Law Commons^™

The Institutional Mismatch Of State Civil Courts, Colleen F. Shanahan, Jessica K. Steinberg, Alyx Mark, Anna E. Carpenter

Faculty Scholarship

State civil courts are central institutions in American democracy. Though designed for dispute resolution, these courts function as emergency rooms for social needs in the face of the failure of the legislative and executive branches to disrupt or mitigate inequality. We reconsider national case data to analyze the presence of social needs in state civil cases. We then use original data from courtroom observation and interviews to theorize how state civil courts grapple with the mismatch between the social needs people bring to these courts and their institutional design. This institutional mismatch leads to two roles of state civil courts …

Judges And The Deregulation Of The Lawyer's Monopoly, Jessica K. Steinberg, Anna E. Carpenter, Colleen F. Shanahan, Alyx Mark

Faculty Scholarship

In a revolutionary moment for the legal profession, the deregulation of legal services is taking hold in many parts of the country. Utah and Arizona, for instance, are experimenting with new regulations that permit nonlawyer advocates to play an active role in assisting citizens who may not otherwise have access to legal services. In addition, amendments to the Rules of Professional Conduct in both states, as well as those being contemplated in California, now allow nonlawyers to have a partnership stake in law firms, which may dramatically change the way capital for the delivery of legal services is raised as …

The Keys To The Kingdom: Judges, Pre-Hearing Procedure, And Access To Justice, Colleen F. Shanahan

Faculty Scholarship

Judges see themselves as – and many reforming voices urge them to be – facilitators of access to justice for pro se parties in our state civil and administrative courts. Judges’ roles in pro se access to justice are inextricably linked with procedures and substantive law, yet our understanding of this relationship is limited. Do we change the rules, judicial behavior, or both to help self-represented parties? We have begun to examine this nuanced question in the courtroom, but we have not examined it in a potentially more promising context: pre-hearing motions made outside the courtroom. Outside the courtroom, judges …

Studying The "New" Civil Judges, Anna E. Carpenter, Jessica K. Steinberg, Colleen F. Shanahan, Alyx Mark

Faculty Scholarship

We know very little about the people and institutions that make up the bulk of the United States civil justice system: state judges and state courts. Our understanding of civil justice is based primarily on federal litigation and the decisions of appellate judges. Staggeringly little legal scholarship focuses on state courts and judges. We simply do not know what most judges are doing in their day-to-day courtroom roles or in their roles as institutional actors and managers of civil justice infrastructure. We know little about the factors that shape and influence judicial practices, let alone the consequences of those practices …

Chevron Bias, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

This Article takes a fresh approach to Chevron deference. Chevron requires judges to defer to agency interpretations of statutes and justifies this on a theory of statutory authorization for agencies. This Article, however, points to a pair of constitutional questions about the role of judges – questions that have not yet been adequately asked, let alone answered.

One question concerns independent judgment. Judges have a constitutional office or duty of independent judgment, under which they must exercise their own independent judgment about what the law is. Accordingly, when they defer to agency interpretations of the law, it must be asked …

Trial By Preview, Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

It has been an obsession of modern civil procedure to design ways to reveal more before trial about what will happen during trial. Litigants today, as a matter of course, are made to preview the evidence they will use. This practice is celebrated because standard theory says it should induce the parties to settle; why incur the expenses of trial, if everyone knows what will happen? Rarely noted, however, is one complication: The impact of previewing the evidence is intertwined with how well the parties know their future audience-that is, the judge or the jury who will be the finder …

A Tale Of Two Paradigms: Judicial Review And Judicial Duty, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

What is the role of judges in holding government acts unconstitutional? The conventional paradigm is "judicial review." From this perspective, judges have a distinct power to review statutes and other government acts for their constitutionality. The historical evidence, however, reveals another paradigm, that of judicial duty. From this point of view, presented in my book Law and Judicial Duty, a judge has an office or duty, in all decisions, to exercise judgment in accord with the law of the land. On this understanding, there is no distinct power to review acts for their constitutionality, and what is called "judicial review" …

Romancing The Court, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

Problem-solving courts, created at the end of the 20th century, make court-based solutions central to addressing significant societal problems, such as substance abuse and its impact on criminal activity and family functioning. Yet, lessons gleaned from over 100 years of family court history suggest that court-based solutions to intractable social problems have rarely been effective. This article asks three questions of the problem-solving court movement: What problem are we trying to solve? Is the court the best place to solve the problem? What are the consequences of giving authority to a court for solving the problem? Answering those questions through …

China's Network Justice, Benjamin L. Liebman, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

China's Internet revolution has set off a furious debate in the West. Optimists from Thomas Friedman to Bill Clinton have predicted the crumbling of the Chinese Party-state ("Party-state"), while pessimists suggest even greater state control. But a far less discussed and researched subject is the effect of China's Internet revolution on its domestic institutions. This Article, the product of extensive interviews across China, asks a new and different question. What has China's Internet revolution meant for its legal system? What does cheaper, if not free, speech mean for Chinese judges?

The broader goal of this Article is to better understand …

Law And Judicial Duty, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Two hundred years ago, in Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice Marshall delivered an opinion that has come to dominate modern discussions of constitutional law. Faced with a conflict between an act of Congress and the U.S. Constitution, he explained what today is known as "judicial review." Marshall described judicial review in terms of a particular type of "superior law" and a particular type of "judicial duty." Rather than speak generally about the hierarchy within law, he focused on "written constitutions."

He declared that the U.S. Constitution is "a superior, paramount law" and that if "the constitution is superior to any …

Judicial Auditing, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents a simple framework for analyzing a hierarchical system of judicial auditing. We concentrate on (what we perceive to be) the two principal reasons that courts and/or legislatures tend to scrutinize the decisions of lower echelon actors: imprecision and ideological bias. In comparing these two reasons, we illustrate how each may yield systematically distinct auditing and reversal behaviors. While auditing for imprecision tends to bring about evenhanded review/reversal, auditing for political bias tends to be contingent on the first mover's chosen action. Examples of these tendencies can be found in a number of legal applications, including administrative law, …

Discretion And Judicial Decision: The Elusive Quest For The Fetters That Bind Judges, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

"The Judge as a Legislator" is the subtitle of the third of Benjamin Cardozo's famous lectures on The Nature of the Judicial Process, delivered in 1921. Though emphasizing the restraints under which judges should act, Cardozo nevertheless compares the task of the judge with that of the legislator:

The choice of methods, the appraisement of values, must in the end be guided by like considerations for the one as for the other. Each indeed is legislating within the limits of his competence. No doubt the limits for the judge are narrower. He legislates only between gaps. He fills the open …