Law Commons^™

Biden, Bennet, And Bipartisan Federal Judicial Selection, Carl Tobias

University of Colorado Law Review Forum

No abstract provided.

How To (Not) Do Things With Judicial Opinions: Minding The Performative Power Of Facts And Dicta, Mb Beasley

University of Colorado Law Review

"Three generations of imbeciles are enough."l These words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes are some of the most infamous and evocative penned from behind the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States. Beyond the feelings of revulsion reading the opinion causes, the facts that Justice Holmes declared to be true and the dicta he used to bolster the Court's holding in Buck v. Bell helped to create the social world we live in today and continue to affect it. Though previous scholarship has recognized the importance of acknowledging the performative power of words in the legal field, little …

The Immigration Court: Zigzagging On The Road To Judicial Independence, Mimi Tsankov

University of Colorado Law Review

The Article will begin by outlining the basic structure of the existing system and identifying some of the key changes that have impacted IJs (Immigation Judges) on the bench, which have driven us to a moment in history that many argue is our most tenuous. Part I will offer a brief overview of our court structure for context. Part II will explain how, after a tumultuous five years, Immigration Courts are currently significantly tarnished such that rehabilitation of the existing system may serve a short-term purpose but will inevitably fail to address the larger, fundamental inequities that result from a …

Government Falsehoods, Democratic Harm, And The Constitution, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Getting Real About Procedure: Changing How We Think, Write And Teach About American Civil Procedure, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

Women’S Votes, Women’S Voices, And The Limits Of Criminal Justice Reform, 1911–1950, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

Deriving its vigor from the work of grassroots organizations at the state and local levels, the League of Women Voters (LWV) sought, in the first half of the twentieth century, to provide newly enfranchised women with a political education to strengthen their voice in public affairs. Local branches like the San Francisco Center learned from experience—through practical involvement in a variety of social welfare and criminal justice initiatives. This Article, written for a symposium commemorating the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, assesses the role of LWV leaders in California and especially San Francisco in reforming three aspects of the criminal …

Criminal Law In Crisis, Benjamin Levin

University of Colorado Law Review Forum

In this Essay, I offer a brief account of how the COVID-19 pandemic lays bare the realities and structural flaws of the carceral state. I provide two primary examples or illustrations, but they are not meant to serve as an exhaustive list. Rather, by highlighting these issues, problems, or (perhaps) features, I mean to suggest that this moment of crisis should serve not just as an opportunity to marshal resources to address the pandemic, but also as a chance to address the harsh realities of the U.S. criminal system. Further, my claim isn’t that criminal law is in some way …

The Failure Of The Criminal Procedure Revolution, William T. Pizzi

Publications

No abstract provided.

Pushing The Envelope: Salzberg V. Sciabacucchi And Delaware's Evolving View Of The Internal Affairs Doctrine, Mark J. Loewenstein

Publications

In January, 2020, the Delaware Supreme Court handed down its decision in Salzberg v. Sciabacucchi, upholding a provision in a certificate of incorporation that designated the federal courts as the exclusive jurisdiction for the litigation of claims under the federal Securities Act of 1933. The inclusion of these provisions in Delaware charters and bylaws – often referred to as “Federal Forum Provisions” or FFPs – raised important questions as to the reach of the internal affairs doctrine. This doctrine provides that the jurisdiction of incorporation regulates the internal affairs of its corporations: the relationship among and between the corporate …

#Metoo And Mass Incarceration, Aya Gruber

Publications

This Symposium Guest Editor’s Note is an adapted version of the Introduction to The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration (UC Press 2020). The book examines how American feminists, in the quest to secure women’s protection from domestic violence and rape, often acted as soldiers in the war on crime by emphasizing white female victimhood, expanding the power of police and prosecutors, touting incarceration, and diverting resources toward law enforcement and away from marginalized communities Today, despite deep concerns over racist policing and mass incarceration, many feminists continue to assert that gender crime …

Copyright Arbitrage, Kristelia A. García

Publications

Regulatory arbitrage—defined as the manipulation of regulatory treatment for the purpose of reducing regulatory costs or increasing statutory earnings—is often seen in heavily regulated industries. An increase in the regulatory nature of copyright, coupled with rapid technological advances and evolving consumer preferences, have led to an unprecedented proliferation of regulatory arbitrage in the area of copyright law. This Article offers a new scholarly account of the phenomenon herein referred to as “copyright arbitrage.”

