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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Adversarial Myth: Appellate Court Extra-Record Factfinding, Brianne J. Gorod Oct 2011

The Adversarial Myth: Appellate Court Extra-Record Factfinding, Brianne J. Gorod

Duke Law Journal

The United States' commitment to adversarial justice is a defining feature of its legal system. Standing doctrine, for example, is supposed to ensure that courts can rely on adverse parties to present the facts courts need to resolve disputes. Although the U.S. legal system generally lives up to this adversarial ideal, it sometimes does not. Appellate courts often look outside the record the parties developed before the trial court, turning instead to their own independent research and to factual claims in amicus briefs. This deviation from the adversarial process is an important respect in which the nation's adversarial commitment is …


Coming Off The Bench: Legal And Policy Implications Of Proposals To Allow Retired Justices To Sit By Designation On The Supreme Court, Lisa T. Mcelroy, Michael C. Dorf Oct 2011

Coming Off The Bench: Legal And Policy Implications Of Proposals To Allow Retired Justices To Sit By Designation On The Supreme Court, Lisa T. Mcelroy, Michael C. Dorf

Duke Law Journal

In the fall of 2010, Senator Patrick Leahy introduced a bill that would have overridden a New Deal-era federal statute forbidding retired Justices from serving by designation on the Supreme Court of the United States. The Leahy bill would have authorized the Court to recall willing retired Justices to substitute for recused Justices. This Article uses the Leahy bill as a springboard for considering a number of important constitutional and policy questions, including whether the possibility of 4-4 splits justifies the substitution of a retired Justice for an active one; whether permitting retired Justices to substitute for recused Justices would …


The Psychology Of Trial Judging, Neil Vidmar Jan 2011

The Psychology Of Trial Judging, Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

Trial court judges play a crucial role in the administration of justice for both criminal and civil matters. Although psychologists have studied juries for many decades, they have paid relatively little attention to judges. Recent writings, however, suggest that there is increasing interest in the psychology of judicial decision making. In this article, I review several selected areas of judicial behavior in which decisions appear to be influenced by psychological dispositions, but I caution that a mature psychology of judging field will need to consider the influence of the bureaucratic court setting in which judges are embedded, judges’ legal training, …


The Conflicted Assumptions Of Modern Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell Jan 2011

The Conflicted Assumptions Of Modern Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

Contribution to Symposium - The Nature of Judicial Authority: A Reflection on Philip Hamburger's Law and Judicial Duty