Common Law Commons^™

Is The Contempt Power Obsolete?, Nino C. Monea

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Contempt power has been with us for as long as we’ve had courts in this country. Through summary contempt proceedings, judges may imprison any person they deem insufficiently respectful to the authority of the court—with significantly less due process than a person would be entitled to under any other criminal offense. In theory, this is necessary to maintain order in the court. But in practice, summary contempt power is serially and seriously abused. Judges use incarceration to deal with piddling offenses or for no real reason at all. This Article argues that the concept of allowing judges nearly unbridled discretion …

Rural America As A Commons, Ann M. Eisenberg

University of Richmond Law Review

With many ready to dismiss non-urban life as a relic of history, rural America’s place in the future is in question. The rural role in the American past is understandably more apparent. As the story of urbanization goes in the United States and elsewhere, the majority of the population used to live in rural places, including small towns and sparsely populated counties. A substantial proportion of those people worked in agriculture, manufacturing, or extractive industries. But trends associated with modernity—mechanization, automation, globalization, and environmental conservation, for instance—have reduced the perceived need for a rural workforce. Roughly since the industrial revolution …

The Move Toward An Indigenous Virgin Islands Jurisprudence: Banks In Its Second Decade, Kristen David Adams

Fordham Law Review

In 2011, the Supreme Court of the U.S. Virgin Islands decided Banks v. International Rental & Leasing Corp. and, with that decision, introduced a new era in Virgin Islands jurisprudence that embraced a much more active role for Virgin Islands courts and a correspondingly diminished role for the American Law Institute’s restatements. This Essay examines what I will call “second-generation” decisions referencing Banks with the goal of determining whether Banks and its progeny have met, or are at least in the process of meeting, “the goal of establishing ‘an indigenous Virgin Islands jurisprudence’” set by the Banks court. Ultimately, this …

Cultural Identity And Territorial Autonomy: U.S. Virgin Islands Jurisprudence And The Insular Cases, Dolace Mclean

Fordham Law Review

This Essay utilizes the lens of postcolonial theory to analyze the development of U.S. Virgin Islands jurisprudence. This Essay asserts that the United States’s acquisition of the territory served the purpose of helping to construct an American narrative of moving from colony to colonial power that surpassed its European forebears. The colonial narrative is fractured by instances of the Supreme Court of the Virgin Islands re-narrating territorial space by utilizing legal principles that are informed by local cultural expressions. Consequently, Virgin Islands jurisprudence is transformed from “colonial dependent” to “postcolonial independent” based on intersectional, progressive principles.

The Paradox Of Death Penalty Delay: A Judicial, Empirical, And Ethical Study, Zoë Gill

Senior Theses and Projects

The American death penalty has been at the center of political debates for decades. More specifically, the complexity of death penalty delay has gained significant attention from the public as well as the Supreme Court justices. Death penalty delay represents the time that transpires between when a capital crime is committed and when the execution is carried out. Today, more than half of all prisoners currently sentenced to death have been on death row for more than 18 years. This staggering statistic has ignited debate and divided the conservative justices from the liberal justices even more. This thesis will first …

Climate Discrimination, Duane Rudolph

Catholic University Law Review

This Article focuses on the coming legal plight of workers in the United States, who will likely face discrimination as they search for work outside their home states. The Article takes for granted that climate change will have forced those workers across state and international boundaries, a reality dramatically witnessed in the United States during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. During that environmental emergency (and the devastation it wrought), workers were forced across boundaries only to be violently discriminated against upon arrival in their new domiciles. Such discrimination is likely to recur, and it will threaten the livelihoods of …

Tort Theory And The Restatement, In Retrospect, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

This is my third paper on the Restatement (Third) of Torts. In my first paper, The Theory of Tort Doctrine and the Restatement (Third) of Torts, I offered a positive economic theory of the tort doctrine that had been presented in the Restatement (Third) of Torts: General Principles, and also an optimistic vision of how positive theoretical analysis could be integrated with the Restatement project. In my second paper, The Economics of the Restatement and of the Common Law, I set out the utilitarian-economic theory of how the common law litigation process could generate optimal (efficient, wealth-maximizing) rules and compared …

Implied Organizations And Technological Governance, Shawn Bayern

William & Mary Law Review

Common law historically adapted creatively and gracefully to the emergence of new types of organizations. Today, statutory forms of organizations predominate. But statutory organizational forms may be ill-suited to govern the novel, loosely coupled, and rapidly changing organizations that can arise through distributed technological mechanisms. This Article suggests that the common law of implied organizations can be a fertile ground for legal responses to technological organizations and indeed may be important not just for regulating such organizations but for giving them important legal capabilities.

