Sandra Day O’Connor’S "First" Principles: A Constructive Vision For An Angry Nation, 2020 Duke Law School
Sandra Day O’Connor’S "First" Principles: A Constructive Vision For An Angry Nation, Lisa Kern Griffin
Faculty Scholarship
During her 25-year tenure on the Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cast the decisive votes to resolve the most emotional debates, yet she maintained collegiality among the Justices and retained the public’s high regard. A recent biography by historian and journalist Evan Thomas chronicles her extraordinary personal qualities, remarkable professional journey, and constructive brand of patriotism. This book review essay describes a legacy in three parts: a lived example of how to thrive in the face of challenges, a jurisprudence driven by the courage to make compromises, and a theory about the long game of American democracy. First reintroduces …
Empty Chairs, 2020 Duke Law School
Generalist Judges And Advocates' Jargon, 2020 University of Missouri School of Law
Generalist Judges And Advocates' Jargon, Douglas E. Abrams
Faculty Publications
Clerking is a privilege. Fresh out of law school and eager to begin their careers, law clerks at any level of the federal or state judiciary covet the opportunity to learn from a judge’s reservoir of knowledge. But law clerks who anticipate careers writing as advocates are also well-positioned to learn about something that a judge may not know when briefs or other adversary submissions land on the desk.
That “something” concerns jargon, this article’s focus because its use by advocates can impede the court’s understanding of a case’s facts and law. “Jargon” refers to “special words or expressions that …
Can The International Criminal Court Succeed? An Analysis Of The Empirical Evidence Of Violence Prevention, 2020 Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School
Can The International Criminal Court Succeed? An Analysis Of The Empirical Evidence Of Violence Prevention, Stuart Ford
Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review
Despite significant optimism about the future of the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) during its early years, recently there has been growing criticism of it by both scholars and governments. As a result, there appears to be more doubt about the ICC’s ability to succeed now than at any other point in its history. So, are the critics correct? Is the ICC failing? No. This Article argues that, not only can the ICC succeed, there is strong evidence that it is already succeeding. It analyzes several recent empirical articles that have convincingly demonstrated that the ICC prevents serious violations of international …
Coordinating Injunctions, 2020 Columbia Law School
Coordinating Injunctions, Bert I. Huang
Faculty Scholarship
Consider this scenario: Two judges with parallel cases are each ready to issue an injunction. But their injunctions may clash, ordering incompatible actions by the defendant. Each judge has written an opinion justifying her own intended relief, but the need to avoid conflicting injunctions presses her to make a further choice – “Should I issue the injunction or should I stay it for now?” Each must make this decision in anticipation of what the other will do.
This Article analyzes such a judicial coordination problem, drawing on recent examples including the DACA cases and the “sanctuary cities” cases. It then …
Committing To Justice: The Case For Impact Of Race And Culture Assessments In Sentencing African Canadian Offenders, 2020 Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University
Committing To Justice: The Case For Impact Of Race And Culture Assessments In Sentencing African Canadian Offenders, Maria C. Dugas
Dalhousie Law Journal
Canadian judges have made notable, although too limited, strides to recognize the unique conditions of Black Canadians in sentencing processes and decisionmaking. The use of Impact of Race and Culture Assessments in sentencing people of African descent has gradually gained popularity since they were first introduced in R v “X.” These reports provide the court with the necessary information about the effect of systemic anti-Black racism on people of African descent and how the experience of racism has informed the circumstances of the offence, the offender, and how it might inform the offender’s experience of the carceral state. This paper …
Legitimate Interpretation – Or Legitimate Adjudication?, 2020 Columbia Law School
Legitimate Interpretation – Or Legitimate Adjudication?, Thomas W. Merrill
Faculty Scholarship
Current debate about the legitimacy of lawmaking by courts focuses on what constitutes legitimate interpretation. The debate has reached an impasse in that originalism and textualism appear to have the stronger case as a matter of theory while living constitutionalism and dynamic interpretation provide much account of actual practice. This Article argues that if we refocus the debate by asking what constitutes legitimate adjudication, as determined by the social practice of the parties and their lawyers who take part in adjudication, it is possible to develop an account of legitimacy that produces a much better fit between theory and practice. …
