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Treading Water: Can Municipal Efforts To Condemn Underwater Mortgages Prevail?, Michael S. Moskowitz

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Disqualifying Defense Counsel: The Curse Of The Sixth Amendment, Keith Swisher

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Lawyer disqualification—the process of ejecting a conflicted lawyer, firm, or agency from a case—is fairly routine and well-mapped in civil litigation. In criminal cases, however, there is an added ingredient: the Sixth Amendment. Gideon, which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, effectively added this ingredient to disqualification analysis involving indigent state defendants although it already existed in essence for both federal defendants and defendants with the wherewithal to retain counsel. Once a defendant is entitled to counsel, the many questions that follow include whether and to what extent conflicts of interest—or other misconduct—render that counsel constitutionally ineffective. Most cases and commentary …

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Reviving Legislative Generality, Evan C. Zoldan

Marquette Law Review

The Supreme Court does not recognize a constitutional principle disfavoring special legislation, that is, legislation that singles out identifiable individuals for benefits or harms that are not applied to the rest of the population. As a result, both Congress and state legislatures routinely enact special legislation despite the fact that it has been linked to a variety of social harms, including corruption and the exacerbation of social inequality. But the Court’s weak protections against special legislation, and the resulting harms, are not inevitable. Instead, special legislation can be limited by what may be called a value of legislative generality, that …