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Full-Text Articles in Judges

A Modest Memoir: Justice Stevens’S Supreme Court Life, Laura K. Ray May 2012

A Modest Memoir: Justice Stevens’S Supreme Court Life, Laura K. Ray

Laura K. Ray

No abstract provided.


Doctrinal Conversation: Justice Kagan's Supreme Court Opinions, Laura Ray Dec 2011

Doctrinal Conversation: Justice Kagan's Supreme Court Opinions, Laura Ray

Laura K. Ray

In her first two terms on the Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan has crafted a distinctive judicial voice that speaks to her readers in a remarkably conversational tone. She employs a variety of rhetorical devices: invocations to “remember” or “pretend”; informal and even colloquial diction; a diverse assortment of similes and metaphors; and parenthetical interjections that guide the reader’s response. These strategies engage the reader in much the same way that Kagan as law professor may well have worked to engage her students, and in the context of judicial opinions they serve several purposes. They make Kagan’s opinions accessible to …


From The Bench To The Screen: The Woman Judge In Film, Laura Ray Dec 2011

From The Bench To The Screen: The Woman Judge In Film, Laura Ray

Laura K. Ray

Although there has been a dramatic increase in the number of women judges over the past half century, their cinematic counterparts have failed to reflect that change. This Article explores the paradoxical relationship between social reality and its representation on screen to identify a lingering resistance to the idea of women exercising judicial power. The Article first examines the sparse history of women judges as central characters in films of the 1930s, finding the tension in those films between judicial authority and domestic happiness. It then turns to Hollywood’s romantic comedies of the 1940s, which resolved that tension through the …