Jurisprudence Commons^™

Antiracist Remedial Approaches In Judge Gregory’S Jurisprudence, Leah M. Litman

Articles

This piece uses the idea of antiracism to highlight parallels between school desegregation cases and cases concerning errors in the criminal justice system. There remain stark, pervasive disparities in both school composition and the criminal justice system. Yet even though judicial remedies are an integral part of rooting out systemic inequality and the vestiges of discrimination, courts have been reticent to use the tools at their disposal to adopt proactive remedial approaches to address these disparities. This piece uses two examples from Judge Roger Gregory’s jurisprudence to illustrate how an antiracist approach to judicial remedies might work.

Textualism For Realists, Ian Samuel

Michigan Law Review

Review of Richard L. Hasen's The Justice of Contradictions: Antonin Scalia and the Politics of Disruption.

The Rhetorical Canons Of Construction: New Textualism's Rhetoric Problem, Charlie D. Stewart

Michigan Law Review

New Textualism is ascendant. Elevated to prominence by the late Justice Antonin Scalia and championed by others like Justice Neil Gorsuch, the method of interpretation occupies an increasingly dominant place in American jurisprudence. Yet, this Comment argues the proponents of New Textualism acted unfairly to reach this lofty perch. To reach this conclusion, this Comment develops and applies a framework to evaluate the rhetoric behind New Textualism: the rhetorical canons of construction. Through the rhetorical canons, this Comment demonstrates that proponents of New Textualism advance specious arguments, declare other methods illegitimate hypocritically, refuse to engage with the merits of their …

Why The Burger Court Mattered, David A. Strauss

Michigan Law Review

A review of Michael J. Graetz and Linda Greenhouse, The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right.

Rethinking Criminal Contempt, John A.E. Pottow, Jason S. Levin

Articles

It is of course too early to tell whether we are in a new era of bankruptcy judge (dis)respectability. Only time will tell. But this Article performs a specific case study, on one discrete area of bankruptcy court authority, based upon a particular assumption in that regard. The assumption is this: certain high-salience judicial events-here, the recent Supreme Court bankruptcy judge decisions, coupled with earlier constitutional precedents involving the limits of Article III-can trigger overreaction and hysteria. Lower courts may read these Supreme Court decisions as calling into question the permissibility of certain bankruptcy court practices under the Constitution, and …

The Tragedy Of Justice Scalia, Mitchell N. Berman

Michigan Law Review

Review of A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law by Antonin Scalia .

Thin Rationality Review, Jacob Gersen, Adrian Vermeule

Michigan Law Review

Under the Administrative Procedure Act, courts review and set aside agency action that is “arbitrary [and] capricious.” In a common formulation of rationality review, courts must either take a “hard look” at the rationality of agency decisionmaking, or at least ensure that agencies themselves have taken a hard look. We will propose a much less demanding and intrusive interpretation of rationality review—a thin version. Under a robust range of conditions, rational agencies have good reason to decide in a manner that is inaccurate, nonrational, or arbitrary. Although this claim is seemingly paradoxical or internally inconsistent, it simply rests on an …

Fun With Administrative Law: A Game For Lawyers And Judges, Adam Babich

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The practice of law is not a game. Administrative law in particular can implicate important issues that impact people’s health, safety, and welfare and change business’ profitability or even viability. Nonetheless, it can seem like a game. This is because courts rarely explain administrative law rulings in terms of the public purposes and policies at issue in lawsuits. Instead, the courts’ administrative law opinions tend to turn on arcane interpretive doctrines with silly names, such as the “Chevron two-step” or “Chevron step zero.” To advance doctrinal arguments, advocates and courts engage in linguistic debates that resemble a smokescreen—tending to obscure …

The Danger Of Nonrandom Case Assignment: How The Southern District Of New York's "Related Cases" Rule Shaped Stop-And-Frisk Rulings, Katherine A. Macfarlane

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The Southern District of New York’s local rules are clear: “[A]ll active judges . . . shall be assigned substantially an equal share of the categories of cases of the court over a period of time.” Yet for the past fourteen years, Southern District Judge Shira Scheindlin has been granted near-exclusive jurisdiction over one category of case: those involving wide-sweeping constitutional challenges to the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) stop-and-frisk policies. In 1999, Judge Scheindlin was randomly assigned Daniels v. City of New York, the first in a series of high-profile and high-impact stop-and-frisk cases. Since then, she has overseen …

Stare Decisis And The Rule Of Law: A Layered Approach, Jeremy Waldron

Michigan Law Review

Stare decisis remains a controversial feature of the legal systems that recognize it. Some jurists argue that the doctrine is at odds with the rule of law; others argue that there are good rule-of-law arguments in favor of stare decisis. This Article considers one possible good rule-of-law argument. It suggests that we should approach stare decisis in a layered way, looking at what the rule of law requires of the various judges involved in the development of a precedent. One rule-of-law principle, the principle of constancy, counsels against lightly overturning such precedents as there are. But that is not in …

