Supreme Court of the United States Commons^™

Law School News: Rwu Law Remembers Sarah Weddington 12/30/2021, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Securities Law In The Supreme Court, Adam C. Pritchard, Robert B. Thompson

Articles

Since the enactment of the first federal securities statute in 1933, securities law has illustrated key shifts in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence. During the New Deal, the Court’s securities law decisions shifted almost overnight from open hostility toward the newly-expanded administrative state to broad deference to agency expertise. In the 1940s, securities cases helped build the legal foundation for a broadly enabling administrative law. The 1960s saw the Warren Court creating new implied rights of action in securities law illustrative of the Court’s approach to statutes generally. The stage seemed set for the rise of “federal corporate law.” The Court …

Law School News: Logan Article Central To Scotus Dissent, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Corruption In Capsules: How It Is Legal For Companies To Put Harmful Ingredients In Vitamins And Dietary Supplements, Emily Leggiero

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

The vitamin and supplement industry has increased exponentially in profits as well as potential products on the market since the turn of the century. However, these products are not regulated, nor do they undergo any premarket clinical research or testing. Public health is compromised by vitamins and supplements that are available for American consumption that is disproportionately unregulated to their chemically similar counterparts. This wicked problem is facilitated through the combination of historical legislative definitions that has since been distorted for corrupt administrative gain through the allotment of corporate expenditures. Company disbursements are made to the same policymakers that create …

2nd Annual Women In Law Leadership Lecture: A Fireside Chat With Debra Katz, Esq. 03-03-2021, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Cancelling Justice? The Case Of James Clark Mcreynolds, Todd C. Peppers

Scholarly Articles

Over the last several years, there has been a vigorous debate as to whether monuments and memorials of Confederate leaders and controversial historical figures should be purged from the public square. These conversations have included former Supreme Court justices and have led to the removal of multiple statues of former Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the infamous “Dred Scott” decision. Drawing on the arguments mounted for and against the removal of statues, this article explores the decision of a small liberal arts college to strip the name of former Supreme Court Justice James Clark McReynolds from a campus building. …

Deep Tracks: Album Cuts That Help Define The Essential Scalia, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Jeff Sutton and Ed Whelan have collected some of Justice Scalia’s “greatest hits” in a volume entitled The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law. The book is an excellent introduction to the jurisprudential thought and literary style of one of the most influential legal thinkers—and legal writers—in modern times. As with any “greatest hits” compilation, however, there are inevitably going to be key “album cuts” for which there will not be space. This essay seeks to supplement Sutton and Whelan’s invaluable efforts by surveying three of those “deep tracks” that shed particular light on …

A Formulaic Recitation Will Not Do: Why The Federal Rules Demand More Detail In Criminal Pleading, Charles Eric Hintz

All Faculty Scholarship

When a plaintiff files a civil lawsuit in federal court, her complaint must satisfy certain minimum standards. Specifically, under the prevailing understanding of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a), a complaint must plead sufficient factual matter to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face, rather than mere conclusory statements. Given the significantly higher stakes involved in criminal cases, one might think that an even more robust requirement would exist in that context. But in fact a weaker pleading standard reigns. Under the governing interpretation of Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 7(c), indictments that simply parrot the …

Attribution Time: Cal Tinney’S 1937 Quip, “A Switch In Time’Ll Save Nine”, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

In the history of the United States Supreme Court, 1937 was a huge year—perhaps the Court’s most important year ever.

Before 1933, the Supreme Court sometimes held that progressive policies enacted by political branches of government were unconstitutional. Such decisions became much more prevalent during President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, from 1933 through 1936. In those years, the Court struck down, often by narrow margins, both federal “New Deal” laws and state law counterparts that sought to combat the devastation of the Great Depression.

Then, in early 1937, President Roosevelt proposed to “pack”—to enlarge—the Court, so that it would …

The (Joseph) Stories Of Newmyer And Cover: Hero Or Tragedy?, Jed H. Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

Kent Newmyer’s classics Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic and John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court are important stories about the architects and heroes of the rule of law in America. In Newmyer’s account, Story played a crucial role preserving the republic and building a legal nation out of rival states, and Newmyer’s Story is fundamentally important for students of American history. But in Robert Cover’s account in Justice Accused on northern judges’ deference to slavery, Story is an anti-hero. Sometimes Story stayed silent. In Prigg v. Pennsylvania, Story overvalued formalistic comity. …

The Lost Promise Of Progressive Formalism, Andrea Scoseria Katz

Scholarship@WashULaw

Today, any number of troubling government pathologies—a lawless presidency, a bloated and unaccountable administrative state, the growth of an activist bench—are associated with the emergence of a judicial philosophy that disregards the “plain meaning” of the Constitution for a loose, unprincipled “living constitutionalism.” Many trace its origins to the Progressive Era
(1890–1920), a time when Americans turned en masse to government as the solution to emerging problems of economic modernity—financial panics, industrial concentration, worsening workplace conditions, and skyrocketing unemployment and inequality—and, the argument goes, concocted a flexible, new constitutional philosophy to allow the federal government to take on vast, new …

Corporate Personhood And Limited Sovereignty, Elizabeth Pollman

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article, written for a symposium celebrating the work of Professor Margaret Blair, examines how corporate rights jurisprudence helped to shape the corporate form in the United States during the nineteenth century. It argues that as the corporate form became popular because of the way it facilitated capital lock-in, perpetual succession, and provided other favorable characteristics related to legal personality that separated the corporation from its participants, the Supreme Court provided crucial reinforcement of these entity features by recognizing corporations as rights-bearing legal persons separate from the government. Although the legal personality of corporations is a distinct concept from their …

American Common Market Redux, Richard Collins

Publications

The Tennessee Wine case, decided in June of 2019, had a major effect on the path of the law for an issue not argued in it. The Supreme Court affirmed invalidity of a protectionist state liquor regulation that discriminated against interstate commerce in violation of the dormant commerce clause doctrine. Its holding rejected a vigorous defense based on the special terms of the Twenty-first Amendment that ended Prohibition—an issue of interest only to those involved in markets for alcoholic drinks. However, the Court’s opinion removed serious doubts about validity of the Doctrine itself, even though the petitioner and supporting amici …

Rabbi Lamm, The Fifth Amendment, And Comparative Jewish Law, Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

Rabbi Norman Lamm’s 1956 article, “The Fifth Amendment and Its Equivalent in the Halakha,” provides important lessons for scholarship in both Jewish and American law. Sixty-five years after it was published, the article remains, in many ways, a model for interdisciplinary and comparative study of Jewish law, drawing upon sources in the Jewish legal tradition, American legal history, and modern psychology. In so doing, the article proves faithful to each discipline on its own terms, producing insights that illuminate all three disciplines while respecting the internal logic within each one. In addition to many other distinctions, since its initial publication, …

"Our Most Sacred Legal Commitments": A Digital Exploration Of The U.S. Supreme Court Defining Who We Are And How They Should Opine, Eric C. Nystrom, David S. Tanenhaus

Scholarly Works

This Article focuses on uncovering the multiple meanings of the word "our" in the published opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court from Chisholm to modern times. To do so, we use a digital legal history approach, combining robust court data, text mining techniques, and expert word classification, using a set of custom open-source tools and open data.