Judges Commons^™

Rehnquist's Missing Letter: A Former Law Clerk's 1955 Thoughts On Justice Jackson And Brown, John Q. Barrett, Brad Snyder

Faculty Publications

"I think that Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed." That's what Supreme Court law clerk William H. Rehnquist wrote privately in December 1952 to his boss, Justice Robert H. Jackson. When the memorandum was made public in 1971 and Rehnquist's Supreme Court confirmation hung in the balance, he claimed that the memorandum reflected Jackson's views, not Rehnquist's. Rehnquist was confirmed, but his explanation triggered charges that he had lied and smeared the memory of one of the Court's most revered justices. This Essay analyzes a newly discovered document—a letter Rehnquist wrote to Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1955, …

Interpretive Divergence All The Way Down: A Response To Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl And Ethan J. Leib, Elected Judges And Statutory Interpretation, 79 U Chi L Rev 1215 (2012), Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

This article is a response to the law review article cited in its title. It focuses on a corollary question raised by the article's analysis: if one takes seriously the proposition that it may make sense for elected judges to interpret statutes differently than do appointed judges, should judicial opinions written by elected judges look substantially different from those written by appointed judges? Part I examines the relative roles of judicial opinions written by elected versus appointed judges in a world in which divergence is practiced. Part II explores specific ways in which we might want or expect an elected …

The Anti-Messiness Principle In Statutory Interpretation, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

Many of the Supreme Court's statutory interpretation opinions reflect a juisprudential aversion to interpreting statutes in a manner that will prove "messy" for implementing courts to administer. Yet the practice of construing statutes to avoid "messiness" has gone largely unnoticed in the statutory interpretation literature. This Article seeks to illuminate the Court's use of "anti-messiness" arguments to interpret statutes and to bring theoretical attention to the principle of "messiness" avoidance. The Article begins by defining the concept of anti-messiness and providing a typology of common anti-messiness arguments used by the Supreme Court. It then considers some dangers inherent in the …

Strengthening Judicial Independence In The New Constitutional Democracies Of Central And Eastern Europe, Hon. John M. Walker Jr., Daniel Schuker

Daniel Schuker

No abstract provided.

Failed Constitutional Metaphors: The Wall Of Separation And The Penumbra, Louis J. Sirico Jr.

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Passive-Voice References In Statutory Interpretation, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court regularly references grammar rules when interpreting statutory language. And yet grammar references play a peculiar role in the Court's statutory cases—often lurking in the background and performing corroborative work to support a construction arrived at primarily through other interpretive tools. The inevitable legisprudential question triggered by such references is, why does the Court bother? If grammar rules provide merely a second, third, or fourth justification for an interpretation reached through other interpretive canons, then what does the Court gain—or think it gains—by including such rules in its statutory analysis?

This essay examines these questions through the lens …

All Judges Are Political—Except When They Are Not: Acceptable Hypocrisies And The Rule Of Law, Keith J. Bybee

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This paper contains the introduction to the new book, All Judges Are Political—Except When They Are Not: Acceptable Hypocrisies and the Rule of Law (Stanford University Press, 2010).

The book begins with the observation that Americans are divided in their beliefs about whether courts operate on the basis of unbiased legal principle or of political interest. This division in public opinion in turn breeds suspicion that judges do not actually mean what they say, that judicial professions of impartiality are just fig leaves used to hide the pursuit of partisan purposes.

Comparing law to the practice of common courtesy, the …

A Tale Of Two Paradigms: Judicial Review And Judicial Duty, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

What is the role of judges in holding government acts unconstitutional? The conventional paradigm is "judicial review." From this perspective, judges have a distinct power to review statutes and other government acts for their constitutionality. The historical evidence, however, reveals another paradigm, that of judicial duty. From this point of view, presented in my book Law and Judicial Duty, a judge has an office or duty, in all decisions, to exercise judgment in accord with the law of the land. On this understanding, there is no distinct power to review acts for their constitutionality, and what is called "judicial review" …

Statutory Interpretation In The Roberts Court's First Era: An Empirical And Doctrinal Analysis, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the Roberts Court's statutory cases from its 2005-2008 Terms, beginning with cases decided after January 31, 2006, when Justice Alito joined the Court, and concluding with cases decided on June 29, 2009, when Justice Souter retired. The Article's approach is both empirical and doctrinal, in that it (1) presents descriptive statistics illustrating the Court's and individual Justices' rates of reliance on fourteen different tools of statutory construction, and (2) engages in doctrinal analysis of the Court's statutory cases, highlighting discernable patterns in the individual Justices' interpretive approaches. The Article makes two significant contributions to the field of …

Instituições, Trabalho E Pessoas, Paulo Ferreira Da Cunha

Paulo Ferreira da Cunha

Os especialistas em doenças terminais sabem que ninguém tem saudades, quando abandona a vida, do trabalho que não fez. Tem saudades sim do tempo que não passou com familiares e amigos. A sociedade contemporânea, e algumas instituições "totais" estão a potenciar até ao expoente demencial a exploração e a despersonalização dos trabalhadores, designadamente proletarizando técnicos superiores e técnicos pensantes que, sem ócio criativo, deixarão de criar. É uma crise civilizacional, nada menos.

