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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Myth Of Accountability And The Anti-Administrative Impulse, Edward Rubin Aug 2005

The Myth Of Accountability And The Anti-Administrative Impulse, Edward Rubin

Michigan Law Review

The idea of accountability is very much in fashion in legal and political thought these days. To be sure, the term is used in a variety of different ways, but that is the nature of fashion. Colored cloth ponchos may be in fashion this season, for example, but they can be shaped and colored in a variety of different ways. It is differences of this sort that sustain a fashion trend. If the only poncho available were red and square, the fashion trend would display an impressive unity, but it wouldn't last very long. In order to make sales, clothing …


Word Games: Raising And Resolving The Shortcomings In Accident-Insurance Doctrine That Autoerotic-Asphyxiation Cases Reveal, Sam Erman Aug 2005

Word Games: Raising And Resolving The Shortcomings In Accident-Insurance Doctrine That Autoerotic-Asphyxiation Cases Reveal, Sam Erman

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that autoerotic asphyxiation deaths are accidents and not the results of intentionally self-inflicted injuries. Part I formally analyzes accident-insurance case law to show that current, viable approaches to accident insurance indicate that autoerotic asphyxiation deaths are accidental. Part II claims autoerotic asphyxiation deaths should not trigger intentionally self-inflicted injury exclusion clauses because the practice does not intentionally injure. This Note concludes beneficiaries should recover when accident-insurance policyholders die during autoerotic asphyxiation.


The Free Exercise Of Religion And Public Schools: The Implications Of Hybrid Rights On The Religious Upbringing Of Children, Michael E. Lechliter Aug 2005

The Free Exercise Of Religion And Public Schools: The Implications Of Hybrid Rights On The Religious Upbringing Of Children, Michael E. Lechliter

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that parents have a fundamental right under the U.S. Constitution to direct the religious upbringing of their children and that courts interpreting Smith have systematically misunderstood and misapplied the Supreme Court's confusing hybrid rights language. Part I explains how Yoder and Smith create and preserve parents' right to direct the religious upbringing of their children. The essential point is that the free exercise right and the parental right are not examined independently and simply added together, but instead are incorporated together to provide a specific bite to the free exercise claim. Part I also examines the lower …


Police And Democracy, David Alan Sklansky Jun 2005

Police And Democracy, David Alan Sklansky

Michigan Law Review

Part I of the Article describes the emergence in postwar America of a particular understanding of a democracy, an understanding generally referred to as "democratic pluralism," "analytic pluralism," "pluralist theory," or simply "pluralism." We will spend a fair bit of time unpacking pluralism, because its fine points will prove important when we turn to the task of tracing its reflections in criminal procedure. That task is taken up in Part II, which examines the ways in which the central tenets of democratic pluralism found echoes in criminal procedure - construed broadly to include not only jurisprudence and legal scholarship but …


The Market For Criminal Justice: Federalism, Crime Control, And Jurisdictional Competition, Doron Teichman Jun 2005

The Market For Criminal Justice: Federalism, Crime Control, And Jurisdictional Competition, Doron Teichman

Michigan Law Review

Part I introduces the concepts of jurisdictional competition and crime displacement and argues that, as a positive matter, a decentralized criminal justice system may create a competitive process among the different units composing it, in which each such unit attempts to divert crime to neighboring communities. Part II then turns to evaluate the normative aspects of jurisdictional competition in the area of criminal justice. In this context I will show that competition can have both advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, the forces of competition might drive jurisdictions to fight crime efficiently, since any jurisdiction that functions inefficiently will suffer …


No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The Cercla Liability Exposure Unfortunately Created By Pre-Acquisition Soil Testing, Jennifer L. Scheller Jun 2005

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The Cercla Liability Exposure Unfortunately Created By Pre-Acquisition Soil Testing, Jennifer L. Scheller

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that CERCLA, as it is currently written, requires courts to hold parties liable for pre-purchase soil investigations that spread or mix contamination because to conclude otherwise would stretch CERCLA beyond its breaking point. Part I argues that both those who order pre-acquisition soil testing and those who conduct the tests are PRPs if the testing spreads existing contamination. Part II argues that the statute does not allow for the judicial creation of a soil testing liability exception. Part III acknowledges the policy problems created by testing liability and advocates a legislative solution to exempt pre-purchase soil testing …


