Jurisprudence Commons^™

Does The Evolving Concept Of Due Process In Obergefell Justify Judicial Regulation Of Greenhouse Gases And Climate Change?: Juliana V. United States, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Justice Kennedy’s Obergefell opinion, which held that same sex marriage is a fundamental right under the Constitution’s due process clause, reasoned that the principles of substantive due process may evolve because of changing societal views of what constitutes “liberty” under the clause, and that judges may recognize new liberty rights in light of their “reasoned judgement.” In Juliana v. United States, Judge Aiken used her “reasoned judgement” to conclude that evolving principles of substantive due process in the Obergefell decision allowed the court to find that the plaintiffs were entitled to a liberty right to a stable climate system capable …

Disbelief Doctrines, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Employment discrimination law is riddled with doctrines that tell courts to believe employers and not workers. Judges often use these disbelief doctrines to dismiss cases at the summary judgment stage. At times, judges even use them after a jury trial to justify nullifying jury verdicts in favor of workers.

This article brings together many disparate discrimination doctrines and shows how they function as disbelief doctrines, causing courts to believe employers and not workers. The strongest disbelief doctrines include the stray comments doctrine, the same decisionmaker inference, and the same protected class inference. However, these are not the only ones. Even …

Discrimination Law: The New Franken-Tort, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This article was part of the Clifford Symposium in Tort Law. The article discusses how the Supreme Court has used tort law to define certain elements of discrimination law, but has not described all of the elements of this new tort. The article is the first one to try to piece together the new "tort" created by the Supreme Court.

Does A House Of Congress Have Standing Over Appropriations?: The House Of Representatives Challenges The Affordable Care Act, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In U.S. House of Representatives v. Sylvia Matthews Burwell, the District Court for D.C. in 2015 held that the House of Representatives has Article III standing to challenge certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act as violations of the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause. The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on legislative standing is complicated. The Court has generally avoided the contentious question of whether Congress has standing to challenge certain presidential actions because of the difficult separation-of-powers concerns in such cases. In Raines v. Byrd, the Court held that individual members of Congress generally do not have Article III standing by simply holding …

Reading Poets, Joseph P. Tomain

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Lawrence Joseph, the poet, has been the subject of a symposium published by the University of Cincinnati Law Review. Lawrence Joseph, the nonfiction novelist, has been similarly honored by the Columbia Law Review. With the publication of The Game Changed, his work should be so recognized and he should be given scholarly attention as a critic/essayist. Joseph the lawyer/poet/scholar has developed a jurisprudence of his own. Joseph’s jurisprudence, however (and to the good), cannot be reduced to a single word like originalism, or even a label like liberal democratic (though he may be in fact). Rather, the resultant jurisprudence refracts …

Statutory Proximate Cause, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Federal statutes often use general causal language to describe how an actor’s conduct must be connected to harm for liability to attach. For example, a statute might state that harm must be “because of” certain conduct. Federal courts have recently relied on this general causal language and other arguments to apply the common law idea of proximate cause to several federal statutes.

While legal scholarship has explored the relationship between statutes and the common law generally, it has not considered whether particular common law doctrines are especially problematic in the statutory context. This Article argues that using proximate cause in …

Liberty Of The Exercise Of Religion In The Peace Of Westphalia, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This essay honors my dear friend of half a century, Burns Weston. In it, I take a fresh look at the backdrop and structure of toleration and religious freedom in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and in the American Constitution, with special focus on a recent unanimous Supreme Court decision of first impression. That important decision protects inner church freedoms in ecclesiastical employment, the so-called "ministerial exception" to federal and state employment discrimination laws.

"Of all the great world religions past and present," writes the noted historian Perez Zagorin, "Christianity has been by far the most intolerant." Violence and …

Wittgenstein Tests Mr. Justice Holmes: On Holmes's Proposal To Separate Legal Concepts From Moral Concepts, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Scholarship And Teaching After 175 Years, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

A quarter century ago, I presided at the 150th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Cincinnati Law School. Newly appointed Justice Sandra Day O'Connor came to dedicate the radically refurbished Taft Hall in the spring of 1983 and to say good things about our long history. This year we begin to celebrate the College's 175th anniversary. For its dedicatory issue, the editor-in-chief of the Law Review, Matthew Singer, invited me to write an introduction as well as to reflect on those twenty-five years and the challenges and opportunities I see ahead for us. Especially as an emeritus dean and …

Rethinking The Involuntary Confession Rule: Toward A Workable Test For Identifying Compelled Self-Incrimination, Mark A. Godsey

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

For more than a century, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Bill of Rights as prohibiting the police from obtaining involuntary confessions from suspects through the use of coercion. If asked whether this involuntary confession rule is an understandable and workable doctrine, however, a noticeable percentage of judges, prosecutors, police officers, criminal defense attorneys and law professors would answer with an unequivocal no.

