Judges Commons^™

Reforming Recusal Rules: Reassessing The Presumption Of Judicial Impartiality In Light Of The Realities Of Judging And Changing The Substance Of Disqualification Standards To Eliminate Cognitive Errors, Melinda A. Marbes

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

In recent years, high profile disqualification disputes have caught the attention of the public. In each instance there has been an outcry when a presiding jurist was asked to recuse but declined. Unfortunately, even if the jurist explains his refusal to recuse, the reasons given often are unsatisfying and do little to quell suspicions of bias. Instead, litigants, the press, and the public question whether the jurist actually is unbiased and doubt the impartiality of the judiciary as a whole. This negative reaction to refusals to recuse is caused, at least in part, by politically charged circumstances that cause further …

African Americans And Punishment For Crime: A Critique Of Mainstream And Neoliberal Discourses, Jason M. Williams, Nishaun Tarae Battle

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Understandings of punishment within the criminological enterprise have failed to capture the nuances associated with experiencing punishment. Moreover, mainstream academic discourses are inherently anachronistic in their conclusions on punishment, thus leaving significant gaps to be filled. One such gap is that of racialized history. This article attempts to make sense of punishment discourses (past and present) by situating them in their proper context. We argue that punishment, in particular for Blacks, is ideological and longstanding. Moreover, we posit that the prolonged punishment of Blacks is hyper manifested in contemporary society via neoliberal logic that has increasingly disabled race as a …

Courts And Executives, Jeffrey L. Yates, Scott S. Boddery

Political Science Faculty Publications

William Howard Taft was both our twenty-seventh president and the tenth Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court -- the only person to have ever held both high positions in our country. He once famously commented that "presidents may come and go, but the Supreme Court goes on forever" (Pringle 1998). His remark reminds us that presidents serve only four-year terms (and are now limited to two of them), but justices of the Supreme court are appointed for life and leave a legacy of precedent-setting cases after departing the High Court. Of course, presidents also leave a legacy of important …

It Can't Wait: Exposing The Connections Between Forms Of Sexual Exploitation, Dawn Hawkins

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Different Voices : Measuring Female Judges' Influence On Women's Rights Issues In The U.S. Courts Of Appeal., Alyson E Hendricks

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

Beginning with President Carter and continuing with each successive president, the federal bench has become more diverse. This has caused scholars to turn their attention to how personal characteristics such as race and sex affect judging. Understanding the effects of gender and race on judging is crucial because white female and minority female judges may bring a different perspective to the bench than their male counterparts due to their shared experiences with discrimination. To fill a gap in the literature, this study examines the impact of women in terms of legal influence and voting behavior. The results demonstrate that women …

Judge Posner's Road Map For Convention Against Torture Claims When Central American Governments Cannot Protect Citizens Against Gang Violence, Steven H. Schulman

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming.

The Missouri Student Transfer Program, Howard E. Fields Iii

Dissertations

In 1993, the state of Missouri passed the Outstanding Schools Act. This law was created as a means to ensure that “all children will have quality educational opportunities, regardless of where in Missouri they live.” Section 167.131 of this law states that an unaccredited district must pay the tuition and transportation cost for students who attend an accredited school in the same or adjoining district. This portion of the law became known as the Student Transfer Program.

The Riverview Gardens School District (RGSD) was one of three unaccredited school districts in the state of Missouri in 2013. With close to …

Law And Identifiability, Daphna Lewinsohn-Zamir, Ilana Ritov, Tehila Kogut

Indiana Law Journal

Psychological studies have shown that people react either more generously or more punitively toward identified individuals than toward unidentified ones. This phenomenon, named the identifiability effect, has received little attention in the legal literature, despite its importance for the law. As a prime example, while legislators typically craft rules that would apply to unidentified people, judges ordinarily deal with identified individuals. The identifiability effect suggests that the outcomes of these two forms of lawmaking may differ, even when they pertain to similar facts and situations.

This Article is a preliminary investigation into the relevance of the identifiability effect for law …

Pretrial Detention And Bail, Megan Stevenson, Sandra G. Mayson

All Faculty Scholarship

Our current pretrial system imposes high costs on both the people who are detained pretrial and the taxpayers who foot the bill. These costs have prompted a surge of bail reform around the country. Reformers seek to reduce pretrial detention rates, as well as racial and socioeconomic disparities in the pretrial system, while simultaneously improving appearance rates and reducing pretrial crime. The current state of pretrial practice suggests that there is ample room for improvement. Bail hearings are often cursory, with no defense counsel present. Money-bail practices lead to high rates of detention even among misdemeanor defendants and those who …

Jobs For Justice(S): Corruption In The Supreme Court Of India, Madhav S. Aney, Shubhankar Dam, Giovanni Ko

Research Collection School Of Economics

We investigate whether judicial decisions are affected by career concerns of judges byanalysing two questions: Do judges respond to pandering incentives by ruling in favourof the government in the hope of receiving jobs after retiring from the Court? Does thegovernment actually reward judges who ruled in its favour with prestigious jobs? To answerthese questions we construct a dataset of all Supreme Court of India cases involving thegovernment from 1999 till 2014, with an indicator for whether the decision was in its favouror not. We find that pandering incentives have a causal effect on judicial decision-making.The exposure of a judge to …

Blackstone, Expositor And Censor Of Law Both Made And Found, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

Jeremy Bentham famously insisted on the separation of law as it is and law as it should be, and criticized his contemporary William Blackstone for mixing up the two. According to Bentham, Blackstone costumes judicial invention as discovery, obscuring the way judges make new law while pretending to uncover preexisting legal meaning. Bentham’s critique of judicial phoniness persists to this day in claims that judges are “politicians in robes” who pick the outcome they desire and rationalize it with doctrinal sophistry. Such skeptical attacks are usually met with attempts to defend doctrinal interpretation as a partial or occasional limit on …

Class Actions And The Counterrevolution Against Federal Litigation, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

All Faculty Scholarship

In this article we situate consideration of class actions in a framework, and fortify it with data, that we have developed as part of a larger project, the goal of which is to assess the counterrevolution against private enforcement of federal law from an institutional perspective. In a series of articles emerging from the project, we have documented how the Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court (wielding both judicial power under Article III of the Constitution and delegated legislative power under the Rules Enabling Act) fared in efforts to reverse or dull the effects of statutory and other incentives for …