Judges Commons^™

Trying To Make Peace With Bush V. Gore (Symposium: Bush V. Gore Issue 2001), Richard D. Friedman

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The Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, shutting down the recounts of Florida's vote in the 2000 presidential election and effectively awarding the election to George W. Bush, has struck many observers, including myself, as outrageous.' Decisions of the Supreme Court should be more than mere reflections of ideological or partisan preference thinly camouflaged behind legalistic language. It would therefore be pleasant to be able to believe that they are more than that. Accordingly, Judge Richard Posner's analysis,2 in which he defends the result reached by the Court-though not the path by which it got there-is particularly welcome. Though …

Festschrift: Lee Loevinger, Layman E. Allen

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Lee Loevinger is well-known and recognized for his outstanding achievements as a Minnesota Supreme Court Justice, as Assistant United States Attorney General for Antitrust, and as a superb practicing attorney. Perhaps less appreciated are his extraordinary contributions to the intersection of law and science generally and more particularly to the nurturing of the application of computer technology to law in its infancy.

Critical Hermeneutics: The Intertwining Of Explanation And Understanding As Exemplified In Legal Analysis, George H. Taylor

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One of the most vexing questions in hermeneutics is whether it can be critical-whether it can engage in critique. In Part I of this Article, I show how within legal hermeneutics the element of critique is present even within those forms of legal interpretation most adherent to stances of "understanding." Here I concentrate on the work of Robert Bork and Justice Antonin Scalia and demonstrate how distance, separation, critique is present within their theories. In Part II, I reverse emphases and show how elements of "understanding" persist within legal theories most avowedly reliant on forms of "explanation." My exemplar here …

Should Judges Take Seriously The Sentencing Commission's Standards For Accepting Plea Agreements?, David Yellen

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No abstract provided.

In Memoriam: Lewis F. Powell, Jr., Christina B. Whitman

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At the time of his resignation, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. was justly praised as a moderate, flexible jurist - open-minded, suspicious of ideology, most often found at the center of a divided Supreme Court. Yet Justice Powell was a man of deeply conservative instincts. Suspicious of invitations to expand the scope of individual constitutional rights, he was a participant and even a leader in the Court's reassertion of a federalism that emphasized deference to states and in its reinvigoration of restrictions on access to federal courts. His jurisprudence was all of a piece. Justice Powell's reluctance to expand federal …

Finding The Constitution: An Economic Analysis Of Tradition's Role In Constitutional Interpretation, Adam C. Pritchard, Todd J. Zywicki

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In this Article, Professor Pritchard and Professor Zywicki examine the role of tradition in constitutional interpretation, a topic that has received significant attention in recent years. After outlining the current debate over the use of tradition, the authors discuss the efficiency purposes of constitutionalism--precommitment and the reduction of agency costs--and demonstrate how the use of tradition in constitutional interpretation can serve these purposes. Rejecting both Justice Scalia's majoritarian model, which focuses on legislative sources of tradition, and Justice Souter's common-law model, which focuses on Supreme Court precedent as a source of tradition, the authors propose an alternative model--the "finding model"-- …

Mirrored Silence: Reflections On Judicial Complicity In Private Violence, Zanita E. Fenton

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Tracy and John had been married for seven years. They were so in love when they met at college. He brought her flowers and wanted to spend all of his free time with her. Everything was perfect. But it seemed to become increasingly tumultuous as soon as they got married, two years later. He didn't just want to spend all of his time with her; he had to know what she was doing every waking moment of the day. He had to approve of her activities and her friends. He called her at work every day. If she wasn't at …

The Reluctant Justice: Lewis F. Powell Jr. Personifies The 'Quality Of Attentiveness', Christina B. Whitman

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Lewis F. Powell Jr. came to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 reluctantly and at an age when many professionals are anticipating retirement rather than a career change. But the Court suited him. He grew to love the work, although he often found it agonizing, and he thrived on the role he played in the history of the Constitution.

Are Criminal Defendants In Japan Truly Receiving Trials By Judges, Daniel H. Foote

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Since my initial appointment as an assistant judge in April of 1950, I have served as a judge for over 39 1/2 years. For most of that time, over 30 years, I have handled criminal trials. Thus, one might say that I personally represent a living history of the current Code of Criminal Procedure. Human beings, however, inevitably tend to idle their time away; and I have been kept busy day in and day out handling cases and up until now have never had the chance to sit back and reflect dispassionately on the actual state of criminal trials. That …

United States V. O'Hagan: Agency Law And Justice Powell's Legacy For The Law Of Insider Trading, Adam C. Pritchard

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The law of insider trading is judicially created; no statutory provision explicitly prohibits trading on the basis of material, non-public information. The Supreme Court's insider trading jurisprudence was forged, in large part, by Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. His opinions for the Court in United States v. Chiarella and SEC v. Dirks were, until recently, the Supreme Court's only pronouncements on the law of insider trading. Those decisions established the elements of the classical theory of insider trading under § 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the "Exchange Act"). Under this theory, corporate insiders and their tippees who …