Basic questions concerning voluntariness and free will - whether it exists, and if so, when it exists, etc. - have puzzled philosophers for centuries and represent one of history's Gordian knots. Not surprisingly, judges have fared no …

Introduction To Law, Ethics, And Affirmative Action In America, Joseph P. Tomain

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This article discusses the language of the opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger. The rhetoric and language that we use to address race is difficult, if not tortured. The article explains why Grutter should have been an easy case and a simple opinion, and the ways in which the final opinion was anything but simple.

The Innocence Revolution And Our "Evolving Standards Of Decency" In Death Penalty Jurisprudence, Mark A. Godsey, Thomas Pulley

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

One cannot adequately consider whether the current administration of the death penalty in America measures up to modern notions of decency without doing so in light of the revolution that has occurred over the past decade in the American criminal-justice system - the Innocence Revolution. Up through the 1990s, as a society, we believed our criminal-justice system was highly accurate, but the recent advent of DNA testing and other advanced technologies has demonstrated the naiveté of such beliefs. This article will discuss the history of the Innocence Revolution, examine the impact of that revolution on our society, and ask: "What …

Between Law And Virtue, Joseph P. Tomain, Barbara Watts

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Legal ethics, professional responsibility, and professionalism are timely topics as lawyers continually reevaluate the standards of their profession, particularly in light of the challenges of multidisciplinary and multijurisdictional practice, as well as the embarrassment facing lawyers involved in and surrounding the Enron collapse. In this article, our goal is to discuss how to think and talk about ethics and professionalism. By way of preview, we need to understand that ethics and professionalism use different vocabularies and, consequently, talk past each other to some extent. Our hope is that understanding the existence of these two vocabularies helps reduce the misunderstanding. Both …

Legal Context: Reading Statutes In Light Of Prevailing Legal Precedent, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

An important question is when judges should consider contextual evidence about the meaning of a statute. Judges usually will read a statute's text in light of judicial precedent prevailing at the time of its enactment to understand the contemporary meaning of various words or phrases in the statute.' A more difficult issue is whether courts should consider contemporary judicial context if a statute's text is silent about an issue. The use of contemporary context to imply statutory meaning has been especially controversial where the issue is whether courts should imply a private right of action.

Whose Federalism, S. Elizabeth Malloy

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article examines briefly the Seminole Tribe and City of Boerne decisions. Part II then focuses on the ADA and the reasons why Congress made it applicable to government conduct as well as private conduct. Finally, Part III examines the argument, based on the new federalism, that the ADA should not apply to state entities. It does not appear that the Court's new federalism has had a liberty-enhancing effect for some of the most vulnerable persons in our society. The Court's revitalized federalism jurisprudence has led to questions about the continuing validity of many of our civil rights statutes as …

Textualism's Selective Canons Of Statutory Construction: Reinvigorating Individual Liberties, Legislative Authority, And Deference To Executive Agencies, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article demonstrates that textualist Judges, most notably Justices Scalia, Thomas, and, to a lesser extent, Kennedy, have applied some canons too aggressively, and slighted others. Textualist Judges have overused clear-statement rules that narrow statutory meaning, especially as a means to promote federalism and states' rights. On the other hand, textualists have neglected canons that promote individual liberty or executive authority Because canons must be applied on a case-by-case basis and different canons can conflict, it is impossible to formulate one rule for how they should be applied. Nevertheless, the common textualist approach of selectively favoring some canons at the …

Taking Our Actual Constitution Seriously, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In this review, by concentrating on the general aim of Dworkin's book, I hope to contribute to the discussion this book is sure to generate. What does the "moral reading" of our Constitution amount to, and what alternative do we have to endorsing such a reading? I ask these questions from what I would call a jurisprudential
perspective. For, while I do teach Jurisprudence, I do not teach Constitutional Law, other than some constitutional law themes that find their way into my Property and Wills & Trusts courses. Accordingly, I am not well placed to review the details or
the …

Looking Back In Pursuit Of The Art Of Law, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

As part of the centennial celebration of the Washington College of Law, I am pleased to accept the invitation of The Law Review to revisit those six fascinating years of my deanship from 1971 to 1977. It is time for a backward glance in light of the profound changes that have since taken place in society, as well as in the Washington College of Law (WCL).

