Law Commons^™

Selected Conceptions Of Federalism: The Selective Use Of History In The Supreme Court's States' Rights Opinions, Lucian E. Dervan

Law Faculty Scholarship

In the period leading to the Civil War, debate over federalism and states’ rights developed into the seeds of a war that would forever change America. Over one hundred years later, the debate over federalism continues, unanswered by the blood of more than half a million soldiers. Over the last decade, the United States Supreme Court has increased state sovereignty and state immunity to levels unseen since the pre-Civil War period. The Court’s opinions are structured in a manner that relies significantly on historical methodologies. The multiple rationales used to structure the Justices’ arguments clash, and the Justices spar with …

Incorporating Bar Pass Strategies Into Routine Teaching Practices, Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The 50th Anniversary Of The Catholic University Law Review, Ralph J. Rohner

Scholarly Articles

This is an essay, not a history, on the first fifty years of the Catholic University Law Review. When an enterprise survives that long, it is cause for acknowledgment and celebration. This seems especially appropriate for the Law Review when we consider that it is managed by amateurs, relies on volunteer labor, and changes leadership every year; yet, it has grown and matured into a respectable scholarly journal. There is reason to wonder from where the Law Review has come, what it has accomplished, and how and where it is going. There is reason, too, to reminisce over half a …

Gender And Legal Writing: Law Schools’ Dirty Little Secrets, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Jan M. Levine

Scholarly Works

While great strides have been made by legal writing professors in the past two decades, many law schools-perhaps most accurately, many law school deans-try to avoid the investments needed to provide their students with professional, high-quality instruction in legal research and legal writing. Law professors, including women law professors, have reacted to their deans' decisions to maintain the status quo largely by quiet acquiescence- although in some cases they openly support that stance. Legal writing seems to be just too hard, and too demanding in time and energy, to be taught by doctrinal law professors, most of whom are men …

Legal Scholarship As A Vocation, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Law professors occupy a twin role as scholars and (most of them, at any rate) as lawyers. Deborah Rhode has pointed out, in her contribution to this symposium, that the lawyer role of the professor carries with it some frequently overlooked obligations, specifically the obligation to perform pro bono service. I agree with her, and have ventured similar arguments myself. Here I will address the more purely theoretical side of the legal scholar's vocation. The text I will take for my sermon is the famous speech on the scholar's role that Max Weber delivered to a student audience eighty years …

Fear And Loathing Of Politics In The Legal Academy, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

In a recent lament about Bush v. Gore, Bruce Ackerman feared that the patent groundlessness of the opinion would convince many of a proposition he attributed to critical legal studies: that law is simply a form of politics.

This remark reflects two tendencies prominent at the Yale Law School in recent years: first, a preoccupation with a now extinct and never very successful movement of left legal academics, and second, a tendency to conflate this movement with the legal conservatism of Jusice Scalia and his collaborators at the University of Chicago and the Rehnquist Court.

These tendencies ride high …

Look Who's Extrapolating: A Reply To Hoffmann, Valerie West, Jeffery Fagan, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

In late March, a reporter called with news of a pirated copy of Professor Joseph Hoffinann's soon-to-be-published "attack" on our study, A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995. Did we care to comment? Obtaining our own copy revealed that Professor Hoffmann's fusillade missed its mark (he misstates what we did) and boomeranged (his mischaracterizations of our analysis accurately describe his own). We do care to comment, and Hoffmann and the Indiana Law Journal have graciously let us do so.

Hoffmann's main claim is that we "extrapolated" the 68% rate of reversible error we reported for capital verdicts …