Confirming Circuit Judges In A Presidential Election Year, 2016 University of Richmond
Confirming Circuit Judges In A Presidential Election Year, Carl W. Tobias
Law Faculty Publications
Over 2016, President Barack Obama tapped accomplished, mainstream candidates for seven of twelve federal appeals court vacancies. Nevertheless, the Senate Judiciary Committee has furnished a public hearing and vote for merely three nominees and did not conduct a hearing for any other prospect this year. 2016 concomitantly is a presidential election year in which appointments can be delayed and stopped—a conundrum that Justice Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court vacancy exacerbates. Because appellate courts comprise tribunals of last resort for practically all cases and critically need each of their members to deliver justice, the appointments process merits scrutiny. The Essay first evaluates …
Confirm Judge Koh For The Ninth Circuit, 2016 University of Richmond
Confirm Judge Koh For The Ninth Circuit, Carl W. Tobias
Law Faculty Publications
On February 25, 2016, President Barack Obama appointed United States District Court Judge Lucy Haeran Koh for a judicial emergency vacancy on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The jurist has served professionally for more than six years in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, ably resolving major litigation. Thus, White House efforts to confirm her were unsurprising. Nevertheless, 2016 is a presidential election year when delay infuses many court appointments. That conundrum was exacerbated because the United States Senate Republican majority refused to even consider United States Court of Appeals …
A Demographic History Of Federal Judicial Appointments By Gender And Race: 1789-2016, 2016 University of Richmond
A Demographic History Of Federal Judicial Appointments By Gender And Race: 1789-2016, Jonathan K. Stubbs
Law Faculty Publications
This article briefly surveys the constitutional and statutory foundation for the creation of the federal judiciary. It also furnishes data, by sex and race, of the appointment of federal judges to courts of general jurisdiction during each presidential administration from September 24, 1789, through April 11, 2016. Thus, Part I describes the pace of diversification of the federal judiciary. While data regarding other attributes of judges (such as their socioeconomic status) exist, extensive analysis of such characteristics falls outside the parameters of this preliminary analysis. Nonetheless, the Article notes in passing that, since 1989, during each presidential administration, the majority …
The Constitutional Nature Of The United States Tax Court, 2016 Washington and Lee University School of Law
The Constitutional Nature Of The United States Tax Court, Brant J. Hellwig
Scholarly Articles
Is the United States Tax Court part of the Executive Branch of government? One would expect that question would be capable of being definitively answered without considerable difficulty. And as recently expressed by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, that indeed is the case. In the course of addressing a challenge to the President's ability to remove a judge of the Tax Court for cause on separation of powers grounds, the D.C. Circuit rejected the premise that the removal power implicates two branches of government: "the Tax Court exercises Executive authority as part of the Executive …
To Compare Or Not To Compare? Reading Justice Breyer, 2016 Washington and Lee University School of Law
To Compare Or Not To Compare? Reading Justice Breyer, Russell A. Miller
Scholarly Articles
Justice Breyer's new book The Court and the World presents a number of productive challenges. First, it provides an opportunity to reflect generally on extra-judicial scholarly activities. Second, it is a major and important - but also troubling - contribution to debates about comparative law broadly, and the opening of domestic constitutional regimes to external law and legal phenomena more specifically. I begin by suggesting a critique of the first of these points. These are merely some thoughts on the implications of extra-judicial scholarship. The greater portion of this essay, however, is devoted to a reading of Justice Breyer's book, …
Judicial Challenges To The Collateral Impact Of Criminal Convictions: Is True Change In The Offing?, 2016 Washington and Lee University School of Law
Judicial Challenges To The Collateral Impact Of Criminal Convictions: Is True Change In The Offing?, Nora V. Demleitner
Scholarly Articles
Judicial opposition to disproportionate sentences and the long-term impact of criminal records is growing, at least in the Eastern District of New York. With the proliferation and harshness of collateral consequences and the hurdles in overcoming a criminal record, judges have asked for greater proportionality and improved chances for past offenders to get a fresh start. The combined impact of punitiveness and a criminal record is not only debilitating to the individual but also to their families and communities. A criminal case against a non-citizen who will be subject to deportation and a decade-long ban on reentry and three different …
Truthiness And The Marble Palace, 2016 Marquette University Law School
Truthiness And The Marble Palace, Chad M. Oldfather, Todd C. Peppers
Scholarly Articles
Tucked inside the title page of David Lat’s Supreme Ambitions, just after a note giving credit for the cover design and before the copyright notice, sits a standard disclaimer of the sort that appears in all novels: “This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.” These may be the most truly fictional words in the entire book. Its judicial characters are recognizable as versions of real judges, including, among others, …
Agenda-Setting In The Regulatory State: Theory And Evidence, 2016 University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Agenda-Setting In The Regulatory State: Theory And Evidence, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters
All Faculty Scholarship
Government officials who run administrative agencies must make countless decisions every day about what issues and work to prioritize. These agenda-setting decisions hold enormous implications for the shape of law and public policy, but they have received remarkably little attention by either administrative law scholars or social scientists who study the bureaucracy. Existing research offers few insights about the institutions, norms, and inputs that shape and constrain agency discretion over their agendas or about the strategies that officials employ in choosing to elevate certain issues while putting others on the back burner. In this article, we advance the study of …
Shattering The Glass Ceiling In International Adjudication, 2016 University of Baltimore School of Law
Shattering The Glass Ceiling In International Adjudication, Nienke Grossman
All Faculty Scholarship
The Article shows that women are found in dramatically low numbers on the benches of the majority of the world’s most important international courts, analyzes the causes of this phenomenon and proposes and evaluates solutions. It establishes that the number of women in the pool of potential judges does not appear to dictate how many women become international judges. It shows, too, that when selection procedures are closed and opaque, and there is no quota or aspirational target for a sex-balanced bench, women obtain international judgeships in disproportionately low numbers. On the other hand, when a quota or aspirational target …
Legal Interpreter For The Jury: The Role Of The Clerk Of The Court In Spain, 2016 University of Burgos
Legal Interpreter For The Jury: The Role Of The Clerk Of The Court In Spain, Mar Jimeno-Bulnes, Valerie P. Hans
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
The Clerk of the Court (secretario judicial) in Spanish provincial courts is an important legal actor in the proceedings of the modern Spanish jury, introduced in 1995. In contrast to the general verdicts of traditional common-law juries, Spanish juries must answer an often lengthy list of specific questions, and must provide the reasoning supporting these responses. Early on, many Spanish juries found the task of providing legally acceptable responses and reasons challenging. Because the law permits the clerk to enter the deliberation room to assist the jury in its writing of the verdict, the clerk has come to act as …
The Long Shadow Of Bush V. Gore: Judicial Partisanship In Election Cases, 2016 Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
The Long Shadow Of Bush V. Gore: Judicial Partisanship In Election Cases, Michael S. Kang, Joanna M. Shepherd
Faculty Articles
Bush v. Gore decided a presidential election and is the most dramatic election case in our lifetime, but cases like it are decided every year at the state level. Ordinary state courts regularly decide questions of election rules and administration that effectively determine electoral outcomes hanging immediately in the balance. Election cases like Bush v. Gore embody a fundamental worry with judicial intervention into the political process: outcome-driven, partisan judicial decisionmaking. The Article investigates whether judges decide cases, particularly politically sensitive ones, based on their partisan loyalties more than the legal merits of the cases. It presents a novel method …
Procedure And Pragmatism, 2016 University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Procedure And Pragmatism, Stephen B. Burbank
All Faculty Scholarship
In this essay, prepared as part of a festschrift for the Italian scholar, Michele Taruffo, I portray him as a pragmatic realist of the sort described by Richard Posner in his book, Reflections on Judging. Viewing him as such, I salute Taruffo for challenging the established order in domestic and comparative law thinking about civil law systems, the role of lawyers, courts and precedent in those systems, and also for casting the light of the comparative enterprise on common law systems, particularly that in the United States. Speaking as one iconoclast of another, however, I also raise questions about Taruffo’s …
Designing Plea Bargaining From The Ground Up: Accuracy And Fairness Without Trials As Backstops, 2016 University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Designing Plea Bargaining From The Ground Up: Accuracy And Fairness Without Trials As Backstops, Stephanos Bibas
All Faculty Scholarship
American criminal procedure developed on the assumption that grand juries and petit jury trials were the ultimate safeguards of fair procedures and accurate outcomes. But now that plea bargaining has all but supplanted juries, we need to think through what safeguards our plea-bargaining system should be built around. This Symposium Article sketches out principles for redesigning our plea-bargaining system from the ground up around safeguards. Part I explores the causes of factual, moral, and legal inaccuracies in guilty pleas. To prevent and remedy these inaccuracies, it proposes a combination of quasi-inquisitorial safeguards, more vigorous criminal defense, and better normative evaluation …
Laird V. Tatum And Article Iii Standing In Surveillance Cases, 2016 University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Laird V. Tatum And Article Iii Standing In Surveillance Cases, Jeffrey L. Vagle
All Faculty Scholarship
Plaintiffs seeking to challenge government surveillance programs have faced long odds in federal courts, due mainly to a line of Supreme Court cases that have set a very high bar to Article III standing in these cases. The origins of this jurisprudence can be directly traced to Laird v. Tatum, a 1972 case where the Supreme Court considered the question of who could sue the government over a surveillance program, holding in a 5-4 decision that chilling effects arising “merely from the individual’s knowledge” of likely government surveillance did not constitute adequate injury to meet Article III standing requirements.