Theseus In The Labyrinth: How State Constitutions Can Slay The Procedural Minotaur, Marcus A. Gadson

Washington Law Review

Civil procedure is one of the biggest hurdles to access to justice. An array of rules and interpretations of those rules have turned lawsuits into meandering mazes with a procedural minotaur waiting to gobble up meritorious claims. The problem is especially acute for the many Americans without abundant resources or access to a lawyer. Fortunately, there is a ready remedy, albeit one access to justice advocates have ignored: state constitutions. Forty state constitutions, which protect hundreds of millions of Americans, generally guarantee “[t]hat all courts shall be open, and every person, for an injury done him in his person, property …

Chevron: Fueling The Right Against Title 42 And The Denial Of U.S. Asylum Rights, Nicholas Pierre-Paul

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

This Note was inspired by the questionable treatment of Haitian asylum seekers in Del Rio, Texas, where horseback U.S. officials charged at them using reins as whips, before immediately deporting them back to Haiti. The U.S. government justified its actions by claiming that Title 42 permits U.S. officials to prohibit the entry of individuals when there is a danger of introducing certain diseases, such as COVID-19. However, Title 42 conflicts with the United States’ codified commitment to the principle of non-refoulment, prohibiting it from returning certain refugees to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened. Accordingly, the …

Sanchez V. Mayorkas: Is This The End Of Green Cards For Temporary Protected Status Holders?, Thalia G. Rivet

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

This Note was inspired by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Sanchez v. Mayorkas. This decision put an end to the decade-long circuit split over whether a Temporary Protected Status (“TPS”) recipient, who entered the United States unlawfully, could still become a Lawful Permanent Resident (“LPR”). Since its inception, TPS holders have been denied an avenue to adjust their status despite their socioeconomic impact on the United States and every TPS-designated country. This Note will break down and analyze the decision in Sanchez v. Mayorkas through (1) the examination of the circuit split cases, (2) the analysis of TPS holder’s …

Implications Of Good Faith In Construction Contracts, Nadine Rashed

Theses and Dissertations

The principle of good faith is making inroads and continues to significantly impact various contractual arrangements. In most civil legal systems, good faith is present as a core principle. Nevertheless, its definition is beyond doubt scarce in the construction industry. However, the common law lacks the good faith obligations. Good faith is one of the fundamental principles that impact the contractual obligations between the contracting parties. This paper creates an urge to address the implications of good faith on construction contracts in the pre-contract and post-contract award stages. Therefore, the paper’s objective is to propose a legal/contractual clause that meets …

Higher Law And Lincoln's Antislavery Constitutionalism: What It Means To Say The Civil War Was Fought Over Slavery, Joel A. Rogers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The US Civil War was fought over slavery. But what do we really mean when we say that? This paper examines that question, first by exploring the idea of “higher law,” which gained tremendous traction in American society starting around 1850. Proponents of the idea claimed that laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act are immoral; that the immorality of such laws is self-evident, and that such immoral laws should be resisted—sometimes even with violence. Meanwhile, opponents of the idea of higher law were not necessarily in favor of slavery, but they opposed the use of extra-Constitutional means to bring …

Routine Activities And Their Relationship To Crime Among Community Members In Ramallah And Al-Bireh, Younes Ahmed Rabee, Ayed Awad Al-Wareikat

Journal of the Association of Arab Universities for Research in Higher Education (مجلة اتحاد الجامعات العربية (للبحوث في التعليم العالي

