Law Commons^™

"Downright Indifference": Examining Unpublished Decisions In The Federal Courts Of Appeals, Merritt E. Mcalister

Michigan Law Review

Nearly 90 percent of the work of the federal courts of appeals looks nothing like the opinions law students read in casebooks. Over the last fifty years, the so-called “unpublished decision” has overtaken the federal appellate courts in response to a caseload volume “crisis.” These are often short, perfunctory decisions that make no law; they are, one federal judge said, “not safe for human consumption.”

The creation of the inferior unpublished decision also has created an inferior track of appellate justice for a class of appellants: indigent litigants. The federal appellate courts routinely shunt indigent appeals to a second-tier appellate …

The Jury: Trial And Error In The American Courtroom, John C. Blattner

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Jury: Trial and Error in the American Courtroom by Stephen J. Adler

Objectivity In Legal Judgement, Heidi Li Feldman

Michigan Law Review

This essay unites the philosophical concern with blend concepts and the legal concern with objectivity. Comparing blend legal concepts with other kinds of blend concepts develops our resources for ascertaining the distinctive characteristics of blend concepts. Cultivating a more refined understanding of blend concepts sharpens our inquiry into objectivity. In Part I of this essay, I explicate the distinctive characteristics of blend concepts, demonstrating that some representative legal concepts, drawn from tort law, possess these characteristics. In Part II, I develop a conception of objectivity suitable for blend judgments - the blend conception of objectivity - and use this conception …

Dangerousness And Criminal Justice, Franklin E. Zimring, Gordon Hawkins

Michigan Law Review

The first section of this paper surveys some recent writings on the topic of dangerousness for major inconsistencies, which we regard as illuminating the special problem of dangerousness in the jurisprudence of criminal sentencing.

The second section describes the "special problem of dangerousness," for, we believe, the first time. The special problem is the fear that any admission of calculations of dangerousness into sentencing decisions will lead to an overuse of dangerousness, which may be worse than the inefficiencies and hypocrisies we confront when denying that future dangerousness is relevant to decisions about prisons.

The third section attempts to reorganize …