Courts Commons^™

Confronting Crawford: Justice Scalia, The Judicial Method, And The Limits(?) Of Originalism, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Crawford v. Washington, which revamped (and even revolutionized) interpretation and application of the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause, just might be Justice Scalia’s most important majority opinion, for three reasons. First, its impact on the criminal justice system has been immense, and even if the case is overruled in the near future, as seems quite possible, that effect will still likely exceed the concrete impact of any other opinion that he wrote. Second, and more importantly, Crawford emphasizes the trite but crucial point that methodology matters. Crawford has generally been a boon to criminal defendants and a bane to prosecutors. When …

The Prophylactic Fifth Amendment, Tracey Maclin

Faculty Scholarship

Before Miranda was decided, the Court had not squarely confronted the issue of when a violation of the Fifth Amendment occurs. Over fifty years ago, the Court acknowledged that the right against self-incrimination has two interrelated facets: The Government may not use compulsion to elicit self-incriminating statements; and the Government may not permit the use in a criminal trial of self-incriminating statements elicited by compulsion. Back then, the “conceptual difficulty of pinpointing” when a constitutional violation occurs — when the Government employs compulsion, or when the compelled statement is actually admitted at trial — was unimportant. Chavez v. Martinez forced …

Resurrecting Miranda's Right To Counsel, David Rossman

Faculty Scholarship

The regime created by Miranda v. Arizona is at this point in its history bankrupt both intellectually and in terms of practical effect. Justices who have joined the Court after Miranda have cut back its scope by stingy interpretations of the doctrine’s reach and effect. In practice, few suspects actually benefit from the way Miranda is now implemented in police stations and courtrooms. Given the failure of Miranda’s promise, can we envision an alternative? Here is one that may be politically palatable and doctrinally feasible, largely adopted from English practice:

1. Police would give the same Miranda warnings that they …

The Patently Unexceptional Venue Statute, Paul Gugliuzza, Megan M. La Belle

Faculty Scholarship

Legal doctrines developed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit are often derided as “exceptionalist,” particularly on issues of procedure. The court’s interpretation of the venue statute for patent infringement suits seems, at first glance, to fit that mold. According to the Federal Circuit, the statute places few constraints on the plaintiff’s choice of forum when suing corporate defendants. This permissive venue rule has lead critics to suggest that the court is, once again, outside the mainstream. The Supreme Court’s recent grant of certiorari in TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods would seem to indicate that those critics …

Chief Justice William Howard Taft's Conception Of Judicial Integrity: The Legal History Of Tumey V. Ohio, Joshua E. Kastenberg

Faculty Scholarship

In 1927, Chief Justice William Howard Taft led a unanimous Court to determine that, at minimum, the right to an impartial and independent judiciary meant that the judge had to lack a personal interest in the outcome of the trial. While the decision, Tumey v. Ohio, was based on a judge’s pecuniary interest, it was also part of Taft’s efforts to ensure that the nation’s judges, from the municipal courts to the Supreme Court had the public’s confidence in their integrity. Tumey, therefore, is not simply a decision on pecuniary interests. It can, and should, be applied to …

Finance In The Courtroom: Appraising Its Growing Pains, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This short essay provides an overview of the current state of finance in corporate law, emphasizing its role in a series of pending appraisal cases at the Delaware Supreme Court.

Historical Gloss, Constitutional Convention, And The Judicial Separation Of Powers, Curtis A. Bradley, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars have increasingly focused on the relevance of post-Founding historical practice to discern the separation of powers between Congress and the executive branch, and the Supreme Court has recently endorsed the relevance of such practice. Much less attention has been paid, however, to the relevance of historical practice to discerning the separation of powers between the political branches and the federal judiciary — what this Article calls the “judicial separation of powers.” As the Article explains, there are two ways that historical practice might be relevant to the judicial separation of powers. First, such practice might be invoked as an …

Democratic Experimentalism, Charles F. Sabel, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Democratic Experimentalism is an orientation in contemporary legal thought that draws on both the critical impulses of modernist theory and the constructive practice of postbureaucratic organization.

