Legal Profession Commons^™

Foreword: The Question Of Process, J. Harvie Wilkinson Iii

Michigan Law Review

Many in the legal profession have abandoned the great questions of legal process. This is too bad. How a decision is reached can be as important as what the decision is. In an increasingly diverse country with many competing visions of the good, it is critical for law to aspire to agreement on process - a task both more achievable than agreement on substance and more suited to our profession than waving the banners of ideological truth. By process, I mean the institutional routes by which we in America reach our most crucial decisions. In other words, process is our …

Zen And The Art Of Jursiprudence, Matthew K. Roskoski

Michigan Law Review

Lawyer bashing is by no means a remarkable phenomenon. It was not remarkable when Shakespeare wrote, "[t]he first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers," and it's not remarkable today. Paul Campos, however, has written a particularly readable example, blending venerable Western lawyer-bashing and pop psychology with unsystematic invocations of Eastern religion. Jurismania is named after Campos's theory that the American legal system has a lot in common with a person suffering from an obsessive-compulsive disorder, an addiction to law that does neither the patient nor those around him much good. In Jurismania, Campos criticizes our insistence on regulating …

Dna As Evidence: Viewing Science Through The Prism Of The Law, Peter Donnelly, Richard D. Friedman

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

DNA evidence has transformed the proof of identity in criminal litigation, but it has also introduced daunting problems of statistical analysis into the process. In this article, we analyze a problem related to DNA evidence that is likely to be of great and increasing significance in the near future. This is the problem of whether, and how, to present evidence that the suspect has been identified through a DNA database search. The following article is adapted from "DNA Database Searches and the Legal Consumption of Scientific Evidence," 97.4 Michigan Law Review 931-984 (1999), and appears here with permission of the …

Uncoupling The Law Of Takings, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

The following article is based on "Deterrence and Distribution in the Law of Takings," 112 Harvard Law Review 997-1025 (March 1999), © 1999 by the Harvard Law Review Association, and appears here by permission. A complete version, with citations, is available from the authors or the editor of Law Quadrangle Notes.

The law of takings couples together matters that should be treated independently. Whatever the boundaries of the the Takings Clause, we think there is much to be gained by analyzing takings in terms of the clause's underlying purposes, and by understanding that efficiency and justice are best served by …