Professor Robert E. Shepherd, Jr. September 22, 1937 - December 11, 2008, Hon. Walter S. Felton Jr.

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Professor Robert E. Shepherd, Jr.: Tending To His Flock To Improve Its Lot, John P. Cunningham

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Representation Reinforcement: A Legislative Solution To A Legislative Process Problem, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

One of the most valuable—and disturbing—insights offered by public choice theory has been the recognition that wealthy, well-organized interests with narrow, intense preferences often dominate the legislative process while diffuse, unorganized interests go under-represented. Responding to this insight, legal scholars in the fields of statutory interpretation and administrative law have suggested that the solution to the problem of representational inequality lies with the courts. Indeed, over the past two decades, scholars in these fields have offered up a host of John Hart Ely-inspired representation reinforcing "canons of construction," designed to encourage judges to use their role as statutory interpreters to …

A New Look At Judicial Impact: Attorney's Fees In Securities Class Actions After Goldberger V. Integrated Resources, Inc., Theodore Eisenberg, Geoffrey Miller, Michael A. Perino

Faculty Publications

Political scientists have long been interested in what impact judicial decisions have on their intended audiences. Compliance has been defined as the lower court's proper application of standards the superior court has enunciated in deciding all cases raising similar or related questions. Most studies find widespread compliance in lower courts, with only rare instances of overt defiance.

This Article attempts to address three questions in the extant judicial impact literature. First, existing studies use rather insensitive measures of compliance and thus may fail to identify instances of subtle resistance to higher court rulings. Second, judicial impact literature has a restrained …

Evidentiary Wisdom And Blinders In Perspective: Thoughts On Misjudging, Elaine W. Shoben

Scholarly Works

Empirical studies serve to enlighten the law, even when they simply confirm the wisdom of existing rules. Chris Guthrie's article, Misjudging, primarily serves that useful function—confirming the wisdom of existing rules—even though the author sought to establish something different. Guthrie's article applies insights from cognitive psychology to the resolution of legal disputes and presents some empirical proof of the effect of the application. He concludes that three sets of “blinders”—informational, cognitive, and attitudinal—affect the ability of judges to reach correct resolutions of disputes. He therefore recommends further appreciation of the ability of arbitration and mediation to avoid some of the …

The "Federalism Five" As Supreme Court Nominees, 1971-1991, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

This article looks back at the Senate confirmation hearing testimonies of five Supreme Court nominees. Following their appointments to the Court, these justices—Chief Justice Rehnquist and Associate Justices O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas—generally voted together in path-breaking federalism cases. They reinvigorated constitutional law limits or decreed new ones on national legislative power, supported the "sovereignty" of state governments, and thus came to be known in some circles as the Rehnquist Court's "Federalism Five." As nominees testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, however, these "federalism" justices did not announce, or for the most part even much hint at, what came to …

Law, Ideology, And Strategy In Judicial Decisonmaking: Evidence From Securities Fraud Actions, Michael A. Perino

Faculty Publications

Legal academics and political scientists continue to debate whether the legal, attitudinal, or strategic model best explains judicial decision making. One limitation in this debate is the high-court bias found in most studies. This article, by contrast, examines federal district court decisions, specifically interpretations of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Initial interpretations of the Act articulated distinct liberal and conservative positions. The data compiled here support the hypothesis that the later emergence of an intermediate interpretation was the result of strategic statutory interpretation rather than simply judges acting consistently with their ideological preferences, although there is some …

The Honorable Robert R. Merhige, Jr.: A Colleague Remembered, Robert E. Payne

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Moral Intelligence: Mind, Brain An The Law , Atahualpa Fernandez