Popping The Question: What The Questionnaire For Federal Judicial Appointments Reveals About The Pursuit Of Justice, Diversity, And The Commitment To Transparency, 2020 Harvard Law School
Popping The Question: What The Questionnaire For Federal Judicial Appointments Reveals About The Pursuit Of Justice, Diversity, And The Commitment To Transparency, Agathon Fric
Dalhousie Law Journal
Since 2017, the Canadian government has published excerpts from questionnaires that prospective judges completed as part of the judicial selection process, subjecting newly appointed superior and federal court judges to a degree of scrutiny that is unprecedented in Canadian history. Using this novel source material, this article explores what a sample of 16 judges’ questionnaires do and do not say about the individuals behind the robes. This review suggests that those appointed to the bench in 2017 generally demonstrate insight into the judicial role in Canada. However, some provide only superficial responses, others parrot back normative values that the government …
Covid, Crisis And Courts, 2020 Columbia Law School
Covid, Crisis And Courts, Colleen F. Shanahan, Alyx Mark, Jessica K. Steinberg, Anna E. Carpenter
Faculty Scholarship
Our country is in crisis. The inequality and oppression that lies deep in the roots and is woven in the branches of our lives has been laid bare by a virus. Relentless state violence against black people has pushed protestors to the streets. We hope that the legislative and executive branches will respond with policy change for those who struggle the most among us: rental assistance, affordable housing, quality public education, comprehensive health and mental health care. We fear that the crisis will fade and we will return to more of the same. Whatever lies on the other side of …
Judicial Credibility, 2020 Columbia Law School
Judicial Credibility, Bert I. Huang
Faculty Scholarship
Do people believe a federal court when it rules against the government? And does such judicial credibility depend on the perceived political affiliation of the judge? This study presents a survey experiment addressing these questions, based on a set of recent cases in which both a judge appointed by President George W. Bush and a judge appointed by President Bill Clinton declared the same Trump Administration action to be unlawful. The findings offer evidence that, in a politically salient case, the partisan identification of the judge – here, as a “Bush judge” or “Clinton judge” – can influence the credibility …
The Handmaid Of Justice: Power And Procedure In The Inferior Courts, 2020 Columbia Law School
The Handmaid Of Justice: Power And Procedure In The Inferior Courts, Kellen R. Funk
Faculty Scholarship
Summing up the history of procedure from the codification movement of the nineteenth century to the Federal Rules practice of today, Robert Bone observed, “Each generation of procedure reformers, it seems, diagnoses the malady and proposes a cure only to have the succeeding generation’s diagnosis treat the cure as a cause of the malady.” While playfully highlighting the contingencies and unexpected consequences of procedural history, Professor Bone was not advocating a cyclical view of history, in which “cost and delay” continually recur as the bugaboos of procedural reformers who can’t quite figure out how to solve the problem. Instead, Bone …
Conference On Best Practices For Managing Daubert Questions, 2020 Columbia Law School
Conference On Best Practices For Managing Daubert Questions, Daniel J. Capra, David G. Campbell, Debra A. Livingston, James P. Bassett, Shelly Dick, Traci L. Lovitt, Thomas Marten, Kathryn N. Nester, Thomas D. Schroeder, Elizabeth J. Shapiro, Timothy Lau, Vince Chhabria, John Z. Lee, William H. Orrick Iii, Edmund A. Sargus Jr., Sarah A. Vance, Edward K. Cheng
Faculty Scholarship
This article is a transcript of the Philip D. Reed Lecture Series Conference on Best Practices for Managing Daubert Questions, held on October 25, 2019, at Vanderbilt Law School under the sponsorship of the Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules. The transcript has been lightly edited and represents the panelists’ individual views only and in no way reflects those of their affiliated firms, organizations, law schools, or the judiciary.
What Do Lawyers Contribute To Law & Economics?, 2020 Columbia Law School
What Do Lawyers Contribute To Law & Economics?, Robert E. Scott, George G. Triantis
Faculty Scholarship
The law-and-economics movement has transformed the analysis of private law in the United States and, increasingly, around the world. As the field developed from 1970 to the early 2000s, scholars have developed countless insights about the operation and effects of law and legal institutions. Throughout this period, the discipline of law-and-economics has benefited from a partnership among trained economists and academic lawyers. Yet the tools that are used derive primarily from economics and not law. A logical question thus demands attention: what role do academic lawyers play in law-and-economics scholarship? In this Essay, we offer an interpretive theory of the …
Paternity And The Quasi-Marital Child, 2019 Barry University School of Law
Paternity And The Quasi-Marital Child, The Honorable Diana Tennis
Child and Family Law Journal
No abstract provided.