The Jurisprudence Of Yogi Berra, Edward H. Cooper, Grace C. Tonner

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Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra was born on May 12, 1925, in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up to become one of baseball's all-time greats. Yogi played nineteen years in the Major Leagues, eighteen with the New York Yankees and one with the New York Mets He has been called the greatest Yankee catcher ever. During his career, Yogi played in a record fourteen World Series and was elected the American League's Most Valuable Player three times. Following his playing career, Yogi managed both the Yankees and the New York Mets, and coached the Yankees, Mets, and Houston Astros. He received …

Chief Justice Hughes' Letter On Court-Packing, Richard D. Friedman

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After one of the great landslides in American presidential history, Franklin D. Roosevelt took the oath of office for the second time on January 20, 1937. As he had four years before, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, like Roosevelt a former governor of New York, administered the oath. Torrents of rain drenched the inauguration, and Hughes’ damp whiskers waved in the biting wind. When the skullcapped Chief Justice reached the promise to defend the Constitution, he “spoke slowly and with special emphasis.” The President responded in kind, though he felt like saying, as he later told his aide Sam Rosenman: …

Judicial Selection In Michigan - Time For A Change?, John W. Reed

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How are we to choose those who judge us? To whom do we entrust the responsibility of protecting our liberties and the power to determine our rights and liabilities? We look for men and women of integrity, diligence, legal ability, and judicial temperament, chosen by methods that balance judicial independence and public accountability.1

Cardozo's Allegheny College Opinion: A Case Study In Law As An Art, Michael Townsend

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This Article consists of two related pieces. One piece considers interpretations of Cardozo's opinion in Allegheny College v. National Chautauqua County Bank. Cardozo commonly is placed among the greatest American judges, but his "analysis in Allegheny College is regularly criticized as contrived and artificial." This Article attempts to resuscitate the reputation of his analysis by placing the case in its historical and doctrinal context. The other piece continues the elaboration of a framework introduced in a previous article for thinking about law as a discipline. Central to this framework is a particular conception of the western intellectual tradition in …

Speaking Truth To Power: The Jurisprudence Of Julia Cooper Mack, Walter J. Walsh

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In 1975, upon her appointment to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, Julia Cooper Mack broke the double barrier of race and gender by becoming the first woman of color ever appointed to any American court of last resort. Over the last two decades, Judge Mack has authored hundreds of opinions articulating a powerful critical jurisprudence previously unheard on the highest level of our judiciary. In the pages that follow, several scholars join the Editors of the Howard Law Journal in suggesting that Judge Mack's life and work warrant careful scrutiny. This symposium explores the roots, development, and substance …

Telling The Story Of The Hughes Court, Richard D. Friedman

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When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., died in 1935, he left the bulk of his estate to the United States Government. This gift, known as the Oliver Wendell Hnlmes Devise, sat in the Treasury for about twenty years, until Congress set up a Presidential Commission to determine what to do with it. The principal use of the money has been to fund a multivolume History of the United States Supreme Court. The history of the project itself has not always been a happy one, for some of the authors have been unable to complete their volumes. Among them was one …

On The 'Fruits' Of Miranda Violations, Coerced Confessions, And Compelled Testimony, Yale Kamisar

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Professor Akhil Reed Amar and Ms. Renee B. Lettow have written a lively, provocative article that will keep many of us who teach constitutional-criminal procedure busy for years to come. They present a reconception of the "first principles" of the Fifth Amendment, and they suggest a dramatic reconstruction of criminal procedure. As a part of that reconstruction, they propose, inter alia, that at a pretrial hearing presided over by a judicial officer, the government should be empowered to compel a suspect, under penalty of contempt, to provide links in the chain of evidence needed to convict him.

Strong Criticism Of The American System Of Trial By Jury, Yale Kamisar

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I grieve for my country to say that the administration of the criminal law in all the states in the Union (there may be one or two exceptions) is a disgrace to our civilization.

Resolution Of Traffic Accident Disputes And Judicial Activism In Japan, Daniel H. Foote

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The topic of resolution of traffic accident cases in Japan has already seen two works in English: a 1989 article by J. Mark Ramseyer and Minoru Nakazato in the Journal of Legal Studies and a 1990 article by Takao Tanase in the Law and Society Review. Why yet another article?

First, despite the fine treatment of a wide range of issues in those articles, neither of those works gave much attention to what I regard as one of the most interesting and important aspects of the Japanese treatment of automobile accident cases: namely, the role of the judiciary and the …

What's An Opinion For? (Special Issue: Judicial Opinion Writing), James Boyd White

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The question the papers in this Special Issue address is whether it matters how judicial opinions are written, and if so why. My hope here is to suggest a way of elaborating the ques­tion that may provide the reader with a useful point of departure for reading the more extensive papers that follow.

