Law Commons^™

Proposal To Reverse The View Of A Confession: From Key Evidence Requiring Corroboration To Corroboration For Key Evidence, Boaz Sangero, Mordechai Halpert

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Both case law and legal literature have recognized that all, and not just clearly statistical, evidence is probabilistic. Therefore, we have much to learn from the laws of probability with regard to the evaluation of evidence in a criminal trial. The present Article focuses on the confession. First, we review legal and psychological literature and show that the probability of a false confession and, consequently, a wrongful conviction, is far from insignificant. In light of this, we warn against the cognitive illusion, stemming from the fallacy of the transposed conditional, which is liable to mislead the trier of fact in …

Supreme Court Institute Annual Report, 2010-2011, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute

SCI Papers & Reports

During the 2010-2011 academic year--corresponding to the U.S. Supreme Court’s October Term (OT) 2010--the Supreme Court Institute (SCI) provided moot courts for advocates in over 93% of the cases heard by the Court this Term; sponsored a range of programming related to the Supreme Court; and hosted delegations of lawyers and judges visiting from Britain, Rwanda, Kosovo, Korea, China, and Germany. A list of all SCI moot courts held in OT 2010, listed by sitting and date of moot and including the name and affiliation of each advocate and the number of student observers, follows the narrative portion of this …

Supreme Court Of The United States, October Term 2010 Preview, Update: December 7, 2010, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute

Supreme Court Overviews

No abstract provided.

Supreme Court Of The United States, October Term 2010 Preview, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute

Supreme Court Overviews

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Civilian Aggravating Factors On The Military Death Penalty (1984-2005): Another Chapter In The Resistance Of The Armed Forces To The Civilianization Of Military Justice, Catherine M. Grosso, David C. Baldus, George Woodworth

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In 1984, the U.S. Armed Forces amended its capital punishment system for death eligible murder to bring it into compliance with Furman v. Georgia. Those amendments were modeled after death penalty legislation prevailing in over thirty states. After a brief period between 1986 and 1990, the charging decisions of commanders and the conviction and sentencing decisions of court martial members (jurors) transformed the military death penalty system into a dual system that treats two classes of death eligible murder quite differently. Since 1990, a member of the armed forces accused of a killing a commissioned officer or murder with a …

Supreme Court Of The United States, October Term 2009 Preview, Update: February 22, 2010, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute

Supreme Court Overviews

No abstract provided.

A Fourth Circuit Photograph, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

The Commission on Structural Alternatives for the Federal Courts of Appeals issued a report and proposals after carefully evaluating the appellate system for a year, while the data have minimally changed since the report's issuance. The Commission's principal focus was the Ninth Circuit, as Congress had instructed, yet the Commission assembled much useful information on each circuit court of appeals and found that all operate efficaciously. Because how the Fourth Circuit addresses a large docket is critical to appellate justice, the Commission's analysis of the tribunal and the court itself merit scrutiny, which this Article undertakes.

Part I of this …

Reply To Richard A. Leo And Jon B. Gould, Samuel R. Gross, Barbara O'Brien

Articles

The following is a letter to the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law received from Professors Samuel Gross and Barbara O'Brien, responding to an article published in the Journal in Fall 2009 by Professors Richard Leo and Jon Gould. This letter is followed by a reply from Professors Leo and Gould. Professors Gross and O'Brien did not see the reply prior to the Journal going to press. As we have indicated before, we welcome letters to the Journal from readers on any topic covered in a prior issue. - Editors

Supreme Court Of The United States, October Term 2009 Preview, Update: October 26, 2009, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute

Supreme Court Overviews

No abstract provided.

Supreme Court Of The United States, October Term 2009 Preview, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute, Amanda M. Boote

Supreme Court Overviews

No abstract provided.

