Law Commons^™

The Case Of The Smart City, Bruce Peabody, Kyle Morgan

Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law

January 7, 2021, marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of Marsh v. Alabama, the case in which the Supreme Court of the United States extended the protections of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to a privately held “company town.” This article makes the case that the longstanding Marsh precedent, and the basic jurisprudential framework it set out, remain important in working through twenty-first century problems regarding public-private partnerships and their impact on constitutional rights. We bring this old ruling into our new century by extrapolating a hypothetical legal controversy from legislation currently under consideration in the states. Thus, the heart of our …

Statutory Interpretation And Chevron Deference In The Appellate Courts: An Empirical Analysis, Amy Semet

Journal Articles

What statutory methods does an appellate court use in reviewing decisions of an administrative agency? Further, in doing this review, are appellate judges more likely to use certain statutory methods when they expressly cite the Chevron two-step framework than if they do not? This Article explores the answers to these questions using an original database of over 200 statutory interpretation cases culled from more than 2,500 cases decided in appellate courts reviewing National Labor Relations Board (NLRB or the Board) adjudications from 1994 through 2020. In particular, the study examined the use of text, language canons, substantive canons, legislative history, …

Gephi Output Files, Folder 3, Part 1: Citation Network Data Files, Joseph S. Miller

Faculty Datasets

This data subset created and collected by Joseph Miller and digitally preserved here is in support of his forthcoming article "A Judge Never Writes More Freely: A Separate-Opinions Citation-Network Approach to Assessing Judicial Ideology". From the article's abstract:

"This Article is the first to apply a novel empirical method—citation network analysis—to particular appellate jurists’ separate judicial opinions (e.g., concurrences, dissents) in an effort to provide a more detailed picture of a judge’s ideological preferences. It focuses on the separate opinions of Justices Scalia and Thomas through the end of October Term 2019: they served for a similar number …

Gephi Output Files, Folder 3, Part 2: Co-Citation Network Data Files, Joseph S. Miller

Faculty Datasets

This data subset created and collected by Joseph Miller and digitally preserved here is in support of his forthcoming article "A Judge Never Writes More Freely: A Separate-Opinions Citation-Network Approach to Assessing Judicial Ideology". From the article's abstract:

"This Article is the first to apply a novel empirical method—citation network analysis—to particular appellate jurists’ separate judicial opinions (e.g., concurrences, dissents) in an effort to provide a more detailed picture of a judge’s ideological preferences. It focuses on the separate opinions of Justices Scalia and Thomas through the end of October Term 2019: they served for a similar number …

Underlying Citation Data, Folder 4, Part 1: Census Of Scalia Cites, Joseph S. Miller

Faculty Datasets

This data subset created and collected by Joseph Miller and digitally preserved here is in support of his forthcoming article "A Judge Never Writes More Freely: A Separate-Opinions Citation-Network Approach to Assessing Judicial Ideology". From the article's abstract:

"This Article is the first to apply a novel empirical method—citation network analysis—to particular appellate jurists’ separate judicial opinions (e.g., concurrences, dissents) in an effort to provide a more detailed picture of a judge’s ideological preferences. It focuses on the separate opinions of Justices Scalia and Thomas through the end of October Term 2019: they served for a similar number …

Underlying Citation Data, Folder 4, Part 2: Census Of Thomas Cites, Joseph S. Miller

Faculty Datasets

This data subset created and collected by Joseph Miller and digitally preserved here is in support of his forthcoming article "A Judge Never Writes More Freely: A Separate-Opinions Citation-Network Approach to Assessing Judicial Ideology". From the article's abstract:

"This Article is the first to apply a novel empirical method—citation network analysis—to particular appellate jurists’ separate judicial opinions (e.g., concurrences, dissents) in an effort to provide a more detailed picture of a judge’s ideological preferences. It focuses on the separate opinions of Justices Scalia and Thomas through the end of October Term 2019: they served for a similar number …

Analyzing The Implications Of The Supreme Court's Application Of The Canons Of Construction In Recent Federal Indian Law Cases, Meredith Harris J.D.