The study aimed to identify the practical routine activities of individuals and their daily routine activities and their relationship with their being victims of crime, and used the qualitative descriptive approach by conducting fifty personal interviews with victims of crime of all kinds in the past years 2020 in Ramallah and A Bireh governorate, and reached The study found, notably the existence of a relationship between the practical routine activities of individuals of victims of various crimes and their occurrence in crime, and the absence of a relationship between the daily routine activities of victims of various crimes and their …

Saying What The Law Should Be, F. Andrew Hessick

BYU Law Review

Recent years have seen a resurgence of the view that the role of the federal courts is to declare what the law is, not what the law should be. Scholars and judges, including a majority of the current U.S. Supreme Court justices, have expressed this view that the law is fixed at its creation and the function of courts is to declare its meaning. But this view is inaccurate. Descriptively, federal courts often say what the law should be. Judges fashion common law, inject their views into interpretations, and issue opinions that do not merely describe the law but have …

Laws Governing Restrictions On Charitable Gifts: The Consequences Of Codification, Nancy Mclaughlin

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Over the last two decades we have seen marked changes in the laws governing donor-imposed restrictions on charitable gifts. These changes have occurred primarily as a result of the adoption in many states of the Uniform Trust Code (the UTC) and the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act (UPMIFA). This Essay explains that codification in the UTC and UPMIFA of liberalized versions of cy pres and deviation, as well as other related changes to the common law, have had unintended negative consequences. Those negative consequences include a lack of coherence in the law, an elevation of form over substance …

A Country In Crisis: A Review Of How The Illegitimate Supreme Court Is Rendering Illegitimate Decisions And Doing Damage That Will Not Soon Be Undone., Regina L. Ramsey ,Esq

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

This article will discuss in detail exactly how the court is illegitimate and makes decisions that are illegitimate, using examples from the October 2021 term. It will also explain why action needs to be taken immediately to reign in this run-away Court to restore public trust. As discussed herein, we cannot sit by and patiently wait for the Court to right itself over time because there are important issues on the current docket, such as race-conscious admissions policies of colleges and universities to ensure student bodies are diverse as future leaders are prepared to live and work in a diverse …

Acceso A La Justicia En Las 13 Principales Ciudades De Colombia Según Su Tipología Y Entorno De Desarrollo En El Periodo 2018-2019, Katerine Orejuela Arcia

Maestría en Estudios y Gestión del Desarrollo – MEGD

El acceso a la justicia se ha constituido en uno de los temas más importantes en la discusión jurídica contemporánea, debido a su relevancia como principio fundante del Estado de Derecho, en su doble condición de derecho humano autónomo y como medio para la garantía de otras libertades; por tanto, se le considera como requisito esencial de la “igualdad sustantiva, de los derechos humanos y del desarrollo sostenible”. (Barón Mendoza, 2019, p. 59).

En Colombia, existen grandes vacíos de conocimiento respecto a los aspectos fundamentales sobre el “acceso a la justicia”, especialmente en lo que tiene que ver con la …

The Afterlife Of Confederate Monuments, Jess Phelps, Jessica N. Owley

Indiana Law Journal

As communities increasingly remove Confederate monuments from public spaces, they must decide what to do with these troubled statues. Given the recent wave of monument removal, we consider how property law and other restrictions impact community decisions on the disposition of monuments removed from public spaces on two levels—by location and future owner. In considering the fate of removed monuments, we profile potential destinations including museums, battlefields, cemeteries, and even storage. Alongside these examples, we discuss how laws constrain (or fail to constrain) the options for new owners and the restrictions on where monuments can be relocated. Even where laws …

Idaho's Law Of Seduction, Michael L. Smith

Faculty Articles

Seduction is a historical cause of action that permitted women's fathers to bring suit on their daughters' behalf in sexual assault and rape cases. This tort emerged long ago when the law's refusal to recognize women's agency left this as the only means of recovering damages in these cases. As time went on, the tort evolved, and women were eventually permitted to bring lawsuits for seduction on their own behalf. Today, most states have abolished seduction, along with other torts permitting recovery for damages arising from intimate conduct. One could be easily forgiven for thinking that such an archaic tort …