Some of the core ideas of Democratic Experimentalism were formulated long ago, notably by pragmatists in the John Dewey mold, but they have been elaborated in response to social developments of recent decades. A recurring challenge presented by these developments is uncertainty, by which we mean the inability to anticipate, much less to assign a probability to, future states of the world. The constellation of changes that make contemporary economies more innovative produces uncertainty …

How Much Has The Supreme Court Changed Patent Law?, Paul Gugliuzza

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided a remarkable number of patent cases in the past decade, particularly as compared to the first twenty years of the Federal Circuit’s existence. No longer is the Federal Circuit “the de facto Supreme Court of patents,” as Mark Janis wrote in 2001. Rather, it seems the Supreme Court is the Supreme Court of patents. In the article at the center of this symposium, Judge Timothy Dyk of the Federal Circuit writes that the Supreme Court’s decisions “have had a major impact on patent law,” citing, among other evidence, the Court’s seventy percent reversal rate …

Pennoyer Was Right, Stephen E. Sachs

Faculty Scholarship

Pennoyer v. Neff has a bad rap. As an original matter, Pennoyer is legally correct. Compared to current doctrine, it offers a more coherent and attractive way to think about personal jurisdiction and interstate relations generally.

To wit: The Constitution imposes no direct limits on personal jurisdiction. Jurisdiction isn't a matter of federal law, but of general law -- that unwritten law, including much of the English common law and the customary law of nations, that formed the basis of the American legal system. Founding-era states were free to override that law and to exercise more expansive jurisdiction. But if …

Protean Statutory Interpretation In The Courts Of Appeals, James J. Brudney, Lawrence Baum

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the first in-depth empirical and doctrinal analysis of differences in statutory interpretation between the courts of appeals and the Supreme Court. It is also among the first to anticipate how the Supreme Court’s interpretive approach may shift with the passing of Justice Scalia.

We begin by identifying factors that may contribute to interpretive divergence between the two judicial levels, based on their different institutional structures and operational realities. In doing so, we discuss normative implications that may follow from the prospect of such interpretive divergence. We then examine how three circuit courts have used dictionaries and legislative …

Sub-Regional Courts In Africa: Litigating The Hybrid Right To Freedom Of Movement, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

Human rights attorneys and civil society groups in Africa have recently focused their advocacy efforts on sub-regional courts associated with economic integration communities in East, West and Southern Africa. The East African Court of Justice (EACJ), the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and the Tribunal of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have received few suits challenging trade restrictions and other barriers to sub-regional integration. Instead, and surprisingly, the courts’ dockets are dominated by complaints alleging violations of international human rights law.
This article offers the first analysis of EACJ, ECOWAS Court and …

Custom In Our Courts: Reconciling Theory With Reality In The Debate About Erie Railroad And Customary International Law, Nikki C. Gutierrez, Mitu Gulati

Faculty Scholarship

One of the most heated debates of the last two decades in U.S. legal academia focuses on customary international law’s domestic status after Erie Railroad v. Tompkins. At one end, champions of the “modern position” support customary international law’s (“CIL”) wholesale incorporation into post-Erie federal common law. At the other end, “revisionists” argue that federal courts cannot apply CIL as federal law absent federal legislative authorization. Scholars on both sides of the Erie debate also make claims about the sources judges reference when discerning CIL. They then use these claims to support their arguments regarding CIL’s domestic status. Interestingly, neither …

Doing Gloss, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

It is common for courts, the political branches, and academic commentators to look to historical governmental practices when interpreting the separation of powers. There has been relatively little attention, however, to the proper methodology for invoking such “historical gloss.” This Essay contends that, in order to gain traction on the methodological questions, we need to begin by considering the potential justifications for crediting gloss. For judicial application of gloss, which is this Essay’s principal focus, there are at least four such justifications: deference to the constitutional views of nonjudicial actors; limits on judicial capacity; Burkean consequentialism; and reliance interests. As …

