Law Commons^™

Changemakers: Elevating Conversations Around Indigenous Peoples' Rights, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

An Uncomfortable Truth: Indigenous Communities And Law In New England: Roger Williams University Law Review Symposium 10/22/2021, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Incitement, Insurrection, Impeachment: Inside The Second Trump Impeachment, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michael M. Bowden

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Whitehouse, Cicilline To Offer 'Inside View' Of 2nd Trump Impeachment Trial 02-17-2021, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Shinall, David L. (Sc 3572), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 3572. Taped interviews by David Shinall, a reporter for WKU’s College Heights Herald, with justices of the Kentucky Supreme Court, made prior to a session of the court held on WKU’s campus on 18 April 2002.

Law Library Blog (July 2019): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Reconsidering Judicial Independence: Forty-Five Years In The Trenches And In The Tower, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

Trusting in the integrity of our institutions when they are not under stress, we focus attention on them both when they are under stress or when we need them to protect us against other institutions. In the case of the federal judiciary, the two conditions often coincide. In this essay, I use personal experience to provide practical context for some of the important lessons about judicial independence to be learned from the periods of stress for the federal judiciary I have observed as a lawyer and concerned citizen, and to provide theoretical context for lessons I have deemed significant as …

Rights And Retrenchment In The Trump Era, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

All Faculty Scholarship

Our aim in this essay is to leverage archival research, data and theoretical perspectives presented in our book, Rights and Retrenchment: The Counterrevolution against Federal Litigation, as a means to illuminate the prospects for retrenchment in the current political landscape. We follow the scheme of the book by separately considering the prospects for federal litigation retrenchment in three lawmaking sites: Congress, federal court rulemaking under the Rules Enabling Act, and the Supreme Court. Although pertinent data on current retrenchment initiatives are limited, our historical data and comparative institutional perspectives should afford a basis for informed prediction. Of course, little in …

An Unfinished Project: John Courtney Murray, Religious Freedom, And Unresolved Tensions In Contemporary American Society, Miguel H. Diaz

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Religious freedom has re-emerged as a controversial issue in the courts, in the Church, and in the public square in the United States. This essay examines the groundbreaking contribution that John Courtney Murray, SJ made to bring about a paradigm shift in Roman Catholic teaching on religious freedom. This shift can be traced to the Church’s transitioning from the view that “error has no rights” to only people—not ideas—have rights. The essay underscores Murray’s focus on human conscience and addresses tensions that have emerged in the United States between voices that affirm the right to religious freedom and those that …

Doctrinal Reasoning As A Disruptive Practice, Jessie Allen

Articles

Legal doctrine is generally thought to contribute to legal decision making only to the extent it determines substantive results. Yet in many cases, the available authorities are indeterminate. I propose a different model for how doctrinal reasoning might contribute to judicial decisions. Drawing on performance theory and psychological studies of readers, I argue that judges’ engagement with formal legal doctrine might have self-disrupting effects like those performers experience when they adopt uncharacteristic behaviors. Such disruptive effects would not explain how judges ultimately select, or should select, legal results. But they might help legal decision makers to set aside subjective biases.

Blackstone, Expositor And Censor Of Law Both Made And Found, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

Jeremy Bentham famously insisted on the separation of law as it is and law as it should be, and criticized his contemporary William Blackstone for mixing up the two. According to Bentham, Blackstone costumes judicial invention as discovery, obscuring the way judges make new law while pretending to uncover preexisting legal meaning. Bentham’s critique of judicial phoniness persists to this day in claims that judges are “politicians in robes” who pick the outcome they desire and rationalize it with doctrinal sophistry. Such skeptical attacks are usually met with attempts to defend doctrinal interpretation as a partial or occasional limit on …

Baker, Walter Arnold, 1937-2010 (Mss 539), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 539. This small collection contains material related to legislative matters of interest to Kentucky legislator and jurist Walter A. Baker, Glasgow, Kentucky. Also includes files about several trips abroad and family material.

Judge Posner’S Simple Law, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

The world is complex, Richard Posner observes in his most recent book, Reflections on Judging. It follows that, to resolve real-world disputes sensibly, judges must be astute students of the world’s complexity. The problem, he says, is that, thanks to disposition, training, and professional incentives, they aren’t. Worse than that, the legal system generates its own complexity precisely to enable judges “to avoid rather than meet and overcome the challenge of complexity” that the world delivers. Reflections concerns how judges needlessly complexify inherently simple law, and how this complexification can be corrected.

Posner’s diagnoses and prescriptions range widely—from the Bluebook …

Anti-Zionism In The Courts Is Not Kosher Law, Gregory L. Rose

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

A German court in Wuppertal held last month that an arson attack on a synagogue causing fire damage was not anti-Semitism but political expression. Also in February, five youths who vandalised 300 Jewish graves and a Holocaust monument in Alsace, France, claimed that the action was not motivated by anti-Semitism.

In general, an attack specifically targeting Chinese would be considered anti-Chinese. Only in an exceptional case, it might not be. Why is the exceptional case becoming the rule for Jews, so that targeting Jews as a group is generally not anti-Jewish but “political”?

Legal artifice is being constructed to make …

Realities Of Religio-Legalism: Religious Courts And Women's Rights In Canada, The United Kingdom, And The United States, Anissa Helie, Marie Ashe

Publications and Research

Religio-legalism – the enforcement of religious law by specifically-religious courts that are tolerated or endorsed by civil government – has long operated against women’s interests in liberty and equality. In the 21st century, religious tribunals – Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim – operate throughout the world. Almost all are male-dominated, patriarchal, and sex-discriminatory. Harms to women produced by Muslim or sharia courts have come into focus in recent years, but present realities of religio-legalism operating through Christian and Jewish – as well as Muslim – religious courts in Western nations have been under-examined.

