Law Commons^™

District Court En Bancs, Maggie Gardner

Fordham Law Review

Despite the image of the solitary federal district judge, there is a long but quiet history of federal district courts deciding cases en banc. District court en bancs predate the development of en banc rehearings by the federal courts of appeals and have been used to address some of the most pressing issues before federal courts over the last one hundred years: Prohibition prosecutions, bankruptcies during the Great Depression, labor unrest in the 1940s, protracted desegregation cases, asbestos litigation, and the constitutionality of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, to name a few. This Article gathers more than 140 examples of voluntary …

Returning To The Statutory Text: Why The Language Of Section 13(B) Requires Courts To Narrowly Construe The Ftc’S Ability To Obtain Injunctive Relief, Christopher Halm

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) enforces over 70 laws in the areas of antitrust and consumer protection, and one valuable tool to support their enforcement is Section 13(b) of the Federal Trade Commission Act (“Section 13(b)”). Section 13(b), among other features, grants the FTC authority to seek an injunction in district court against any defendant that is “about to violate” one or more of those laws. For the past three decades, courts have adopted a permissive judicial interpretation of that language, authorizing injunctions against defendants when the allegedly impending violations were only “likely to recur” based on past misconduct. This …

How Experts Have Dominated The Neuroscience Narrative In Criminal Cases For Twelve Decades: A Warning For The Future, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

Phineas Gage, the man who survived impalement by a rod through his head in 1848, is considered “one of the great medical curiosities of all time.” While expert accounts of Gage's post-accident personality changes are often wildly damning and distorted, recent research shows that Gage mostly thrived, despite his trauma. Studying past cases such as Gage’s helps us imagine—and prepare for—a future of law and neuroscience in which scientific debates over the brain’s functions remain fiery, and experts divisively control how we characterize brain-injured defendants.

This Article examines how experts have long dominated the neuroscience narrative in U.S. criminal cases, …

Free-Ing Criminal Justice, I. Bennett Capers

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Aba Model Rule 8.4(G), Discriminatory Speech, And The First Amendment, Bruce A. Green, Rebecca Roiphe

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Are The Federal Rules Of Evidence Unconstitutional?, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

The Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) rest on an unacceptably shaky constitutional foundation. Unlike other regimes of federal rulemaking—for Civil Procedure, for Criminal Procedure, and for Appellate Procedure—the FRE rulemaking process contemplated by the Rules Enabling Act is both formally and functionally defective because Congress enacted the FRE as a statute first but purports to permit the Supreme Court to revise, repeal, and amend those laws over time, operating as a kind of supercharged administrative agency with the authority to countermand congressional statutes. Formally, this system violates the constitutionally-delineated separation of powers as announced in Chadha, Clinton, and the non-delegation …

Can The Fourth Amendment Keep People "Secure In Their Persons"?, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.