Judges Commons^™

Supreme Silence And Precedential Pragmatism: King V. Burwell And Statutory Interpretation In The Federal Courts Of Appeals, Michael J. Cedrone

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article studies statutory interpretation as it is practiced in the federal courts of appeal. Much of the academic commentary in this field focuses on the Supreme Court, which skews the debate and unduly polarizes the field. This Article investigates more broadly by looking at the seventy-two federal appellate cases that cite King v. Burwell in the two years after the Court issued its decision. In deciding that the words “established by the State” encompass a federal program, the Court in King reached a pragmatic and practical result based on statutory scheme and purpose at a fairly high level of …

Overruling Mcculloch?, Mark A. Graber

Arkansas Law Review

Daniel Webster warned Whig associates in 1841 that the Supreme Court would likely declare unconstitutional the national bank bill that Henry Clay was pushing through the Congress. This claim was probably based on inside information. Webster was a close association of Justice Joseph Story. The justices at this time frequently leaked word to their political allies of judicial sentiments on the issues of the day. Even if Webster lacked first-hand knowledge of how the Taney Court would probably rule in a case raising the constitutionality of the national bank, the personnel on that tribunal provided strong grounds for Whig pessimism. …

Justice Begins Before Trial: How To Nudge Inaccurate Pretrial Rulings Using Behavioral Law And Economic Theory And Uniform Commercial Laws, Michael Gentithes

William & Mary Law Review

Injustice in criminal cases often takes root before trial begins. Overworked criminal judges must resolve difficult pretrial evidentiary issues that determine the charges the State will take to trial and the range of sentences the defendant will face. Wrong decisions on these issues often lead to wrongful convictions. As behavioral law and economic theory suggests, judges who are cognitively busy and receive little feedback on these topics from appellate courts rely upon intuition, rather than deliberative reasoning, to resolve these questions. This leads to inconsistent rulings, which prosecutors exploit to expand the scope of evidentiary exceptions that almost always disfavor …

Reshaping American Jurisprudence In The Trump Era - The Rise Of Originalist Judges, Jeffrey F. Addicott

Faculty Articles

One of the factors that is often cited as a key reason why President Donald J. Trump was elected as the forty-fifth president, was his pledge to the American people to "make America great again" by appointing "conservative judges" to the bench, particularly when it came to filling any vacancies that might open on the United States Supreme Court. Since the never ending fight for securing an ideological majority on the Supreme Court is always viewed with great concern by both political parties, many wondered whether then candidate Trump was simply telling potential voters what they wanted to hear, or …

Certainty Versus Flexibility In The Conflict Of Laws, Kermit Roosevelt Iii

All Faculty Scholarship

Traditional choice of law theory conceives of certainty and flexibility as opposed values: increase one, and you inevitably decrease the other. This article challenges the received wisdom by reconceptualizing the distinction. Rather than caring about certainty or flexibility for their own sake, it suggests, we care about them because each makes it easier to promote a certain cluster of values. And while there may be a necessary tradeoff between certainty and flexibility, there is no necessary tradeoff between the clusters of values. It is possible to improve a choice of law system with regard to both of them. The article …

Sticks, Stones, And So-Called Judges: Why The Era Of Trump Necessitates Revisiting Presidential Influence On The Courts, Quinn W. Crowley

Indiana Law Journal

This Note will be primarily divided into three main sections. Part I of this Note will begin by discussing the importance of judicial independence in modern society and the role of elected officials in shaping the public perception of the courts. Additionally, as problems of judicial legitimacy are age-old and date back to America’s founding, Part I will include a brief discussion of an early clash between President Thomas Jefferson and the courts.

Parts II and III of this Note will seek to place President Trump’s conduct towards the judicial branch within the proper historical context. Part II examines the …

What Would Justice Brennan Say To Justice Thomas, Stephen Wermiel

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Kennedy's Legacy: A Principled Justice, Mitchell N. Berman, David Peters

All Faculty Scholarship

After three decades on the Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy remains its most widely maligned member. Concentrating on his constitutional jurisprudence, critics from across the ideological spectrum have derided Justice Kennedy as “a self-aggrandizing turncoat,” “an unprincipled weathervane,” and, succinctly, “America’s worst Justice.” We believe that Kennedy is not as bereft of a constitutional theory as common wisdom maintains. To the contrary, this Article argues, his constitutional decisionmaking reflects a genuine grasp (less than perfect, more than rudimentary) of a coherent and, we think, compelling theory of constitutional law—the account, more or less, that one of has introduced in other work …

Considerations Of History And Purpose In Constitutional Borrowing, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is part of a symposium issue dedicated to "Constitutional Rights: Intersections, Synergies, and Conflicts" at William and Mary School of Law. I make four points. First, perfect harmony among rights might not always be normatively desirable. In fact, in some instances, such as when First Amendment and Second Amendment rights clash, we might wish to have expressive rights consistently trump gun rights. Second, we can't resolve clashes between rights in the abstract but instead must consult history in a broadly relevant rather than a narrowly "originalist" fashion. When we do so, we learn that armed expression and white …