American Indian Law Journal

Federal Indian law in the United States has historically relied on application of the Indian Canons of Construction (“Canons”). The courts have relied on these principles since 1832. However, their application has not been consistent. Indeed, the Canons are discretionary which has led to judicial avoidance. Yet, recent Supreme Court opinions demonstrate a resurgence of the Canons and a trend towards a textualist approach, both of which involve greater deference to tribal understandings. Ultimately, the opinions in United States v. Washington, Washington State Dept. of Licensing v. Cougar Den, Herrera v. Wyoming, and McGirt v. Oklahoma, …

Digital Evidence In Appeals Of Criminal Cases Before The U.S. Courts Of Appeal: A Review Of Decisions And Examination Of The Legal Landscape From 2016 – 2020, Martin Novak

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This study is a follow-up to Digital Evidence in Criminal Cases before the U.S. Courts of Appeal: Trends and Issues for Consideration – 2010 to 2015. The current study examines appeals of criminal cases before the United States Courts of Appeal from January 2016 through August 2020, where one or more appeal claims were related to digital evidence. The purpose of this research was to determine if the legal landscape has changed since 2015; examine the most relevant legal issues related to digital evidence; and analyze how precedential cases may have affected digital forensics as evidence.

The Conceptual Problems Arising From Legal Pluralism, Jorge Luis Fabra-Zamora

Journal Articles

This paper argues that analytical jurisprudence has been insufficiently attentive to three significant puzzles highlighted by the legal pluralist tradition: the existence of commonalities between different types of law, the possibility of a distinction between law and non-law, and the explanatory centrality of the state. I further argue that the resolution of these questions sets the stage for a renewed agenda of analytical jurisprudence and has to be considered in attempts for reconciliation between the academic traditions of analytical jurisprudence and legal pluralism, often called “pluralist jurisprudence.” I also argue that the resolution of these problems affects the empirical, doctrinal, …

Movement Judges, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

Judges matter. The opinions of a few impact the lives of many. Judges romanticize their own impartiality, but apathy in the face of systems of oppression favors the status quo and clears the way for conservative agendas to take root. The lifetime appointments of federal judges, the deliberate weaponization of the bench by reactionary opponents of the New Deal and progressive social movements, and the sheer inertia of judicial self-restraint have led to the conservative capture of the courts. By contrast, empathy for the oppressed and downtrodden renders substantive justice possible and leaves room for unsuccessful litigants to accept unfavorable …

On Lenity: What Justice Gorsuch Didn’T Say, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

This Essay was first published online at 108 Va. L. Rev. Online 239 (2022).

Facially neutral doctrines create racially disparate outcomes. Increasingly, legal academia and mainstream commentators recognize that this is by design. The rise of this colorblind racism in Supreme Court jurisprudence parallels the rise of the War on Drugs as a political response to the Civil Rights Movement. But, to date, no member of the Supreme Court has acknowledged the reality of this majestic inequality of the law. Instead, the Court itself has been complicit in upholding facially neutral doctrines when confronted with the racial disparities they create. …

Courts As Auditors Of Legislation?, Daniel Pi, Giampaolo Frezza, Francesco Parisi

Law Faculty Scholarship

Sources of law vary greatly across geography and human history. Some legal systems identify democratic lawmaking with political deliberation, while others rely on judicial process and judgemade law. This Essay argues that the normative problem of determining a hierarchy of legal sources may be usefully understood in terms of mechanism design, and that legislation and judicial precedent operate complementarily. If the ultimate policy objective is to create legal rules that reflect the "will of the people," judge-made law can function as an audit on the rules promulgated by elected legislatures. The two sources of law, working in conjunction, thereby correct …

How Rhetoric Reveals Judicial Motives In Employment Discrimination Cases, Susan E. Provenzano

