Law Commons^™

Technologically Improving Textualism, Jeffrey W. Stempel, Erik S. Knutsen

Nevada Law Journal Forum

The textualist approach to construing statutes, regulations, contracts, and other documents remains dominant but has drawbacks, most significantly its tendency to disregard probative evidence of textual meaning in favor of isolated judicial impressions and dictionary definitions. Although a broader, contextual, “integrative” approach to interpretation is preferable, the hegemony of textualism, even extreme textualism, is unlikely to recede soon. Textualism can be substantially improved, however, through effective use of a form of big data—the corpus linguistics approach to discerning word meaning. By enlarging the universe of sources about how words are actually used, corpus linguistics represents a significant improvement over imperial …

Endogenous And Dangerous, Brian N. Larson

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’S Copyright Jurisprudence, Ryan Vacca, Ann Bartow

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court’S Chief Justice Of Intellectual Property Law, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Judicial Consensus: Why The Supreme Court Should Decide Its Cases Unanimously, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

Like Congress and other deliberative bodies, the Supreme Court decides its cases by majority vote. If at least five of the nine Justices come to an agreement, their view prevails. But why is that the case? Majority voting for the Court is not spelled out in the Constitution, a federal statute, or Supreme Court rules.

Nor it is obvious that the Court should decide by a majority vote. When the public votes on a ballot measure, it typically makes sense to follow the majority. The general will of the electorate ought to govern. But judicial decisions are not supposed to …

The Elastics Of Snap Removal: An Empirical Case Study Of Textualism, Thomas O. Main, Jeffrey W. Stempel, David Mcclure

Scholarly Works

This article reports the findings of an empirical study of textualism as applied by federal judges interpreting the statute that permits removal of diversity cases from state to federal court. The “snap removal” provision in the statute is particularly interesting because its application forces judges into one of two interpretive camps—which are fairly extreme versions of textualism and purposivism, respectively. We studied characteristics of cases and judges to find predictors of textualist outcomes. In this article we offer a narrative discussion of key variables and we detail the results of our logistic regression analysis. The most salient predictive variable was …

Talking Back In Court, M. Eve Hanan

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Rhetoric Of Racism In The United States Supreme Court, Kathryn M. Stanchi

Scholarly Works

This Article is the first study that categorizes and analyzes all the references to the terms "racist," "racism," and "white supremacy" throughout Supreme Court history. It uses the data to tease out how the Court shaped the meaning of these terms and uncovers a series of patterns in the Court's rhetorical usages. The most striking pattern uncovered is that, for the Supreme Court, racism is either something that just happens without any acknowledged racist actor or something that is perpetrated by a narrow subset of usual suspects, such as the Ku Klux Klan or Southern racists. In the Supreme Court's …

Adding Context And Constraint To Corpus Linguistics, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

In Part I, I discuss the reasons why corpus linguistics should not be considered in isolation from contextual factors, as the latter often illuminate meanings that cannot be found from simply chronicling the usage of a given word. In Part II, I demonstrate, through the lens of three Supreme Court cases, that corpus linguistics does not aid interpretation when the words of a statute or document are clear, but their application to the facts at hand is not. My critique of corpus linguistics mirrors the larger, long-running, and ongoing debate of the merits of a more textual approach to interpretation …

The Pull Of Delaware: How Judges Have Undermined Nevada’S Efforts To Develop Its Own Corporate Law, Adam Chodorow, James Lawrence

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Judges And Gambling, Robert M. Jarvis

UNLV Gaming Law Journal

No abstract provided.

“Remarkable Influence”: The Unexpected Importance Of Justice Scalia’S Deceptively Unanimous And Contested Majority Opinions, Linda L. Berger, Eric C. Nystrom

Scholarly Works

What constitutes judicial influence and how should it be measured? Curious about the broader role that rhetoric plays in judicial influence over time, we undertook a rhetorical-computational analysis of the 282 majority opinions that Justice Scalia wrote during his 30 years on the Supreme Court. Our analysis is the first to examine the full majority opinion output of a Supreme Court justice using a unique “medium data” approach that combines rhetorical coding with quantitative analysis relying on Shepard’s Citations and LexisNexis headnotes. The resulting study casts doubt on the ability of judicial authors, including Justice Scalia, to control the extent …

Snap Removal: Concept; Cause; Cacophony; And Cure, Jeffrey W. Stempel, Thomas O. Main, David Mcclure

Scholarly Works

So-called “snap removal” – removal of a case from state to federal court prior to service on a forum state defendant – has divided federal trial courts for 20 years. Recently, panels of the Second, Third and Fifth Circuits have sided with those supporting the tactic even though it conflicts with the general prohibition on removal when the case includes a forum state defendant, a situation historically viewed as eliminating the need to protect the outsider defendant from possible state court hostility.