In some cases, copyright arbitrage may work to expose and/or correct for an extant gap or inefficiency in the regulatory regime. In other cases, copyright arbitrage may …

Religious Courts In Secular Jurisdictions: How Jewish And Islamic Courts Adapt To Societal And Legal Norms, Rabea Benhalim

Publications

At first glance, religious courts, especially Sharia courts, seem incompatible with secular, democratic societies. Nevertheless, Jewish and Islamic courts operate in countries like the United States, England, and Israel. Scholarship on these religious courts has primarily focused on whether such religious legal pluralism promotes the value of religious freedom, and if so, whether these secular legal systems should accommodate the continued existence of these courts. This article shifts the inquiry to determine whether religious courts in these environments accommodate litigants’ popular opinions and the secular, procedural, and substantive justice norms of the country in which they are located. This article …

The Use Of Courts To Protect The Environmental Commons, Lakshman Guruswamy

Publications

No abstract provided.

No Longer A Second-Class Class Action? Finding Common Ground In The Debate Over Wage Collective Actions With Best Practices For Litigation And Adjudication, Scott A. Moss, Nantiya Ruan

Publications

Rule 23 class actions include all potential members, if granted certification. For wage claims, 29 U.S.C. § 216(b) allows not class but collective actions covering only those opting in. Courts have practiced Rule 23-style gatekeeping in collective actions – requiring certification motions, which they deny if members lack enough commonality. Our 2012 article argued against this practice. No statute or rule grants judges the § 216(b) gatekeeping power early cases assumed, and with good reason: opt-in reduces the agency problems justifying Rule 23 gatekeeping; and Congress passed § 216(b) as not a stricter, opt-in form of class action, but liberalized …

Commentary, Improving The Quality And Consistency Of Copyright Infringement Analysis In Music, Kristelia A. García

Publications

No abstract provided.

Preclusion Law As A Model For National Injunctions, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

Celebrating Mundane Conflict, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

This Article interrogates the dominant conception of conflict and challenges the narrative of conflict as hard, difficult and painful to engage. The Article reveals two primary framing errors that cause one to misperceive how ubiquitous and ordinary is conflict. The first error is to misperceive conflict as categorical — something either is a conflict or it is not. People make that error as a way of trying to avoid conflict. People falsely hope that there might be a category of “not conflict,” like disagreements, that will be easier to navigate. The second error is to misperceive the world and individuals …

The Disruptive Neuroscience Of Judicial Choice, Anna Spain Bradley

Publications

Scholars of judicial behavior overwhelmingly substantiate the historical presumption that most judges act impartially and independent most of the time. The reality of human behavior, however, says otherwise. Drawing upon untapped evidence from neuroscience, this Article provides a comprehensive evaluation of how bias, emotion, and empathy—all central to human decision-making—are inevitable in judicial choice. The Article offers three novel neuroscientific insights that explain why this inevitability is so. First, because human cognition associated with decision-making involves multiple, and often intersecting, neural regions and circuits, logic and reason are not separate from bias and emotion in the brain. Second, bias, emotion, …

Character Flaws, Frederic Bloom

Publications

Character evidence doctrine is infected by error. It is riddled with a set of pervasive mistakes and misconceptions—a group of gaffes and glitches involving Rule 404(b)’s “other purposes” (like intent, absence of accident, and plan) that might be called “character flaws.” This Essay identifies and investigates those flaws through the lens of a single, sensational case: United States v. Henthorn. By itself, Henthorn is a tale worth telling—an astonishing story of danger and deceit, malice and murder. But Henthorn is more than just a stunning story. It is also an example and an opportunity, a chance to consider character …

Dethroning The Hierarchy Of Authority, Amy J. Griffin

Publications

The use of authority in legal argument is constantly evolving—both the types of information deemed authoritative and their degree of authoritativeness—and that evolution has accelerated in recent years with dramatic changes in access to legal information. In contrast, the uncontroversial and ubiquitous “hierarchy of authority” used as the cornerstone for all legal analysis has remained entirely fixed. This article argues that the use of the traditional hierarchy as the dominant model for legal authority is deeply flawed, impeding a deeper understanding of the use of authority in legal argument. Lawyers, judges, and academics all know this, and yet no scholarly …

Class Actions, Civil Rights, And The National Injunction, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

This essay is a response to Professor Samuel Bray’s article proposing a blanket prohibition against injunctions that enjoin a defendant’s conduct with respect to nonparties. He argues that national injunctions are illegitimate under Article III and traditional equity and result in a number of difficulties.

