Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
- Publication Year
- Publication
- Publication Type
- File Type
Articles 1 - 30 of 32
Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Texans Shortlisted For The U.S. Supreme Court: Why Did Lightning Only Strike Once?, The Honorable John G. Browning
Texans Shortlisted For The U.S. Supreme Court: Why Did Lightning Only Strike Once?, The Honorable John G. Browning
St. Mary's Law Journal
No abstract provided.
The Founders' Multi-Purpose Chief Justice: The English Origins Of The American Chief Justiceship, Justin W. Aimonetti, Jackson A. Myers
The Founders' Multi-Purpose Chief Justice: The English Origins Of The American Chief Justiceship, Justin W. Aimonetti, Jackson A. Myers
West Virginia Law Review
During the founding era, the American Chief Justice was nearly unrecognizable to modern eyes. Rather than a purely judicial officer, the Chief Justice was a multi-purpose minister, serving as a judge, an administrator, a diplomat, and an advisor. He was what we call the “multi-purpose Chief Justice.” The multi-purpose Chief Justice of the Early Republic originated with the ancient English office of the Lord Chief Justice. English judges historically served as multi-purpose ministers to the king, engaging in administrative and even political tasks. This was especially true for the Lord Chief Justice. Even as other English judges settled into more …
Fmc Corp. V. Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, Seth T. Bonilla
Fmc Corp. V. Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, Seth T. Bonilla
Public Land & Resources Law Review
In 1998, FMC Corporation agreed to submit to the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes’ permitting processes, including the payment of fees, for clean-up work required as part of consent decree negotiations with the Environmental Protection Agency. Then, in 2002, FMC refused to pay the Tribes under a permitting agreement entered into by both parties, even though the company continued to store hazardous waste on land within the Shoshone-Bannock Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho. FMC challenged the Tribes’ authority to enforce the $1.5 million permitting fees first in tribal court and later challenged the Tribes’ authority to exercise civil regulatory and adjudicatory jurisdiction over …
The Empty Chair: Reflections On An Absent Justice, Jennifer L. Behrens
The Empty Chair: Reflections On An Absent Justice, Jennifer L. Behrens
Faculty Scholarship
This article examines a January 1888 letter to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison Waite from Associate Justice Stanley Matthews. Justice Matthews requested time away from the notoriously overworked Court’s session in order to attend the funeral of Dr. Peter Parker, renowned medical missionary and diplomat. The piece presents biographical sketches of Justice Matthews and Dr. Parker, and considers the historical context of the potential absence on the late nineteenth-century Court’s operations.
Empty Chairs, Jennifer L. Behrens
Why The Burger Court Mattered, David A. Strauss
Why The Burger Court Mattered, David A. Strauss
Michigan Law Review
A review of Michael J. Graetz and Linda Greenhouse, The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right.
Clerking For God’S Grandfather: Chauncey Belknap’S Year With Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Todd C. Peppers, Ira Brad Matetsky, Elizabeth R. Williams, Jessica Winn
Clerking For God’S Grandfather: Chauncey Belknap’S Year With Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Todd C. Peppers, Ira Brad Matetsky, Elizabeth R. Williams, Jessica Winn
Scholarly Articles
Most of what we know about law clerks comes from the clerks themselves, usually in the form of law review articles memorializing their Justices and their clerkships or in interviews with reporters and legal scholars. In a few instances, however, law clerks have contemporaneously memorialized their experiences in diaries. These materials provide a rare window into the insular world of the Court. While the recollections contained in the diaries are often infused with youthful hero worship for their employer—in contradistinction to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s claim that no man is a hero to his valet— they offer a real-time, …
Reading Blackstone In The Twenty-First Century And The Twenty-First Century Through Blackstone, Jessie Allen
Reading Blackstone In The Twenty-First Century And The Twenty-First Century Through Blackstone, Jessie Allen
Book Chapters
If the Supreme Court mythologizes Blackstone, it is equally true that Blackstone himself was engaged in something of a mythmaking project. Far from a neutral reporter, Blackstone has some stories to tell, in particular the story of the hero law. The problems associated with using the Commentaries as a transparent window on eighteenth-century American legal norms, however, do not make Blackstone’s text irrelevant today. The chapter concludes with my brief reading of the Commentaries as a critical mirror of some twenty-first-century legal and social structures. That analysis draws on a long-term project, in which I am making my way through …