Will Quants Rule The (Legal) World?, Edward K. Cheng

Michigan Law Review

The quants are coming! And they are here to stay-so argues Professor Ian Ayres' in his new book, Super Crunchers, which details the brave new world of statistical prediction and how it has already begun to affect our lives. For years, academic researchers have known about the considerable and at times surprising advantages of statistical models over the considered judgments of experienced clinicians and experts. Today, these models are emerging all over the landscape. Whether the field is wine, baseball, medicine, or consumer relations, they are vying against traditional experts for control over how we make decisions. To be …

Frequency And Predictors Of False Conviction: Why We Know So Little, And New Data On Capital Cases, Samuel R. Gross, Barbara O'Brien

Articles

In the first part of this article, we address the problems inherent in studying wrongful convictions: our pervasive ignorance and the extreme difficulty of obtaining the data that we need to answer even basic questions. The main reason that we know so little about false convictions is that, by definition, they are hidden from view. As a result, it is nearly impossible to gather reliable data on the characteristics or even the frequency of false convictions. In addition, we have very limited data on criminal investigations and prosecutions in general, so even if we could somehow obtain data on cases …

Supreme Court Of The United States, October Term 2007 Preview, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute, Rupal Doshi

Supreme Court Overviews

No abstract provided.

Significant Developments In Veterans Law (2004-2006) And What They Reveal About The U.S. Court Of Appeals For Veterans Claims And The U.S. Court Of Appeals For The Federal Circuit, Michael P. Allen

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Nearly twenty years ago, Congress for the first time created a system for judicial review of decisions denying veterans benefits. Specifically, Congress created an Article I Court: the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. Veterans dissatisfied with actions of the Department of Veterans Affairs regarding benefits could appeal to the Veterans Court. The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit provided appellate oversight of the Veterans Court. There simply is nothing like the Veterans Court elsewhere in American law. Yet, despite its uniqueness, there has been little scholarly attention to this institution.

This Article begins to …

Docketology, District Courts And Doctrine, David A. Hoffman, Alan J. Izenman, Jeffrey Lidicker

All Faculty Scholarship

Empirical legal scholars have traditionally modeled trial court judicial opinion writing by assuming that judges act rationally, seeking to maximize their influence by writing opinions in politically important cases. Support for this hypothesis has reviewed published trial court opinions, finding that civil rights and other "hot" topics are more likely to be explained than purportedly ordinary legal problems involved in resolving social security and commercial law cases. This orthodoxy comforts consumers of legal opinions, because it suggests that they are largely representative of judicial work. To test such views, we collected data from a thousand cases in four different jurisdictions. …

Supreme Court Of The United States, October Term 2005 Overview, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute, Rebecca Cady

Supreme Court Overviews

No abstract provided.

What We Know, And What We Should Know About American Trial Trends, Margo Schlanger

Articles

More than a few people noticed that the American court system was seeing ever fewer trials before Marc Galanter named the phenomenon.' But until Galanter mobilized lawyers2 and scholars to look systematically at the issue, inquiry was both piecemeal and sparse. Over the past three years, in contrast, Galanter's research 3 and his idea entrepreneurship, crystallized in the "Vanishing Trial" label, has spawned if not a huge literature at least a substantial one. We have now gotten the benefit of sustained scholarly inquiry by researchers of many stripes. Their work has been largely, though not entirely, empirical, and so we …

Vitality Of Voluntary Guidelines In The Wake Of Blakely V. Washington: An Empirical Assessment, The Articles On Guideline Operation Issues, John F. Pfaff

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the extent to which voluntary, non-binding criminal sentencing guidelines influence the sentencing behavior of state trial judges. In particular, it focuses on the ability of such guidelines to encourage judges to sentence consistently and to avoid improperly taking into account a defendant's race or sex. It also compares such guidelines to more-binding presumptive guidelines, which were recently found constitutionally impermissible in Blakely v. Washington. In general, the results indicate that voluntary guidelines are able to accomplish much, though not all, that presumptive guidelines were able to, especially with respect to sentence variation. For example, voluntary guidelines appear …

Bayes' Law, Sequential Uncertainties, And Evidence Of Causation In Toxic Tort Cases, Neal C. Stout, Peter A. Valberg

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Judges are the gatekeepers of evidence. Arguably, the most difficult duty for a judicial gatekeeper is to screen the reliability of expert opinions in scientific fields such as medicine that are beyond the ken of most judges. Yet, judges have a duty to scrutinize such expert opinion evidence to determine its reliability and admissibility. In toxic tort cases, the issue of causation-whether the alleged exposures actually caused the plaintiffs injury-is nearly always the central dispute, and determining admissibility of expert causation opinion is a daunting challenge for most judges. We present a comprehensive review of the courts' struggles with the …

Supreme Court Overview, October Term 2004, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute, Kelly Falls

Supreme Court Overviews

No abstract provided.