This essay by Ashe and Helie documents …

The Establishment Of Juvenile Courts And The Fulfilment Of Vietnam's Obligations Under The Convention On The Rights Of The Child, Thi Thanh Nga Pham

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

This article situates child protection by Vietnam’s judicial bodies in relation to the requirements of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other international instruments in juvenile justice. It demonstrates that Vietnam’s legislation and practices do not fully comply with international standards and that there remains a significant gap between the letter of the law and its implementation. Party-government policy on judicial reform, however, creates the potential for establishing juvenile courts in Vietnam. The feasibility of such juvenile courts, and the implications for Vietnam meeting its obligations under the Convention, are also surveyed.

Monroe County, Kentucky - Court Records (Sc 1217), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 1217. Docket book, Monroe County, Kentucky, December 1832 - November 1838, listing judgments and warrants.

Barren County, Kentucky - Court Records (Sc 884), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 884. Circuit Court of Barren County, Kentucky, Memoranda Book, 5 June 1819-December 1821.

Barren County, Kentucky - Court Records (Sc 876), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 876. Barren County, Kentucky, Quarter Sessions Order Book, 1799-1802.

Helm, John Blakey, 1899-1979 (Sc 572), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 572. Typescript of a speech, [April, 1949], entitled “Memo on Second Appellate District Judges” by John Blakey Helm, which contains a history of the district and biographical information about the judges who had served that district until 1949.

The Prosecution Of Pirates In National Courts, Robin M. Warner

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The substantial rise in piracy incidents off the Horn of Africa since 2008 has exposed significant gaps in the international law framework for investigation and prosecution of piracy offences and its implementation in national criminal justice systems. This article examines the principal elements of this framework including the definition of piracy and associated obligations in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC). It reviews progress towards criminalisation of piracy offences in national legislative systems and distinctive trends in piracy legislation around the world. It also examines key features of the jurisprudence emerging from the regional …

Book Review: Desmond Manderson: Kangaroo Courts And The Rule Of Law. The Legacy Of Modernism. Routledge, Abingdon 2012., Luis Gomez Romero

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Kangaroo Courts represents the height of the recent work that Desmond Manderson has developed around the nexus between ‘law and literature’ and the rule of law. Manderson’s approach to this matter is unique in taking seriously both literary theory and the aesthetic aspects of literary texts—strange though it may seem, this is an authentic revolution in the field of law and literature. Manderson rightly observes that back to their very origins the discourses constructed around the conjunction of ‘law and literature’ have suffered from two structural weaknesses: first ‘a concentration on substance and plot’ and second ‘a salvific belief in …

New Technologies And Constitutional Law, Thomas Fetzer, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Constitution Day 2012: The American Judiciary, Robert Berry

Librarian Publications

Robert Berry, research librarian for the social sciences at the Sacred Heart University Library, has written an essay about the role of the American Judiciary in interpreting laws of the United States government. The essay was written for the occasion of Constitution Day 2012 at Sacred Heart University.

Euis Nurlaelawati, Modernization, Tradition And Identity: The Kompilasi Hukum Islam And Legal Practice In The Indonesian Religious Courts, Nadirsyah Hosen

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Book review:

Euis Nurlaelawati, Modernization, Tradition and Identity:·the Kompilasi Hukum Islam and Legal Practice in the Indonesian Religious Courts, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterd,am, 2010, 304 pp.

On The Study Of Judicial Behaviors: Of Law, Politics, Science And Humility, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

In this paper, which was prepared to help set the stage at an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Indiana (Bloomington) in March, I first briefly review what I take to be the key events and developments in the history of the study of judicial behavior in legal scholarship, with attention to corresponding developments in political science. I identify obstacles to cooperation in the past – such as indifference, professional self-interest and methodological imperialism -- as well as precedents for cross-fertilization in the future. Second, drawing on extensive reading in the political science and legal literatures concerning judicial behavior, …

All Judges Are Political—Except When They Are Not: Acceptable Hypocrisies And The Rule Of Law, Keith J. Bybee

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This paper contains the introduction to the new book, All Judges Are Political—Except When They Are Not: Acceptable Hypocrisies and the Rule of Law (Stanford University Press, 2010).

The book begins with the observation that Americans are divided in their beliefs about whether courts operate on the basis of unbiased legal principle or of political interest. This division in public opinion in turn breeds suspicion that judges do not actually mean what they say, that judicial professions of impartiality are just fig leaves used to hide the pursuit of partisan purposes.

Comparing law to the practice of common courtesy, the …

Toward A Revised 4.2 No-Contact Rule, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Time Out, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Indigenous Sentencing Courts (Brief 5, December), Elena Marchetti

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

This brief focuses on Indigenous sentencing courts, which operate in all Australian states and territories except Tasmania. These courts have been established according to protocols and practices, and can be distinguished from more informal practices that occur in remote areas where judicial officers travel on circuit. The first court was established in Port Adelaide on 1 June 1999. Indigenous sentencing courts do not practise or adopt Indigenous customary laws. Rather, they use Australian criminal laws and procedures to sentence Indigenous offenders who have either pleaded guilty or been found guilty, but they allow Indigenous Elders and Respected Persons to participate …