The Supreme Judicial Court In Its Fourth Century: Meeting The Challenge Of The "New Constitutional Revolution", Charles H. Baron
The Supreme Judicial Court In Its Fourth Century: Meeting The Challenge Of The "New Constitutional Revolution", Charles H. Baron
Charles H. Baron
In the mid-19th century, when the United States was confronted with daunting changes wrought by its expanding frontiers and the advent of the industrial revolution, its state supreme courts developed the principles of law which facilitated the nation's growth into the great continental power it became. First in influence among these state supreme courts was the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts-whose chief justice, Lemuel Shaw, came widely to be known as "America's greatest magistrate." It is this tradition that the court brings with it as it develops its place in the "new constitutional revolution" presently sweeping our state supreme courts. …
Statutory Interpretation Doctrine On The Modern Supreme Court And Four Doctrinal Approaches To Judicial Decision-Making , R. Randall Kelso
Statutory Interpretation Doctrine On The Modern Supreme Court And Four Doctrinal Approaches To Judicial Decision-Making , R. Randall Kelso
Pepperdine Law Review
No abstract provided.
A Reluctant Apology For Plessy: A Response To Akhil Amar, Barry P. Mcdonald
A Reluctant Apology For Plessy: A Response To Akhil Amar, Barry P. Mcdonald
Pepperdine Law Review
A response to the article "Plessy v. Ferguson and the Anti-Canon," by Akhil Amar, published in the November 2011 issue of the "Pepperdine Law Review," is presented. Topics include an examination of Justice Henry Billings Brown's decision in the case, the constitutionality of segregating U.S. citizens by race, and the impact of public opinion on U.S. Supreme Court decisions.
Plessy V. Ferguson And The Anti-Canon, Akhil Reed Amar
Plessy V. Ferguson And The Anti-Canon, Akhil Reed Amar
Pepperdine Law Review
The article focuses on the U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which dealt with the constitutionality of racial segregation in the U.S. Topics include the application of precedent in controversial U.S. Supreme Court cases, when the U.S. Constitution can overrule a court decision, and dissenting judicial opinions.
Coming To Terms With Dred Scott: A Response To Daniel A. Farber, Paul Finkelman
Coming To Terms With Dred Scott: A Response To Daniel A. Farber, Paul Finkelman
Pepperdine Law Review
When thinking about Dred Scott, the issue is not how do we “rehabilitate” the opinion. The goal of scholarship here is to understand the opinion, place it in the context of its own time, and explain its enduring significance. After that, we may praise or damn it, and rehabilitate it or condemn it. No one today likes the Dred Scott opinion or the result. But, this article argues that Professor Daniel A. Farber is so incensed by the opinion that he vastly overstates its historical significance including incorrectly blaming Chief Justice Taney for causing the Civil War. This article rejects …
But How Will The People Know? Public Opinion As A Meager Influence In Shaping Contemporary Supreme Court Decision Making, Tom Goldstein, Amy Howe
But How Will The People Know? Public Opinion As A Meager Influence In Shaping Contemporary Supreme Court Decision Making, Tom Goldstein, Amy Howe
Michigan Law Review
Chief Justice John Roberts famously described the ideal Supreme Court Justice as analogous to a baseball umpire, who simply "applies" the rules, rather than making them. Roberts promised to "remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat." At her own recent confirmation hearings, Elena Kagan demurred, opining that Roberts's metaphor might erroneously suggest that "everything is clear-cut, and that there's no judgment in the process." Based on his 2009 book, The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution, Barry Friedman …
Judicial Compensation And The Definition Of Judicial Power In The Early Republic, James E. Pfander
Judicial Compensation And The Definition Of Judicial Power In The Early Republic, James E. Pfander
Michigan Law Review
Article III's provision for the compensation of federal judges has been much celebrated for the no-diminution provision that forecloses judicial pay cuts. But other features of Article Ill's compensation provision have largely escaped notice. In particular, little attention has been paid to the framers' apparent expectation that Congress would compensate federal judges with salaries alone, payable from the treasury at stated times. Article III's presumption in favor of salary-based compensation may rule out fee-based compensation, which was a common form of judicial compensation in England and the colonies but had grown controversial by the time of the framing. Among other …
Judicial Power And Mobilizable History, Richard A. Primus
