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Bankruptcy Policymaking In An Imperfect World, Elizabeth Warren

Michigan Law Review

This essay is about bankruptcy policy. It attempts to articulate a comprehensive statement about the various and competing goals that underlie the bankruptcy system. The essay offers both a positive observation, drawn from the Code and its operation, and a normative evaluation, designed to outline the difficult value judgments that comprise the bankruptcy system. It also serves warning: before commentators propose any sweeping changes or policymakers take seriously any suggestions to scrap the system, they must consider the impact of such proposals on a number of competing normative goals.

The Constitution, The Legislature, And Unfair Surprise: Toward A Reliance-Based Approach To The Contract Clause, Robert A. Graham

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that the Court should return to a reliance-based approach to Contract Clause challenges, fashioned loosely along the same lines as the HRID. Although it does not advocate that the Court revivify the rules created by the early decisions, the Note proposes that the Court look to the private parties' expectations and, more specifically, to the reasonableness of those expectations in deciding the clause's applicability to a particular case. Part I provides a brief history of the Contract Clause and its development. This Part follows the clause from the Constitutional Convention through the 1980s to illustrate the Court's …

Books Received, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A List of Books Received by the Michigan Law Review

Allocating The Burden Of Proof To Effectuate The Preservation And Federalism Goals Of The Coastal Zone Management Act, Martin J. Lalonde

Michigan Law Review

Primarily due to policy considerations, this Note argues that courts should allocate to the federal agency proposing an activity that may affect the coastal zone the burden of proving consistency with a state CMP. This allocation effectuates Congress's intent to vest states with primary control to preserve the coastal zone. Part I provides a general background of the Act's consistency requirement for federally conducted activities. Part II examines the various factors that courts traditionally consider when allocating burdens of proof in litigation. Part III evaluates these factors as applied to the consistency issue under the CZMA. Part IV concludes that …

Article Ii Revisionism, Cass R. Sunstein

Michigan Law Review

One of the most striking developments of the last decade has been the new use of Article II in public law adjudication. Article II is a prominent feature not only of cases involving the creation of federal institutions that are independent of the President, but also of new disputes involving reviewability, scope of review, and standing.

Professor Krent and Mr. Shenkman have performed a valuable service in spelling out the argument that Article II, rather than Article III, justifies constitutional limits on legislative grants of standing. Indeed, on several important matters, we are very much in agreement. In this brief …

Postconviction Review Of Jury Discrimination: Measuring The Effects Of Juror Race On Jury Decisions, Nancy J. King

Michigan Law Review

In Part I, I review the empirical evidence concerning the effect of jury discrimination on jury decisions. Using the work of social and cognitive psychologists, I argue that the influence of jury discrimination on jury decisions is real and can be measured by judges in certain circumstances. The empirical studies suggest criteria that courts could use to identify the cases in which jury discrimination is most likely to affect the verdict. I also refute the argument that white judges can never predict the behavior of jurors of racial backgrounds different than their own and conclude that judicial estimates of the …

Books Received, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A List of Books Received by the Michigan Law Review

Periodical Index, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A List of Periodicals by the Michigan Law Review

The Constitutionality Of Employer-Accessible Child Abuse Registries: Due Process Implications Of Governmental Occupational Blacklisting, Michael R. Phillips

Michigan Law Review

This Note discusses the due process implications of permitting employer access to state child abuse registries when disclosure affects registry members' employment.

Books Received, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A List of Books Received by the Michigan Law Review

Periodical Index, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Subject Index of Articles, Comments, Notes, and Recent Developments Appearing in Leading Law Reviews

Plus Ҫa Change, Paul Brest

Michigan Law Review

Harry Edwards and I both finished law school in 1965, and his article presents an occasion to consider how much the legal academy has changed during the intervening years. Animating Judge Edwards' complaints about the contemporary legal academy is a nostalgia for happier days. His images are of decline - of a growing disjunction between the academy and practice, of law schools' abandoning their proper missions, of their movement toward pure theory. My own view is quite different. Except for some noteworthy demographic transformations and a healthy broadening of the academic agenda, legal education has changed little during these almost …

