Jurisprudence Commons^™

The New Dread, Part Ii: The Judicial Overthrow Of The Reasonableness Standard In Police Shooting, Kindaka J. Sanders

Cleveland State Law Review

This Article series argues that the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on excessive force from Graham v. Connor to the present has undermined the objectivity of the reasonableness standard. In its place, the Court has erected a standard that reflects modern conservative political ideology, including race conservatism, law and order, increased police discretion, and the deconstruction of the Warren Court’s expansion of civil rights and civil liberties. Indeed, the Court, dominated by law-and-order conservatives, is one of the greatest triumphs of conservatism. Modern conservatism developed as a backlash against various social movements like the Civil Rights Movement and spontaneous urban rebellions during …

Dignity And The Promise Of Conscience, Duane Rudolph

Cleveland State Law Review

This Article focuses on the relationship between three specific invocations of dignity in American law, whose emphases are different. The first appeared in the late eighteenth century and is concerned with the dignity of a state or sovereign. The second made its appearance at the beginning of the nineteenth century and is devoted to the dignity of the court. The third is concerned with the dignity of the human person. International instruments and foreign constitutions evoked dignity in this sense in the 1930s and 1940s. In the United States, the Restatement of Torts, First evoked this sense of the term …

Failing To Keep The Cat In The Bag: A Decennial Assessment Of Federal Rule Of Evidence 502'S Impact On Forfeiture Of Legal Privilege Under Customary Waiver Doctrine, Jared S. Sunshine

Cleveland State Law Review

Federal Rule of Evidence 502—providing certain exemptions from the surrender of attorney-client and work product privilege because a confidential item was disclosed—had great expectations to live up to after its enactment in 2008, as Congress and others heralded it as a panacea to litigation’s woes in the face of bourgeoning discovery. The enacted rule was the subject of much skepticism by the academic punditocracy, however. Ten years later, this Article surveys the actual results and finds that, regrettably, pessimism has proven the better prediction. Percolation of debate over the rule’s many ambiguities and courts’ disparate approaches have not resolved initial …

Forgotten Cases: Worthen V. Thomas, David F. Forte

Cleveland State Law Review

According to received opinion, the case of the Home Bldg. & Loan Ass’n v. Blaisdell, decided in 1934, laid to rest any force the Contract Clause of the United States Constitution had to limit state legislation that affected existing contracts. But the Supreme Court’s subsequent decisions belies that claim. In fact, a few months later, the Court unanimously decided Worthen v. Thomas, which reaffirmed the vitality of the Contract Clause. Over the next few years, in twenty cases, the Court limited the reach of Blaisdell and confirmed the limiting force of the Contract Clause on state legislation. Only …

The "P" Word: Ohio Should Adopt The Uniform Premarital Agreements Act To Achieve Consistency And Uniformity In The Treatment Of Prenuptial Agreements, Jenna Christine Colucci

Cleveland State Law Review

Throughout the United States, courts have used inconsistent standards for the interpretation of prenuptial agreements. Under Ohio jurisprudence, courts are concerned with protecting the vulnerable spouse or the economically disadvantaged party. This legal standard acknowledges the unique relationship of the parties to the contract and will generally review the procedural and substantive components of the prenuptial agreement. Conversely, other courts are weary of interfering with the contractual freedom of the parties and will only invalidate a prenuptial agreement upon a showing of fraud, duress, or misrepresentation. The Uniform Premarital Agreement Act was drafted in 1983 to address the inconsistent treatment …

Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., James Wilson, And The Pursuit Of Equality And Liberty, Deborah A. Roy

Cleveland State Law Review

This Article analyzes the jurisprudence of one of the most transformative Supreme Court Justices, William J. Brennan, Jr., from the perspective of his vision that the United States Constitution is founded on Human Dignity. Justice Brennan expressed this principle in his opinions that advanced the realization of individual rights for each and every American. The principle of human dignity invokes the values of equality and liberty. The article shows that Justice Brennan traced the principle of human dignity back to the Founding Fathers and the constitutional government that they established. Rather than being unhinged from the Constitution as his critics …

The Ideological Divide: Conflict And The Supreme Court's Certiorari Decision , Emily Grant, Scott A. Hendrickson, Michael S. Lynch

Cleveland State Law Review

This Article bridges a gap in existing literature by evaluating, from an empirical perspective, the impact of conflict among the lower courts on the Supreme Court’s decision to grant or deny a petition for a writ of certiorari. Specifically, this Article looks at the political ideology of the lower courts involved in a split of authority on federal law and compares those positions to the political ideology of the Supreme Court itself. This Article concludes that the ideological content of lower court opinions in a conflict case impacts the Supreme Court’s certiorari decisions in a statistically significant way, and thus …

