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Full-Text Articles in Law
Section 6: Criminal, Institute Of Bill Of Rights Law, William & Mary Law School
Section 6: Criminal, Institute Of Bill Of Rights Law, William & Mary Law School
Supreme Court Preview
No abstract provided.
Death By Daubert: The Continued Attack On Private Antitrust, Christine P. Bartholomew
Death By Daubert: The Continued Attack On Private Antitrust, Christine P. Bartholomew
Journal Articles
In 2011, with five words of dicta, the Supreme Court opened Pandora’s box for private antitrust enforcement. By suggesting trial courts must evaluate the admissibility of expert testimony at class certification, the Court placed a significant obstacle in the path of antitrust class actions. Following the Supreme Court’s lead, most courts now permit parties to bring expert challenges far earlier than the traditional summary judgment or pretrial timing. Premature rejection of expert testimony dooms budding private antitrust suits — cases that play an essential role in modern antitrust enforcement. The dangers for private antitrust plaintiffs are compounded by the Court’s …
Dna Helps Clear Man's Name From Rape Charge After 24 Years, Colin Starger
Dna Helps Clear Man's Name From Rape Charge After 24 Years, Colin Starger
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Trial By Google: Judicial Notice In The Information Age, Jeffrey Bellin, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson
Trial By Google: Judicial Notice In The Information Age, Jeffrey Bellin, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson
Faculty Publications
This Article presents a theory of judicial notice for the information age. It argues that the ease of accessing factual data on the Internet allows judges and litigants to expand the use of judicial notice in ways that raise significant concerns about admissibility, reliability, and fair process. State and federal courts are already applying the surprisingly pliant judicial notice rules to bring websites ranging from Google Maps to Wikipedia into the courtroom, and these decisions will only increase in frequency in coming years. This rapidly emerging judicial phenomenon is notable for its ad hoc and conclusory nature—attributes that have the …
The Mother's Day Column: Parent-Child Evidentiary Privilege In Montana, Cynthia Ford
The Mother's Day Column: Parent-Child Evidentiary Privilege In Montana, Cynthia Ford
Faculty Journal Articles & Other Writings
In this article the author examines the lack of parent-child evidentiary privilege in Montana.
Unconstitutionality And The Rule Of Wide-Open Cross-Examination: Encroaching On The Fifth Amendment When Examining The Accused, Ronald L. Carlson, Michael S. Carlson
Unconstitutionality And The Rule Of Wide-Open Cross-Examination: Encroaching On The Fifth Amendment When Examining The Accused, Ronald L. Carlson, Michael S. Carlson
Scholarly Works
When Georgia adopted a new evidence code on January 1, 2013, it embraced the rule on scope of cross-examination which local courts have traditionally followed. This is the wide-open rule which permits the cross-examiner to range across the entire case, no matter how limited the direct exam. Subjects foreign to the direct can be freely explored, limited only by the rule of relevancy.
Commentators have associated the majority, more limited cross-examination methodology with American jurisprudence and the wide-ranging approach with English courts. Reflecting this divide, the Supreme Court of South Dakota recognized "two principal schools of thought" when it comes …
Catalogs, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
Catalogs, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
All Faculty Scholarship
It is a virtual axiom in the world of law that legal norms come in two prototypes: rules and standards. The accepted lore suggests that rules should be formulated to regulate recurrent and frequent behaviors, whose contours can be defined with sufficient precision. Standards, by contrast, should be employed to address complex, variegated, behaviors that require the weighing of multiple variables. Rules rely on an ex ante perspective and are therefore considered the domain of the legislator; standards embody a preference for ex post, ad-hoc, analysis and are therefore considered the domain of courts. The rules/standards dichotomy has become a …
Painful Disparities, Painful Realities, Amanda C. Pustilnik
Painful Disparities, Painful Realities, Amanda C. Pustilnik
Faculty Scholarship
Legal doctrines and decisional norms treat chronic claims pain differently than other kinds of disability or damages claims because of bias and confusion about whether chronic pain is real. This is law’s painful disparity. Now, breakthrough neuroimaging can make pain visible, shedding light on these mysterious ills. Neuroimaging shows these conditions are, as sufferers have known all along, painfully real. This Article is about where law ought to change because of innovations in structural and functional imaging of the brain in pain. It describes cutting-edge scientific developments and the impact they should make on evidence law and disability law, and, …
He Loves Me? He Loves Me Not? He Wants To Keep Me From Testifying?, Cynthia Ford
He Loves Me? He Loves Me Not? He Wants To Keep Me From Testifying?, Cynthia Ford
Faculty Journal Articles & Other Writings
This article discusses spousal privilege as it exists in Montana.
