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Full-Text Articles in Law
Incorporating Social Science Into Criminal Defense Practice, Eve Brensike Primus
Incorporating Social Science Into Criminal Defense Practice, Eve Brensike Primus
Articles
In recent decades, social scientists have created a treasure trove of empirical and sociological data that defenders can and should use to help their clients. Evidence rules, criminal law, and criminal procedure are filled with concepts informed by social science. When is evidence likely to unfairly prejudice a defendant in the eyes of a jury? Do police interact differently with members of minority populations and how should that inform concepts of reasonableness? How easy or difficult is it for people to identify individuals they see during high-stress criminal episodes? How effective are police interrogation tactics at getting at the truth …
Can Prostitution Law Reform Curb Sex Trafficking? Theory And Evidence On Scale Substitution, And Replacement Effects, Simon Hedlin
Can Prostitution Law Reform Curb Sex Trafficking? Theory And Evidence On Scale Substitution, And Replacement Effects, Simon Hedlin
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
Sex trafficking, a pervasive problem in many parts of the world, has become increasingly salient to policymakers and the general public. Activists, politicians, and scholars continue to engage in debates about how best to curb it. This Article discusses one especially contentious dimension of these debates: does banning prostitution reduce sex trafficking? Or is legalizing prostitution the optimal approach? Or is there a third, better way? Proceeding both theoretically and empirically, this Article seeks to cast light on the relationship between different types of prostitution laws and the prevalence of sex trafficking and human trafficking. It attempts to make three …
The Effect Of Time Of Day On Reference Interactions In Academic Law Libraries, Seth Quidachay-Swan
The Effect Of Time Of Day On Reference Interactions In Academic Law Libraries, Seth Quidachay-Swan
Law Librarian Scholarship
Libraries and librarians generally aspire to provide the best services they can to their user communities. But what does that mean? Assumptions about what is needed may not necessarily align with the actual preferences of a given user group. In this column, Seth Quidachay-Swan presents a case study that explores the interaction between time of day and medium of information delivery. Examining data gathered in a law library environment, the author concludes that modern presumptions about the diminishing need for traditional information services may not allow for effectively managing user expectations.
Do Liquidated Damages Encourage Breach? A Psychological Experiment, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
Do Liquidated Damages Encourage Breach? A Psychological Experiment, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
Michigan Law Review
This Article offers experimental evidence that parties are more willing to exploit efficient-breach opportunities when the contract in question includes a liquidated-damages clause. Economists claim that the theory of efficient breach allows us to predict when parties will choose to breach a contract if the legal remedy for breach is expectation damages. However, the economic assumption of rational wealth-maximizing actors fails to capture important, shared, nonmonetary values and incentives that shape behavior in predictable ways. When interpersonal obligations are informal or underspecified, people act in accordance with shared community norms, like the moral norm of keeping promises. However, when sanctions …
Preserving A Racial Hierarchy: A Legal Analysis Of The Disparate Racial Impact Of Legacy Preferences In University Admissions, Kathryn Ladewski
Preserving A Racial Hierarchy: A Legal Analysis Of The Disparate Racial Impact Of Legacy Preferences In University Admissions, Kathryn Ladewski
Michigan Law Review
Many public and private universities around the country employ legacy admissions preferences in order to give children of alumni special consideration in the admissions process. Such preferences disproportionately benefit white applicants at the cost of their nonwhite counterparts, because past generations of college students were less diverse than today's applicant pool. However, universities argue that their legacy preferences are justified because they assist in alumni fundraising efforts. This Note presents a statistical analysis to argue that legacy preferences are prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because they have a discriminatory effect on minority college applicants and have not …
Leaps And Bounds, Nestor M. Davidson
Leaps And Bounds, Nestor M. Davidson
Michigan Law Review
Imagine how stunted our understanding of the federal government would be without any detailed scholarly examination of the U.S. Constitution itself. As remarkable as that sounds, that is essentially the problem that Gerald Frug and David Barron have set out to remedy for local governments in their superb City Bound. In the book, Frug and Barron take a comprehensive, empirical look at the legal frameworks under which cities and other local governments operate, providing an invaluable roadmap for understanding the hidden architecture of legal constraints that-largely without notice-are shaping America's urban future. Why this kind of analysis has rarely been …
Practice Makes Perfect? An Empirical Study Of Claim Construction Reversal Rates In Patent Cases, David L. Schwartz
Practice Makes Perfect? An Empirical Study Of Claim Construction Reversal Rates In Patent Cases, David L. Schwartz
Michigan Law Review
