Judges Commons^™

Judicial Fact-Finding At Sentencing, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

This encyclopedia entry summarizes the pendulum-swings that led the Supreme Court in Apprendi v. New Jersey, Blakely v. Washington, and United States v. Booker to limit judges' ability to find facts at sentencing. Paradoxically, the much-criticized Federal Sentencing Guidelines have survived; a line of cases that began as an effort to restore juries' role has turned into a guarantor of judicial discretion; and the doctrine has quickly moved far from its Sixth Amendment roots to a policy balancing test. The Court could instead have pursued a different, more fruitful path. The Court did not have to force sentencing factors into …

Reasonable Suspicion Or Real Likelihood: A Question Of Semantics? Re Shankar Alan S/O Anant Kulkarni, Lionel Leo, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The law on apparent bias has been mired in some controversy following the High Court decision of Re Shankar Alan s/o Anant Kulkarni, where Sundaresh Menon J.C. seemingly departed from the tentative views of Andrew Phang J.C. (as he then was) in Tang Kin Hwa v. Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners Board on the issue of whether there were any material differences between the “reasonable suspicion of bias” test and the “real likelihood of bias” test, the two formulations of the test for apparent bias that have been variously adopted by different jurisdictions in the common law world. In Tang Kin …

The Supreme Common Law Court Of The United States, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Supreme Court's primary role in the history of the United States, especially in constitutional cases (and cases hovering in the universe of the Constitution), has been to limit Congress's ability to redefine and redistribute rights in a direction most people would characterize as liberal. In other words, the Supreme Court, for most of the history of the United States since the adoption of the Constitution, has been a conservative force against change and redistribution. The Court has used five distinct devices to advance its control over the law. First, it has construed rights-creating constitutional provisions narrowly when those …

Administrative Judges' Role In Developing Social Policy, Charles H. Koch Jr.

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“Militant Judgement?: Judicial Ontology, Constitutional Poetics, And ‘The Long War’”, Penelope J. Pether

Working Paper Series

This Article, a contribution to the Cardozo Law Review symposium in honor of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, uses Badiou’s theorizing of the event and of the militant in Being and Event as a basis for an exploration of problems of judicial ontology and constitutional hermeneutics raised in recent decisions by common law courts dealing with the legislative and executive confinement of “Islamic” asylum seekers, “enemy combatants” and “terrorism suspects,” and certain classes of criminal offenders in spaces beyond the doctrines, paradigms and institutions of the criminal law. The Article proposes an ontology and a poetics of judging equal to …

A Comment On The Relationship Between Judicial Salary And Judicial Quality, Stephen G. Marks

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Scott Baker was kind enough to present his empirical research on the relationship between judicial salary and judicial quality to the Law and Economics Workshop run by Professor Keith Hylton and me last fall and I am honored to be able to comment on it today. It is part of a growing body of literature in law that tries to shed light on important issues through statistical analysis. Baker's paper, even before its publication, generated a significant amount of buzz.

Gender, Race, And Intersectionality On The Federal Appellate Bench., Todd Collins, Laura Moyer

Faculty Scholarship

While theoretical justifications predict that a judge’s gender and race may influence judicial decisions, empirical support for these arguments has been mixed. However, recent increases in judicial diversity necessitate a reexamination of these earlier studies. Rather than examining individual judges on a single characteristic, such as gender or race alone, this research note argues that the intersection of individual characteristics may provide an alternative approach for evaluating the effects of diversity on the federal appellate bench. The results of cohort models examining the joint effects of race and gender suggest that minority female judges are more likely to support criminal …

A Rodent In Robes, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

Because of the credible (but ultimately unresolved) sexual harassment charges leveled against him by Anita Hill and others at his confirmation hearings, as well as his creepy-crawly anti-individual rights voting record on the Supreme Court, nearly every time U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas visits a university campus there are protests by faculty and students, and now Michael Adams' decision to invite Thomas to be the commencement speaker at the upcoming UGA graduation ceremony has created a furor. For years, UGA administrators appear to have tolerated sexual harassment on campus, and in recent months there have been startling revelations of …

