Judges Commons^™

I Call Rigamarole (Or Taradiddle) On 'Originalist' Justices, Rachel A. Van Cleave

Publications

Last week, while Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was holding forth about how she applies originalism, invoking her mentor and former boss Justice Antonin Scalia, current Supreme Court justices were undermining an originalist opinion authored by Scalia. Nominee Barrett explained originalism: “I understand [the Constitution] to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. So that meaning doesn’t change over time, and it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it.”

Oral arguments in Torres v. Madrid make clear that, for some justices, originalism is appropriate, except when …

Playing Favorites? Implicit Bias On The Bench, Michele Benedetto Neitz

Publications

The concept of implicit bias has moved to the forefront of public discussion in the last decade, and many judges have already been trained on this issue. But it is worth considering how a specific type of implicit bias, in-group favoritism, may affect a judge’s everyday decisions.

Circuit Splits And Empiricism In The Supreme Court, Karen M. Gebbia

Publications

This Article demonstrates, empirically rather than merely in theory, how a failure to apply accurate data to test carefully constructed hypotheses leads to unreliable conclusions concerning the relationship between the Supreme Court and the circuit courts of appeal. Specifically, commentators routinely misapply facially accurate raw data regarding the rate at which the Court reverses circuit court decisions to support unreliable conclusions regarding the comparative degree of accord between the Court and individual circuits. Commentators and the popular press then employ these unreliable conclusions to draw unsupported inferences regarding the reasons for supposed discord between the Court and the circuits, and …

Early Disclosure Would Gut Judicial Complaint System, Susan Rutberg, Peter Keane

Publications

No abstract provided.

Socioeconomic Bias In The Judiciary, Michele Benedetto Neitz

Publications

Judges hold a prestigious place in our judicial system, and they earn double the income of the average American household. How does the privileged socioeconomic status of judges affect their decisions on the bench? This Article examines the ethical implications of what Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski recently called the “unselfconscious cultural elitism” of judges.** This elitism can manifest as implicit socioeconomic bias.

Despite the attention paid to income inequality, implicit bias research and judicial bias, no other scholar to date has fully examined the ramifications of implicit socioeconomic bias on the bench. The Article explains that socioeconomic bias …

A Unique Bench, A Common Code: Evaluating Judicial Ethics In Juvenile Court, Michele Benedetto Neitz

Publications

Recent cases involving ethical scandals on the juvenile court bench have caught the interest of legal scholars, judges, practitioners, and the public. This article proposes a new theoretical framework for assessing these problems and articulates a series of vital ethical reforms.

Despite their distinct role in an atypical court, juvenile court judges are not subject to unique ethical standards. Most jurisdictions have adopted the ABA Model Code of Judicial Conduct as the ethical code guiding juvenile court judges. However, this Model Code, intended to apply to any person in a decision-making capacity, was created for a more conventional type of …

Appointment Process To The Bench Is Not Sacrosanct, Susan Rutberg

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Jesse Carter Collection, Janet Fischer

Publications

This is Appendix 2 in The Great Dissents of the "Lone Dissenter," Justice Jesse W. Carter's Twenty tumultuous Years on the California Supreme Court (Carolina Academic Press, 2010). The appendix describes the Jesse Carter holdings at Golden Gate University School of Law Library.

The Supreme Court And Gender-Neutral Language: Setting The Standard Or Lagging Behind?, Leslie M. Rose

Publications

Most modern legal writing texts and style manuals recommend that writers use gender-neutral language. Gender-neutral language is achieved by avoiding the use of “gendered generics” (male or female nouns and pronouns used to refer to both men and women). For example, gender neutrality could be achieved by referring to “Members of Congress,” rather than “Congressmen,” and by changing a few words in the previous quotation from Melendez-Diaz: “The defendant always has [the] burden of raising a Confrontation Clause objection; statutes simply govern the time within which the [defendant] must do so.” As this article demonstrates, most members of the United …

Crisis On The Immigration Bench: An Ethical Perspective, Michele Benedetto Neitz

Publications

The purpose of this article is to suggest a new lens through which to examine the crisis in immigration courts: judicial ethics. Ethical considerations frequently play a decisive role in the resolution of immigration cases, in part because the outcomes for litigants in immigration courts can depend almost entirely on the attitude of the judge. Accordingly, the acknowledged crisis in immigration courts has severe implications for judicial ethics. Because the term "judicial ethics" encompasses a broad array of principles, this article will narrow its focus to bias and incompetence on the part of immigration judges in the courtroom. Part II …

Eustitia: Institutionalizing Justice In The European Union, Helen E. Hartnell

Publications

The European Union is installing new infrastructure upon which to build a "genuine European area of justice. This "European judicial area" constitutes a key component of the "area of freedom, security and justice" ("AFSJ"). The Amsterdam Treaty added the AFSJ as a dimension of the Union, in order to promote the free movement of persons. "EUstitia" is a neologism that aims to capture both pragmatic and aspirational aspects of this new European governance project. The term is used here to refer solely to the civil law component of the AFSJ. This article both examines EUstitia's key features, and explores the …

Review Of Judging Credentials: Nonlawyer Judges And The Politics Of Professionalism By Doris Marie Provine, William T. Gallagher

Publications

Doris Marie Provine's Judging Credentials is a provocative work that draws on and furthers the critical approach to the study of professions. The book is a study of judges in lower courts of limited jurisdiction who are not lawyers, a group of considerable size. There are over 13,000 of them in the United States. In this work Provine examines the legal profession's assertion that these judges are inferior to judges who are lawyers. Contrary to both professional claims and popular belief, Provine argues that lay judges in America's lower courts perform as well as their lawyer counterparts. Her conclusions derive …

Nineteen Eighty: Being An Interview With William O. Douglas Shortly After His Death Together With A Brief Remembrance Of His Life, Marc Stickgold

Publications

No abstract provided.