Panel Assignment In The Federal Courts Of Appeals, Marin K. Levy

Faculty Scholarship

It is common knowledge that the federal courts of appeals typically hear cases in panels of three judges and that the composition of the panel can have significant consequences for case outcomes and for legal doctrine more generally. Yet neither legal scholars nor social scientists have focused on the question of how judges are selected for their panels. Instead, a substantial body of scholarship simply assumes that panel assignment is random. This Article provides what, up until this point, has been a missing account of panel assignment. Drawing on a multiyear qualitative study of five circuit courts, including in-depth interviews …

Opposing International Justice: Kenya’S Integrated Backlash Strategy Against The Icc, Laurence R. Helfer, Anne E. Showalter

Faculty Scholarship

The government of Kenya has employed a wide range of strategies to undermine the recently-dismissed prosecutions of President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto before the International Criminal Court (ICC). This Article argues that these strategies are part of an integrated backlash campaign against the ICC, one that encompasses seemingly unrelated actions in multiple global, regional and national venues. We identify three overarching themes that connect these diverse measures— politicizing complementarity, regionalizing political opposition, and pairing instances of cooperation and condemnation to diffuse accusations of impunity. By linking its discrete acts of opposition to these three themes, the government …

Signing Statements And Presidentializing Legislative History, John De Figueiredo, Edward H. Stiglitz

Faculty Scholarship

Presidents often attach statements to the bills they sign into law, purporting to celebrate, construe, or object to provisions in the statute. Though long a feature of U.S. lawmaking, the President has avowedly attempted to use these signing statements as tool of strategic influence over judicial decision making since the 1980s — as a way of creating “presidential legislative history” to supplement and, at times, supplant the traditional congressional legislative history conventionally used by the courts to interpret statutes. In this Article, we examine a novel dataset of judicial opinion citations to presidential signing statements to conduct the most comprehensive …

Reciprocal Legitimation In The Federal Courts System, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Much scholarship in law and political science has long understood the U.S. Supreme Court to be the “apex” court in the federal judicial system, and so to relate hierarchically to “lower” federal courts. On that top-down view, exemplified by the work of Alexander Bickel and many subsequent scholars, the Court is the principal, and lower federal courts are its faithful agents. Other scholarship takes a bottom-up approach, viewing lower federal courts as faithless agents or analyzing the “percolation” of issues in those courts before the Court decides. This Article identifies circumstances in which the relationship between the Court and other …

Brief Of Professor Stephen E. Sachs As Amicus Curiae, Bnsf Railway Co. V. Tyrrell, Stephen E. Sachs

Faculty Scholarship

[This brief was filed in support of the petitioner in No. 16-405 (U.S., cert. granted Jan. 13, 2017).]

BNSF Railway Co. should win this case, but on statutory grounds alone. BNSF makes three arguments:

1) That Daimler AG v. Bauman forbids Montana’s exercise of general personal jurisdiction here;

2) That Congress has not sought to license the state’s exercise of jurisdiction; and

3) That such a license would be void under the Fourteenth Amendment.

BNSF’s first two arguments are fully persuasive and decide the case. As a result, the Court should decline to reach the third argument. Not only is …

American Trial Films And The Popular Culture Of Law, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

The American trial and American cinema share certain epistemological tendencies. Both stake claims to an authoritative form of knowledge based on the indubitable quality of observable phenomena. And both are preoccupied with sustaining the authority that underlies the knowledge produced by visual perception. The American trial and cinematic form also increasingly share cultural space. Although the trial film (otherwise known as the courtroom drama) is as old as the medium of film, the continuing popularity of the legal drama centered on a courtroom verdict suggests more than a trend. The inherent affinities between law and film not only produce enduring …