ExpressO

This paper discusses several issues at the impact of cognitive neuroscience have to do with the current theoretical and methodological edifice of juridical science. Localizing the brain correlates related to moral judgments, using neuroimage techniques (and also studies on brain lesions), seems to be, without doubt, one of the big events in the history of the normative social sciences.The best neuroscientific model of normative judgment available today establishes that the ethical-cerebral law operator counts on, in his neural evaluative-affective systems, a permanent presence of requirements, obligations and strategies, with a “should be” that incorporates internally rational and emotional reasons, that …

Congressional Threats Of Removal Against Federal Judges, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

The federal judicial branch has lately become the object of increasing scrutiny and distrust by its legislative counterpart. Congressional suspicion is often directed toward judicial discretion in criminal sentencing and, more generally, the degree to which judges are perceived to be beholden to a particular ideological point of view or personal bias. This distrust has bred a potent strain of political opportunism that Congress has manifested in several recent bills. One of these, the Feeney Amendment to the PROTECT Act, all but eliminated judicial discretion in sentencing and tacitly threatens judges' continued employment. Though the Supreme Court's recent decision in …

A Commander's Power, A Civilian's Reason: Justice Jackson's Korematsu Dissent, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

Robert Houghwout Jackson was a justice of the United States Supreme Court during the years of World War II. This article considers his great but potentially perplexing December 1944 dissent in Korematsu v. United States, in which he refused to join the Court majority that proclaimed the constitutionality of military orders excluding Japanese Americans from the West Coast of the United States during the War years. This article considers Justice Jackson's Korematsu dissent in full. It was and is, contrary to some of the criticisms it has received over the past 60 years, a coherent position. Jackson's dissent is also …

Judges As Film Critics: New Approaches To Filmic Evidence, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

This Article exposes internal contradictions in case law deciding the use and admissibility of film as evidence. Based on a review of more than ninety state and federal cases dating from 1923 to the present, the Article explains how the source of these contradictions is the frequent miscategorization of film as "demonstrative evidence," that category of evidence that purports to illustrate other evidence rather than to be directly probative of some fact at issue. The Article further demonstrates how these contradictions are based on two venerable jurisprudential anxieties. One is the concern about the growing trend toward replacing the traditional …

Law And Judicial Duty, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Two hundred years ago, in Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice Marshall delivered an opinion that has come to dominate modern discussions of constitutional law. Faced with a conflict between an act of Congress and the U.S. Constitution, he explained what today is known as "judicial review." Marshall described judicial review in terms of a particular type of "superior law" and a particular type of "judicial duty." Rather than speak generally about the hierarchy within law, he focused on "written constitutions."

He declared that the U.S. Constitution is "a superior, paramount law" and that if "the constitution is superior to any …

Does Law And Literature Survive Lawyerland?, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

No abstract provided.

Supreme Court Federalism Decisions, Leon Friedman

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Judicial Auditing, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents a simple framework for analyzing a hierarchical system of judicial auditing. We concentrate on (what we perceive to be) the two principal reasons that courts and/or legislatures tend to scrutinize the decisions of lower echelon actors: imprecision and ideological bias. In comparing these two reasons, we illustrate how each may yield systematically distinct auditing and reversal behaviors. While auditing for imprecision tends to bring about evenhanded review/reversal, auditing for political bias tends to be contingent on the first mover's chosen action. Examples of these tendencies can be found in a number of legal applications, including administrative law, …

Gazing Into The Crystal Ball: Reflections On The Standards State Judges Should Use To Ascertain Federal Law, Donald H. Zeigler

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Embracing Descent: The Bankruptcy Of A Business Paradigm For Conceptualizing And Regulating The Legal Profession, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Lawyers are said to travel in packs, or at least pairs, and in the popular parlance are often compared to hoards of locusts, herds of cattle, or unruly mobs. However, at least for purposes of assessing concerns with professionalism currently surrounding the bar and the public, whether attorneys are more or less social than other human animals does not matter. My point is simply that lawyers are social beings; like other human beings in social and occupational groups, lawyers behave largely in accordance with group norms, in much the same way peer pressure led Julian English toward juvenile delinquency in …

Deciding The Stop And Frisk Cases: A Look Inside The Supreme Court's Conference, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

In our system of constitutional decision-making, the Supreme Court makes law as an institution in its formal written opinions. The Court and its individual members make their official legal marks in the printed pages of the United States Reports. In June 1968, in Terry v. Ohio and Sibron v. New York, the two decisions that approved the constitutionality under the Fourth Amendment of police stop and frisk practices, the Court filled many official pages with rich discussion. Over the ensuing thirty years, these Court and individual opinions have shaped the course of constitutional analysis in our courts and guided the …

What Is Law? A Search For Legal Meaning And Good Judging Under A Textualist Lens, Roger Colinvaux

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.