The Scrivener's Error, 2016 University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
The Scrivener's Error, Ryan David Doerfler
All Faculty Scholarship
It is widely accepted that courts may correct legislative drafting mistakes, i.e., so-called “scrivener’s errors,” if and only if such mistakes are “absolutely clear.” The rationale is that, if a court were to recognize a less clear error, it “might be rewriting the statute rather than correcting a technical mistake.”
This Essay argues that the standard is much too strict. The current rationale ignores that courts can “rewrite,” i.e., misinterpret, a statute both by recognizing an error and by failing to do so. In turn, because the current doctrine is designed to protect against one type of mistake (false positives) …
Spelling Out Spokeo, 2016 University of Pennsylvania
Spelling Out Spokeo, Craig Konnoth, Seth F. Kreimer
All Faculty Scholarship
For almost five decades, the injury-in-fact requirement has been a mainstay of Article III standing doctrine. Critics have attacked the requirement as incoherent and unduly malleable. But the Supreme Court has continued to announce “injury in fact” as the bedrock of justiciability. In Spokeo v. Robins, the Supreme Court confronted a high profile and recurrent conflict regarding the standing of plaintiffs claiming statutory damages. It clarified some matters, but remanded the case for final resolution. This Essay derives from the cryptic language of Spokeo a six stage process (complete with flowchart) that represents the Court’s current equilibrium. We put …
Double Counting: The Appropriate Application Of The Vulnerable Victim Enhancement For Child Sex Offenders, 2016 American University Washington College of Law
Double Counting: The Appropriate Application Of The Vulnerable Victim Enhancement For Child Sex Offenders, Amy Yoon
American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law
No abstract provided.
Saving The Public Interest Class Action By Unpacking Theory And Doctrinal Functionality, 2016 University of Colorado Law School
Saving The Public Interest Class Action By Unpacking Theory And Doctrinal Functionality, Suzette M. Malveaux
Publications
No abstract provided.
It’S So Hard To Say Goodbye: Why Article Iii Judges Leave (Or Don’T), 2016 Duke Law
It’S So Hard To Say Goodbye: Why Article Iii Judges Leave (Or Don’T), Johnnie Blakeney Rawlinson
Duke Law Master of Judicial Studies Theses
Thurgood Marshall famously stated: “I was appointed to a life term, and I intend to serve it.” Justice Marshall’s sentiment is in lockstep with the expressed intent of the Founding Fathers, who embedded the concept of life tenure for Article III judges into the Constitution at the time of its adoption. This paper explores the extent to which Article III judges in this era echo the sentiment expressed by Justice Marshall, and the reasons some Article III judges have elected not to serve a life term. The paper also examines whether Article III judges have gravitated toward careers in the …
Enhancing Judicial Institutions: Enhancing Economic Development, 2016 Duke Law
Enhancing Judicial Institutions: Enhancing Economic Development, Stephane Alia Haisley
Duke Law Master of Judicial Studies Theses
Since the 1980s, scholars and development banks have recognized the link between judicial institutions and economic growth. This thesis proposes to explore the role of judicial institutions in the performance of economies and questions whether enhancing judicial institutions can result in enhancing economic development in developing countries. Since the 1990s development banks have explored the role of judicial institutions in the quest for economic development. Both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have done this through the pursuit of judicial reform efforts in countries with ailing economies. The focus has been on improving the efficiency of the …