Coding Complexity: Bringing Law To The Empirical Analysis Of The Supreme Court, Carolyn Shapiro

All Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the legal academy has experienced a surge of interest in quantitative empirical analysis. Unfortunately, this enthusiasm has not always been accompanied by careful analysis of what the tools and resources of quantitative analysis can tell us about law and legal doctrine. As this Article demonstrates, the findings of some studies therefore unwittingly reflect the limitations of those tools and resources rather than providing insight into the workings of courts.

Specifically, this Article provides a long-overdue critical analysis of the most influential source of data about the Supreme Court, the Original Supreme Court Database, created by political scientist …

The Verdict On Juries, Valerie P. Hans, Neil Vidmar

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In reviewing debates and research evidence about jury trials for our book, American Juries: The Verdict (Prometheus Books, 2007), we have had the chance to reflect on the status of the jury system in the United States. High profile jury trials put the spotlight on the American practice of using its citizens as decision makers. When jury verdicts are at odds with public opinion, criticisms of the institution are common. The civil jury has been a lightning rod for those who want tort reform. This article draws together some of our reflections about the health of the jury system …

Tribute To The Honorable Irma Raker Upon Her Retirement, Barlow Burke

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In this article the author pays tribute to Judge Raker’s pre-law school tour de force citizen testimony in Eger v. Stone, 253 A.2d 372 (Md. 1969), which established the standard for credibility of lay witnesses in zoning cases, acceptance of citizen testimony as establishing the basis for an application’s denial, and acceptance of hearsay in an administrative forum in Maryland.

Judge Raker was a student of the author, who taught a course in modern land law at the Washington College of Law during Judge Raker’s tenure in law school. The article discusses two of Judge Raker’s real estate transaction opinions, …

Reflections: The Honorable Irma S. Raker – Judge, Teacher, And Role Model, David E. Aaronson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article is a sketch of Judge Irma S. Raker’s career from her days as a law student at Washington College of Law to her distinguished career as a jurist and teacher. Judge Raker’s first legal job was as an Assistant State’s Attorney in Montgomery County, Maryland, where her appointment as the first woman litigator was a milestone in the local legal community. She was appointed in 1980 to serve as a judge on the District Court for Montgomery County and, in 1982, to serve on the Circuit Court for Montgomery County. Judge Raker decided a number of seminal cases, …

Reflections: The Honorable Irma S. Raker – Judge, Teacher, And Role Model, Elizabeth I. Boals

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article is a sketch of Judge Irma S. Raker’s career from her days as a law student at Washington College of Law to her distinguished career as a jurist and teacher. Judge Raker’s first legal job was as an Assistant State’s Attorney in Montgomery County, Maryland, where her appointment as the first woman litigator was a milestone in the local legal community. She was appointed in 1980 to serve as a judge on the District Court for Montgomery County and, in 1982, to serve on the Circuit Court for Montgomery County. Judge Raker decided a number of seminal cases, …

Reflections: The Honorable Irma S. Raker – Judge, Teacher, And Role Model, Anthony C. Morella

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article is a sketch of Judge Irma S. Raker’s career from her days as a law student at Washington College of Law to her distinguished career as a jurist and teacher. Judge Raker’s first legal job was as an Assistant State’s Attorney in Montgomery County, Maryland, where her appointment as the first woman litigator was a milestone in the local legal community. She was appointed in 1980 to serve as a judge on the District Court for Montgomery County and, in 1982, to serve on the Circuit Court for Montgomery County. Judge Raker decided a number of seminal cases, …

Advocacy Through Briefs In The U.S. Court Of Appeals., Susan B. Haire, Laura P. Moyer

Faculty Scholarship

The focus of this paper is to evaluate the role of advocates in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit by examining the characterization of issues offered in appellate briefs against the issues addressed in the court's decisions. Specifically, in an environment in which attorneys are expected to frame the issues on appeal and judges are expected to respond to those issues, what accounts for judges addressing some issues while suppressing others? By explicitly focusing on how the substantive content of an opinion is shaped, we depart from other, earlier scholarship on the advantages of "repeat player" litigants …

A Significant Symposium, Roger J. Miner '56

New York Law School Events and Publications

No abstract provided.

