Jurisprudence Commons^™

Movement Judges, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

Judges matter. The opinions of a few impact the lives of many. Judges romanticize their own impartiality, but apathy in the face of systems of oppression favors the status quo and clears the way for conservative agendas to take root. The lifetime appointments of federal judges, the deliberate weaponization of the bench by reactionary opponents of the New Deal and progressive social movements, and the sheer inertia of judicial self-restraint have led to the conservative capture of the courts. By contrast, empathy for the oppressed and downtrodden renders substantive justice possible and leaves room for unsuccessful litigants to accept unfavorable …

Who's Afraid Of Judicial Activism? Reconceptualizing A Traditional Paradigm In The Context Of Specialized Domestic Violence Court Programs, Jennifer L. Thompson

Maine Law Review

The Specialized Domestic Violence Pilot Project (Pilot Project), implemented in York and Portland in July and August 2002, is the result of the collaborative efforts of the District Court system, law enforcement, prosecutors, members of the defense bar, and various community agencies offering services to victims and perpetrators. District court judges are largely responsible for overseeing the changes in court procedures and implementing the new protocols in domestic violence cases. The Pilot Project, and the changes it is making to the role that courts play in domestic violence cases, represents a significant departure from the procedures followed by traditional court …

Look Back At The Rehnquist Era And An Overview Of The 2004 Supreme Court Term, Erwin Chemerinsky

Erwin Chemerinsky

No abstract provided.

The Demise Of Habeas Corpus And The Rise Of Qualified Immunity: The Court's Ever Increasing Limitations On The Development And Enforcement Of Constitutional Rights And Some Particularly Unfortunate Consequences, Stephen R. Reinhardt

Michigan Law Review

The collapse of habeas corpus as a remedy for even the most glaring of constitutional violations ranks among the greater wrongs of our legal era. Once hailed as the Great Writ, and still feted with all the standard rhetorical flourishes, habeas corpus has been transformed over the past two decades from a vital guarantor of liberty into an instrument for ratifying the power of state courts to disregard the protections of the Constitution. Along with so many other judicial tools meant to safeguard the powerless, enforce constitutional rights, and hold the government accountable, habeas has been slowly eroded by a …

Preliminary Thoughts On The Virtues Of Passive Dialogue, Michael Heise

Michael Heise

The judicial, legislative, and executive branches interact in many ways. These interactions fuel a constitutional dialogue that serves as a backdrop to myriad governmental activities, both large and small. The judiciary's participation is necessary, desirable, and, as a practical matter, inevitable. In my article I analyze two competing models that bear on the normative question: What form should the judiciary's participation take? Debates over the judiciary's appropriate role in the public constitutional dialogue have captured scholarly attention for decades. Recent attention has focused on a growing distinction between the active and passive models of judicial participation. My article approaches this …

A Typology Of Judging Styles, Corey Rayburn Yung

Northwestern University Law Review

This Article calls into question the fundamental premises of models of judicial decisionmaking utilized by legal and political science scholars. In the place of the predominant theories, I offer a new approach to understanding judicial behavior which recognizes judicial heterogeneity, multidimensional behavior, and interconnectedness among judges at different levels within the judiciary. The study utilizes a unique dataset of over 30,000 judicial votes from eleven courts of appeals in 2008, yielding statistically independent measures for judicial activism, ideology, independence, and partisanship. Based upon those four metrics, statistical cluster analysis is used to identify nine statistically distinct judging styles: Trailblazing, Consensus …

Look Back At The Rehnquist Era And An Overview Of The 2004 Supreme Court Term, Erwin Chemerinsky

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Hobby Lobby And The Pathology Of Citizens United, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

Four years ago, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission held that for-profit corporations possess a First Amendment right to make independent campaign expenditures. In so doing, the United States Supreme Court invited speculation that such corporations might possess other First Amendment rights as well. The petitioners in Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius are now arguing that for-profit corporations are among the intended beneficiaries of the Free Exercise Clause and, along with the respondents in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, that they also qualify as “persons” under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Neither suggestion follows inexorably from Citizens United, …

Social Justice And The Warren Court: A Preliminary Examination, Arthur S. Miller

Pepperdine Law Review

Whether courts should attempt to advance social justice is a much debated topic in American jurisprudence. The conventional wisdom about the judicial process is to the contrary. In this article, Professor Arthur S. Miller suggests that the Supreme Court's innovative civil rights and civil liberties decisions during Chief Justice Earl Warren's tenure had the ultimate effect of helping to preserve the status quo of the social order. Its decisions, coming at a time of economic abundance, were a means of siphoning off discontent from disadvantaged groups at minimum social cost to the established order. The "activist" decisions under Warren were …

Parsing Judicial Activism, Scott Dodson

Scott Dodson

This microsymposium contribution responds to Suzanna Sherry's paper "Why We Need More Judicial Activism" and offers a heuristic--what I call libertarian activism--for distinguishing activism that reduces governmental power from activism that enhances governmental power.

Judicial Activism: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

No matter how judges are selected, sooner or later some unfortunate candidate will be labeled a "judicial activist." One has to wonder: Does the term have any identifiable core meaning? Or is it just an all-purpose term of opprobrium, reflecting whatever brand of judicial behavior the speaker regards as particularly pernicious? Implicit in this question are several important issues about the role of courts in our democratic society.

I take my definition from Judge Richard Posner, who describes activist decisions as those that expand judicial power over other branches of the national government or over state governments. Unlike other uses …

Preliminary Thoughts On The Virtues Of Passive Dialogue, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The judicial, legislative, and executive branches interact in many ways. These interactions fuel a constitutional dialogue that serves as a backdrop to myriad governmental activities, both large and small. The judiciary's participation is necessary, desirable, and, as a practical matter, inevitable. In my article I analyze two competing models that bear on the normative question: What form should the judiciary's participation take?

Debates over the judiciary's appropriate role in the public constitutional dialogue have captured scholarly attention for decades. Recent attention has focused on a growing distinction between the active and passive models of judicial participation. My article approaches this …

The Federal Circuit: Judicial Stability Or Judicial Activism?, Introduction To A Review Of Recent Decisions Of The United States Court Of Appeals For The Federal Circuit, The Honorable Pauline Newman

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Taking The Framers Seriously, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article reviews Taking the Constitution Seriously by Walter Berns (1987).

This review focuses on three of the key historical points that Walter Berns makes: his arguments that the Declaration of Independence is a Lockean document; that the Constitution encapsulates the political philosophy of the Declaration; and that the framers viewed the commercialization of society as a salutary development and were unambivalent champions of the right to property. Examination of these issues suggests that the ideological universe of the framers was far more complex than Berns indicates. While the revolutionary era witnessed a new concern with individual rights and a …