Subdivisions, Standing And The Supremacy Clause: Can A Political Subdivision Sue Its Parent State Under Federal Law, Brian P. Keenan Jun 2005

Subdivisions, Standing And The Supremacy Clause: Can A Political Subdivision Sue Its Parent State Under Federal Law, Brian P. Keenan

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that political subdivisions should be able to seek protection from their parent states under the Supremacy Clause when alleging a conflict between state law and any federal law, be it the Constitution, treaty, or a federal statute. Part I argues that the precedential cases like Hunter and Trenton were limited to the constitutional provisions in question and therefore did not bar all suits under the Supremacy Clause. Part II shows that the issue is one of constitutional protection of political subdivisions, rather than Article III standing, which had a completely different meaning when Hunter and Trenton were …


Was The Frog Prince Sexually Molested?: A Review Of Peter Westen's The Logic Of Consent, Heidi M. Hurd May 2005

Was The Frog Prince Sexually Molested?: A Review Of Peter Westen's The Logic Of Consent, Heidi M. Hurd

Michigan Law Review

Peter Westen's The Logic of Consent is nothing short of a tour de force. In the tradition of the very best and most significant contributions to legal theory, Professor Westen demonstrates that we do not know what we think we know about a capacity that on a daily basis turns trespasses into dinner parties, brutal batteries into football games, rape into lovemaking, and the commercial appropriation of name and likeness into biography. While we all employ claims of consent in everyday moral gossip to absolve some and withhold sympathy from others, and while courts of law across the nation commonly …


The Originalist And Normative Case Against Judicial Activism: A Reply To Professor Randy Barnett, Steven G. Calabresi May 2005

The Originalist And Normative Case Against Judicial Activism: A Reply To Professor Randy Barnett, Steven G. Calabresi

Michigan Law Review

In Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty, Professor Randy E. Barnett lays out a bold defense of the theory of originalism in constitutional interpretation. Professor Barnett's book is perhaps the most important book about originalism since Robert H. Bork's The Tempting of America. Barnett presents a normative case as to why contemporary Americans should agree to be governed by the original meaning of the Constitution, and, like most sophisticated originalists, he nicely distinguishes between original meaning and original intent. Barnett correctly notes that what really matters in constitutional interpretation is not what the Framers intended that provision …


Addressing Imperfections In The Tax System: Procedural Or Substantive Reform?, Leandra Lederman, Stephen W. Mazza May 2005

Addressing Imperfections In The Tax System: Procedural Or Substantive Reform?, Leandra Lederman, Stephen W. Mazza

Michigan Law Review

Books about tax administration tend to fall into one of two broad categories: those that paint the Internal Revenue Service ("IRS") as an agency peopled by corrupt, out-of-control bureaucrats who take pleasure in seeing innocent taxpayers suffer, and those that tell readers how to structure their affairs to minimize the risk of incurring an IRS employee's wrath during a tax audit. Perfectly Legal, the full title of which communicates David Cay Johnston's intent to focus on the tax system, does neither of those things. Instead, it is a book much like The Great American Tax Dodge, which explained …


Judging The Law Of Politics, Guy-Uriel Charles May 2005

Judging The Law Of Politics, Guy-Uriel Charles

Michigan Law Review

Election law scholars are currently engaged in a vigorous debate regarding the wisdom of judicial supervision of democratic politics. Ever since the Court's 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr, the Court has increasingly supervised a dizzying array of election-related matters. These include the regulation of political parties, access to electoral ballots, partisanship in electoral institutions, the role of race in the design of electoral structures, campaign financing, and the justifications for limiting the franchise. In particular, and as a consequence of the Court's involvement in the 2000 presidential elections in Bush v. Gore, a central task of election …


Is U.S. Ceo Compensation Inefficient Pay Without Performance?, John E. Core, Wayne R. Guay, Randall S. Thompson May 2005

