Law Commons^™

Rights And Retrenchment In The Trump Era, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

All Faculty Scholarship

Our aim in this essay is to leverage archival research, data and theoretical perspectives presented in our book, Rights and Retrenchment: The Counterrevolution against Federal Litigation, as a means to illuminate the prospects for retrenchment in the current political landscape. We follow the scheme of the book by separately considering the prospects for federal litigation retrenchment in three lawmaking sites: Congress, federal court rulemaking under the Rules Enabling Act, and the Supreme Court. Although pertinent data on current retrenchment initiatives are limited, our historical data and comparative institutional perspectives should afford a basis for informed prediction. Of course, little in …

The Politics Of Access: Examining Concerted State/Private Enforcement Solutions To Class Action Bans, Myriam E. Gilles

Articles

Procedural and substantive constraints on the ability of ordinary people to access the civil justice system have become all too commonplace. The “justice gap” owes much to cuts in funding for legal aid and court administration, heightened pleading standards, ever-rising costs of discovery, increasingly restrictive views on standing to sue, and the co-opting of small claims court by businesses seeking to collect debts, among other obstacles in the path to the courthouse. But the most consequential impediment, surely, is the enforcement of mandatory arbitration clauses with class action bans, which bar consumers and employees from bringing or being represented in …

Consumers, Sellers-Advisors, And The Psychology Of Trust, Kelli Alces Williams, Justin Sevier

Scholarly Publications

Every day, consumers ask sellers for advice. Because they do not or cannot know better, consumers rely on that advice in making financial decisions of varying significance. Sellers, motivated by strong and often conflicting self-interests, are well-positioned to lead consumers to make decisions that are profitable for sellers and may be harmful to the consumers themselves. Short of imposing fraud liability in extreme situations, the law neither protects the trust consumers place in “seller-advisors,” nor alerts them to the incentives motivating the advice that sellers give. This Article makes several contributions to the literature. First, it identifies and defines the …

Newsroom: Have We Outgrown Brown? 02-06-2018, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Curbing Remedies For Official Wrongs: The Need For Bivens Suits In National Security Cases, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Access To Justice For Four Billion: Urban And Environmental Options And Challenges, Colin Crawford

Publications

This Article proceeds in five parts. Part I considers four prominent theories on the meaning of "access to justice." To be sure, the lines and divisions between these positions are in practice less rigid than this text will at times suggest. Nonetheless, the four approaches are sufficiently different from one another to justify a critical evaluation. Part I therefore undertakes to provide such an evaluation of these different proposals. In this, Part I seeks to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the different proposals with respect to the search for answers to some of the questions related to what "access …

Think Fast: Post Judgment Considerations In Hague Child Abduction Cases, Timothy L. Arcaro

Faculty Scholarship

This article will focus on post judgment considerations in the context of federal district court proceedings, which frequently parallel the procedural aspects of U.S. state court proceedings. Part I of this article will examine the Abduction Convention structure and function to contextualize the interplay of return cases and post-judgment considerations. Part II will examine the flexible notions of Due Process and post-trial relief in Hague proceedings at the federal district court level. Part III will examine post-judgment access remedies and practical considerations in establishing custodial rights. In Part IV, I will share my conclusions on post-judgment relief in Hague Abduction …

“Nationwide” Injunctions Are Really “Universal” Injunctions And They Are Never Appropriate, Howard Wasserman

Faculty Publications

Federal district courts are routinely issuing broad injunctions prohibiting the federal government from enforcing constitutionally invalid laws, regulations, and policies on immigration and immigration-adjacent issues. Styled “nationwide injunctions,” they prohibit enforcement of the challenges laws not only against the named plaintiffs, but against all people and entities everywhere.

The first problem with these injunctions is one of nomenclature. “Nationwide” suggests something about the “where” of the injunction, the geographic scope in which it protects. The better term is “universal injunction,” which captures the real controversy over the “who” of the injunction, as courts purport to protect the universe of all …

To Sue And Be Sued: Capacity And Immunity Of American Indian Nations, Richard B. Collins

Publications

Can American Indian nations sue and be sued in federal and state courts? Specific issues are whether tribes have corporate capacity to sue, whether a Native group has recognized status as a tribe, and whether and to what extent tribes and their officers have governmental immunity from suit. Tribal capacity to sue is now well established, and federal law has well-defined procedures and rules for tribal recognition. But tribal sovereign immunity is actively disputed.