Switching Time And Other Thought Experiments: The Hughes Court And Constitutional Transformation, Richard D. Friedman

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For the most part, the Supreme Court's decisions in 1932 and 1933 disappointed liberals. The two swing Justices, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Justice Owen J. Roberts, seemed to have sided more with the Court's four conservatives than with its three liberals. Between early 1934 and early 1935, however, the Court issued three thunderbolt decisions, all by five-to-four votes on the liberal side and with either Hughes or Roberts writing for the majority over the dissent of the conservative foursome: in January 1934, Home Building & Loan Ass'n v. Blaisdell' severely limited the extent to which the Contracts Clause …

A Reaffirmation: The Authenticity Of The Roberts Memorandum, Or Felix The Non-Forger (Justices Felix Frankfurter And Owen J. Roberts), Richard D. Friedman

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In the December 1955 issue of this Law Review, Justice Felix Frankfurter published a tribute to his late friend and colleague, Owen J. Roberts.' The tribute centered on what Frankfurter claimed was the text of a memorandum that Roberts wrote in 1945 to explain his conduct in the critical minimum wage cases of 1936 and 1937, Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo2 and West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish.' Scholars have often challenged the adequacy of Roberts's account of why he cast decisive votes for the conservatives in Tipaldo and for the liberals in West Coast Hotel.4 Until recently, …

The Tension Between Rules And Discretion In Family Law: A Report And Reflection, Carl E. Schneider

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The history of law is many things. But one of them is the story of an unremitting struggle between rules and discretion. The tension between these two approaches to legal problems continues to pervade and perplex the law today. Perhaps nowhere is that tension more pronounced and more troubling than in family law. It is probably impossible to practice family law without wrestling with the imponderable choice between rules and discretion. Consider, for example, how many areas of family law are now being fought over in-just those terms. For decades we have lived with an abundantly discretionary way of resolving …

Settling For A Judge: A Comment On Clermont And Eisenberg, Samuel R. Gross

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Trial by Jury or Judge: Transcending Empiricism,1 by Kevin Clermont and Theodore Eisenberg, is not only an important article, it is unique. To most Americans, trial means trial by jury. In fact, over half of all federal trials are conducted without juries2 (including 31% of trials in cases in which the parties have the right to choose a jury3), and the proportion of bench trials in state courts is even higher.4 And yet, while there is a large literature on the outcomes of jury trials and the factors that affect them,5 nobody else has systematically compared trials by jury to …

Judging The Judges: Three Opinions, James Boyd White

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For some time I have been working on the problem of judicial criticism, focusing especially on the question: What is it in the work of a judge that leads us to admire a judicial opinion with the result of which we disagree, or to condemn an opinion that "comes out" the way we would do if we were charged with the responsibility of decision? The response I have been making is that this kind of judicial excellence (and its opposite too) lies in the sort of social and intellectual action in which the opinion engages: in the character the court …

Rethinking The Substantive Rules For Custody Disputes In Divorce, David L. Chambers

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A few states, mostly in the West and South, still retain a preference in custody disputes for placing young children with their mothers. In most other states, legislatures or courts have replaced the maternal presumption with a rule directing courts to be guided solely by the child's "welfare" or "best interests." A few legislatures have created a new preference for joint custody, directing courts to consider favorably requests by a parent for such arrangements, even over the objection of the other parent. This Article argues that the trend away from the maternal presumption is sensible, but that the current best-interests …

Error Correction, Lawmaking, And The Supreme Court’S Exercise Of Discretionary Review, Arthur D. Hellman

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Controversies involving the United States Supreme Court generally center on the content of Court’s decisions, but in recent years, much attention has focused on the Court’s processes – in particular, two very different aspects of the Court’s modes of doing business. At one end of the spectrum, the number of cases receiving plenary consideration – full briefing, oral argument, and (almost invariably) a signed opinion – has shrunk to levels lower than any since the Civil War. At the other end, the Court has effectively resolved many high-profile disputes through unexplained orders granting or denying emergency relief in cases in …

Eight Cases And Section 251, James J. White

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[A] continuing sense of reliance and security that the promised performance will be forthcoming. . . is an important feature of the bargain-so states Comment 1 to section 2-609 of the Uniform Commercial Code. At common law, one party to a contract might suffer considerable and justifiable anxiety about the other party's willingness or ability to perform and yet have no legal basis for cancelling the contract or for procuring additional assurances from the other party. Section 251 of the Restatement (Second) of Contracts is designed to provide a remedy for one party's reasonable fears that the other party to …

Individual And Community: An Appreciation Of Mr. Justice Powell, Christina B. Whitman

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When the nomination of Lewis F. Powell, Jr., to the Supreme Court of the United States was submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee ten years ago, much was made of his extraordinary record of service to his city, his state, and his profession.1 Justice Powell's career has been a model of individual responsibility to society. His belief in the value of civic life, and in the desirability of making such a life available to everyone, has been a dominant influence in his work on the Supreme Court. In what follows, I shall attempt to define some of the assumptions with …

Is Washington Ready For Merit Selection Of Judges, Hugh D. Spitzer, William S. Bailey

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In 1980, Seattle established a judicial merit selection process for the Seattle Municipal Court, based on an approach used in many other jurisdictions and by the federal government under President Carter. The Seattle plan represents the first time a merit selection commission of lawyers and lay people has been used for nonfederal appointments in Washington. The two individuals subsequently appointed to the Seattle Municipal Court have gone through one of this state's most rigorous judicial selection processes.

In this article, we will review how judges are presently selected in this state, the various methods of choosing judges in other jurisdictions …