The Mystery Of Life In The Laboratory Of Democracy: Personal Autonomy In State Law, Adam J. Macleod

Cleveland State Law Review

This article attempts to carve a path between the two sides in this autonomy war. It begins by bringing into dialogue with each other four of the most influential legal philosophers of our day: Joseph Raz, Ronald Dworkin, John Finnis, and Robert George. Each of these four scholars makes bold and instructive claims about the value and limits of personal autonomy. The article then examines several different areas of state law where one might expect a principle of autonomy to be implicated, and articulates six important lessons that one can glean from state law about the relationship between personal autonomy …

Originalism, John Marshall, And The Necessary And Proper Clause: Resurrecting The Jurisprudence Of Alexander Addison, Patrick J. Charles

Cleveland State Law Review

However, to give Marshall full credit for the “choice of means” doctrine is unfair, he was not the first to lay claim to the doctrine when interpreting the Necessary and Proper Clause. Indeed, the philosophical and legal influences of John Marshall have been the speculation of scholarly discourse for some time. For instance, many legal commentators and historians have attributed the influence of Marshall's opinions to being a strong Federalist because many of his opinions echo the Federalist interpretation of the Constitution. However, Marshall's opinions were also influenced by factors that sometimes conflicted with Federalist thought. This Article does not …

Rhetorical Neutrality: Colorblindness, Frederick Douglass, And Inverted Critical Race Theory, Cedric Merlin Powell

Cleveland State Law Review

Rhetorical Neutrality refers to the middle ground approach adopted by the Supreme Court in its race jurisprudence. This Article examines rhetorical neutrality as evinced in the narratives espoused in the opinions of Justices O'Connor and Thomas. In Grutter, both Justices employ neutral approaches, rooted in colorblindness. However, the underlying rhetoric, or how their reasoning is expressed in their respective opinions, is strikingly distinct. Neither Justice advances a remedial approach; both Justices start with the premise that race is inherently suspect, but their approaches diverge because they view colorblind neutrality in fundamentally distinct ways.

Reason's Freedom And The Dialectic Of Ordered Liberty , Edward C. Lyons

Cleveland State Law Review

The present Article proposes, via consideration of a contrast between two classical accounts of dialectical reasoning, that the employment of "public reason," in substantive due process analysis, is unworkable in theory and contrary to more reflective Supreme Court precedent. Part I of this Article raises a number of issues for consideration relating to the epistemology of law and focuses especially on the concept of public reason and its critique. Part II addresses alternative approaches to legal reasoning suggested by classical accounts of practical reasoning and virtue theory and considers the operation of such legal analysis outside the area of substantive …

Legal Change, The Eighty-Third Cleveland-Marshall Fund Visiting Scholar Lecture , Gerald Torres

Cleveland State Law Review

This Essay will proceed in the following steps. First, I want to propose a preliminary definition of legal change. As I hope to make clear, there are technical and non-technical dimensions to the definition. Second, I want to offer a preliminary definition of social change and social movements. Third, I want to build on the analysis of the late Professor Thomas Stoddard in which he sketched out a relationship between what he calls "rule shifting" and "culture shifting."' Finally, I want to describe what Professor Lani Guinier and I have come to call "demosprudence." I appreciate that it is not …

Monism, Nominalism, And Public-Private In The Work Of Margaret Jane Radin, Christopher L. Sagers

Cleveland State Law Review

This essay begins by situating the distinction in history generally and in American legal thought. Its historical aspect seems important because it suggests that the distinction is not predetermined—it is historically and culturally contingent. That fact has been largely ignored in the American legal academy, and among most of the judiciary it is all but outright socialist treachery to suggest it.