The Mind In The Major American Law School, Lee C. Bollinger

Michigan Law Review

Legal scholarship is significantly, even qualitatively, different from what it was some two or three decades ago. As with any major change in intellectual thought, this one is composed of several strands. The inclusion in the legal academic community of women and minorities has produced, not surprisingly, a distinctive and at times quite critical body of thought and writing. The emergence of the school of thought known as critical legal studies has renewed and extended the legal realist critique of law of the first half of the century. But more than anything else it is the interdisciplinary movement in legal …

Index, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

Contents of Volume 91: Subject Index, Articles, Notes, Authors, Books Reviewed

Stewardship, Donald B. Ayer

Michigan Law Review

While I agree with much that Judge Edwards has proposed, I thus submit that his formulations of the problem are partial - a bit like those of the blind men examining different parts of the elephant. The law's current unhappiness is only partly described as that of law schools and practicing lawyers going in different directions, of law practice becoming too commercial, or of law schools failing to serve the needs of the practicing lawyers and judges with practical teaching and scholarship. All of these observations, while correct as far as they go, miss the root of the problem, which …

A Response From The Visitor From Another Planet, J. Cunyon Gordon

Michigan Law Review

In order to admit, as I do, that the related planets of practice and academia are conjoined, one has to realize, as I have, that the legacy of the heavily doctrinal education Edwards wants to preserve may be precisely the lawyers he upbraids - lawyers who generally do not live, work, and behave ethically (with fairness, compassion, and creativity) in a complex, heterogeneous society. This recognition in turn compels the conclusion I reach that the outsiders - with their challenges to the status quo's values, their upstart theories and innovative pedagogies, and even their Star Trek-and-the-law scholarship - may help …

Mad Midwifery: Bringing Theory, Doctrine, And Practice To Life, Barbara Bennett Woodhouse

Michigan Law Review

I share Judge Edwards' concern about the health of legal education and about lawyers as a force in society. I differ, however, in defining the sickness and prescribing the cure, at least when it comes to teaching. In my view, we need to integrate, not to dichotomize and polarize further, the practical and the impractical, the doctrinal and the theoretical. His critique, and my intuitive response to it, challenged me to examine and articulate where we disagree, based on what I have learned in my five years in the classroom and what it is I hope to accomplish in my …

Students As Teachers, Teachers As Learners, Derrick Bell, Erin Edmonds

Michigan Law Review

Judge Edwards divides his analysis of the cause of the crisis in ethical lawyering into an overview and three parts. The overview and first two parts deal mainly with the role of law schools and legal curriculum in what he views as the deterioration of responsible, capable practitioners. This article takes issue with some of the assumptions, analyses, and conclusions those sections contain. The third part of Edwards' article analyzes the role of law firms in causing that same deterioration. This article agrees with and will elaborate upon that part of Edwards' treatment.

We approach Judge Edwards' article, we hope, …

Continuing Criminal Enterprise, Conspiracy, And The Multiple Punishment Doctrine, Kenneth G. Schuler

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that the Multiple Punishment Doctrine prohibits the imposition of concurrent convictions and sentences upon criminal defendants found guilty of engaging in a CCE and conspiring to violate narcotics laws. Part I surveys the values underlying the Multiple Punishment Doctrine and traces the evolution of the Supreme Court's application of the doctrine to modern criminal law. Part II examines the various methods employed by the circuit courts of appeals to deal with simultaneous convictions and sentences for CCE and conspiracy. Part III reviews the test, identified in Part I, that the Supreme Court has implicitly utilized to analyze …

The Deprofessionalization Of Legal Teaching And Scholarship, Richard A. Posner

Michigan Law Review

The editors have asked me to comment on Judge Edwards' double-barreled blast at legal education and the practice of law. This I am happy to do. It is an important article, stating with refreshing bluntness concerns that are widely felt but have never I think been so forcefully, so arrestingly expressed. Nevertheless I have deep disagreements with it.

The Disjunction Between Judge Edwards And Professor Priest, Louis H. Pollak

Michigan Law Review

With characteristic vigor, Judge Harry Edwards, in his essay The Growing Disjunction Between Legal Education and the Legal Profession, has censured the law schools and, secondarily, the bar, for what he sees as profoundly disturbing trends pulling academics and practitioners farther and farther apart. Judge Edwards' censure is not proffered off the cuff. He has carefully polled his former law clerks on their perceptions of their law school years and of their postclerkship professional experiences - whether in private practice, in government, or in teaching. In the text and footnotes of his essay, Judge Edwards quotes his law clerks' …