Is U.S. Ceo Compensation Inefficient Pay Without Performance?, John E. Core, Wayne R. Guay, Randall S. Thompson

Michigan Law Review

In Pay Without Performance, Professors Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried develop and summarize the leading critiques of current executive compensation practices in the United States. This book, and their highly influential earlier article, Managerial Power and Rent Extraction in the Design of Executive Compensation, with David Walker offer a negative, if mainstream, assessment of the state of U.S. executive compensation: U.S. executive compensation practices are failing in a widespread manner, and much systemic reform is needed. The purpose of our Review is to summarize the book and to offer some counterarguments to try to balance what is becoming …


Gay Politics And Precedents, Frank B. Cross May 2005

Gay Politics And Precedents, Frank B. Cross

Michigan Law Review

One can find many analyses of the development of gay rights law in America but none are so illuminating as Daniel Pinello's in his book Gay Rights and American Law. More significantly, while it offers a superb understanding of the recent record of gay rights litigation, the book provides a fine-grained and sophisticated understanding of judicial decisionmaking in this important and developing area of the law. Indeed, the value of the book for students of judicial decisionmaking even transcends its value for students of gay rights jurisprudence. Quantitative empirical studies of judicial decisionmaking, well established in political science, have …


Is There A Future For Leniency In The U.S. Criminal Justice System?, Nora V. Demleitner May 2005

Is There A Future For Leniency In The U.S. Criminal Justice System?, Nora V. Demleitner

Michigan Law Review

The spring 2004 release of the gruesome pictures of sexual humiliation and torture at Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad revealed how some U.S. troops, intelligence officers, and private contractors treated Iraqi prisoners taken during and after the war. High-ranking government officials may have condoned, if not encouraged, the abuses. Only reluctantly have they agreed to extend protections customarily accorded civilians and military fighters during a war to individuals detained in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Congressional investigations appear to have stalled, military inquiries have been manifold but resultless. Only a handful of low ranking soldiers have been court-martialed, and a …


Caught In The Trap: Pricing Racial Housing Preferences, A. Mechele Dickerson May 2005

Caught In The Trap: Pricing Racial Housing Preferences, A. Mechele Dickerson

Michigan Law Review

In The Two-Income Trap, Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren and business consultant Amelia Warren Tyagi reach a startling conclusion: a two-income middle-class family faces greater financial risks today than a one-income family faced three decades ago. Middle-class families are caught in an "income trap" because they budget based on two incomes and face financial ruin if they lose an income or incur unexpected expenses. The authors suggest that most middle-class families cannot quickly adjust their budgets because their largest monthly expense is the fixed mortgage payment. The parents maintained that they had to allocate a significant portion of …


The Appeal, Alex Kozinski, Alexander Volokh May 2005

The Appeal, Alex Kozinski, Alexander Volokh

Michigan Law Review

Appeal from the United States District Court. Hermann Bendemann, District Judge, Presiding. Argued and Submitted July 3, 1926. Filed May 1, 2005. Before: Alex K., Bucephalus and Godot, Circuit Judges. Opinion by Judge Alex K.


Rule-Oriented Realism, Emily Sherwin May 2005

Rule-Oriented Realism, Emily Sherwin

Michigan Law Review

In his new book The Law and Ethics of Restitution, Hanoch Dagan undertakes to explain and justify the American law of restitution. He offers a broad theoretical account of this poorly understood subject, designed not only to fortify the substantive law of restitution but also to clarify the role and methodology of courts in developing the field. Dagan's book also provides lively discussion of the role of restitution in some of the most highly publicized legal developments of recent years. Those who think of restitution as an obscure branch of "legal remedies" may be surprised to read about the …


Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens And Alien Citizens, Leti Volpp May 2005

Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens And Alien Citizens, Leti Volpp

Michigan Law Review

America is a nation of immigrants, according to our national narrative. This is the America with its gates open to the world, as well as the America of the melting pot. Underpinning this national narrative is a very particular story of immigration that foregrounds the inclusion of immigrants, rather than their exclusion. Highlighted in this story is the period before 1924, of relatively unfettered European immigration, and the period after 1965, post the lifting of national origins quotas. Also underlying this national narrative is a particular story about what happens once immigrants enter. In this story the immigrant traverses smoothly …