This Article examines whether U.S. district court judges improve their skills at patent claim construction with experience, including the experience of having their own cases reviewed by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In theory, higher courts teach doctrine to lower courts via judicial decisions, and lower courts learn from these decisions. This Article tests the teaching-and-learning premise on the issue of claim construction in the realities of patent litigation. While others have shown that the Federal Circuit reverses a large percentage of lower court claim constructions, no one has analyzed whether judges with more claim construction appeal …
Young Associates In Trouble, William D. Henderson, David Zaring
Young Associates In Trouble, William D. Henderson, David Zaring
Michigan Law Review
Large law firms have reputations as being tough places to work, and the larger the firm, the tougher the firm. Yet, notwithstanding the grueling hours and the shrinking prospects of partnership, these firms perennially attract a large proportion of the nation's top law school graduates. These young lawyers could go anywhere but choose to work at large firms. Why do they do so if law firms are as inhospitable as their reputations suggest? Two recent novels about the lives of young associates in large, prestigious law firms suggest that such a rational calculation misapprehends the costs. Law professor Kermit Roosevelt's …
Inside The Administrative State: A Critical Look At The Practice Of Presidential Control, Lisa Schultz Bressman, Michael P. Vandenbergh
Inside The Administrative State: A Critical Look At The Practice Of Presidential Control, Lisa Schultz Bressman, Michael P. Vandenbergh
Michigan Law Review
From the inception of the administrative state, scholars have proposed various models of agency decision-making to render such decision-making accountable and effective, only to see those models falter when confronted by actual practice. Until now, the "presidential control" model has been largely impervious to this pattern. That model, which brings agency decision-making under the direction of the president, has strengthened over time, winning broad scholarly endorsement and bipartisan political support. But it, like prior models, relies on abstractions - for example, that the president represents public preferences and resists parochial pressures that do not hold up as a factual matter. …
Signatures Of Ideology: The Case Of The Supreme Court's Criminal Docket, Ward Farnsworth
Signatures Of Ideology: The Case Of The Supreme Court's Criminal Docket, Ward Farnsworth
Michigan Law Review
Everyone suspects that Supreme Court justices' own views of policy play a part in their decisions, but the size and nature of the part is a matter of vague impression and frequent dispute. Do their preferences exert some pressure at the margin or are they better viewed as the mainsprings of decision? The latter claim, identified with legal realism, has been lent some support by political scientists who point out that some justices regularly vote for or against certain kinds of claims (for example, under the Fourth Amendment), or that votes in some areas are broadly predictable according to a …
A Theory In Search Of A Court, And Itself: Judicial Minimalism At The Supreme Court Bar, Neil S. Siegel
A Theory In Search Of A Court, And Itself: Judicial Minimalism At The Supreme Court Bar, Neil S. Siegel
Michigan Law Review
According to the prevailing wisdom in academic public law, constitutional theory is a field that seeks to articulate and evaluate abstract accounts of the nature of the United States Constitution. Theorists offer those accounts as guides to subsequent judicial construction of constitutional provisions. As typically conceived, therefore, constitutional theory tends to proceed analytically from the general to the particular; its animating idea is that correct decisions in constitutional cases presuppose theoretical commitments to the methodological principles that should guide constitutional interpretation and the substantive values such interpretation should advance. In its enthusiasm for abstraction, constitutional theory has, at times, generated …
Apology Within A Moral Dialectic: A Reply To Professor Robbennolt, Lee Taft
Apology Within A Moral Dialectic: A Reply To Professor Robbennolt, Lee Taft
Michigan Law Review
Over the last several years, much has been written about the role of apology in facilitating the resolution of legal disputes. Within this body of work a debate has developed among legal scholars, practitioners, and legislators. Under traditional rules of evidence an apology which acknowledged fault would enter evidence as an admission against interest. Now there is a movement to legislatively "protect" apologies from the effects of the traditional rule in order to facilitate apology without evidentiary encumbrance. Scholars who have argued in favor of the relaxation of the traditional rule have largely relied on anecdotal evidence to support their …
Some Steps Between Attitudes And Verdicts, Phoebe C. Ellsworth
Some Steps Between Attitudes And Verdicts, Phoebe C. Ellsworth
Book Chapters
Most research that has attempted to predict verdict preferences on the basis of stable juror characteristics, such as attitudes and personality traits, has found that individual differences among jurors are not very useful predictors, accounting for only a small proportion of the variance in verdict choices. Some commentators have therefore concluded that verdicts are overwhelmingly accounted for by "the weight of the evidence," and that differences among jurors have negligible effects. But there is a paradox here: In most cases the weight of the evidence is insufficient to produce firstballot unanimity in the jury (Hans & Vidmar, 1986; Hastie, Penrod, …