Jurisprudence Commons^™

The Jurisprudence Of Pleading: Rights, Rules, And Conley V. Gibson, Emily Sherwin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In 1957, in the case of Conley v. Gibson, the Supreme Court announced a minimal standard for the contents of a complaint under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and endorsed what has come to be known as 'notice' pleading. This article, prepared for a symposium on Conley, reviews the debate over pleading requirements that preceded the case. Unlike modern discussions of pleading, which focus on the level of factual specificity required in complaints, the pre-Conley debate was about the legal content of complaints - an question largely forgotten in the years following Conley.

The early twentieth century debate over …

Michelle Obama: The "Darker Side" Of Presidential Spousal Involvement And Activism, Gregory S. Parks, Quinetta M. Roberson, Phd

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Pundits and commentators have attempted to make sense of the role that race and gender have played in the 2008 presidential campaign. Whereas researchers are drawing on varying bodies of scholarship (legal, cognitive and social psychology, and political science) to illuminate the role that Senator Obama’s race and Senator Clinton’s gender has/had on their campaign, Michelle Obama has been left out of the discussion. As Senator Clinton once noted, elections are like hiring decisions. As such, new frontiers in employment discrimination law place Michelle Obama in context within the current presidential campaign. First, racism and sexism are both alive and …

Cafa Judicata: A Tale Of Waste And Politics, Kevin M. Clermont, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The Class Action Fairness Act has taken on its real form through construction by the federal judges. That form emerges in this empirical study of judicial activity and receptivity to the Act. Our data comprise the opinions under the Act published during the two and a half years following its enactment in 2005.

CAFA has produced a lot of litigation in its short life. The cases were varied, of course, but most typically the resulting published federal opinion involved a removed contract case, with the dispute turning on the statute's effective date or on federal jurisdiction. Even though the opinions …

The Tropicalization Of Proportionality Balancing: The Colombian And Mexican Examples, Luisa Conesa

Cornell Law School Inter-University Graduate Student Conference Papers

In “The Tropicalization of Proportionality Balancing: the Colombian and Mexican Examples” the author analyzes how the German based proportionality balancing test was exported to Latin America, by studying the Colombian Constitutional Court and the Mexican Supreme Court. This work is guided by the following questions: what is proportionality balancing? How has it been used by the Colombian and Mexican jurisprudences and what are its influences? Do the Courts cite other jurisdictions when using the test? Have they imported a traditional European test? Or, have they “tropicalized” it?

The study of the Latin American examples leads to the conclusion that the …

Government Lawyers In The Liberal State, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Criticism of the “politicization” of the role of federal government lawyers has been intense in recent years, with the scandals over the hiring practices at the Department of Justice, and the advice given to the administration by lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel, concerning various aspects of the post-9/11 national security environment. Unfortunately, many of these critiques do not hold up very well under scrutiny. We lack a coherent account of what it means to “politicize” the practice of interpreting and applying the law. This paper argues that our evaluative discourse about the ethics of government lawyers is inadequately …

Impartiality In Judicial Ethics: A Jurisprudential Analysis, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.