Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
Supreme Verbosity: The Roberts Court's Expanding Legacy, Mary Margaret Penrose
Supreme Verbosity: The Roberts Court's Expanding Legacy, Mary Margaret Penrose
Faculty Scholarship
The link between courts and the public is the written word. With rare exceptions, it is through judicial opinions that courts communicate with litigants, lawyers, other courts, and the community. Whatever the court’s statutory and constitutional status, the written word, in the end, is the source and the measure of the court’s authority.
It is therefore not enough that a decision be correct—it must also be fair and reasonable and readily understood. The burden of the judicial opinion is to explain and to persuade and to satisfy the world that the decision is principled and sound. What the court says, …
Nonmajority Opinions And Biconditional Rules, Adam N. Steinman
Nonmajority Opinions And Biconditional Rules, Adam N. Steinman
Faculty Scholarship
In Hughes v. United States, the Supreme Court will revisit a thorny question: how to determine the precedential effect of decisions with no majority opinion. For four decades, the clearest instruction from the Court has been the rule from Marks v. United States: the Court's holding is "the position taken by those Members who concurred in the judgments on the narrowest grounds." The Marks rule raises particular concerns, however, when it is applied to biconditional rules. Biconditionals are distinctive in that they set a standard that dictates both success and failure for a given issue. More formulaically, they combine an …
Law Library Blog (January 2018): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Law Library Blog (January 2018): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Law Library Newsletters/Blog
No abstract provided.
Artis V. District Of Columbia—What Did The Court Actually Say?, Doron M. Kalir
Artis V. District Of Columbia—What Did The Court Actually Say?, Doron M. Kalir
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
On January 22, 2018, the Supreme Court issued Artis v. District of Columbia. A true "clash of the titans," this 5-4 decision featured colorful comments on both sides, claims of "absurdities," uncited use of Alice in Wonderland vocabulary ("curiouser," anyone?), and an especially harsh accusation by the dissent that "we’ve wandered so far from the idea of a federal government of limited and enumerated powers that we’ve begun to lose sight of what it looked like in the first place."
One might assume that the issue in question was a complex constitutional provision, or a dense, technical federal code …
Teva And The Process Of Claim Construction, Lee Petherbridge Ph.D., R. Polk Wagner
Teva And The Process Of Claim Construction, Lee Petherbridge Ph.D., R. Polk Wagner
All Faculty Scholarship
In Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc. v. Sandoz, Inc., the Supreme Court addressed an oft-discussed jurisprudential disconnect between itself and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit: whether patent claim construction was “legal” or “factual” in nature, and how much deference is due to district court decisionmaking in this area. In this Article, we closely examine the Teva opinion and situate it within modern claim construction jurisprudence. Our thesis is that the Teva holding is likely to have only very modest effects on the incidence of deference to district court claim construction but that for unexpected reasons the …