Memorial Service, Hon. Howard G. Munson, Roger J. Miner '56

Memorials and Eulogies

No abstract provided.

Ideological Cohesion And Precedent (Or Why The Court Only Cares About Precedent When Most Justices Agree With Each Other), Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the profound role that ideological cohesion plays in explaining the Supreme Court's willingness to advance a coherent vision of the law - either by overruling precedents inconsistent with that vision or by establishing rule-like precedents intended to bind the Supreme Court and lower courts in subsequent cases. Through case studies of the New Deal, Warren, and Rehnquist Courts, this Article calls attention to key differences between Courts in which five or more Justices pursue the same substantive objectives and Courts which lack a dominant voting block. In particular, when five or more Justices pursue the same substantive …

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em: A Pragmatic Approach To Nonprecedential Opinions In The Federal Appellate Courts, Amy E. Sloan

All Faculty Scholarship

For many years, judges and academics have debated the pros and cons of non-precedential judicial opinions in the federal appellate courts. Although the utility, necessity, and advisability of non-precedential opinions remain interesting issues to debate, at this point they are somewhat beside the point. Academics have lost the debate on non-precedential opinions. Judges control whether non-precedential opinions are permissible, and judges are not going to give them up anytime soon.

So, as the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Rather than continue to debate the merits of non-precedential opinions, the better course of action is to find …

Oregon Partner Law Blocked, Arthur S. Leonard

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Judicial Supremacy, Judicial Activism: Cooper V. Aaron And Parents Involved, Kermit Roosevelt Iii

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Concurrence, Posner-Style: Ten Ways To Look At The Concurring Opinions Of Judge Richard A. Posner, Robert F. Blomquist

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Impartiality In Judicial Ethics: A Jurisprudential Analysis, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Working Class Judges, Jason J. Czarnezki

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Part I of this article provides our reanalysis of Scott Baker's data that examines the relationship between judicial salaries and the work habits and voting patterns of federal appellate judges. Part II establishes an additional comparative context that allows us to speculate why Top Five legal markets may foster a more intense tradeoff of influence versus remuneration. Indeed, as we note, the real or perceived financial tradeoffs are so enormous - and conspicuous - in Top Five markets that federal judges may feel they have been lumped together with a large, faceless working class. We conclude by suggesting that the …

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 …

A Different Take On The Roberts Court: The Court As An Institution, Ideology, And The Settled Nature Of American Constitutional Law, Robert A. Sedler

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Ditching "The Disposal Plan": Revisiting Miranda In An Age Of Terror, 20 St. Thomas L. Rev. 155 (2008), Kim D. Chanbonpin

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dear President Bush: Leaving A Legacy On The Federal Bench, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

The appointments of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito were milestones in your stated quest to transform the courts. Appreciating that a critical duty assigned to the president by the Constitution is nominating and, with Senate advice and consent, appointing judges, you vowed to recommend "strict constructionists." Selection has enhanced importance, given modern perceptions that judges are essentially the final arbiters of societal disputes, including such questions as terrorism and affirmative action. The Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and Grutter v. Bollinger opinions as well as the public school desegregation and Schiavo litigation trenchantly illuminate those notions.

You can still …

St. George Tucker, William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

An encyclopedia entry on St. George Tucker's practice at the bar and how his distinction as a lawyer led to his appointment to the ,General Court of Virginia on January 4, 1788. On January 6, 1804, he was elevated to the Court of Appeals of Virginia.

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 …