Tennessee Law Review

Employment discrimination plaintiffs tend to lose on summary judgment. In these cases, judges are acting like juries and undermining anti-discrimination legislation while paying lip service to the law and the judicial role. How and why are courts doing this? Legal scholars blame bad doctrine and biased judging. But neither one tells the full story. The tell is in the opinions' strategic use of language, which shows how the court, as an institution, "sized up" the case and the motives of key actors the parties, the lawmakers, other courts, and the court itself. Conducting the first-ever rhetorical analysis of this problem, …

Foreword To The Symposium, The Death Of Eyewitness Testimony And The Rise Of Machine, Jane Campbell Moriarty, Erin Mccluan

Duquesne Law Review

Artificial intelligence, machine evidence, and complex technical evidence are replacing human-skill-based evidence in the courtroom. This may be an improvement on mistaken eyewitness identification and unreliable forensic science evidence, which are both causes of wrongful convictions. Thus, the move toward more machine- based evidence, such as DNA, biometric identification, cell service location information, neuroimaging, and other specialties may provide better evidence. But with such evidence comes different problems, including concerns about proper cross-examination and confrontation, reliability, inscrutability, human bias, constitutional concerns, and both philosophic and ethical questions.

What Machines Can Teach Us About "Confrontation", Andrea Roth

Duquesne Law Review

In this short Article, I argue that treating non-human conveyances of information-and other forms of evidence that cannot be cross-examined-as beyond the Confrontation Clause is unsatisfactory as a matter of text, history, logic, and principle. Instead, all of these clues lead to one conclusion: the right of confrontation is a right not only to physical presence of certain human witnesses to facilitate demeanor review and questioning, but to a meaningful opportunity to scrutinize the government's proof, whatever its form.⁸ That right would include out-of-court discovery of critical contextual information about the evidence, whether or not exculpatory, and a …

The Inscrutability Problem: From First-Generation Forensic Science To Neuroimaging Evidence, Jane Campbell Moriarty

Duquesne Law Review

Expert testimony continues to turn away from human-based skills to embrace machine-based evidence. Technology is used to identify and locate individuals, unlock encrypted devices, and even to evaluate criminal responsibility. Perhaps this is a positive change. The shortcomings of first-generation forensic identification specialties are substantial and include the inscrutability of its subjective comparisons. As such, this newer generation of evidence may well be an improvement. Yet the inscrutability problem adopts many forms. Machine-based evidence relies on hardware, software, algorithms, statistics, and engineering to reach results-ones created and interpreted by humans subject to bias and cognitive error; results the justice system …

Technology - Revealing Or Framing The Truth? A Jurisprudential Debate, Dana Neacsu

Duquesne Law Review

Technology is so much more than a prosthetic. But how much more? And what else is it? In the legal realm, its role is not yet clear. Such a lack of elucidation becomes problematic, especially when technology has the ability to convert assumptions into facts, and it takes on a truth-making, rather than a mere truth-revealing mission. This Article argues that it is problematic to enable technology to stand in for reflective thinking, and calls attention to the fact that evidentiary rules enable technology to decide what can be proven, ergo what truth is.

Considering "Machine Testimony": The Impact Of Facial Recognition Software On Eyewitness Identifications, Valena Beety

Duquesne Law Review

Andrea Roth's seminal work in Machine Testimony and Trial by Machine presented a problem that is now upon us: addressing biased algorithms and the rampant reliance on technology by prosecutors and law enforcement.¹ That reliance, however, is no longer unquestioning. Roth's work came at a crucial moment in time, when other articles were embracing the apparent impartiality of technology and algorithms for use in the criminal legal system. Her scholarship steered us away from that blind acceptance and dove deep, not only questioning technology itself, but also how to frame those questions of technology in the courtroom.

