Law Commons^™

Four Remarkable Ohio Women Lawyers--The Cronise Sisters Of Tiffin, Florence Allen, And Cleveland Law School's "Hard-Boiled Mary'", Arthur R. Landever

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Four Ohio Women blazed the trail. Among the early women lawyers in our state, they overcame resistance from the male bar or the culture of the day to distinguish themselves in the profession. Nettie Cronise was the first woman admitted to the Ohio bar. Her sister Florence followed, several months later. Florence Allen, admitted in 1914, became the nation's preeminent woman judge of her time. Mary Grossman, from Jewish immigrant roots, had a memorable career on the Cleveland Municipal Court. Why did these women choose law despite society's obstacles? What do they have to tell us?

Child Abuse: Should You Report It?, David F. Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article discusses the options under the Code of Professional Responsibility for a domestic relations attorney who acquires confidential or secret information about child abuse by a client.

Method In Jewish Bioethics: An Overview, Dena S. Davis

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This essay introduces the reader to the processes by which Jewish ethical-legal reasoning brings old insights to bear on new problems generated by advances in science and medicine. There are at least four reasons why Jewish legal thinking in this area is important to the wider community of Western legal scholars. First, because the law often strives to consider different religious beliefs, it is important to understand these beliefs, the history of these beliefs, and how they function within their religious community.

Second, Jewish legal thinking is important because representatives of religious traditions frequently serve on policy and law-making bodies. …

John Marshall And The Moral Basis For Judicial Review, David F. Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

During the last two decades, many observers have been disappointed in some of the appointments to the federal bench and in the judicial philosophies some judges have brought with them. But if we turn to the source of our constitutional order, we would find in the example of John Marshall the moral basis for the judicial craft.

The Prevalence Of Social Science In Gay Rights Cases: The Synergistic Influences Of Historical Context, Justificatory Citation, And Dissemination Efforts, Patricia J. Falk

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Disjunctive legal change is often accompanied by a period of frantic activity as the competing forces of stasis and evolution vie for domination. Nowhere is the battle for legal change likely to be more sharply joined than when the findings of modern science, in their varied and multifarious forms, are pitted directly against prevailing moral or societal precepts. One of the latest incarnations of this trend is the battle over the legal recognition of gay "rights." In recent history, the courts have been inundated by gay litigants seeking the rights and protections already afforded other discrete groups within society. In …

Section 1983 Litigation In The Ohio Courts: An Introduction For Ohio Lawyers And Judges, Steven H. Steinglass

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This review of § 1983 litigation in the Ohio courts has three principal goals. First, it provides an introduction to state court § 1983 litigation for Ohio lawyers and judges. Commentators have recognized the importance of state court § 1983 litigation, and the Supreme Court has begun to pay greater attention to state court § 1983 cases. Nonetheless, most § 1983 materials focus on the federal courts. Moreover, the few works addressing litigation of § 1983 claims in state courts either lack an Ohio focus or, where there is such a focus, deal narrowly with specific Ohio issues. This article …

Apostasy And Blasphemy In Pakistan, David F. Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article analyzes how the law against blasphemy has become a weapon against religious minorities in Pakistan. It begins with a brief overview of the constitutional struggle between the forces for religious tolerance and that element of Pakistani society seeking a particularized Islamization of Pakistan's law and culture. The second section of the article explains the manner in which classical Islamic law (the Shari'a) treated apostasy and blasphemy, and how it permitted private acts of religious vengeance to be immune from legal liability. In the final section, I describe how the current law on blasphemy imposes a harsh regime on …

Courts Take Close Look At Adult Use Regs, Alan C. Weinstein

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Regulations imposed on "adult businesses" by state or local government raise serious constitutional issues because the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of expression extends to sexually oriented media. This article provides an update on recent adult business cases dealing with locational restrictions, public indecency laws, licensing requirements, and public health regulations.

Constitutional Impediments To National Health Reform: Tenth Amendment And Spending Power Hurdles, S. Candice Hoke

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article proceeds in four Parts. The first briefly summarizes the approach of each of the pending health reform bills and distills those portions relevant to current Tenth Amendment and Spending Clause analysis. Provisions that would impose on States the financial and administrative responsibility for achieving Federal regulatory objectives or that specify punitive measures to be taken against States choosing not to participate in the cooperative program are critical features for the inquiry. Employing these criteria, the first Part identifies seven distinct and largely novel models of problematic regulatory instructions that warrant more probative analysis.The second Part briefly outlines the …

Absurdity And The Limits Of Literalism: Defining The Absurd Result Principle In Statutory Interpretation, Veronica Dougherty

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The absurd result principle in statutory interpretation provides an exception to the rule that a statute should be interpreted according to its plain meaning. In an age of increasing debate about the proper approach to statutory interpretation, and of increasing emphasis on literal approaches, the absurd result principle poses intriguing challenges to literalism and to theories of interpretation generally.The absurd result principle is extraordinarily powerful. It authorizes a judge to ignore a statute's plain words in order to avoid the outcome those words would require in a particular situation. This is a radical thing; judges are not supposed to rewrite …

Book Review Essay, Urban Politics, The City Liberal, Progressive, And Conservative, W Dennis Keating

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Reviewing Stella M. Capek and John I. Gilderboom, Community Versus Commodity: Tenants and the American City; Richard Edward DeLeon, Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Franscisco; Chis McNickle, To be Mayor of New York: Ethnic Politics in the City; John Hull Mollenkopf, A Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York City Politics.

Lunch With Frank Battisti, David F. Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Memorial tribute to Judge Frank Battisti

Power And Presumptions; Rules And Rhetoric; Institutions And Indian Law, Deborah A. Geier

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This 1994 article explores how unspoken, underlying presumptions shifted in Supreme Court jurisprudence regarding the analysis of tribal sovereignty.

"Life" And "Liberty": Their Original Meaning, Historical Antecedents, And Current Significance In The Debate Over Abortion Rights, Sheldon Gelman

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The legal controversy over abortion has been a dispute about constitutional “liberty.” Constitutional debate has ranged far and wide over questions of natural law, interpretative method, and judicial function, yet liberty remains the focal point. It is widely believed that if abortion and privacy rights derive from anything in the Constitution, they derive from “liberty,” and that if anything in the Constitution tells us how to treat those rights, “liberty” does. Part I outlines the present day controversy over liberty and abortion, including the multiple, conflicting opinions in Casey. Part II examines the phrase “life, liberty, or property,” and the …

Patents In Health Care - Subsidy And Victimisation?, Michael Henry Davis

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In theory, a patent provides a monopoly over a product or a process in return for the disclosure of an inventive discovery. In practice, however, it is an indirect form of government intervention in healthcare which carries enormous calculable costs but whose benefits are entirely a matter of faith. It is ironic that in healthcare of all areas, where the guiding principle is the application of the scientific method, extraordinary investments are made in a system which so far has not been subjected to any scientific test.