Theory Wars In The Conflict Of Laws, Louise Weinberg May 2005

Theory Wars In The Conflict Of Laws, Louise Weinberg

Michigan Law Review

Fifty years ago, at the height of modernism in all things, there was a great revolution in American choice-of-law theory. You cannot understand what is going on in the field of conflict of laws today without coming to grips with this central fact. With this revolution, the old formalistic way of choosing law was dethroned, and has occupied a humble position on the sidelines ever since. Yet there has been no lasting peace. The American conflicts revolution is still happening, and poor results are still frustrating good intentions. Now comes Dean Symeon Symeonides, the author of the choice of- law …


Equality, Objectivity, And Neutrality, Alafair S. Burke May 2005

Equality, Objectivity, And Neutrality, Alafair S. Burke

Michigan Law Review

When is homicide reasonable? That familiar, yet unanswered question continues to intrigue both courts and criminal law scholars, in large part because any response must first address the question, "reasonable to whom?" The standard story about why that threshold question is both difficult and interesting usually involves a juxtaposition of "objective" and "subjective" standards for judging claims of reasonableness. On the one hand, the story goes, is a "subjective" standard of reasonableness under which jurors evaluate the reasonableness of a criminal defendant's beliefs and actions by comparing them to those of a hypothetical reasonable person sharing all of the individual …


Pluralizing International Criminal Justice, Mark A. Drumbl May 2005

Pluralizing International Criminal Justice, Mark A. Drumbl

Michigan Law Review

From Nuremberg to The Hague scours the institutions of international criminal justice in order to examine their legitimacy and effectiveness. This collection of essays is edited by Philippe Sands, an eminent authority on public international law and professor at University College London. The five essays derive from an equal number of public lectures held in London between April and June 2002. The essays - concise and in places informal - carefully avoid legalese and arcania. Taken together, they cover an impressive spectrum of issues. Read individually, however, each essay is ordered around one or two well-tailored themes, thereby ensuring analytic …


National Identity In A Multicultural Nation: The Challenge Of Immigration Law And Immigrants, Kevin R. Johnson, Bill Ong Hing May 2005

National Identity In A Multicultural Nation: The Challenge Of Immigration Law And Immigrants, Kevin R. Johnson, Bill Ong Hing

Michigan Law Review

Samuel Huntington's provocative new book Who Are We?: The Challenges to National Identity is rich with insights about the negative impacts of globalization and the burgeoning estrangement of people and businesses in the United States from a truly American identity. The daunting question posed by the title of the book is well worth asking. After commencing the new millennium with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. military torture of Iraqi prisoners, indefinite detentions of U.S. citizens declared by the President to be "enemy combatants," and a massive domestic "war on terror" that has punished and frightened Arab, Muslim, and other …


Unity And Pluralism In Contract Law, Nathan Oman May 2005

Unity And Pluralism In Contract Law, Nathan Oman

Michigan Law Review

It is a cliché of contemporary legal scholarship that, in the last few decades, the study of law has witnessed a vast proliferation of competing theoretical approaches. The old faith in the careful honing of doctrinal concepts and the essential usefulness of legal analysis has given way to a cacophony of competing theoretical sects. Economists, moral philosophers, sociologists, historians, and others have stepped forward to offer the insights of this or that discipline as a new and superior path to legal enlightenment. Perhaps nowhere has this cliché been truer than in the realm of contracts scholarship, where, for a generation, …


For Whom Does The Bell Toll: The Bell Tolls For Brown?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig May 2005

For Whom Does The Bell Toll: The Bell Tolls For Brown?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Michigan Law Review

Fifty years after the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education, black comedian and philanthropist Dr. Bill Cosby astonished guests at a gala in Washington, D.C., when he stated, "'Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem. (Black people] have got to take the neighborhood back . . . . (Lower economic Blacks] are standing on the comer and they can't speak English.'" Cosby, one of the wealthiest men in the United States, complained about "lower economic" Blacks "not holding up their end in this deal." He then asked the question, "'Well, Brown …