Biometrics And An Ai Bill Of Rights, Margaret Hu

Duquesne Law Review

This Article contends that an informed discussion on an Al Bill of Rights requires grappling with biometric data collection and its integration into emerging Al systems. Biometric Al systems serve a wide range of governmental purposes, including policing, border security and immigration enforcement, and biometric cyberintelligence and biometric-enabled warfare. These systems are increasingly categorized as "high-risk" when deployed in ways that may impact fundamental constitutional rights and human rights. There is growing recognition that high-risk biometric AI systems, such as facial recognition identification, can pose unprecedented challenges to criminal procedure rights. This Article concludes that a failure to recognize these …

Ending Manner-Of-Death Testimony And Other Opinion Determinations Of Crime, Keith A. Findley, Dean A. Strang

Duquesne Law Review

In January 2011, Ellen Greenberg's fianc6 and her apartment building manager broke down her apartment door after she failed repeatedly to respond to attempts to contact her.¹ They found herd ead in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, the victim of twenty stab wounds to her chest, torso, head, and neck, including stab wounds to the back of her head and to her body through her clothes. They found a half-eaten fruit salad on the kitchen counter along with an overturned knife block. By all appearances, Greenberg was the victim of a grisly murder, and the medical …

On-Screen V. In Person: How A Tech-Savvy World Is Impacting Jurors' Perceptions Of Witnesses, Michael T. Deer

Duquesne Law Review

When speaking to a friend or loved one via video chat, one receives the thrill of seeing that person in real time-without a faceto- face encounter. Video chatting is a popular mechanism in the twenty-first century, as the technology comes in various forms and lives at our fingertips.¹ Whether a family is video chatting with an overseas servicemember during a holiday, a person is attending an online class or work meeting, or someone is seeing his or her doctor by way of a virtual appointment, our notion of "face time" has evolved significantly.² In fact, Merriam-Webster now defines …

A Call For Transparency In Sports To The Government Of Puerto Rico, Karla V. Aponte

St. Thomas Law Review

Much like a state, Puerto Rico is self-governed, but cannot interfere with federal law. However, sports federations in Puerto Rico are not governed by the existing applicable federal law. Sports federations are avoiding most of the strict regulations imposed by federal acts, mainly because Puerto Rico has its own Olympic identity, and is recognized by the International Olympic Committee as a separate country. As a result, the language on the federal acts has been interpreted to only apply to those organizations representing the United States. Because of this, federations avoid strict auditing procedures, and other regulations, which consequently have deterred …

Towards A Dramaturgical Theory Of Constitutional Interpretation, Jessica Rizzo

Seattle University Law Review

Like legal texts, dramatic texts have a public function and public responsibilities not shared by texts written to be appreciated in solitude. For this reason, the interpretation of dramatic texts offers a variety of useful templates for the interpretation of legal texts. In this Article, I elaborate on Jack Balkin and Sanford Levinson’s neglected account of law as performance. I begin with Balkin and Levinson’s observation that both legal and dramatic interpreters are charged with persuading audiences that their readings of texts are “authoritative,” analyzing the relationship between legal and theatrical authority and tradition. I then offer my own theory …

The Influence Of The Federalist Society On Judical Politics And Law In The United States, Peter S. K. Lynch

Theses and Dissertations--Political Science

This dissertation examines the Federalist Society, which is a network of conservative and libertarian attorneys, judges, law professors, and law students. The organization was founded by law students at Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, and the University of Chicago Law School in 1982, and has, over the last four decades, come to play a central role in law and politics in the United States. Individuals affiliated with the Federalist Society influence the law through a variety of avenues.

Federalist Society-members advance the goals of the conservative legal movement in a variety of capacities—by writing amicus curiae briefs providing the …

Criminal Acts And Basic Moral Equality, John A. Humbach

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Modern criminal justice presupposes that persons are not morally equal. On the contrary, those who do wrong are viewed by the law as less worthy of respect, concern and decent treatment: Offenders, it is said, “deserve” to suffer for their misdeeds. Yet, there is scant logical or empirical basis for the law's supposition that offenders are morally inferior. The usual reasoning is that persons who intentionally or knowingly do wrong are the authors and initiators of their acts and, as such, are morally responsible for them. But this reasoning rests on the assumption that a person's mental states, such as …