The Real Formalists, The Real Realists, And What They Tell Us About Judicial Decision And Legal Education, Edward Rubin

Michigan Law Review

The periodization of history, like chocolate cake, can have some bad effects on us, but it is hard to resist. We realize, of course, that Julius Caesar didn’t think of himself as “Classical” and Richard the Lionhearted didn’t regard the time in which he lived as the Middle Ages. Placing historical figures in subsequently defined periods separates us from them and impairs our ability to understand them on their own terms. But it is difficult to understand anything about them at all if we try to envision history as continuous and undifferentiated. We need periodization to organize events that are …

Testing Minimalism: A Reply, Cass R. Sunstein

Michigan Law Review

Some judges are less ambitious than others; they have minimalist tendencies. Minimalists are unambitious along two dimensions. First, they seek to rule narrowly rather than broadly. In a single case, they do not wish to resolve other, related problems that might have relevant differences. They are willing to live with the costs and burdens of uncertainty, which they tend to prefer to the risks of premature resolution of difficult issues. Second, minimalists seek to rule shallowly rather than deeply, in the sense that they favor arguments that do not take a stand on the foundational debates in law and politics. …

Rule-Oriented Realism, Emily Sherwin

Michigan Law Review

In his new book The Law and Ethics of Restitution, Hanoch Dagan undertakes to explain and justify the American law of restitution. He offers a broad theoretical account of this poorly understood subject, designed not only to fortify the substantive law of restitution but also to clarify the role and methodology of courts in developing the field. Dagan's book also provides lively discussion of the role of restitution in some of the most highly publicized legal developments of recent years. Those who think of restitution as an obscure branch of "legal remedies" may be surprised to read about the …

Against Interpretive Supremacy, Saikrishna Prakash, John Yoo

Michigan Law Review

Many constitutional scholars are obsessed with judicial review and the many questions surrounding it. One perennial favorite is whether the Constitution even authorizes judicial review. Another is whether the other branches of the federal government must obey the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution and what, if anything, the other branches must do to execute the judiciary's judgments. Marbury v. Madison has been a full-employment program for many constitutional law scholars, including ourselves. Larry Kramer, the new Dean of Stanford Law School, shares this passion. He has devoted roughly the last decade of his career, with two lengthy law review …

Appellate Courts Inside And Out, Maxwell L. Stearns

Michigan Law Review

While the United States Supreme Court has been the object of seemingly endless scholarly commentary, the United States Courts of Appeals are just now coming into their own as a subject of independent academic inquiry. This is an important development when one considers that the vast bulk of relevant precedents governing most federal court litigation comes not from the Supreme Court, but rather from the United States Courts of Appeals. Because relatively few courts of appeals decisions are reviewed in the Supreme Court, with rare exception, the federal circuit courts provide the functional equivalent of that Court's proverbial "last word." …

Interpretation And Institutions, Cass R. Sunstein, Adrian Vermeule

Michigan Law Review

Suppose that a statute, enacted several decades ago, bans the introduction of any color additive in food if that additive "causes cancer" in human beings or animals. Suppose that new technologies, able to detect low-level carcinogens, have shown that many potential additives cause cancer, even though the statistical risk is often tiny - akin to the risk of eating two peanuts with governmentally-permitted levels of aflatoxins. Suppose, finally, that a company seeks to introduce a certain color additive into food, acknowledging that the additive causes cancer, but urging that the risk is infinitesimal, and that if the statutory barrier were …

Reply: The Institutional Dimension Of Statutory And Constitutional Interpretation, Richard A. Posner

Michigan Law Review

Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue in Interpretation and lnstitutions that judicial interpretation of statutes and constitutions should take account both of the institutional framework within which interpretation takes place and of the consequences of different styles of interpretation; they further argue that this point has been neglected by previous scholars. The first half of the thesis is correct but obvious; the second half, which the authors state in terms emphatic to the point of being immodest, is incorrect. Moreover, the authors offer no feasible suggestions for how the relation between interpretation and the institutional framework might be studied better …

Interpretive Theory In Its Infancy: A Reply To Posner, Cass R. Sunstein, Adrien Vermeule

Michigan Law Review

In law, problems of interpretation can be explored at different levels of generality. At the most specific level, people might urge that the Equal Protection Clause forbids affirmative action, or that the Food and Drug Act applies to tobacco products. At a higher level of generality, people might argue that the Equal Protection Clause should be interpreted in accordance with the original understanding of its ratifiers, or that the meaning of the Food and Drug Act should be settled with careful attention to its legislative history. At a still higher level of generality, people might identify the considerations that bear …

How Is Constitutional Law Made?, Tracey E. George, Robert J. Pushaw Jr.