This Response argues, from a normative lens, that Bray’s proposed ban on national injunctions should be rejected. Such a bright-line rule against national injunctions is too blunt an instrument to address the complexity of our tripartite system of government, our pluralistic society and our democracy. Although national injunctions may be imperfect and crude forms of …

Envisioning 100% Access To Justice In Colorado, Daniel M. Taubman, Melissa Hart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Introducing Govinfo: A New Source For Federal Government Documents Online, Erik Beck

Publications

No abstract provided.

"Make Him An Offer He Can't Refuse"-- Mezzanatto Waivers As Lynchpin Of Prosecutorial Overreach, Christopher B. Mueller

Publications

Plea bargaining is the dominant means of disposing of criminal charges in the United States, in both state and federal courts. This administrative mechanism has become a system that is grossly abusive of individual rights, leading to many well-known maladies of the criminal justice system, which include overcharging, overincarceration, convictions on charges that would likely fail at trial, and even conviction of “factually innocent” persons. Instrumental in the abuses of plea bargaining is the so-called Mezzanatto waiver, which takes its name from a 1995 Supreme Court decision that approved the practice of getting defendants to agree that anything they say …

Saving The Public Interest Class Action By Unpacking Theory And Doctrinal Functionality, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

In The Shadows Of Sunlight: The Effects Of Transparency On State Political Campaigns, Abby K. Wood, Douglas M. Spencer

Publications

In recent years, the courts have invalidated a variety of campaign finance laws while simultaneously upholding disclosure requirements. Courts view disclosure as a less-restrictive means to root out corruption while critics claim that disclosure chills speech and deters political participation. Using individual-level contribution data from state elections between 2000 and 2008, we find that the speech-chilling effects of disclosure are negligible. On average, less than one donor per candidate is likely to stop contributing when the public visibility of campaign contributions increases. Moreover, we do not observe heterogeneous effects for small donors or ideological outliers despite an assumption in First …

Colorado Rule Of Evidence 502: Preserving Privilege And Work Product Protection In Discovery, Christopher B. Mueller, Ronald J. Hedges, Lino S. Lipinsky

Publications

No abstract provided.

Prior Consistent Statements: The Dangers Of Misinterpreting Recently Amended Federal Rule Of Evidence 801(D)(1)(B), Laird C. Kirkpatrick, Christopher B. Mueller

Publications

A recent amendment to Federal Rule of Evidence 801(d)(1)(B) expands the situations in which prior consistent statements by testifying witnesses can be used as substantive evidence, and not merely as rehabilitating evidence. In this piece, the Authors argue that the revised rule may mislead judges and lawyers to conclude that prior consistent statements are always usable as substantive evidence when offered to rehabilitate a witness. Nothing could be further from the truth. The intent, although hard to discern on the face of the revised rule, is only to allow substantive use of consistent statements that are otherwise admissible to rehabilitate …

New Hardware And Software Innovations (For Volumetric Modeling), A. Keith Turner

Uncovering the Hidden Resource: Groundwater Law, Hydrology, and Policy in the 1990s (Summer Conference, June 15-17)

19 pages (includes illustrations and maps).

Slides: Wrapping Up The Big Horn Adjudication: Lessons After 38 Years And 20,000 Claims, Ramsey L. Kropf

Innovations in Managing Western Water: New Approaches for Balancing Environmental, Social and Economic Outcomes (Martz Summer Conference, June 11-12)

Presenter: Ramsey L. Kropf, Deputy Solicitor for Water Resources, Office of the Solicitor, U.S. Department of the Interior

34 slides