Law Commons^™

Habeas And Hubris, Barry Friedman

Vanderbilt Law Review

In 1965 the Supreme Court made clear that state prosecutors were virtually free to exercise peremptory challenges to remove blacks from criminal juries for no reason other than their race.' Roughly twenty years later the Supreme Court changed its mind: "The core guarantee of equal protection . . . would be meaningless were we to approve the exclusion of jurors on the basis of such assumptions [of bias], which arise solely from the jurors' race."

The right to counsel experienced a similar reversal of fortune. About fifty years ago the Court decided that "fundamental fairness" and a "universal sense of …

Quasi-Constitutional Law: Clear Statement Rules As Constitu, William N. Eskridge, Jr., Philip P. Frickey

Vanderbilt Law Review

In one of the most celebrated law review articles of all time, Karl Llewellyn argued that the traditional canons of statutory construction are not reliable guides to predicting judicial interpretations, because for every canon supporting one interpretation there is a counter-canon cutting against that interpretation. He accomplished his tour de force in large part by focusing upon the "referential" canons-rules referring the Court to an outside or preexisting source to determine statutory meaning'-and upon the "linguistic" canons-general conventions of language, grammar, and syntax. Llewellyn did not explore in any detail the "substantive" canons, the clear statement rules or presumptions of …

The Costs Of Incoherence: A Comment On Plain Meaning, West Virginia University Hospitals, Inc. V. Casey, And Due Process Of Statutory Interpretation, T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Theodore M. Shaw

Vanderbilt Law Review

Karl Llewellyn's classic article on the canons of statutory construction, which we rightly celebrate in this Symposium, is too clever by half. To the reader untutored in the scholarly literature on statutory interpretation, the "thrust but parry" pairing of the canons is a delightful demonstration of how legal argument is structured in a way guaranteed to maintain discretion in the judiciary and to keep lawyers in business. No case involving a statute is clear cut because the canons can lend support to either side. This means that no lawyer is without an argument, and a judge is free to do …

Matching Tests For Double Jeopardy Violations With Constitutional Interests, Eli J. Richardson

Vanderbilt Law Review

Familiar to most Americans, the double jeopardy clause (the clause) of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution represents an idea so basic that the average person probably would feel comfortable attempting to explain it. Courts confronted with the task of fixing the meaning of the clause and the scope of its protection, how- ever, have found the task to be far from simple. The United States Supreme Court has been no exception.

During the 1989 Term, the Supreme Court continued its ongoing efforts to define double jeopardy protection. In Dowling v. United States the Court held that the …

State Constitutional Analyses Of Public School Finance Reform Cases: Myth Or Methodology?, Jonathan Banks

Vanderbilt Law Review

The public education system in the United States fails to educate economically disadvantaged children. Students from poor families are more likely to repeat grades,' to have below average basic academic skills, to drop out of school, and to forego attending college. These gaps in educational achievement translate into an inability to compete effectively in the employment market place. In an attempt to remedy these inequalities, plaintiffs have attacked the most obvious source of disparity: state school financing schemes.