Michigan Law Review

Bismarck famously remarked: "Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made." This witticism applies with peculiar force to constitutional law. Judges and commentators examine the sausage (the Supreme Court's doctrine), but ignore the messy details of its production. Maxwell Stearns has demonstrated, with brilliant originality, that the Court fashions constitutional law through process-based rules of decision such as outcome voting, stare decisis, and justiciability. Employing "social choice" economic theory, Professor Stearns argues that the Court, like all multimember decisionmaking bodies, strives to formulate rules that promote both rationality and fairness (p. 4). Viewed through the lens …

Terry Firma: Background Democracy And Constitutional Foundations, Frank I. Michelman

Michigan Law Review

Ages ago, I had the excellent luck to fall into a collaboration with Terrance Sandalow to produce a casebook now long forgotten. There could have been no more bracing or beneficial learning experience for a fledgling legal scholar (meaning me). What brought us together indeed was luck from my standpoint, but it was enterprise, too - the brokerage of an alert West Publishing Company editor picking up on a casual remark of mine as he made one of his regular sweeps through Harvard Law School. A novice law professor, I mentioned to him how much I admired a new essay …

Foreword: The Question Of Process, J. Harvie Wilkinson Iii

Michigan Law Review

Many in the legal profession have abandoned the great questions of legal process. This is too bad. How a decision is reached can be as important as what the decision is. In an increasingly diverse country with many competing visions of the good, it is critical for law to aspire to agreement on process - a task both more achievable than agreement on substance and more suited to our profession than waving the banners of ideological truth. By process, I mean the institutional routes by which we in America reach our most crucial decisions. In other words, process is our …

The Jurisprudence Of Yogi Berra, Edward H. Cooper, Grace C. Tonner

Articles

Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra was born on May 12, 1925, in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up to become one of baseball's all-time greats. Yogi played nineteen years in the Major Leagues, eighteen with the New York Yankees and one with the New York Mets He has been called the greatest Yankee catcher ever. During his career, Yogi played in a record fourteen World Series and was elected the American League's Most Valuable Player three times. Following his playing career, Yogi managed both the Yankees and the New York Mets, and coached the Yankees, Mets, and Houston Astros. He received …

The Tension Between Rules And Discretion In Family Law: A Report And Reflection, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

The history of law is many things. But one of them is the story of an unremitting struggle between rules and discretion. The tension between these two approaches to legal problems continues to pervade and perplex the law today. Perhaps nowhere is that tension more pronounced and more troubling than in family law. It is probably impossible to practice family law without wrestling with the imponderable choice between rules and discretion. Consider, for example, how many areas of family law are now being fought over in-just those terms. For decades we have lived with an abundantly discretionary way of resolving …

Judicial Discretion: Is One More Of A Good Thing Too Much?, David B. Sentelle

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Judicial Discretion by Aharon Barak

Judging The Judges: Three Opinions, James Boyd White

Articles

For some time I have been working on the problem of judicial criticism, focusing especially on the question: What is it in the work of a judge that leads us to admire a judicial opinion with the result of which we disagree, or to condemn an opinion that "comes out" the way we would do if we were charged with the responsibility of decision? The response I have been making is that this kind of judicial excellence (and its opposite too) lies in the sort of social and intellectual action in which the opinion engages: in the character the court …

Legal Theory And The Obligation Of A Judge: The Hart/Dworkin Dispute, Philip Soper

Book Chapters

Confronted with standards beyond those obvious in purpose and rule, the positivist, says Dworkin, has two choices. He must either claim that such standards are only discretionary and hence not legally binding, or he may concede their binding status and argue that he identifies them as legal standards through reference, in some more complex way, to his theoretical master test.

There is, however, a third possibility. The positivist might admit that some standards bind judges but explain that they play a role in the legal system sufficiently different from that of ordinary rules and principles to justify excluding them from …

The Eighteenth-Century Background Of John Marshall's Constitutional Jurisprudence, William E. Nelson

Michigan Law Review

This analysis of Marshall's constitutional jurisprudence avoids the pitfalls of previous theories. It does not see the Federalist political program as the source of Marshall's constitutional doctrines and thus does not need to explain how Marshall qualified his political principles or how he convinced non-Federalist judges to accept them. Instead, this essay argues that legal, not political, principles underlay Marshall's jurisprudence, but it attempts to understand those principles in a manner consistent with the unavoidable twentieth-century assumption that law is a body of flexible rules responsive to social reality rather than a series of immutable, unambiguous doctrines derived from a …

Congressional Repair Of The Erie Derailment, Leonard V. Quigley

Michigan Law Review

It is the thesis of this article that such legislative review and repair is required today on the part of the federal legislature in regard to the diversity jurisdiction of the federal courts. Such reconsideration is particularly appropriate where, as in the analogous commerce clause area, the subject matter has been committed specifically to the Congress by the Constitution.

Kirchheimer: Political Justice: The Use Of Legal Procedure For Political Ends, Kenneth S. Carlston

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends. By Otto Kirchheimer.

Wasserstrom: The Judicial Decision- Toward A Theory Of Legal Justification, William B. Harvey

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Judicial Decision- Toward A Theory of Legal Justification By Richard A. Wasserstrom.