Avoiding Adversarial Adjudication, Michael T. Morley
Avoiding Adversarial Adjudication, Michael T. Morley
Scholarly Publications
There are a variety of procedural vehicles through which litigants may seek a substantive court ruling or order that declares or modifies their legal rights and obligations without actually litigating the merits of a case as a whole or particular issues within the case. These alternatives include defaults, failures to oppose motions for summary judgment, waivers and forfeitures, stipulations of law, confessions of error, and consent decrees. Courts presently apply different standards in determining whether to accept or allow litigants to take advantage of each of these vehicles for avoiding adversarial adjudication. Because all of these procedural alternatives share the …
The Hidden Daubert Factor: How Judges Use Error Rates In Assessing Scientific Evidence, John B. Meixner Jr., Shari Seidman Diamond
The Hidden Daubert Factor: How Judges Use Error Rates In Assessing Scientific Evidence, John B. Meixner Jr., Shari Seidman Diamond
Scholarly Works
In Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, the United States Supreme Court provided a framework under which trial judges must assess the evidentiary reliability of scientific evidence whose admissibility is challenged. One factor of the Daubert test, the “known or potential rate of error” of the expert’s method, has received considerably less scholarly attention than the other factors, and past empirical study has indicated that judges have a difficult time understanding the factor and use it less frequently in their analyses as compared to other factors. In this paper, we examine one possible interpretation of the “known or potential rate of …
Teaching “The Wire”: Crime, Evidence, And Kids, Andrea L. Dennis
Teaching “The Wire”: Crime, Evidence, And Kids, Andrea L. Dennis
Scholarly Works
I have a confession: I have only watched Season 1 of The Wire, and it has been many years since I did that. Thus, both my knowledge and pedagogical use of the show are limited. What explanation can I offer for my failings? I am a Maryland native with family who resides in Baltimore City, or Charm City as it is affectionately called. I worked for several years as an assistant federal public defender in Baltimore City. Over time, I have seen the city evolve, and I have seen it chew up and spit out many good people and some …
Trial By Google: Judicial Notice In The Information Age, Andrew Ferguson
Trial By Google: Judicial Notice In The Information Age, Andrew Ferguson
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
This Article presents a theory of judicial notice for the information age. It argues that the ease of accessing factual data on the Internet allows judges and litigants to expand the use of judicial notice in ways that raise significant concerns about admissibility, reliability, and fair process. State and federal courts are already applying the surprisingly pliant judicial notice rules to bring websites ranging from Google Maps to Wikipedia into the courtroom, and these decisions will only increase in frequency in coming years. This rapidly emerging judicial phenomenon is notable for its ad hoc and conclusory nature – attributes that …
Law And Neuroscience: Recommendations Submitted To The President's Bioethics Commission, Owen D. Jones, Richard J. Bonnie, B. J. Casey, Andre Davis, David L. Faigman, Morris Hoffman, Read Montague, Stephen J. Morse, Marcus E. Raichle, Jennifer A. Richeson, Elizabeth Scott, Laurence Steinberg, Kim Taylor-Thompson, Anthony Wagner, Gideon Yaffe
Law And Neuroscience: Recommendations Submitted To The President's Bioethics Commission, Owen D. Jones, Richard J. Bonnie, B. J. Casey, Andre Davis, David L. Faigman, Morris Hoffman, Read Montague, Stephen J. Morse, Marcus E. Raichle, Jennifer A. Richeson, Elizabeth Scott, Laurence Steinberg, Kim Taylor-Thompson, Anthony Wagner, Gideon Yaffe
All Faculty Scholarship
President Obama charged the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to identify a set of core ethical standards in the neuroscience domain, including the appropriate use of neuroscience in the criminal-justice system. The Commission, in turn, called for comments and recommendations. The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience submitted a consensus statement, published here, containing 16 specific recommendations. These are organized within three main themes: 1) what steps should be taken to enhance the capacity of the criminal justice system to make sound decisions regarding the admissibility and weight of neuroscientific evidence?; 2) to what extent …
Expert Mining And Required Disclosure, Jonah B. Gelbach
Expert Mining And Required Disclosure, Jonah B. Gelbach
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Persuasive Visions: Film And Memory, Jessica Silbey
Persuasive Visions: Film And Memory, Jessica Silbey
Faculty Scholarship
This commentary takes a new look at law and film studies through the lens of film as memory. Instead of describing film as evidence and foreordaining its role in truth-seeking processes, it thinks instead of film as individual, institutional and cultural memory, placing it squarely within the realm of contestability. Paralleling film genres, the commentary imagines four forms of memory that film could embody: memorabilia (cinema verite), memoirs (autobiographical and biographical film), ceremonial memorials (narrative film monuments of a life, person or institution), and mythic memory (dramatic fictional film). Imagining film as memory resituates film’s role in law (procedural, substantive …
Group To Individual Inference In Scientific Expert Testimony, Christopher Slobogin, David Faigman, John Monahan
Group To Individual Inference In Scientific Expert Testimony, Christopher Slobogin, David Faigman, John Monahan
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
A fundamental divide exists between what scientists do as scientists and what courts often ask them to do as expert witnesses. Whereas scientists almost invariably inquire into phenomena at the group level, trial courts typically need to resolve cases at the individual level. In short, scientists generalize while courts particularize. A basic challenge for trial courts that rely on scientific experts, therefore, concerns determining whether and how scientific knowledge derived from studying groups can be helpful in the individual cases before them (what this Article refers to as "G2i'). To aid in dealing with this challenge, this Article proposes a …