Law Commons^™

Judging And Baseball, Merritt E. Mcalister

UF Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Judicial Impartiality In A Partisan Era, Cassandra Burke Robertson

Florida Law Review

Judicial legitimacy rests on the perception of judicial impartiality. As a partisan gulf widens among the American public, however, there is a growing skepticism of the judiciary’s neutrality on politically sensitive topics. Hardening partisan identities mean that there is less middle ground on political issues and less cooperation among those with differing political views. As a result, the public increasingly scrutinizes judges and judicial candidates for signs of political agreement, distrusting those perceived to support the opposing political party.

Judges themselves are not immune to these political forces. In spite of a strong judicial identity that demands impartiality and judicial …

Judging Implicit Bias: A National Empirical Study Of Judicial Stereotypes, Justin D. Levinson, Mark W. Bennett, Koichi Hioki

Florida Law Review

American judges, and especially lifetime-appointed federal judges, are often revered as the pinnacle of objectivity, possessing a deep commitment to fairness, and driven to seek justice as they interpret federal laws and the U.S. Constitution. As these judges struggle with some of the great challenges of the modern legal world, empirical scholars must seek to fully understand the role of implicit bias in judicial decision-making. Research from the field of implicit social cognition has long documented negative implicit biases towards a wide range of group members, some of whom may well be harmed in various ways across the legal system. …

Underinclusivity And The First Amendment: The Legislative Right To Nibble At Problems After Williams-Yulee, Clay Calvert

UF Law Faculty Publications

Using the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 opinion in Williams-Yulee v. Florida Bar as an analytical springboard, this Article examines the slipperiness — and sometimes fatalness — of the underinclusiveness doctrine in First Amendment free-speech jurisprudence. The doctrine allows lawmakers, at least in some instances, to take incremental, step-by-step measures to address harms caused by speech, rather than requiring an all-out, blanket-coverage approach. Yet, if the legislative tack taken is too small to ameliorate the harm that animates a state’s alleged regulatory interest, it could doom the statute for failing to directly advance it. In brief, the doctrine of underinclusivity requires …

Expertise And Opinion Assignment On The Courts Of Appeals: A Preliminary Investigation, Jonathan Remy Nash

Florida Law Review

This Article examines the role of expertise in judicial opinion assignment and offers four contributions: First, this Article develops a general theory of opinion assignment on multimember courts. Second, this Article uses that theory to predict how expertise might influence opinion assignment. Third, because the theory advanced in this Article suggests that the courts of appeals are far more likely to witness experience-based opinion assignment than is the Supreme Court, this Article contributes to an understanding of opinion assignment practices in this understudied area. Fourth, this Article identifies two settings in which the theory this Article advances should have observable …

The Dimensions Of Judicial Impartiality, Charles Gardner Geyh

Florida Law Review

Scholars have traditionally analyzed judicial impartiality piecemeal, in disconnected debates on discrete topics. As a consequence, current understandings of judicial impartiality are balkanized and muddled. This Article seeks to reconceptualize judicial impartiality comprehensively, across contexts. In an era when “we are all legal realists now,” perfect impartiality—the complete absence of bias or prejudice—is at most an ideal; “impartial enough” has, of necessity, become the realistic goal. Understanding when imperfectly impartial is nonetheless impartial enough is aided by conceptualizing judicial impartiality in three distinct dimensions: a procedural dimension, in which impartiality affords parties a fair hearing; a political dimension, in which …

Judicial Logrolling, F. Andrew Hessick, Jathan P. Mclaughlin

Florida Law Review

In the federal judicial system, multiple judges hear cases on appeal. Although assigning cases to multiple judges provides a number of benefits, it also generates the potential for conflict. Because each judge has his own set of preferences and values, judges on appellate panels often disagree with each other. Judges currently resolve these disagreements by filing separate opinions or drafting compromise opinions. A different way to resolve these disagreements is to allow vote trading across cases. Scholars and judges have condemned this practice, however, and judges have insisted that it does not occur.

