Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Court clerk (7)
- Judicial clerkship (6)
- Law school (6)
- Clerkship (4)
- Harvard Law School (3)
-
- Black (2)
- Book review (2)
- Federal courts (2)
- Judges (2)
- ABA (1)
- Abolition Constitutionalism (1)
- Amendment (1)
- American Bar Association (1)
- Appellate Court (1)
- Appellate review (1)
- Article III (1)
- Central Europe (1)
- Clerk (1)
- Comparative law (1)
- Constitutional Convention (1)
- Constitutional Law (1)
- Court of appeals (1)
- Czech Republic (1)
- Discrimination (1)
- District courts (1)
- Eastern Europe (1)
- Empirical study (1)
- Ethnic (1)
- Ethos (1)
- Federal Court (1)
- Publication Year
Articles 1 - 24 of 24
Full-Text Articles in Judges
What Roosevelt Did To Brown V. Board Of Education, Or Race And Court Packing, Jill M. Fraley
What Roosevelt Did To Brown V. Board Of Education, Or Race And Court Packing, Jill M. Fraley
Scholarly Articles
Roughly one-third of American schools remain segregated. Scholars have offered a variety of explanations, mostly social and cultural, but sometimes legal, for why desegregation did not proceed effectively after Brown v. Board of Education. This Article articulates a less expected and previously undocumented cause: President Roosevelt's prior attempt at court packing slowed--even derailed--desegregation.
The story of what Roosevelt's court packing did to make the work of integration harder is a cautionary tale, particularly for those who want to alter the U.S. Supreme Court now in furtherance of a modern cause. The only reasonable route for reforming the Supreme Court must …
Thoughts On Law Clerk Diversity And Influence, Todd C. Peppers
Thoughts On Law Clerk Diversity And Influence, Todd C. Peppers
Scholarly Articles
It is my great good fortune to have been asked to comment on the remarkable Article Law Clerk Selection and Diversity: Insights from Fifty Sitting Judges of the Federal Courts of Appeals by Judge Jeremy D. Fogel, Professor Mary S. Hoopes, and Justice Goodwin Liu. Drawing on a rich vein of data gathered pursuant to a carefully crafted research design and extensive interviews, the authors provide the most detailed account to date regarding the selection criteria used by federal appeals court judges to select their law clerks. The authors pay special attention to the role that diversity plays in picking …
Movement Judges, Brandon Hasbrouck
Movement Judges, Brandon Hasbrouck
Scholarly Articles
Judges matter. The opinions of a few impact the lives of many. Judges romanticize their own impartiality, but apathy in the face of systems of oppression favors the status quo and clears the way for conservative agendas to take root. The lifetime appointments of federal judges, the deliberate weaponization of the bench by reactionary opponents of the New Deal and progressive social movements, and the sheer inertia of judicial self-restraint have led to the conservative capture of the courts. By contrast, empathy for the oppressed and downtrodden renders substantive justice possible and leaves room for unsuccessful litigants to accept unfavorable …
Recent Attacks On Judicial Independence: The Vulgar, The Systemic, And The Insidious, James E. Moliterno, Peter Čuroš
Recent Attacks On Judicial Independence: The Vulgar, The Systemic, And The Insidious, James E. Moliterno, Peter Čuroš
Scholarly Articles
This article offers an opening to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) situation and attacks against the judiciary in this region since 2010. The focus is not primarily on historical path dependence like the rest of this issue. Instead, the focus aims at the nature of attacks on the judiciary. Such attacks have appeared in CEE and the US in recent years. Its interest lies in explaining similar patterns visible in the judiciaries of CEE. Particularly, it looks at the current conditions in the Czech judiciary, political interventions in Poland since 2015 and in Hungary since 2010, and undermining of trust …
Against Court Packing, Or A Plea To Formally Amend The Constitution, Jill M. Fraley
Against Court Packing, Or A Plea To Formally Amend The Constitution, Jill M. Fraley
Scholarly Articles
The original arguments against court packing carry less weight in the current social and constitutional era. Less weight, however, implies some validity to those concerns and within those arguments is an acknowledgement that court packing comes with some risk to governmental stability. Still, the original arguments against court packing cannot be categorized as strong in the current climate.
