Legal Profession Commons^™

The Duties Of Non-Judicial Actors In Ensuring Competent Negotiation, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay, written for a symposium at Duquesne Law School entitled Plea Bargaining After Lafler and Frye, offers thoughts on how lawyers could learn from doctors’ experience in catching and preventing medical errors and aviation experts’ learning from airplane crashes and near misses. It also expresses skepticism about the efficacy of judges’ ex post review of ineffective assistance of counsel, but holds out more hope that public-defender organizations, bar associations, probation officers, sentencing judges, sentencing commissions, and line and supervisory prosecutors can do much more to prevent misunderstanding and remedy ineffective bargaining advice in the first place.

From Citizen Suits To Conservation Easements: The Increasing Private Role In Public Permit Enforcement, Jessica Owley

Articles

The past 40 years have seen an increase in the involvement of private actors in environmental law. One of the best-known (and arguably best-loved) methods for public involvement is the citizen suit. This popular method of public enforcement of environmental permits (among other things) has been joined by the use of conservation easements. Conservation easements are increasingly used to meet permit mitigation requirements. When private nonprofits hold these exacted conservation easements, they assume the role of permit enforcers. It is their job to ensure that conservation easement terms are complied with, giving them oversight and control over one of the …

The Federal Judicial Conduct And Disability System: Unfinished Business For Congress And For The Judiciary, Arthur D. Hellman

Testimony

For most of the nation’s history, the only formal mechanism for dealing with misconduct by federal judges was the cumbersome process of impeachment. That era ended with the enactment of the Judicial Councils Reform and Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980 (1980 Act or Act). In 2002, Congress made modest amendments to the Act and codified the provisions in Chapter 16 of Title 28. In 2008, the Judicial Conference of the United States – the administrative policy-making body of the federal judiciary – approved the first set of nationally binding rules for misconduct proceedings.

Under the 1980 Act and …

Bulk Misdemeanor Justice, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

This short essay responds to Alexandra Natapoff’s article Misdemeanors, which shines a much-needed spotlight on the mass production of criminal justice and injustice in millions of low-level cases. The prime culprit in Natapoff’s story is the hidden, informal discretion that police officers enjoy to arrest, charge, and effect convictions, abetted by prosecutors’ and judges’ abdication and defense counsel’s absence or impotence. The roots of the problem she identifies, I argue, go all the way down to the system’s professionalization and mechanization. Given the magnitude of the problem, Natapoff’s solutions are surprisingly half-hearted, masking the deeper structural problems that demand …

Waiving Goodbye To A Fundamental Right: Allocation Of Authority Between Attorneys And Clients And The Right To A Public Trial, 38 J. Legal Prof. 1 (2013), Alberto Bernabe

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Jury Jokes And Legal Culture, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Minding The Court: Enhancing The Decision-Making Process, Pamela Casey, Kevin Burke, Steve Leben

Faculty Works

A compelling and growing body of research from the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience provides important insights about how we process information and make decisions. This research has great potential significance for judges, who spend much of their time making decisions of great importance to others. For most judges, this research literature is not part of their judicial education. This article reviews cutting edge research about decision making and discusses its implications for helping judges and those who work with them produce fair processes and just outcomes. It builds on a 2007 American Judges Association paper that encouraged judges …

Ripples Against The Other Shore: The Impact Of Trauma Exposure On The Immigration Process Through Adjudicators, Kate Aschenbrenner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Market For Justice: A First Empirical Look At Third Party Litigation Funding, David S. Abrams, Daniel L. Chen

All Faculty Scholarship

The alienability of legal claims holds the promise of increasing access to justice and fostering development of the law. While much theoretical work points to this possibility, no empirical work has investigated the claims, largely due to the rarity of trading in legal claims in modern systems of law. In this paper we take the first step toward empirically testing some of these theoretical claims using data from Australia. We find some evidence that third-party funding corresponds to an increase in litigation and court caseloads. Cases with third-party funders are more prominent than comparable ones. While third-party funding may have …

Thinking, Big And Small, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.