Judicial Power And Mobilizable History, Richard A. Primus
Articles
One contribution that law professors can make to constitutional discourse, I suggest, is the nurturing of new mobilizable histories. A "mobilizable history," as I will use the term, is a narrative, image, or other historical source that is sufficiently well-known to the community of constitutional decisionmakers so as to be able to support a credible argument in the discourse of constitutional law. It draws upon materials that are within the collective memory of constitutional interpreters; indeed, a necessary step in nurturing a new mobilizable history is to introduce new information into that collective memory or to raise the prominence of …
Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. And The Counterrevolution In The Federal Securities Laws, Adam C. Pritchard
Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. And The Counterrevolution In The Federal Securities Laws, Adam C. Pritchard
Articles
The confirmation of Lewis F. Powell, Jr., to the Supreme Court coincided with a dramatic shift in the Court's approach to securities law. This Article documents Powell's influence in changing the Court's direction in securities law. Powell's influence was the product of his extensive experience with the securities laws as a corporate lawyer, which gave him much greater familiarity with that body of law than his fellow Justices had. That experience also made him skeptical of civil liability, particularly class and derivative actions. Powell's skepticism led him to interpret the securities law in a consistently narrow fashion to reduce liability …
Justice Frank Murphy And American Labor Law, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Justice Frank Murphy And American Labor Law, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Articles
Working people and disfavored groups were central concerns of Frank Murphy, the last Michigan Law School graduate to sit on the United States Supreme Court. In the pages of this Review, just over a half century ago, Archibald Cox wrote of him: "It was natural ...th at his judicial work should be most significant in these two fields [labor law and civil rights] and especially in the areas where they coalesce."' In this Essay, after a brief overview of Murphy the man, his days at the University of Michigan, and his career prior to the Court appointment, I shall review …
Free-Standing Due Process And Criminal Procedure: The Supreme Court's Search For Interpretive Guidelines, Jerold H. Israel
Free-Standing Due Process And Criminal Procedure: The Supreme Court's Search For Interpretive Guidelines, Jerold H. Israel
Articles
When I was first introduced to the constitutional regulation of criminal procedure in the mid-1950s, a single issue dominated the field: To what extent did the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment impose upon states the same constitutional restraints that the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments imposed upon the federal government? While those Bill of Rights provisions, as even then construed, imposed a broad range of constitutional restraints upon the federal criminal justice system, the federal system was (and still is) minuscule as compared to the combined systems of the fifty states. With the Bill of Rights provisions …
Taking Decisions Seriously, Richard D. Friedman
Taking Decisions Seriously, Richard D. Friedman
Reviews
The New Deal era is one of the great turning points of American constitutional history. The receptivity of the Supreme Court to regulation by state and federal governments increased dra- matically during that period. The constitutionalism that prevailed before Charles Evans Hughes became Chief Justice in 1930 was similar in most respects to that of the beginning of the twen- tieth century. The constitutionalism that prevailed by the time Hughes’ successor Harlan Fiske Stone died in 1946 is far more related to that of the end of the century. How this transformation occurred is a crucial and enduring issue in …
United States V. O'Hagan: Agency Law And Justice Powell's Legacy For The Law Of Insider Trading, Adam C. Pritchard
United States V. O'Hagan: Agency Law And Justice Powell's Legacy For The Law Of Insider Trading, Adam C. Pritchard
Articles
The law of insider trading is judicially created; no statutory provision explicitly prohibits trading on the basis of material, non-public information. The Supreme Court's insider trading jurisprudence was forged, in large part, by Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. His opinions for the Court in United States v. Chiarella and SEC v. Dirks were, until recently, the Supreme Court's only pronouncements on the law of insider trading. Those decisions established the elements of the classical theory of insider trading under § 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the "Exchange Act"). Under this theory, corporate insiders and their tippees who …