Exonerations In The United States 1989 Through 2003, Samuel R. Gross, Kriten Jacoby, Daniel J. Matheson, Nicholas Montgomery, Sujata Patil

Articles

On August 14, 1989, the Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago, Illinois, vacated Gary Dotson's 1979 rape conviction and dismissed the charges.1 Mr. Dotson-who had spent ten years in and out of prison and on parole for this conviction-was not the first innocent prisoner to be exonerated and released in America. But his case was a breakthrough nonetheless: he was the first who was cleared by DNA identification technology. It was the beginning of a revolution in the American criminal justice system. Until then, exonerations of falsely convicted defendants were seen as aberrational. Since 1989, these once-rare events have become …

Supreme Court Statistical Overview, October Term 2003, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute, Liz Hollander

Supreme Court Overviews

No abstract provided.

Dna As Evidence: Viewing Science Through The Prism Of The Law, Peter Donnelly, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

In this article, we analyze a problem related to DNA evidence that is likely to be of great and increasing significance in the near future. This is the problem of whether, and how, to present evidence that the suspect has been identified through a DNA database search. In our view, the two well-known reports on DNA evidence issued by the National Research Council (NRC) have been badly mistaken in their analysis of this problem. The mistakes are significant because the reports have carried great authority with American courts; moreover, the DNA Advisory Board of the FBI has endorsed the second …

Supreme Court Of Nevada, Administrative Office Of The Courts, Nevada Domestic Violence Resource Manual, Mary E. Berkheiser

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Dna Database Searches And The Legal Consumption Of Scientific Evidence, Peter Donnelly, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

DNA evidence has transformed the proof of identity in criminal litigation, but it has also introduced daunting problems of statistical analysis into the process. In this Article, we analyze a problem related to DNA evidence that is likely to be of great and increasing significance in the near future. This is the problem of whether, and how, to present evidence that the suspect has been identified through a DNA database search. In our view, the two well-known reports on DNA evidence issued by the National Research Council ("NRC"), each of which has carried great authority with the American courts on …

Pages Per Term In The United States Reports And Converting Supreme Court Citations To Term Announced: A Statistical Research Tool, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

This short article presents a valuable statistical research tool for those involved in analysis of U.S. Supreme Court opinions. Researchers are made available the data regarding the number of pages that the Supreme Court has written each term and provides an easier basis for identifying this page count with the term announced, which is not otherwise immediately evident from the volume number of the U.S. Reports.

The Limits Of A Scientific Jurisprudence: The Supreme Court And Psychology, J. Alexander Tanford

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Effectiveness Of Measures To Increase Appellate Court Efficiency And Decision Output, Thomas B. Marvell, Carlisle E. Moody

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article will examine the effectiveness of measures commonly employed to increase appellate court productivity. Part I of the Article sets forth some common design problems and explains how the research technique employed in the present study avoids these problems by using a multiple time-series research design. Part II applies this design to state court data. Part II also describes the dependent variable, the number of appeals decided per judge, used in the regression analysis. Part III discusses the results of that analysis-the impact of each change listed above on judicial productivity. The Article, although not advocating the adoption of …

Review Of The Justice Of The Western Consular Courts In Nineteenth Century Japan, Whitmore Gray

Reviews

Richard Chang attacks the generalization accepted by many historians that the Western consular tribunals in nineteenth-century Japan were so partial- toward West- erners and against Japanese-that they seldom rendered evenhanded justice. His study required two steps. First he tried to determine how many "mixed" cases came to trial-cases in which aJapanese brought a claim against a foreign resident in a consular court or was the complaining party in criminal proceedings against a foreigner. Between 1875 and 1895 there were five such cases that were widely reported and commented on at the time, and that have often been cited as examples. …

The Courts And The 1980 Census Challenges: Tailoring Rights To Fit Remedies, David B. Tachau

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Note thus presents a vivid illustration of how the recognition of legal rights sometimes may depend wholly upon the efficacy of awarding relief. Parts I and II survey the 1980 census challenges and explore whether the 1980 litigants presented sound grievances. Part III argues that the 1980 census challengers may have failed because the reviewing courts could envision no feasible remedies for their injuries, and not because the challengers presented flawed legal and constitutional arguments. Finally, part IV criticizes the courts for dismissing the census challenges without confronting or acknowledging the gravity of the constitutional injuries threatened by census …