The essay moves on to consider Radin's work itself. The prominence of the distinction is relatively obvious in some of her work on technological marketing and design issues, but I will suggest that in fact it runs quietly just …

Love And Architecture: Race, Nation, And Gender Performances Inside And Outside The State, Angela P. Harris

Cleveland State Law Review

In this essay, I will use the metaphor of "performance" to describe the complicated interplay of power and identity. Each of the essays in this Cluster, I suggest, is concerned with some facet of identity performance within the power fields of gender, race, and nation. Perry calls our attention to how skin color, though typically subsumed by "race" in legal discourse, is a resource for performing identity that in fact complicates our understanding of racial subordination. Nancy Ehrenreich and Nicholas Espiritu are concerned with how states mobilize individual and collective race and gender performances as a way of inciting and …

Outsider Citizenships And Multidimensional Borders: The Power And Danger Of Not Belonging, Pedro A. Malavet

Cleveland State Law Review

In this closing for the LatCrit VIII symposium, I adopt a collective view of the articles, and attempt to develop how the themes discussed in them fit within LatCrit scholarship. I will then interrogate the future of our enterprise by discussing the danger of succumbing to the seduction of the real or perceived need "to reinvent the wheel," or at least to clothe ideas in overly-developed language. Last, the Conclusion discusses how LatCrit scholarship is both promoted and challenged by the articles published here. I further include some suggested institutional responses to the opportunities for mentoring and nurturing that I …

City And Citizen: Community-Making As Legal Theory And Social Struggle, Francisco Valdes

Cleveland State Law Review

The Eighth Annual LatCrit Conference met in Cleveland in May, 2003 to engage a timely and topical theme - City and Citizen: Operations of Power, Strategies of Resistance. Importantly, the theme explicitly drew critical attention not only to operations of power but also to strategies of resistance, and thereby implicitly invited LatCritical analysis of how the two converge in the messy and multifaceted processes of building communities on any human scale. To open and introduce this symposium, this Foreword similarly proceeds in two parts: the first Part, reviewing the four "clusters" of essays comprising the symposium, focuses mostly on "operations …

Citizen And Citizenship Within And Beyond The Nation, Tayyab Mahmud

Cleveland State Law Review

The Latina/o Critical Legal Theory (LatCrit) movement, whose point of departure was the ground furnished by Legal Realism, Critical Legal Studies, Feminist Legal Theory, and Critical Race theory, has over time incorporated teachings of Queer Theory, Postcolonial Studies, Culture Studies, and Subaltern Studies. The three contributions to this cluster in the Symposium are worthy exemplars of this legacy as they open new avenues to broaden and deepen the project of critical legal scholarship. Jointly, the three interventions constitute a formidable spatial and temporal canvas. One explores the past, one interrogates the present, and one contemplates the future. One has the …

Of Desi, J. Lo And Color Matters: Law, Critical Race Theory The Architecture Of Race, Imani Perry

Cleveland State Law Review

In this article I want to posit two ways in which a critique of the black white binary leads us to understandings of race and racism that are useful for the struggles of all peoples of color. The first is, the critique should lead us to advocate for an understanding of race as an architecture rather than categorical. The second argument is that when we focus upon race as an architecture it leads us away from a linear notion of racial hierarchy with white at the top and black at the bottom, and towards a sense that the distribution of …

The Justice Who Wouldn't Be Lutheran: Toward Borrowing The Wisdom Of Faith Traditions, Marie A. Failinger

Cleveland State Law Review

Only a few legal scholars have attempted to work out what jurisprudence might look like if lawmakers and judges took their religious world-views seriously-and explicitly-in their work, in a way respectful of "the fact of pluralism." My task is to imagine the concrete case: what a judge's jurisprudence might look like if a judge considered the wisdom of his own religious tradition in constitutional cases. This article explores broad jurisprudential themes and specific First Amendment and social welfare opinions of Justice William Rehnquist, who for some years has been a member of a Lutheran congregation, my own denomination. While Justice …

Special Proceedings In Ohio: What Is The Ohio Supreme Court Doing With The Final Judgment Rule, Donald I. Gitlin

Cleveland State Law Review

This note will analyze special proceedings in Ohio insofar as they relate to the appealability of interlocutory orders. Because of the complex and evolving nature of the Ohio Supreme Court's interpretation of special proceedings, this note's analysis must necessarily be largely descriptive of Ohio case law. In addition, this note will highlight differences between Ohio appellate practice and federal practice in order to acquaint the reader with the dramatically different results reached by the two systems. In addition, Part II of this note will examine what is meant by the phrase "substantial right," which appears in the second prong of …

Justice, Mental Health, And Therapeutic Jurisprudence, David B. Wexler

Cleveland State Law Review

Mental health law advocates and even scholars have typically been hostile toward, afraid of, or at best indifferent to, the mental health disciplines (mainly psychiatry and psychology) and their practitioners. Learning to be skeptical of supposed scientific expertise is an important lesson, and the law should never simply defer to psychiatry and the related disciplines. But to the extent that the legal system now ignores developments in the mental health disciplines, the lesson of healthy skepticism has been overlearned. It is my thesis, then, that those of us interested in 'justice" in mental health law ought not to adopt the …