Against Interpretive Supremacy, Saikrishna Prakash, John Yoo May 2005

Against Interpretive Supremacy, Saikrishna Prakash, John Yoo

Michigan Law Review

Many constitutional scholars are obsessed with judicial review and the many questions surrounding it. One perennial favorite is whether the Constitution even authorizes judicial review. Another is whether the other branches of the federal government must obey the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution and what, if anything, the other branches must do to execute the judiciary's judgments. Marbury v. Madison has been a full-employment program for many constitutional law scholars, including ourselves. Larry Kramer, the new Dean of Stanford Law School, shares this passion. He has devoted roughly the last decade of his career, with two lengthy law review …


Deferring, Frederick Schauer May 2005

Deferring, Frederick Schauer

Michigan Law Review

Many academics, upon encountering a book on deference by a leading legal theorist, would assume that the book was still another contribution to a long and prominent debate about the existence (or not) of an obligation to obey the law. But that would be a mistake. In fact, this is a book not about obligation or obedience but about deference, and it is precisely in that difference that the significance of Philip Soper's book lies. Especially in law, where the Supreme Court (sometimes) defers to the factual, legal, and even constitutional determinations of Congress and administrative agencies, where appellate courts …


The Ghost Of Telecommunications Past, Philip J. Weiser May 2005

The Ghost Of Telecommunications Past, Philip J. Weiser

Michigan Law Review

When the canon for the field of information law and policy is developed, Paul Starr's The Creation of the Media will enjoy a hallowed place in it. Like Lawrence Lessig's masterful Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Starr's tour de force explains how policymakers have made a series of "constitutive choices" about how to regulate different information technologies that helped to shape the basic architecture of the information age. In so doing, Starr displays the same literary and analytical skill he used in writing the Pulitzer Prizewinning The Social Transformation of American Medicine, the firsthand experience he gained …


A New Understanding Of Tax, Edward J. Mccaffery Mar 2005

A New Understanding Of Tax, Edward J. Mccaffery

Michigan Law Review

Perhaps we should blame it all on Mill. A great deal and possibly all of the mind-numbing complexity of America's largest and least popular tax follows from the decision to have a progressive personal income tax. Proponents wanted an individual income tax notwithstanding - indeed, in large part because of - such a tax's "double taxation" of savings. This double-tax argument is an analytic point generally attributed to Mill's classic 1848 treatise, Principles of Political Economy. Historically, much of the support for the Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, came from Southern and Midwestern, progressive, agricultural interests, who wanted, in …


Killing The Willing: "Volunteers," Suicide And Competency, John H. Blume Mar 2005

Killing The Willing: "Volunteers," Suicide And Competency, John H. Blume

Michigan Law Review

When my client Robert South decided to waive his appeals so that his death sentence could be carried out, I understood why he might make that choice. Robert had a brain tumor that could not be surgically removed. Though not fatal, the tumor disrupted his sleep/wake cycle and had other negative physical consequences, including severe headaches, for his daily existence. He also had chronic post-traumatic stress disorder ("PTSD"), resulting from a profound history of childhood physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Robert suffered from daily recurrent flashbacks of the abuse. He had been on death row for almost a decade, and …


There Is Always A Need: The "Necessity Doctrine" And Class Certification Against Government Agencies, Daniel Tenny Mar 2005

There Is Always A Need: The "Necessity Doctrine" And Class Certification Against Government Agencies, Daniel Tenny

Michigan Law Review

On its face, Rule 23(b)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure seems tailor-made for lawsuits against government. Rule 23(b)(2) allows a class action when "the party opposing the class has acted or refused to act on grounds generally applicable to the class, thereby making appropriate final injunctive relief or corresponding declaratory relief with respect to the class as a whole." This situation arises frequently in people's dealings with government agencies: recipients of public benefits and consumers using public utilities, for example, constitute large groups of people all subject to identical government policies who might seek injunctive relief. Litigants attempting …