Symposium On Law, Literature, And The Humanities. Introduction: Conducting Our Educations In Public, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This symposium grew out of James Boyd White's Marx Lecture, given April 21, 1994, at the University of Cincinnati, and this issue owes its existence to some happy coincidences with that event. One coincidence was the idea occurring to a number of us that, as nice as it would be to publish Professor White's thoughts on the Crito in these pages of the Law Review, how much nicer still it would be to surround those thoughts, or to follow them, with the thoughts of other scholars in the field, showing how these others responded to the text discussed by White …

Thinking Things, Not Words: Irvin Rutter's Pragmatic Jurisprudence Of Teaching, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Those of us in legal education and in the profession of law are in debt to the Law Review for publishing in this issue the last work of the late Professor Irvin Rutter, Law, Language, and Thinking Like a Lawyer.

On the occasion of Irvin Rutter's retirement in 1980, I briefly summarized these earlier contributions, locating them within the legal realist tradition, and we awaited the publication of his last work, then still in draft not quite satisfactory to Professor Rutter. In this essay, I situate his final work on teaching law in the pragmatist tradition with special emphasis on …

The Activity Of Being A Lawyer: The Imaginative Pursuit Of Implications And Possibilities, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

If law as an activity emerged naively and unpremeditated, as a direction of attention pursued without premonition of what it would lead to, then by now it has hollowed out a character for itself, as Oakeshott says, and has become specified in a "practice." Having acquired this firmness of character, as Oakeshott further says, law may present itself as a puzzle, thus provoking reflection. Thinking about law in this manner or mood is something that I wish to call "philosophy of law," and this is itself an honorable activity with a character and mannerisms of its own.2 In law school, …

Do The United States Sentencing Guidelines Deprive Defendants Of Due Process?, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

It is difficult to determine whether due process requires individualized sentencing because sentencing goals and practices have varied greatly during the course of this nation's history. A court applying Judge Bork's original intent doctrine of constitutional interpretation would probably reach a result different from that reached by a court employing a more liberal view of due process protections.1o It is likely that liberals and conservatives on the current Supreme Court would disagree on whether the Guidelines violate due process.

This article argues that the Guidelines can be saved and can satisfy due process requirements if the Supreme Court interprets the …

Kennan And Human Rights, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This essay seeks understanding of his view of normative thinking in foreign policy, whether moral or legal, and the implications from the perspective of human rights in an unfriendly world. It criticizes his conceptual presuppositions to gain clarity, posing paradoxes and dilemmas regarding their normative quality within the present structure of international relations.

Uncertainty In Law And Its Negation: Reflections, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

For this issue of the Review, the editors invited me to reflection. In response, I wish to consider some aspects of a problem that has bothered me over the past quarter-century. This problem arises from radical subjectivism and its effect on the legal order. I believe that something is radically subjective in law when one norm is considered as valid as any other, or when one perception of facts is thought as valid as any other, for the reason that any objective principles for determining validity are either inadequate or considered meaningless tautologies, masking the subjective preference of those with …

Institutionalized Conflicts Between Law And Policy, Joseph P. Tomain

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Law and policy do not mix well. The legal system is a significant force which contributes to the splintering of substantive policies. While this argument is made with specific reference to energy law and policy, it also has a general application to other classes of complex cases.

The "signs" that law and policy do not interact neatly manifest themselves in the form of conflicts of two different categories. In the first category are conflicts between the ends and purposes of law and policy. These are addressed in Section 11 of this article. In the second category are conflicts within the …

The Uses Of Human Rights Norms To Inform Constitutional Interpretation, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Recent federal court of appeals decisions have relied on fundamental human rights norms to inform constitutional interpretation. This comment reviews the reasoning in those cases to identify possible constitutional uses of fundamental human rights norms and to suggest some conceptual framework for their use. The need for such a framework is illustrated by the cases themselves, which seem disparate and disjointed, with no discernible coherent philosophy, though each makes good sense when considered alone.

Irvin C. Rutter, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Tribute to legal scholar, Irvin Rutter.

In Memoriam Of Professor George D. Horning Jr., Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Tribute to legal scholar, George D. Horning Jr.

Studying Law As The Possibility Of Principled Action, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The study of law may be viewed as the critical analysis of a system of logically coherent rules governing action. In the United States, the responsibility for legal education has traditionally fallen upon the law schools. Within the legal profession and law schools a restive spirit now prevails, seeking to further clarify the meaning of that responsibility.' Two responses appear in the law schools, for good or ill.

International Judicial Assistance And Utah Practice, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This article will undertake to consider the present framework of Utah procedural law in relation to international judicial assistance. It will endeavor to suggest methods of handling problems of personal service, evidence, and proof of foreign law and will seek to point out some dangers along the way.