Law Commons^™

The False Promise Of Jurisdiction Stripping, Daniel Epps, Alan M. Trammell

Scholarship@WashULaw

Jurisdiction stripping is seen as a nuclear option. Its logic is simple: by depriving federal courts of jurisdiction over some set of cases, Congress ensures those courts cannot render bad decisions. In theory, it frees up the political branches and the states to act without fear of judicial second-guessing. To its proponents, it offers the ultimate check on unelected and unaccountable judges. To critics, it poses a grave threat to the separation of powers. Both sides agree, though, that jurisdiction stripping is a powerful weapon. On this understanding, politicians, activists, and scholars throughout American history have proposed jurisdiction stripping measures …

Political Ideology And Judicial Administration: Evidence From The Covid-19 Pandemic, Kyle Rozema, Adam Chilton, Christopher Anthony Cotropia, David L. Schwartz

Scholarship@WashULaw

We study the effect of political ideology on the administration of the judiciary by investigating how the chief judges of federal district courts set courthouse policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. To do so, we use novel data on the geographic boundaries of federal courts and on the contents of pandemic orders. We account for state and local conditions and policies by leveraging district courts in states that have multiple judicial districts and that have courthouses in multiple counties, and we isolate the effect of chief ideology by using simulations that difference out unobserved district-level effects. We find no …

The Future Of Supreme Court Reform, Daniel Epps, Ganesh Sitaraman

Scholarship@WashULaw

For a brief moment in the fall of 2020, structural reform of the Supreme Court seemed like a tangible possibility. After the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September, some prominent Democratic politicians and liberal commentators warmed to the idea of expanding the Court to respond to Republicans’ rush to confirm a nominee before the election, despite their refusal four years prior to confirm Judge Merrick Garland on the ground that it was an election year. Though Democratic candidate Joe Biden won the Presidency in November, Democrats lost seats in the House and have a majority in the Senate …

An Unfinished Dialogue: Congress, The Judiciary, And The Rules For Federal Judicial Misconduct Proceedings, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

Federal judges can be impeached and removed from office for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but what can be done to investigate and remedy less serious misconduct? Congress gave its answer 40 years ago when it passed the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980. The Act emerged from a series of complex interactions between Congress and the judiciary that could hardly be replicated today. Initially there was strong support, particularly in the Senate, for a centralized, “strictly adjudicatory” system, including a provision for removal of judges without impeachment. Over the course of several years, however, the judiciary persuaded Congress to …

Laird V. Tatum And Article Iii Standing In Surveillance Cases, Jeffrey L. Vagle

All Faculty Scholarship

Plaintiffs seeking to challenge government surveillance programs have faced long odds in federal courts, due mainly to a line of Supreme Court cases that have set a very high bar to Article III standing in these cases. The origins of this jurisprudence can be directly traced to Laird v. Tatum, a 1972 case where the Supreme Court considered the question of who could sue the government over a surveillance program, holding in a 5-4 decision that chilling effects arising “merely from the individual’s knowledge” of likely government surveillance did not constitute adequate injury to meet Article III standing requirements.

Thinking, Big And Small, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beyond Principal-Agent Theories: Law And The Judicial Hierarchy, Pauline Kim

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Essay critically examines the commonplace use by judicial politics scholars of principal-agent models to describe the federal judicial hierarchy. It argues that agency models are useful in highlighting certain aspects of the interaction between upper and lower courts - specifically, the existence of value conflicts and informational asymmetries - but that in other ways traditional principal-agent models fit poorly the relationship between the lower federal courts and the Supreme Court. As a consequence, these models tend to obscure important normative questions about the relationship between lower and upper courts, as well as to distort the role that law plays …

Quasi-Preemption: Nervous Breakdown In Our Constitutional System, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Has The Erie Doctrine Been Repealed By Congress?, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Preemption In The Rehnquist Court: A Preliminary Empirical Assessment, Michael S. Greve, Jonathan Klick

All Faculty Scholarship

The federal preemption of state law has emerged as a prominent field of study for legal scholars and political scientists. This rise to prominence of a technical and often dull field of jurisprudence is due to a number of developments-increasingly frequent federal statutory preemptions; the states' unprecedented aggressiveness in regulating business transactions, the expansion of corporate liability under state common law and the increased resort of corporate defendants to federal preemption defenses; and, not least, the Rehnquist Court's discovery of federalism and states' rights.

Unfortunately, the preemption debate has been marred by misperceptions and a lack of reliable data. Extravagant …

Alternative Career Resolution Ii: Changing The Tenure Of Supreme Court Justices, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Creation Of A Usable Judicial Past: Max Lerner, Class Conflict, And The Propagation Of Judicial Titans, Sarah Barringer Gordon

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Ignorance And Procedural Law Reform: A Call For A Moratorium, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Compounding Or Creating Confusion About Supplemental Jurisdiction? A Reply To Professor Freer, Thomas D. Rowe Jr., Stephen B. Burbank, Thomas M. Mengler

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Rewriting History: The Propriety Of Eradicating Prior Decisional Law Through Settlement And Vacatur, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Coda On Supplemental Jurisdiction, Stephen B. Burbank, Thomas D. Rowe Jr., Thomas M. Mengler

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Hold The Corks: A Comment On Paul Carrington's "Substance" And "Procedure" In The Rules Enabling Act, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Of Rules And Discretion: The Supreme Court, Federal Rules And Common Law, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Chancellor's Boot, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Alternative Career Resolution: An Essay On The Removal Of Federal Judges, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sanctions In The Proposed Amendments To The Federal Rules Of Civil Procedure: Some Questions About Power, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Federal Reserved Water Rights Policy And Improving Federal-State Relations In The West: A Discussion Of The Need For Federal Legislation On Reserved Rights: Outline, Charles B. Roe, Jr.

Water Resources Allocation: Laws and Emerging Issues: A Short Course (Summer Conference, June 8-11)

8 pages.