Chief Justice Hughes' Letter On Court-Packing, Richard D. Friedman
Chief Justice Hughes' Letter On Court-Packing, Richard D. Friedman
Articles
After one of the great landslides in American presidential history, Franklin D. Roosevelt took the oath of office for the second time on January 20, 1937. As he had four years before, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, like Roosevelt a former governor of New York, administered the oath. Torrents of rain drenched the inauguration, and Hughes’ damp whiskers waved in the biting wind. When the skullcapped Chief Justice reached the promise to defend the Constitution, he “spoke slowly and with special emphasis.” The President responded in kind, though he felt like saying, as he later told his aide Sam Rosenman: …
Telling The Story Of The Hughes Court, Richard D. Friedman
Telling The Story Of The Hughes Court, Richard D. Friedman
Articles
When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., died in 1935, he left the bulk of his estate to the United States Government. This gift, known as the Oliver Wendell Hnlmes Devise, sat in the Treasury for about twenty years, until Congress set up a Presidential Commission to determine what to do with it. The principal use of the money has been to fund a multivolume History of the United States Supreme Court. The history of the project itself has not always been a happy one, for some of the authors have been unable to complete their volumes. Among them was one …
Switching Time And Other Thought Experiments: The Hughes Court And Constitutional Transformation, Richard D. Friedman
Switching Time And Other Thought Experiments: The Hughes Court And Constitutional Transformation, Richard D. Friedman
Articles
For the most part, the Supreme Court's decisions in 1932 and 1933 disappointed liberals. The two swing Justices, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Justice Owen J. Roberts, seemed to have sided more with the Court's four conservatives than with its three liberals. Between early 1934 and early 1935, however, the Court issued three thunderbolt decisions, all by five-to-four votes on the liberal side and with either Hughes or Roberts writing for the majority over the dissent of the conservative foursome: in January 1934, Home Building & Loan Ass'n v. Blaisdell' severely limited the extent to which the Contracts Clause …
A Reaffirmation: The Authenticity Of The Roberts Memorandum, Or Felix The Non-Forger (Justices Felix Frankfurter And Owen J. Roberts), Richard D. Friedman
A Reaffirmation: The Authenticity Of The Roberts Memorandum, Or Felix The Non-Forger (Justices Felix Frankfurter And Owen J. Roberts), Richard D. Friedman
Articles
In the December 1955 issue of this Law Review, Justice Felix Frankfurter published a tribute to his late friend and colleague, Owen J. Roberts.' The tribute centered on what Frankfurter claimed was the text of a memorandum that Roberts wrote in 1945 to explain his conduct in the critical minimum wage cases of 1936 and 1937, Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo2 and West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish.' Scholars have often challenged the adequacy of Roberts's account of why he cast decisive votes for the conservatives in Tipaldo and for the liberals in West Coast Hotel.4 Until recently, …
The Supreme Judicial Court In Its Fourth Century: Meeting The Challenge Of The "New Constitutional Revolution", Charles Baron
The Supreme Judicial Court In Its Fourth Century: Meeting The Challenge Of The "New Constitutional Revolution", Charles Baron
Charles H. Baron
In the mid-19th century, when the United States was confronted with daunting changes wrought by its expanding frontiers and the advent of the industrial revolution, its state supreme courts developed the principles of law which facilitated the nation's growth into the great continental power it became. First in influence among these state supreme courts was the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts-whose chief justice, Lemuel Shaw, came widely to be known as "America's greatest magistrate." It is this tradition that the court brings with it as it develops its place in the "new constitutional revolution" presently sweeping our state supreme courts. …
Advice, Consent, And Influence, Robert F. Nagel
On The Constitutional Status Of The Administrative Agencies, Harold H. Bruff
On The Constitutional Status Of The Administrative Agencies, Harold H. Bruff
Publications
No abstract provided.
Justices And Presidents: A Political History Of Appointments To The Supreme Court (2d Edition), James S. Portnoy
Justices And Presidents: A Political History Of Appointments To The Supreme Court (2d Edition), James S. Portnoy
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Justices and Presidents: A Political History of Appointments to the Supreme Court (2d edition) by Henry J. Abraham
How Useful Is Judicial Review In Free Speech Cases?, Robert F. Nagel
How Useful Is Judicial Review In Free Speech Cases?, Robert F. Nagel
Publications
No abstract provided.