The Separation Of Migrant Families At The Border Under The Trump Administration’S Zero-Tolerance Policy: A Critical Analysis Of The Mistreatment Of Immigrant Children Held In U.S. Custody, 2019 Barry University School of Law
The Separation Of Migrant Families At The Border Under The Trump Administration’S Zero-Tolerance Policy: A Critical Analysis Of The Mistreatment Of Immigrant Children Held In U.S. Custody, Dhillon Ramkhelawan
Child and Family Law Journal
This article provides a critical analysis of the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy that separated migrant families at the Southwest United States border from April to June 2018. It will provide a statistical analysis regarding the number of migrant children that were separated from their parents during this time period, and it will describe the poor living conditions that many of these children were subjected to as they waited for their parent’s immigration cases to be decided. Additionally, this article will also critically analyze the United States’ history of mistreating migrant children who started to flee their war-torn countries in Central …
2020 Fellowship Topic Announcement, 2019 Pepperdine University
2020 Fellowship Topic Announcement, National Association Of Administrative Law Judiciary
Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary
No abstract provided.
Rethinking The Efficiency Of The Common Law, 2019 University of Florida
Rethinking The Efficiency Of The Common Law, D. Daniel Sokol
Notre Dame Law Review
This Article shows how Posner and other scholars who claimed that common law was efficient misunderstood the structure of common law. If common law was more efficient, there would have been a noticeable push across most, if not all, doctrines to greater efficiency. This has not been the case. Rather, common law, better recast as a “platform,” could, under a certain set of parameters, lead to efficient outcomes. Next, the Article’s analysis suggests that while not every judge thinks about efficiency in decisionmaking, there must be some architectural or governance feature pushing in the direction of efficiency—which exists in some …
Combating Judicial Misconduct: A Stoic Approach, 2019 Cicchini Law Office, LLC
Combating Judicial Misconduct: A Stoic Approach, Michael D. Cicchini
Buffalo Law Review
Judicial ethics rules require criminal court judges to be competent, even-tempered, and impartial. In reality, however, many judges are grossly ignorant of the law, incredibly hostile toward the defense, and outright biased in favor of the state. Such acts of judicial misconduct pose serious problems for the criminal defense lawyer and violate many of the defendant’s statutory and constitutional rights.
This Article presents a framework for the defense lawyer to use in combating judicial misconduct. The approach is rooted in a principle of Stoic philosophy called “negative visualization.” That is, the lawyer should anticipate and visualize judicial incompetence, hostility, and …
Parens Patriae And Parental Rights: When Should The State Override Parental Medical Decisions?, 2019 Cleveland-Marshall College of Law
Parens Patriae And Parental Rights: When Should The State Override Parental Medical Decisions?, Elchanan G. Stern
Journal of Law and Health
Alfie Evans was a terminally ill British child whose parents, clinging to hope, were desperately trying to save his life. Hospital authorities disagreed and petitioned the court to enjoin the parents from removing him and taking him elsewhere for treatment. The court stepped in and compelled the hospital to discontinue life support and claimed that further treatment was not in the child’s best interest. This note discusses the heartbreaking stories of Alfie and two other children whose parents’ medical decisions on their behalf were overridden by the court. It argues that courts should never decide that death is in a …
Virtual Briefing At The Supreme Court, 2019 William & Mary Law School
Virtual Briefing At The Supreme Court, Jeffrey L. Fisher, Allison Orr Larsen
Faculty Publications
The open secret of Supreme Court advocacy in a digital era is that there is a new way to argue to the Justices. Today's Supreme Court arguments are developed online: they are dissected and explored in blog posts, fleshed out in popular podcasts, and analyzed and re-analyzed by experts who do not represent the parties or have even filed a brief in the case at all. This "virtual briefing" (as we call it) is intended to influence the Justices and their law clerks but exists completely outside of traditional briefing rules. This article describes virtual briefing and makes a case …