Reconstructing Section Five Of The Fourteenth Amendment To Assist Impoverished Children, James Wilson

Cleveland State Law Review

This article maintains that the Supreme Court's most recent affirmative action decisions, City of Richmond v. JA. Croson, Co. and Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. F.C.C. provide a surprising opportunity for the Court to offer constitutional protection to many Americans who are currently under protected, particularly to poor children. This Article will argue that the Richmond/Metro double standard is acceptable in such difficult areas as affirmative action, particularly if the Court also adopts this Article's primary proposal that the Court should sometimes permit Congress to "dilute" Supreme Court decisions. This Article shall explore this proposed doctrine of limited dilution by applying …

The Changing Course: The Use Of Precedent In The District Of Columbia Circuit, Patricia M. Wald

Cleveland State Law Review

An article by my colleague Judge Edwards uses a series of computer runs from the court's 1983 term to make out a statistical case that our members mostly agree with each other and do not fall into predictable "conservative," “liberal," or even "moderate," voting blocs; labels that the press so dearly loves to pin on us. I agree that our votes in a large number of cases, particularly administrative law cases, do not so easily typecast us. I do, however, think that in the high visibility cases, involving controversial social or "moral" issues, our differences in judicial philosophy, on the …

Mini In Banc Proceedings: A Survey Of Circuit Practices, Steven Bennett, Christine Pembroke

Cleveland State Law Review

In banc review was originally intended to resolve conflicts in circuit precedent. Full-scale in banc proceedings, however, are cumbersome, costly and time-consuming. In determining whether to proceed with in banc review, courts appear to weigh the costs of in banc review against its potential benefits. Employing this calculus, courts often forgo in banc review in conflict cases that would otherwise receive such treatment. One solution to this problem is to reduce the cost and delay of in banc proceedings by streamlining the procedure. Recently, several federal circuit courts of appeals have adopted abbreviated forms of in banc review. The purpose …

Process And Property In Constitutional Theory, Frank I. Michelman

Cleveland State Law Review

Could property be a "process right?" "Property" does denote, among other things, a class or cluster of legal rights. In appropriate contexts, it plainly means a class or cluster of constitutional rights. But could the constitutional right of property possibly be a "process," as opposed to a "substantive," right?

Theories Of Professors H.L.A. Hart And Ronald Dworkin - A Critique, John W. Van Doren

Cleveland State Law Review

This article will attempt to summarize the views of Professors Hart and Dworkin and engage in a critical evaluation of their thinking to demonstrate what will be perceived as a disparity between their theories and the way the legal machinery operates today.

Federal Courts, Injunctions, Declaratory Judgments, And State Law: The Supreme Court Has Finally Fashioned A Workable Abstention Doctrine, Clair E. Dickinson

Cleveland State Law Review

The American judicial system is founded on several policies which act as guideposts for the courts. Among these is the policy that states should be as free from federal control as possible. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the view that federal courts have a duty to protect individuals from violations of their constitutional rights. These policies meet, and seemingly clash, when a plaintiff enters a federal court either to request a declaratory judgment that a state statute is unconstitutional or to seek an injunction against the enforcement of the statute. The balancing of these competing interests has …

A Review Of Hohfeld's Fundamental Legal Concepts, Alan D. Cullison

Cleveland State Law Review

Wesley N. Hohfeld tried to split the atom of legal discourse and to identify its elementary particles. He identified eight atomic particles which he called "the lowest common denominators of the law." All legal concepts, he thought, can be completely analyzed, even defined, in terms of these eight fundamental legal conceptions: Right, No-Right, Power, Disability, Duty, Privilege, Liability, Immunity. Of course, Hohfeld had in mind very specific meanings for these eight terms; so it is not the words themselves, but rather the meanings he had in mind, that tell Hohfeld's story. The first thing that needs clarifying is what kind …

Soviet Theory Of Jurisprudence, Francis G. Homan Jr.

Cleveland State Law Review

Any examination of Marxian theory and its embodiment in Soviet jurisprudence must first review its roots in Hegelian philosophy. Bolshevism, Fascism and National Socialism have all relied on Hegelian theory, with tremendous political impact on modern history.

Book Review, Rudolf H. Heimanson

Cleveland State Law Review

Reviewing Richard A. Wasserstrom, The Judicial Decision: Toward a Theory of Legal Justification, Stanford University Press, 1961