Consistent with the public policy underlying diversity jurisdiction – availability of a federal forum to protect against defending …

In Re: Discipline Of James Colin, 135 Nev. Adv. Op. 43 (Sep. 19, 2019), Jose Tafoya

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The court found James Colin made statements he knew were false or with reckless disregard as to their truth or falsity concerning the qualifications or integrity of a judge. Colin also engaged in conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice. The court suspended him for six months and one day.

Your Honor, On Social Media: The Judicial Ethics Of Bots And Bubbles, Katrina Lee

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

To Bail Or Not To Bail: Protecting The Presumption Of Innocence In Nevada, Ebeth Palafox, Brendan Mcleod

Nevada Law Journal Forum

This white paper aims to discuss the issues associated with bail reform in Nevada, provide an analysis of bail reform efforts across the country, and purpose possible solutions for obstacles to bail reform in Nevada. The white paper’s proposed recommendations for practical bail reform is a three-phase plan to eliminate the injustices that arise from Nevada’s current cash bail model.

Judicial Disqualification: Federal-State Distinctions, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Federal and state law regarding disqualification (aka recusal) of judges is both similar and different, requiring that counsel be aware of federal and state statutes, the Nevada Code of Judicial Conduct and even constitutional considerations.

Why Women? Judging Transnational Courts And Tribunals, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Bridget J. Crawford, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

Calls for greater representation of women on the bench are not new. Many people share the intuition that having more female judges would make a difference to the decisions that courts might reach or how courts arrive at those decisions. This hunch has only equivocal empirical support, however. Nevertheless legal scholars, consistent with traditional feminist legal methods, persist in asking how many women judges there are and what changes might bring more women to the bench. This essay argues that achieving diversity in international courts and tribunals – indeed on any bench – will not happen simply by having more …

Political Dysfunction And Constitutional Structure, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

In this essay, Professor Orentlicher reviews three books that analyze different features of the U.S. political system:

1. Michelle Belco & Brandon Rottinghaus, The Dual Executive: Unilateral Orders in a Separated and Shared Power System (Stanford Univ. Press 2017).

2. Richard A. Posner, The Federal Judiciary: Strengths and Weaknesses (Harvard Univ. Press 2017).

3. Martin H. Redish, Judicial Independence and the American Constitution: A Democratic Paradox (Stanford Univ. Press 2017).

Rewriting Judicial Opinions And The Feminist Scholarly Project, Linda L. Berger, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Bridget J. Crawford

Scholarly Works

In this introduction to an online symposium on Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the United States Supreme Court, the editors of this groundbreaking project reflect on the journey and what remains to be done.

Judicial Peremptory Challenges As Access Enhancers, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Discussions regarding diminishing access to justice have centered on the high disputing costs, gradual contraction of substantive rights, and increasingly defendant-friendly procedure. The importance of the ideological, experiential, and jurisprudential orientation of the judges presiding over litigation at the trial level has received much less-and insufficient-attention. Because so much focus has been on federal appellate courts, commentators have largely overlooked a potentially powerful tool for improving access and promoting a fair airing of claims at the trial level: a litigant's automatic ability to transfer a case to a different judge as a matter of right to avoid judges who are …

Justice As Fair Division, Ian C. Bartrum

Scholarly Works

The current hyperpoliticization of the Court grows out of a feedback loop between politicized appointments and politicized decision-making. This Article suggests a change in the internal procedures by which the Court hears and decides particular cases. A three-Justice panel hears and decides each case. Appeal to an en banc sitting of the entire Court would require a unanimous vote of all non-recused Justices. This Article explores several possible approaches in selecting the three-Justice panel. This Article proposes that applying a fair division scheme to the Court's decision-making process might act to reverse this loop and work to depoliticize the Court …

Remorse Bias, M. Eve Hanan

Scholarly Works

In this article, Professor M. Eve Hanan addresses how implicit cognitive biases may affect judges when they decide whether to credit defendants' displays of remorse and how we can lessen the effects of that bias. Part I of this article introduces the main ideas to be discussed. Part II establishes the salience of remorse to punishment decisions and then demonstrates the ambiguity involved in assessing the sincerity of remorse. Part III examines existing research on implicit biases associating African Americans with criminality to consider whether judges are likely to view African American defendants' expressions of remorse as insincere and, thus, …

Toward A Feminist Political Theory Of Judging: Neither The Nightmare Nor The Noble Dream, Sally J. Kenney

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

United States Magistrate Judges: Present But Unaccounted For, Philip M. Pro

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

"Nothing Less Than Indispensable": The Expansion Of Federal Magistrate Judge Authority And Utilization In The Past Quarter Century, Douglas A. Lee, Thomas E. Davis

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Equality Writ Large, Phyllis Goldfarb

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Magistrate Judges And The Transformation Of The Federal Judiciary, Daniel W. Hamilton, Thomas O. Main

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Article I Judges In An Article Iii World: The Career Path Of Magistrate Judges, Tracey E. George, Albert H. Yoon

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Comparative Outputs Of Magistrate Judges, Christina L. Boyd

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.