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The Foreshadow Docket, Bert I. Huang
The Foreshadow Docket, Bert I. Huang
Faculty Scholarship
Imagine the Supreme Court issuing an emergency order that signals interest in departing from precedent, as if foreshadowing a change in the law. Seeing this, should the lower courts start ruling in ways that also anticipate the law of the future? They need not do so in their merits rulings. That much is clear. Such a signal does not create new binding precedent. Rather, it reflects the Justices’ guess about the future of the law — and what if that guess is wrong?
Yet for a lower court ruling on a temporary stay or injunction, the task seems to call …
Lightened Scrutiny, Bert I. Huang
Lightened Scrutiny, Bert I. Huang
Faculty Scholarship
The current anxiety over judicial vacancies is not new. For decades, judges and scholars have debated the difficulties of having too few judges for too many cases in the federal courts. At risk, it is said, are cherished and important process values. Often left unsaid is a further possibility: that not only process, but also the outcomes of cases, might be at stake. This Article advances the conversation by illustrating how judicial overload might entail sacrifices of first-order importance.
I present here empirical evidence suggesting a causal link between judicial burdens and the outcomes of appeals. Starting in 2002, a …
Courts Or Tribunals? Federal Courts And The Common Law, Peter L. Strauss
Courts Or Tribunals? Federal Courts And The Common Law, Peter L. Strauss
Faculty Scholarship
Every Justice, save perhaps Justice Breyer, has recently subscribed to an opinion raising questions in one or another context about whether federal courts can appropriately exercise common law law-making functions that had, until these questions began to appear, been characteristic of all American courts. To invoke a special class of "federal tribunal" whose actions are not to be confused with those of common law courts suggests broader implications than the long-familiar debates about Erie RR. Co. v. Tompkins, or more recent contentions over when, if ever, it is appropriate to infer privately enforceable judicial remedies in aid of federal statutes; …