A better argument against court packing is simply that it is unlikely to be effective for any long-term informal constitutional change that is responsive to key social issues. Informal constitutional change is more clearly stable when it involves structural change rather than …
Practical Truth: The Value Of Apparent Honesty In Supreme Court Opinions, Timothy C. Macdonnell
Practical Truth: The Value Of Apparent Honesty In Supreme Court Opinions, Timothy C. Macdonnell
Scholarly Articles
Judicial honesty or judicial candor is the subject of significant scholarly attention, but it is not the focus of this Essay. Rather, the author's focus is on the importance that appearing honest has on the persuasive force of an opinion and the dangers associated with failing to achieve that goal. This distinction is not intended to suggest Justices should seek apparent honesty while not being actually honest. Rather, this Essay emphasizes that actually honest opinions must also be apparently honest. Thus, judicial candor is necessary to apparent honesty, but it is not always sufficient on its own.
To support the …
Clerking For God’S Grandfather: Chauncey Belknap’S Year With Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Todd C. Peppers, Ira Brad Matetsky, Elizabeth R. Williams, Jessica Winn
Clerking For God’S Grandfather: Chauncey Belknap’S Year With Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Todd C. Peppers, Ira Brad Matetsky, Elizabeth R. Williams, Jessica Winn
Scholarly Articles
Most of what we know about law clerks comes from the clerks themselves, usually in the form of law review articles memorializing their Justices and their clerkships or in interviews with reporters and legal scholars. In a few instances, however, law clerks have contemporaneously memorialized their experiences in diaries. These materials provide a rare window into the insular world of the Court. While the recollections contained in the diaries are often infused with youthful hero worship for their employer—in contradistinction to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s claim that no man is a hero to his valet— they offer a real-time, …
To Compare Or Not To Compare? Reading Justice Breyer, Russell A. Miller
To Compare Or Not To Compare? Reading Justice Breyer, Russell A. Miller
Scholarly Articles
Justice Breyer's new book The Court and the World presents a number of productive challenges. First, it provides an opportunity to reflect generally on extra-judicial scholarly activities. Second, it is a major and important - but also troubling - contribution to debates about comparative law broadly, and the opening of domestic constitutional regimes to external law and legal phenomena more specifically. I begin by suggesting a critique of the first of these points. These are merely some thoughts on the implications of extra-judicial scholarship. The greater portion of this essay, however, is devoted to a reading of Justice Breyer's book, …
Judicial Challenges To The Collateral Impact Of Criminal Convictions: Is True Change In The Offing?, Nora V. Demleitner
Judicial Challenges To The Collateral Impact Of Criminal Convictions: Is True Change In The Offing?, Nora V. Demleitner
Scholarly Articles
Judicial opposition to disproportionate sentences and the long-term impact of criminal records is growing, at least in the Eastern District of New York. With the proliferation and harshness of collateral consequences and the hurdles in overcoming a criminal record, judges have asked for greater proportionality and improved chances for past offenders to get a fresh start. The combined impact of punitiveness and a criminal record is not only debilitating to the individual but also to their families and communities. A criminal case against a non-citizen who will be subject to deportation and a decade-long ban on reentry and three different …
Truthiness And The Marble Palace, Chad M. Oldfather, Todd C. Peppers
Truthiness And The Marble Palace, Chad M. Oldfather, Todd C. Peppers
Scholarly Articles
Tucked inside the title page of David Lat’s Supreme Ambitions, just after a note giving credit for the cover design and before the copyright notice, sits a standard disclaimer of the sort that appears in all novels: “This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.” These may be the most truly fictional words in the entire book. Its judicial characters are recognizable as versions of real judges, including, among others, …
Surgeons Or Scribes? The Role Of United States Court Of Appeals Law Clerks In "Appellate Triage", Todd C. Peppers, Micheal W. Giles, Bridget Tainer-Parkins
Surgeons Or Scribes? The Role Of United States Court Of Appeals Law Clerks In "Appellate Triage", Todd C. Peppers, Micheal W. Giles, Bridget Tainer-Parkins
Scholarly Articles
Using original survey data, we explore how federal courts of appeals judges select and use their law clerks—a question that we answered in an earlier article about federal district court clerks. As with that first article, we do not intend to tackle such normative issues as whether courts of appeals law clerks possess too much influence over the judicial process or whether the selection criteria used by these judges is appropriate. What we will present, however, is descriptive data on the criteria that courts of appeals judges use to pick their law clerks as well as the tasks assigned to …
