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Articles 1 - 12 of 12

Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Bringing Light To The Halls Of Shadow, Richard J. Peltz-Steele Oct 2007

Bringing Light To The Halls Of Shadow, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Faculty Publications

Appellate judges operate in the shadows. Though they don’t see it that way. “We are judged by what we write,” said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. True too, court proceedings and records are presumptively open to the public. The West Wing of the White House is certainly not so vulnerable to public scrutiny, and the backrooms of legislative chambers are famously smoke-filled. Yet the parts of court activity that we see and hear seem only to whet our appetite for the rest of the process. In this Preface, the author introduces the subject of the journalist and the court, …


Birth Of An Institution: Horace Gray And The Lost Law Clerks, Todd C. Peppers Jan 2007

Birth Of An Institution: Horace Gray And The Lost Law Clerks, Todd C. Peppers

Scholarly Articles

In a vault hidden away in a downtown Boston bank rests a large silver loving cup. The cup was presented to Associate Justice Horace Gray on March 22, 1902 by his law clerks, and engraved on its tarnished surface are the names of the nineteen Harvard Law School graduates who served as Justice Gray’s law clerks. While the details surrounding the presentation of the cup have been lost to history, the gift was likely prompted by the failing health of Justice Gray and his future departure from the Supreme Court. The loving cup is still held by the Gray family, …


Who Writes The Rules For Hostile Takeovers, And Why? The Peculiar Divergence Of Us And Uk Takeover Regulation, John Armour, David A. Skeel Jr. Jan 2007

Who Writes The Rules For Hostile Takeovers, And Why? The Peculiar Divergence Of Us And Uk Takeover Regulation, John Armour, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Justice O'Connor And 'The Threat To Judicial Independence': The Cowgirl Who Cried Wolf?, Arthur D. Hellman Jan 2007

Justice O'Connor And 'The Threat To Judicial Independence': The Cowgirl Who Cried Wolf?, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

Sandra Day O'Connor retired from active service on the United States Supreme Court in early 2006. As her principal "retirement project," she has taken on the task of defending the independence of the judiciary. In speeches, op-ed articles, and public interviews, she has warned that "we must be ever vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies." Justice O'Connor has done the nation a service by bringing the subject of judicial independence to center stage and by calling attention to the important values it serves. Unfortunately, however, in describing the threats to that independence, she …


The Judicial Treatment Of Noneconomic Compensatory Damages In The 19th Century, Ronald J. Allen, Alexia Brunet Jan 2007

The Judicial Treatment Of Noneconomic Compensatory Damages In The 19th Century, Ronald J. Allen, Alexia Brunet

Publications

Do high verdicts for tort cases containing noneconomic damages have historical precedent? We present the results of our empirical inquiry into the treatment of noneconomic compensatory damages by the courts from 1800-1900. Using 1,175 tort cases from this era, we show that, notwithstanding constant reiteration of jury discretion over damages, courts tightly controlled awards. In fact, no case prior to 1900 permitted a noneconomic compensatory damages award exceeding $450,000 in current dollars. Logistic regression results reveal that an increase in total monetary damages is positively and significantly related to the probability of reversal when noneconomic damages were claimed, and that …


Trial Of The Rosenbergs: An Account, Douglas O. Linder Jan 2007

Trial Of The Rosenbergs: An Account, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

The Rosenberg Trial is the sum of many stories: a story of betrayal, a love story, a spy story, a story of a family torn apart, and a story of government overreaching. As is the case with many famous trials, it is also the story of a particular time: the early 1950's with its cold war tensions and headlines dominated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his demagogic tactics. The Manhattan Project was the name given to the top-secret effort of Allied scientists to develop an atomic bomb. One of the Manhattan Project scientists working in Los Alamos was a British …


Truth, Deterrence, And The Impeachment Exception , James L. Kainen Jan 2007

Truth, Deterrence, And The Impeachment Exception , James L. Kainen

Faculty Scholarship

James v. Illinois permits illegally-obtained evidence to impeach defendants, but not defense witnesses. Thus far, all courts have construed James to allow impeachment of defendants' hearsay declarations. This article argues against allowing illegally-obtained evidence to impeach defendants' hearsay declarations because doing so unduly diminishes the exclusionary rule's deterrent effect. The distinction between impeaching defendants and defense witnesses disappears when courts allow prosecutors to impeach defendants' hearsay declarations. Because defense witnesses report exculpatory conduct of a defendant who always has a substantial interest in disguising his criminality, their testimony routinely incorporates defendant hearsay. Defense witness testimony thus routinely paves the way …


Toward A History Of Children As Witnesses, David S. Tanenhaus, William Bush Jan 2007

Toward A History Of Children As Witnesses, David S. Tanenhaus, William Bush

Scholarly Works

This brief essay offers a selective overview of recent trends in the historical scholarship on American childhood from the origins of the American Revolution to the early years of the Cold War. This overview of the literature has two purposes. First, it highlights recent socio-cultural scholarship that presents substantive challenges to the conventional ways of understanding the history of children and the law. Second, in so doing, it points out that legal histories concerned solely with doctrinal matters can, and often do, present a limited and distorted window into the past. Instead, the essay argues that the place of children, …


The Mcmartin Preschool Abuse Trial, Douglas O. Linder Jan 2007

The Mcmartin Preschool Abuse Trial, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial, the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history, should serve as a cautionary tale. When it was all over, the government had spent seven years and $15 million dollars investigating and prosecuting a case that led to no convictions. More seriously, the McMartin case left in its wake hundreds of emotionally damaged children, as well as ruined careers for members of the McMartin staff. No one paid a bigger price than Ray Buckey, one of the principal defendants in the case, who spent five years in jail awaiting trial for a crime (most …


A Retroactivity Retrospective, With Thoughts For The Future: What The Supreme Court Learned From Paul Mishkin, And What It Might, Kermit Roosevelt Iii Jan 2007

A Retroactivity Retrospective, With Thoughts For The Future: What The Supreme Court Learned From Paul Mishkin, And What It Might, Kermit Roosevelt Iii

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Judicial Activism And Its Critics, Kermit Roosevelt Iii, Richard Garnett Jan 2007

Judicial Activism And Its Critics, Kermit Roosevelt Iii, Richard Garnett

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Beyond Mitigation: Towards A Theory Of Allocution, Kimberly A. Thomas Jan 2007

Beyond Mitigation: Towards A Theory Of Allocution, Kimberly A. Thomas

Articles

THE COURT: I don't think I have time to listen .... I am not going to reexamine your guilt or innocence here. That is not the purpose of a sentence.. THE DEFENDANT: I did not have the chance to tell you .... THE DEFENDANT: But, your Honor, listen to me-1 Should the court hear this defendant? Is the story of innocence relevant at allocution-the defendant's opportunity to speak on his or her own behalf at the sentencing hearing prior to the imposition of sentence? Or, is the purpose of allocution something different, as the judge suggests? The answers depend on …