Jurisprudence Commons^™

The Supreme Court’S Chief Justice Of Intellectual Property Law, Bob Gomulkiewicz

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Justice Clarence Thomas is one of the most recognizable members of the United States Supreme Court. Many people recall his stormy Senate confirmation hearing and notice his fiery dissenting opinions that call on the Court to reflect the original public meaning of the Constitution. Yet observers have missed one of Justice Thomas’s most significant contributions to the Court—his intellectual property law jurisprudence. Justice Thomas has authored more majority opinions in intellectual property cases than any other Justice in the Roberts Court era and now ranks as the most prolific author of patent law opinions in the history of the Supreme …

Reasoning V. Rhetoric: The Strange Case Of “Unconstitutional Beyond A Reasonable Doubt”, Hugh D. Spitzer

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An odd formulation has frequented American constitutional discourse for 125 years: a declaration that courts should not overturn a statute on constitutional grounds unless it is “unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt.” This concept has been thought of as a presumption, a standard, a doctrine, or a philosophy of coordinate branch respect and judicial restraint. Yet it has been criticized because “beyond a reasonable doubt” is at root an evidentiary standard of proof in criminal cases rather than a workable theory or standard for deciding constitutional law cases. This article discusses the history and use of “unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt,” …

Beyond Severability, Lisa Marshall Manheim

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Severability is a wrecking ball. Even the most cautious use of this doctrine demolishes statutes in contravention of legislative intent and without adequate justification. It does so through the imposition of an artificially restrictive framework: one that requires that courts respond to a statute’s constitutional flaw by disregarding that statute either in whole or in part. In the last few years alone, this framework has flattened the Voting Rights Act, threatened the Bankruptcy Code, and nearly toppled the Affordable Care Act.

Yet courts apply severability reflexively, never demanding justification for its destructive treatment. Scholars, meanwhile, assiduously debate the particulars of …

Post-Racial Proxies: Resurgent State And Local Anti-"Alien" Laws And Unity-Rebuilding Frames For Antidiscrimination Values, Mary D. Fan

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Though unauthorized migration into the United States has diminished substantially since 2007, anti-“illegal alien” state and local laws and furor are flaring again. While one of the biggest worries regarding such “anti-alien” laws is the risk of racialized harm, courts invalidating overreaching statutes are relying on structural or procedural grounds, such as preemption and due process doctrines. [PARA] This Article examines how these political and legal trends point to how proxies are used in a post-racial era to dance around race, in constructive, national unity-rebuilding as well as divisive, inflammatory ways. Anti-alien legislation is a proxy way to vent resurgent …

Citizenship Perception Strain In Cases Of Crime And War: On Law And Intuition, Mary De Ming Fan

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The jurisprudence on crime and war has repeatedly indicated that citizenship matters in determining the scope and applicability of constitutional protections. Just how citizenship matters and what vision of the citizen controls have been murky, however. A rich literature has developed deploring how the nation and the jurisprudence have appeared to slip beneath the baseline of protections when faced with formal citizens who challenge our popular notions about what citizens look like, feel like, and do. What warrants further examination is why this may be so. Understanding the processes that may blur the doctrine and lead to slippage in citizenship …

Textualism In Gatt/Wto Jurisprudence: Lessons For The Constitutionalization Debate, Dongsheng Zang

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Today, the World Trade Organization (WTO) jurisprudence is subject to tremendous controversy, the WTO panels' or Appellate Body's interpretation of a WTO text is often heatedly debated; and yet, there seems not much attention paid to the general methodology of interpretation in the practice of the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) and WTO jurisprudence, even in a recent debate over constitutionalization between Petersmann and his critics. In rejecting his human rights approach to constitutionalization, Petersmann's critics, rightfully, warn him that he has failed to appreciate the complex relations between human rights and free trade in the history of …

Probability And Statistics In The Legal Curriculum: A Case Study In Disciplinary Aspects Of Interdisciplinarity, Michael Townsend

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This Article considers interdisciplinarity and the legal curriculum in the context of probability and statistics. Section D of Part II begins the discussion by sketching some multidisciplinary, pluridisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches. Part III is the workhorse of this Article. The particular example used here is the well-known jury discrimination case of Castaneda v. Partida as described in Section A. This "case study" provides the basis for a crossdisciplinary experience that offers students an opportunity to think about law as a discipline. It is difficult for students to step back and look at law as a discipline when there is …

Textual Imagination, Mary D. Fan

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Textualism's revival illuminated the judicial imagination at play behind the search for congressional intent through legislative history. The Supreme Court’s decision in Buckhannon Board & Care Home v. West Virginia Department of Health & Human Resources shows the Supreme Court’s mounting disregard for legislative history and concomitant attempt to erect replacement canons of statutory construction to guide textual interpretation. The opinion privileged a canon of statutory construction over the legislative record of congressional intent. Of more imminent and practical impact, Buckhannon invalidated the catalyst theory of awarding plaintiff’s fees to “prevailing parties” under statutes authorizing private attorneys general to bring …

Cardozo's Allegheny College Opinion: A Case Study In Law As An Art, Michael Townsend

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This Article consists of two related pieces. One piece considers interpretations of Cardozo's opinion in Allegheny College v. National Chautauqua County Bank. Cardozo commonly is placed among the greatest American judges, but his "analysis in Allegheny College is regularly criticized as contrived and artificial." This Article attempts to resuscitate the reputation of his analysis by placing the case in its historical and doctrinal context. The other piece continues the elaboration of a framework introduced in a previous article for thinking about law as a discipline. Central to this framework is a particular conception of the western intellectual tradition in …

Redefining Radicalism: A Historical Perspective, Walter J. Walsh

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This Essay suggests that Unger's attack on formalism and objectivism is not so new. After noting the early contributions of Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham, it does so by particular reference to the critique of William Sampson (1764-1836), the banished Irish civil rights lawyer and political activist, who led an intellectual charge upon the American common law more than a century and a half ago. It also suggests that by depicting the common law as incompatible with the egalitarian ideal of a democratic republic, Sampson sowed the seeds of a distinct radical tradition of which the critical legal studies movement …

A Need For Clarity: Toward A New Standard For Preliminary Injunctions, Lea B. Vaughn

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This Article examines the various standards for preliminary injunctions and demonstrates the ways in which the standards have become confused by irrelevant layers of meaning. Those layers of meaning are analyzed; nonfunctional accretions are discarded, and legitimate modem meanings are developed. The discussion is conducted against a background of assumptions about what makes a good standard, for example, accessibility and comprehensiveness. By modernizing the standard, the parties and the courts will frankly and openly discuss the underlying legal issues and values. This, in turn, should lead to more legitimate decisions.

Under a modernized standard, a court should redress immediate pretrial …