Judicial Assistants Or Junior Judges: The Hiring, Utilization, And Influence Of Law Clerks, Chad Oldfather, Todd C. Peppers
Judicial Assistants Or Junior Judges: The Hiring, Utilization, And Influence Of Law Clerks, Chad Oldfather, Todd C. Peppers
Scholarly Articles
Law clerks have been part of the American judicial system since 1882, when Supreme Court Justice Horace Gray hired a young Harvard Law School graduate named Thomas Russell to serve as his assistant. Justice Gray paid for his law clerks out of his own pocket until Congress authorized funds for the hiring of “stenographic clerks” in 1886. The Gray law clerks, however, were not mere stenographers. Justice Gray assigned them a host of legal and non-legal job duties. His clerks discussed the record and debated the attendant legal issues with Justice Gray prior to oral argument, conducted legal research, and …
Random Chance Or Loaded Dice: The Politics Of Judicial Designation, Todd C. Peppers, Katherine Vigilante, Christopher Zorn
Random Chance Or Loaded Dice: The Politics Of Judicial Designation, Todd C. Peppers, Katherine Vigilante, Christopher Zorn
Scholarly Articles
Here, we take advantage of a unique characteristic of the procedures of the U.S. courts of appeals—the discretion held by chief judges to designate district court judges to three-judge appellate panels— to examine empirically the importance of oversight and judicial hierarchy on judges' behavior in those courts. Specifically, we examine the extent to which decisions about the policy preferences of designated judges vary systematically with the ideological tenor of the chief judge himself, the court as a whole, and the U.S. Supreme Court. More simply put, we ask: are district court judges selected to sit on appeals court panels simply …
The Judicial Power And The Inferior Federal Courts: Exploring The Constitutional Vesting Thesis, A. Benjamin Spencer
The Judicial Power And The Inferior Federal Courts: Exploring The Constitutional Vesting Thesis, A. Benjamin Spencer
Scholarly Articles
The third branch of our federal government has traditionally been viewed as the least of the three in terms of the scope of its power and authority. This view finds validation when one considers the extensive authority that Congress has been permitted to exercise over the Federal Judiciary. From the beginning, Congress has understood itself to possess the authority to limit the jurisdiction of inferior federal courts. The Supreme Court has acquiesced to this understanding of congressional authority without much thought or explanation.
It may be possible, however, to imagine a more robust vision of the Judicial Power through closer …
Justice Hugo Black And His Law Clerks: Match-Making And Match Point, Todd C. Peppers
Justice Hugo Black And His Law Clerks: Match-Making And Match Point, Todd C. Peppers
Scholarly Articles
Like other Justices on the Supreme Court, Justice Black hired law clerks to assist with the work of the Court. Each year, his law clerks would assist in reviewing cert. petitions, doing legal research, and editing opinion drafts. These job duties, however, were only one dimension of the Black clerkship. As the Justice himself once remarked to a law-clerk applicant, “I don’t pick my law clerks for what they can do for me, I pick my law clerks for what I can do for them.”
Till Death Do Us Part: Chief Justices And The United States Supreme Court, Todd C. Peppers, Chad M. Oldfather
Till Death Do Us Part: Chief Justices And The United States Supreme Court, Todd C. Peppers, Chad M. Oldfather
Scholarly Articles
In this Essay, we identify and explore an additional institutional difficulty, which bridges these last two components of the proposed Act. Prior commentary has chronicled the phenomenon of Justices serving beyond the point at which they are able to perform their duties. It has also addressed the unique powers and responsibilities of the Chief Justice, with some arguing that the administrative aspects of the role should be divorced from the effectively life tenure associated with a position on the Court. We wish to highlight a connection. The unique powers and responsibilities of the center chair may make Chief Justices even …
Isaiah And His Young Disciples: Justice Brandeis And His Law Clerks, Todd C. Peppers
Isaiah And His Young Disciples: Justice Brandeis And His Law Clerks, Todd C. Peppers
Scholarly Articles
It cannot be said that Louis Dembitz Brandeis has suffered from a lack of scholarly attention. Brandeis is considered to be one of the most influential Justices in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, and scores of books and law-review articles have been written about Brandeis the lawyer, the political insider, the Zionist, and the Justice. A case can be made, however, that history has not fully recognized the important and lasting contribution that Brandeis made to the development of the institutional rules and norms surrounding the Supreme Court law clerk, an oversight that this essay seeks to rectify.