Clerks In The Maze, Pierre Schlag

Michigan Law Review

It must be very difficult to be a judge - particularly an appellate judge. Not only must appellate judges reconcile often incommensurable visions of what law is, what it commands, or what it strives to achieve, but judges must do this largely alone. What little help they have in terms of actual human contact, apart from their clerks, typically takes the form of two or more advocates whose entire raison d'être is to persuade, coax, and manipulate the judge into reaching a predetermined outcome - one which often instantiates or exemplifies only the most tenuous positive connection to the rhetoric …

Judge Edwards' Indictment Of "Impractical" Scholars: The Need For A Bill Of Particulars, Sanford Levinson

Michigan Law Review

I can summarize my response as follows: Although Judge Edwards' article certainly seems to be leveling a heartfelt indictment, it lacks a sufficiently precise bill of particulars to know exactly whom he has accused of doing what. Nor does one know exactly what penalty Judge Edwards would exact from the miscreants. Unless he supplies such a bill, his indictment should be dismissed, though, presumably, without prejudice to its reinstatement should he wish to do the hard work of supplying evidence for the charges he set out.

Pro Bono Legal Work: For The Good Of Not Only The Public, But Also The Lawyer And The Legal Profession, Nadine Strossen

Michigan Law Review

I agree with Judge Edwards that "the lawyer has an ethical obligation to practice public interest law - to represent some poor clients; to advance some causes that he or she believes to be just." I also concur in Judge Edwards' opinion that "[a] person who deploys his or her doctrinal skill without concern for the public interest is merely a good legal technician - not a good lawyer."

Rather than further develop Judge Edwards' theme that lawyers have a professional responsibility to do pro bono work, I will offer another rationale for such work, grounded in professional and individual …

Lawyers, Scholars, And The "Middle Ground", Robert W. Gordon

Michigan Law Review

The Judge seems to be arguing that both teachers and firm lawyers have been seduced from their real vocation by the fatal attraction of neighboring cultures: the practitioners by the commercial culture of their business clients, the academics by the disciplinary paradigms and prestige of theory in the rest of the university. The "deserted middle ground" is the ground of professional practice - practical, yet also public-minded. Perhaps without straining his thesis too far we could ascribe to Judge Edwards a "republican" view of the legal profession, in which legal scholars, practitioners, judges, legislators, and administrators - despite their separate …

The Growing Disjunction Between Legal Education And The Legal Profession: A Postscript, Harry T. Edwards

Michigan Law Review

In this essay I offer a postscript to "The Growing Disjunction." It is not possible for me to "respond" directly to the other participants in this symposium, because I had no opportunity before publication to read what they have written. I will therefore limit myself to two tasks. First, I will briefly discuss several issues raised in the article. Second, and most important, I wish to share a representative sample of the responses I have received regarding the article. These responses, I think, provide good evidence of the magnitude of the problem that we face.

Fraudulent Concealment, Self-Concealing Conspiracies, And The Clayton Act, Richard F. Schwed

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that courts should apply a self-concealment standard to section 4B of the Clayton Act rather than require a showing of additional affirmative acts. Part I examines the history of the fraudulent concealment doctrine and its application to antitrust cases. It identifies three different standards used by courts to satisfy the concealment element and finds that courts apply the doctrine inconsistently. Part II analyzes the relationship between the fraudulent concealment doctrine and the self-concealment standard in antitrust cases by examining the judicial development of the doctrine and Congress' intent in enacting section 4B. Part II concludes that the …

Books Received, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A List of Books Received by the Michigan Law Review

Periodical Index, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Subject Index of Articles, Comments, Notes, and Recent Developments Appearing in Leading Law Reviews

The Fantastic Wisconsylvania Zero-Bureaucratic-Cost School Of Bankruptcy Theory: A Comment, James W. Bowers

Michigan Law Review

In two recently published articles, Wisconsin Law Professor Lynn LoPucki and Pennsylvania Law Professor Elizabeth Warren, nearly simultaneously, fired the latest shots in one of academia's hottest ongoing debates: whether any good reason for having bankruptcy law exists. Justice Holmes once opined that the future belonged to the lawyer skilled in statistics and economics. LoPucki and Warren apparently agree about statistics but argue that, in a world with positive transaction costs, economic theory has little to contribute to our understanding about the justifications for bankruptcy law.

I write to highlight what one might easily overlook in LoPucki's and Warren's pieces. …