This Article reviews retained tribal sovereignty in general and summarizes past contests over tribal capacity to sue and their resolution into today’s settled rule. Next is …

Interim Relief: National Report For Canada, Trevor C. W. Farrow, Jonathan Silver

Articles & Book Chapters

Evolving litigation poses many challenges to litigants and their counsel before final adjudication. Canadian courts have fashioned various remedies to meet these challenges in order to preserve and maintain the court's authority to secure a just result.

Preclusion Law As A Model For National Injunctions, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

Patent Clutter, Janet Freilich

Faculty Scholarship

Patent claims are supposed to clearly and succinctly describe the patented invention, and only the patented invention. This Article hypothesizes that a substantial amount of language in patent claims is in fact not about the core invention, which may contribute to well-documented problems with patent claims. I analyze the claims of 40,000 patents and applications, and document the proliferation of “clutter”—language in patent claims that is not about the invention. Although claims are supposed to be exclusively about the invention, clutter appears across industries and makes up approximately 25% of claim language. Patent clutter may contribute several major problems in …

Suing The President For First Amendment Violations, Sonja R. West

Scholarly Works

On any given day, it seems, President Donald Trump can be found attacking, threatening, or punishing the press and other individuals whose speech he dislikes. His actions, moreover, inevitably raise the question: Do any of these individuals or organizations (or any future ones) have a viable claim against the President for violating their First Amendment rights?

One might think that the ability to sue the President for violation of the First Amendment would be relatively settled. The answer, however, is not quite that straightforward. Due to several unique qualities about the First Amendment and the presidency, it is not entirely …

The Rule Of Reason, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust’s rule of reason was born out of a thirty-year (1897-1927) division among Supreme Court Justices about the proper way to assess multi-firm restraints on competition. By the late 1920s the basic contours of the rule for restraints among competitors was roughly established. Antitrust policy toward vertical restraints remained much more unstable, however, largely because their effects were so poorly understood.

This article provides a litigation field guide for antitrust claims under the rule of reason – or more precisely, for situations when application of the rule of reason is likely. At the time pleadings are drafted and even up …

Remedies And The Government's Constitutionally Harmful Speech, Helen Norton

Publications

Although governments have engaged in expression from their inception, only recently have we begun to consider the ways in which the government’s speech sometimes threatens our constitutional rights. In my contribution to this symposium, I seek to show that although the search for constitutional remedies for the government’s harmful expression is challenging, it is far from futile. This search is also increasingly important at a time when the government’s expressive powers continue to grow—along with its willingness to use these powers for disturbing purposes and with troubling consequences.

More specifically, in certain circumstances, injunctive relief, declaratory relief, or damages can …

Look What's New - Utah's Groundbreaking Efforts To Use Online Dispute Resolution (Odr) To Increase Access To Justice, Laurel Terry

Faculty Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Of Brutal Murder And Transcendental Sovereignty: The Meaning Of Vested Private Rights, Adam J. Macleod

Faculty Articles

The idea of vested private rights is divisive; it divides those who practice law from those who teach and think about law. On one side of the divide, practicing lawyers act as though (at least some) rights exist and exert binding obligations upon private persons and government officials, such that once vested, the rights cannot be taken away or retrospectively altered. Lawyers convey estates in property, negotiate contracts, and write and send demand letters on the supposition that they are specifying and vindicating rights, which are rights not as a result of a judgment by a court in a subsequent …

Statutory Damages And Standing After Spokeo V. Robins, Richard L. Heppner Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

In Spokeo v. Robins, the U.S. Supreme Court held that courts may no longer infer the existence of an injury in fact—and thus constitutional standing—from a statute’s use of a particular remedy, such as a statutory or liquidated damages provision. But Spokeo also directed courts to consider whether Congress intended to identify an intangible harm and elevate it to the status of a “concrete” injury in fact when deciding standing questions. This article argues that courts can and should continue to pay close attention to the structure and language of statutory remedial provisions in making that assessment. The article proposes …

Deepening The Relational Ecology Of Restorative Justice, Jennifer Llewellyn, Brenda Morrison

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

It is our pleasure to introduce and frame this Special Issue of The International Journal of Restorative Justice. This Special Issue seeks to advance and expand thinking, research and practice of a restorative approach at the level of institutions and social systems, from families to workplaces. The articles and notes from the field included here were developed out of the 2016 International Conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, that shared the title and focus of this issue. The conference was held to fulfil a commitment made by the parties involved in a restorative justice process at the Faculty of Dentistry, Dalhousie …