went to the polls on November 4, 1975, to approve a sweeping constitutional amendment that radically revised Kentucky’s court system. Although reformers had decried Kentucky’s confusing court system since the 1940s, the real roots of the revision of the judicial article can be found in the failed movement in the late 1960s to replace Kentucky’s 1891 constitution. Unbowed by the defeat, judicial reformers immediately set out to pass a separate amendment reforming the courts, …
Courts, Congress, And Public Policy, Part I: The Fda, The Courts, And The Regulation Of Tobacco, Jeffrey R. Lax, Mathew D. Mccubbins
Courts, Congress, And Public Policy, Part I: The Fda, The Courts, And The Regulation Of Tobacco, Jeffrey R. Lax, Mathew D. Mccubbins
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Conditions For Judicial Independence, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Roger Noll, Barry R. Weingast
Conditions For Judicial Independence, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Roger Noll, Barry R. Weingast
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Courts, Congress, And Public Policy, Part Ii: The Impact Of The Reapportionment Revolution On Congress And State Legislatures, Jeffrey R. Lax, Mathew D. Mccubbins
Courts, Congress, And Public Policy, Part Ii: The Impact Of The Reapportionment Revolution On Congress And State Legislatures, Jeffrey R. Lax, Mathew D. Mccubbins
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.