This Article argues that the blanket condemnation …

Federalism, Diversity, Equality, And Article Iii Judges: Geography, Identity, And Bias, Sharon E. Rush

UF Law Faculty Publications

Each individual has a background, and that background shapes the individual’s views about life, creating an inevitable form of bias referred to as “experiential bias.” Experiential bias is shaped by many identity traits, including, among others, race, sex, sexual orientation, religion and even geography. The geographic identity of state judges and their potential unfair experiential bias is the common justification for federal court diversity jurisdiction. But experiential bias is inescapable, affecting everyone who's ever had an experience, and is generally not unfair, as demonstrated by most studies regarding the "fairness" justification for diversity jurisdiction. More recently, Justice O’Connor connected racial …

Judges Are (And Ought To Be) Different, Peter D. Webster

Florida Law Review

Scott Hawkins’s Perspective on Judicial Merit Retention in Florida makes a number of important points, one of which in particular warrants emphasis as Florida voters prepare to go to the polls to determine the fate of the justices and appellate judges standing for retention. The role a judge plays in our society is (and ought to be) fundamentally different from that played by a politician or other elected representative. Judges do not (and should not) have a constituency. They do not represent anyone; rather, their sole allegiance must be to the rule of law.

Merit Retention Elections, Joseph W. Little

Florida Law Review

Florida Bar Immediate Past President Scott Hawkins’s law review essay publishes this eye-catching fact: “90% of the participating voters do not understand what the term ‘judicial merit retention’ means.” This ignorance sends a troubling message because merit retention of appellate judges has been the law in Florida since 1976 and three supreme court justices and numerous district court judges are on the November general election ballot. Even worse, Florida voters themselves chose this method to hold appellate judges accountable instead of submitting them to periodic popular elections, which was the rule in Florida for most of its history as a …

How Florida Accepted Merit Retention: Nothing Succeeds Quite Like A Scandal, Martin A. Dyckman

Florida Law Review

The wisdom of selecting judges on merit was slow to take root in the Sunshine State. It had been advocated since the 1940s, first by the Florida State Bar Association and then by the official Florida Bar, but a notoriously malapportioned, rural-dominated legislature was sterile ground. By the mid-1970s, however, circumstances had become ripe—and in a sense pungent—to accomplish in part what had seemed impossible.

The Perspective Of A Junior Circuit Judge On Judicial Modesty, William Pryor Jr.

Florida Law Review

I appreciate the invitation to deliver the Dunwody Lecture this year, and I am grateful that this occasion has allowed me to visit, for the first time, one of the premier law schools in this Circuit and our nation. The Levin College of Law enjoys an excellent reputation for the education of lawyers. It is the alma mater of three judges of our court, and each year top graduates of this college serve our court with distinction as law clerks. I hope this visit will be the first of many to come for me. My topic today is judicial modesty, …

Perspective On Judicial Merit Retention In Florida, Scott G. Hawkins

Florida Law Review

This November, voters will decide whether to retain in office three justices of the Florida Supreme Court and fifteen judges of the district courts of appeal. This Essay explains the merit retention process and puts that process in historical context. It analyzes the challenges voters face in making decisions about whether to retain appellate court judges and highlights The Florida Bar’s role in educating voters about merit retention. The Florida constitution entrusts the important decision whether to retain appellate court judges, including supreme court justices, to the voters, and in order to make that decision, voters must be informed about …

Triangulating Judicial Responsiveness: Automated Content Analysis, Judicial Opinions, And The Methodology Of Legal Scholarship, Chad M. Oldfather, Joseph P. Bockhorst, Brian P. Dimmer

Florida Law Review

The increasing availability of digital versions of court documents, coupled with increases in the power and sophistication of computational methods of textual analysis, promises to enable both the creation of new avenues of scholarly inquiry and the refinement of old ones. This Article advances that project in three respects. First, it examines the potential for automated content analysis to mitigate one of the methodological problems that afflicts both content analysis and traditional legal scholarship—their acceptance on faith of the proposition that judicial opinions accurately report information about the cases they resolve and courts‘ decisional processes. Because automated methods can quickly …

Dissecting Axes Of Subordination: The Need For A Structural Analysis, Darren Lenard Hutchinson

UF Law Faculty Publications

Proceedings of a criminal trial in Dallas, Texas, demonstrate the vulnerability of LGBT individuals to judicial bias. Although the jury convicted the defendant of murdering two gay males, the judge explained his light sentence: "I put prostitutes and gays at about the same level, and I'd be hard put to give somebody life for killing a prostitute . . . had [the victims] not been out there trying to spread AIDS, they'd still be alive today . . . These two guys that got killed wouldn't have been killed if they hadn't been cruising the streets picking up teen-age boys …