Law Commons^™

Accountability Courts In Georgia: Judges In The State Of Georgia Explain How They Have Been Empowered By Visionary Political And Judicial Leaders To Tackle Crime, Prison Population, Mental Illness, And Drug Dependency Through Service In Accountability Courts, W. James Sizemore Jr.

Mercer Law Review

Georgia leads the way nationally when it comes to promoting and funding the expansion of accountability courts (commonly called drug courts or mental health courts). The fact that the effort to expand such courts in Georgia was spearheaded by Republican Governor Nathan Deal is surprising to some. This article provides a peek behind the curtain at the massive judicial and political effort to make accountability courts an essential part of criminal justice reform in the State of Georgia.

The article begins with a brief look at the history of accountability courts in Georgia, specifically focusing on several Superior Court Judges …

Coase’S Parable, F.E. Guerra-Pujol

Mercer Law Review

Some stories have heroes and villains. Others involve a voyage, a quest, or a monster to be defeated. The law is no exception. Most legal stories are about identifying wrongdoers and vindicating the rights of victims, and this standard victim-wrongdoer model not only informs recent developments in legal scholarship, such as feminist jurisprudence or critical race theory; it also informs our classical liberal tradition.5 But what if harms are reciprocal or jointly caused? In other words, what if victims are just as responsible as wrongdoers for their plight?

Justice, Play, And Politics, Eugene Garver

Mercer Law Review

Justice as Play is a highly illuminating gloss on Coke's idea of the law as "artificial reason," and one of its merits is that it is equally about the law as artificial and as reason. While he leans on Huizinga to talk about justice as play, Jack Sammons deepens the analogy by another meaning of play, celebrating the venerable connections between the trial and the drama as relatively insulated arenas for developing alternatives to the existing political order. According to Jack, legal argument can be regarded as play because of that relative insulation. So I want to turn from judicial …

Justice As Play, Jack L. Sammons

Mercer Law Review

I am interested here in using Johannes Huizinga's work on play, Homo Ludens, to explore a strange, yet civilizing, phenomenon. Why do we take those social disputes in our ordinary lives that often seem most serious and therefore most divisive, turn them over to playful participants in a legal game, and then choose, more or less, to call the outcome of this game justice and to trust it as such even to the point of preferring it to the political? Why, that is, do we think that it is justice that arises from this play?

This inquiry is not …

Interstitial Lawmaking: Uniformity Or Conformity?, Lillian Harris Lockary

Mercer Law Review

When Congress does not fully address the substantive law contemplated by a statute, federal courts have the responsibility to fashion a governing rule of decision according to their own standards-the conflict of laws rules of the forum. More precisely, the task of judicial legislation could be labeled one of interstitial lawmaking, of interpreting an indeterminate statute, rather than conflict of law. If subject matter jurisdiction is founded on a federal statute, and not diversity of citizenship, the source of law for the litigation is federal, and the rule of Erie R.R. v. Tompkins, that state law applies of its …

Injunctive Law Enforcement: Leaven Or Secret Weapon, Frank E. Maloney

Mercer Law Review

The historical development of English law resulted in the division of the law into three main branches: common law, equity, and criminal law. The common law as administered by the king's court developed into a rigid system of formal actions, with relief by way of money damages as the one remedy in personal actions. This development, together with the growth of highly technical rules of pleading, left many situations in which no adequate relief was available in those courts; and the resulting inflexibility of the system led to the growth of equity, under which the king's prerogative might be exercised …