Reasoning V. Rhetoric: The Strange Case Of “Unconstitutional Beyond A Reasonable Doubt”, Hugh D. Spitzer

Articles

An odd formulation has frequented American constitutional discourse for 125 years: a declaration that courts should not overturn a statute on constitutional grounds unless it is “unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt.” This concept has been thought of as a presumption, a standard, a doctrine, or a philosophy of coordinate branch respect and judicial restraint. Yet it has been criticized because “beyond a reasonable doubt” is at root an evidentiary standard of proof in criminal cases rather than a workable theory or standard for deciding constitutional law cases. This article discusses the history and use of “unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt,” …

Less Restrictive Alternatives And The Ancillary Restraints Doctrine, Thomas B. Nachbar

Seattle University Law Review

In Ohio v. American Express, both the majority and dissent introduced into Supreme Court antitrust jurisprudence a new test for evaluating restraints under the rule of reason: a less restrictive alternatives test. Occasionally appearing in circuit court cases, less restrictive alternatives tests have not been part of Supreme Court’s approach to the rule of reason, which generally evaluates restraints of trade by balancing their anticompetitive and procompetitive effects.

American Express was the first Supreme Court case to mention a less restrictive alternatives test, potentially representing a major shift in antitrust law, but it was not the last. In 2021’s …

Legal And Market Initiatives To Increase Diversity In Corporations—A Cross-Jurisdictional Analysis, Akshaya Kamalnath

Seattle University Law Review

This Article will critically examine various legal and market initiatives to increase diversity in corporations, with the aim of assessing their effectiveness. The initiatives explored in this Article include quota laws in Europe (including recent amendments in France and Germany which introduce quotas for executive director positions) and California; disclosure laws in the U.S., Nasdaq, and U.K.; and initiatives by institutional investors. The main argument this Article makes is that both quotas and quantitative disclosures do not provide the right incentives for corporations to make genuine efforts to improve diversity. The alternative this Article proposes is not to simply leave …

Court Review: Journal Of The American Judges Association, Vol. 58, No. 4, Eve M. Brank, David Dreyer, David Prince

Court Review: Journal of the American Judges Association

Interview

Stresses of the Job in Modern Times: Coaching Resilience in Judges, Peer-to-Peer, an Interview with Jan Bouch; David Prince

Articles

Prosecutorial Misconduct: Assessment of Perspectives from the Bench, Saul M. Kassin, Stephanie A. Cardenas, Vanessa Meterko, and Faith Barksdale

Limiting Access to Remedies: Select Criminal Law and Procedure Cases from the Supreme Court’s 2021-22 Term, Eve Brensike Primus and Justin Hill

You Can Change Judging and Justice, Thomas R. French

The Online Courtroom: Leveraging Remote Technology in Litigation American Bar Association, Tort, Trial, and Insurance Practice Section, J. Gary Hastings

Departments

Editor’s Note, Eve Brank, David Dreyer, and David …

Court Review: Journal Of The American Judges Association, Vol. 58, No. 2, Eve M. Brank, David Dreyer, David Prince

Court Review: Journal of the American Judges Association

The Military Divorce: An Overview; Joseph A. DeWoskin, Mark E. Sullivan and Dan Wiley

The American Psychological Association’s Guidelines for Child Custody Evaluations in Family Law Proceedings: Implications for the Courts; Helen T. Brantley, Eric Y. Drogin, and Jemour A. Maddux

Uncovering the Secrets of Statistics as Evidence in Business Valuations; Christopher C. Melcher

Judicial Accommodation of Pro Se Parties; Michael Roundy

Editor’s Note; David M. Johnson

President’s Column; Yvette Mansfield Alexander

Canon Conversations; Access, Flexibility, and Practice; Cynthia Gray

Crossword; Vic Fleming

Thoughts from Canada: Strip Searches in Canada and the Constitutional Right to be Free from Unreasonable …