Law Commons^™

Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied: May A Prisoner's Challenge To Parole Revocation Be Delayed Until The Sentence Is Completed And Then Dismissed As Moot?, Jimmy Gurule

Journal Articles

A preview of Spencer v. Kemna, a 1997 Supreme Court case where a prison inmate challenged the revocation of his parole by the state of Missouri. This case is significant because the inmate initiated his challenge while in prison and continued it after he had served his sentence and was released. Substantial confusion exists in case law regarding whether such a challenge would be considered moot after the inmate had completed serving his or her sentence. At issue is if the “collateral consequences” rule applies to challenges against parole revocations. The Court has ruled that challenges by individuals against their …

Welfare Magnets: The Race For The Top, F. H. Buckley, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

Race to the bottom explanations of welfare policies suggest that the power to set welfare payouts should be assigned to the federal government. Such theories predict that states cut benefits levels when faced with an increased demand for welfare from welfare migrants. This Article's econometric study of the determinants of AFDC payouts finds no evidence that states react in this way. This suggests that states should be accorded the power to curtail welfare payments to new arrivals through residency requirements, an issue left as moot in Anderson v. Green.

Continuity And Rupture In "New Approaches To Comparative Law", Paolo G. Carozza

Journal Articles

In the course of this conference on "new approaches to comparative law;" it has struck me as curious that so little has been said about the "old" approaches to comparative law. In such a self-conscious effort to distinguish ourselves from our predecessors, one would expect at least some articulation of distinctive criteria, if not a full-fledged manifesto of novelty. Giinter Frankenberg gave us three ideal-type identities of the comparative lawyer; David Kennedy boxed up the old approaches in his taxonomical chart. They and others have referred to the expansion of capitalist market economics and liberal democratic political structures as the …

On Living One Way In Town And Another Way At Home, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The title of this Lecture is from Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The occasion for the proposition is when the smalltown southern gentleman-lawyer Atticus Finch is given an opportunity to lie to protect his son from harm. He refuses. He says that the most important thing he has for his son is not protection but integrity. He says, "I can't live one way in town and another way in my home. "

The separation of town from home is an old one in the history of lawyers in America. When you trace the nineteenth-century development of legal ethics, …

Is This Appropriate?, Thomas L. Shaffer, Julia B. Meister

Journal Articles

The word "appropriate" is so wildly overused in American culture that, as with other vacuous words and phrases, a person learns to read right through it. "Appropriate" is verbal tofu. This Essay pauses instead of reading through, particularly to notice the instances in which "appropriate" and its negative counterpart are used to give the appearance of a moral or legal judgment.

"Appropriate," chosen to express a legal judgment, is not only vacuous; it is also irresponsible. It catches the legislator, judge, or administrator in the act of passing the buck, as the President did when he ordered the Justice Department …

The Secret Lives Of The Four Horsemen, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

"Outlined against red velvet drapery on the first Monday of October, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Van Devanter, McReynolds, Sutherland, and Butler. They formed the crest of the reactionary cyclone before which yet another progressive statute was swept over the precipice yesterday morning as a packed courtroom of spectators peered up at the bewildering panorama spread across the mahogany bench above." Or so Grantland Rice might have written, had he been a legal realist. For more than two generations scholars …

Property Distribution Physics: The Talisman Of Time And Middle Class Law, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

Should the young professional's spouse get some share in a newly acquired career while the young military officer's will not? Does the division between alimony and property make any sense, given no-fault divorce? Is reimbursement for lost career opportunities plus a share in the couple's tangible property fair compensation for a divorcing spouse? Such difficult questions frame this piece, which will also—and I believe necessarily—digress into the nature of marriage, the duties of parenting, and modern divorce philosophy.