William Thaddeus Coleman, Jr.: Breaking The Color Barrier At The U.S. Supreme Court, Todd C. Peppers
William Thaddeus Coleman, Jr.: Breaking The Color Barrier At The U.S. Supreme Court, Todd C. Peppers
Scholarly Articles
The purpose of this essay is twofold: It will endeavor to succinctly summarize the important events of Coleman’s life and professional career, while making the argument that these achievements were as groundbreaking in the legal community as Robinson’s were to baseball. Admittedly, looking to our national pastime is hardly an original literary maneuver; The myriad similarities and links between baseball and the law have offered rich material for many legal writers.2 Moreover, this article does not wish to diminish Coleman’s accomplishments by comparing them to a mere “game.” By drawing upon the sixtieth anniversary of Robinson’s debut, my hope is …
Law Clerk Influence On Supreme Court Decision Making: An Empirical Assessment, Todd C. Peppers, Christopher Zorn
Law Clerk Influence On Supreme Court Decision Making: An Empirical Assessment, Todd C. Peppers, Christopher Zorn
Scholarly Articles
Here, we undertake the first effort at assessing the existence and extent of law clerk influence in the U.S. Supreme Court. Drawing upon original survey data on the political ideology of 532 former law clerks, we evaluate the extent to which both the Justice's personal policy preferences and those of his or her law clerks exert an independent influence on the Justice's votes. While our results are preliminary, they nonetheless support the contention that--over and above "selection effects" due to Justices choosing like-minded clerks--clerks' ideological predilections exert an additional, and not insubstantial, influence on the Justices' decisions on the merits. …
Birth Of An Institution: Horace Gray And The Lost Law Clerks, Todd C. Peppers
Birth Of An Institution: Horace Gray And The Lost Law Clerks, Todd C. Peppers
Scholarly Articles
In a vault hidden away in a downtown Boston bank rests a large silver loving cup. The cup was presented to Associate Justice Horace Gray on March 22, 1902 by his law clerks, and engraved on its tarnished surface are the names of the nineteen Harvard Law School graduates who served as Justice Gray’s law clerks. While the details surrounding the presentation of the cup have been lost to history, the gift was likely prompted by the failing health of Justice Gray and his future departure from the Supreme Court. The loving cup is still held by the Gray family, …
Picking Federal Judges: A Note On Policy And Partisan Selection Agendas, Micheal W. Giles, Virginia A. Hettinger, Todd C. Peppers
Picking Federal Judges: A Note On Policy And Partisan Selection Agendas, Micheal W. Giles, Virginia A. Hettinger, Todd C. Peppers
Scholarly Articles
The importance of lower federal courts in the policymaking process has stimulated extensive research programs focused on the process of selecting the judges of these courts and the factors influencing their decisions. The present study employs judicial decisionmaking in the U.S. Courts of Appeals as a window through which to reexamine the politics of selection to the lower courts. It differs from previous studies of selection in three ways. First, it takes advantage of recent innovations in measurement to go beyond reliance on political party as a measure of the preferences of actors in the selection process. Second, employing these …
Should Oral Argument On Appeal Be Abolished Unless Requested By The Court?, Lewis F. Powell Jr.
Should Oral Argument On Appeal Be Abolished Unless Requested By The Court?, Lewis F. Powell Jr.
Powell Speeches
No abstract provided.
Landmark Communications, Inc. V. Virginia, Lewis F. Powell Jr.
Landmark Communications, Inc. V. Virginia, Lewis F. Powell Jr.
Supreme Court Case Files
No abstract provided.
O'Connor V. Donaldson, Lewis F. Powell Jr.
O'Connor V. Donaldson, Lewis F. Powell Jr.
Supreme Court Case Files
No abstract provided.