Law Commons^™

Putting The Fetus First — Legal Regulation, Motherhood, And Pregnancy, Emma Milne

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The fetus-first mentality advocates that pregnant women and women who could become pregnant should put the needs and well-being of their fetuses before their own. As this Article will illustrate, this popular public perception has pervaded criminal law, impacting responses to women deemed to be the “irresponsible” pregnant woman and so the “bad” mother. The Article considers cases from Alabama and Indiana in the United States and from England in the United Kingdom, providing clear evidence that concerns about the behavior of pregnant women now hang heavily over criminal justice responses to women who experience a negative pregnancy outcome or …

Customer Domination At Work: A New Paradigm For The Sexual Harassment Of Employees By Customers, Einat Albin

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article introduces a novel legal paradigm—customer domination at work—to address the sexual harassment of employees by customers. This new approach challenges the prevailing paradigm, which focuses on the employer-employee binary relationship. I show how, under current Title VII law, the prevailing paradigm leads to a weaker form of employer liability than other instances where employers are liable for the sexual harassment of their employees. The protection for workers is also limited. The same is true of two other legal regimes discussed in the Article: Germany and Britain. More importantly, I argue that the prevailing paradigm precludes a true understanding …

Parallel Justice: Creating Causes Of Action For Mandatory Mediation, Marie A. Failinger

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The American common law system should adopt court-connected mandatory mediation as a parallel system of justice for some cases that are currently not justiciable, such as wrongs caused by constitutionally protected behavior. As evidence that such a system is practical, this Article describes systemic and ethical parallels between court-connected mediation and the rise of the equity courts in medieval England, demonstrating that there are no insurmountable practical objections to the creation of “mediation-only” causes of action. The Article then explores the constitutional concerns surrounding the idea of “mandatory mediation-only” causes of action, using constitutional hate speech and invasion of privacy …

Taking The English Right To Counsel Seriously In American Civil Gideon Litigation, Scott F. Llewellyn, Brian Hawkins

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Courts have rejected a right to counsel for indigent civil litigants under the U.S. Constitution. But in some American states, that right arguably already exists as a matter of common law, albeit derived from centuries-old English common and statutory law. This Article analyzes the viability of arguments for incorporating the old English right to counsel in the twenty-seven American states that continue to recognize old English common and statutory law as a source of binding authority. Such "originalist" arguments may be appealing to judges who are more willing to revive a historically based right than establish a new right based …

The Appropriations Power And Sovereign Immunity, Paul F. Figley, Jay Tidmarsh

Michigan Law Review

Discussions of sovereign immunity assume that the Constitution contains no explicit text regarding sovereign immunity. As a result, arguments about the existence-or nonexistence-of sovereign immunity begin with the English and American common-law doctrines. Exploring political, fiscal, and legal developments in England and the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this Article shows that focusing on common-law developments is misguided. The common-law approach to sovereign immunity ended in the early 1700s. The Bankers' Case (1690- 1700), which is often regarded as the first modern common-law treatment of sovereign immunity, is in fact the last in the line of English …

Legal Fictions In Pierson V. Post, Andrea Mcdowell

Michigan Law Review

American courts and citizens generally take the importance of private property for granted. Scholars have sought to explain its primacy using numerous legal doctrines, including natural law, the Lockean principle of a right to the product of one's labor, Law & Economics theories about the incentives created by property ownership, and the importance of bright line rules. The leading case on the necessity of private property, Pierson v. Post, makes all four of these points. This Article argues that Pierson has been misunderstood. Pierson was in fact a defective torts case that the judges shoe-horned into a property mold …

Same Old, Same Old: Scientific Evidence Past And Present, Edward K. Cheng

Michigan Law Review

For over twenty years, and particularly since the Supreme Court's Daubert decision in 1993, much ink has been spilled debating the problem of scientific evidence in the courts. Are jurors or, in the alternative, judges qualified to assess scientific reliability? Do courts really need to be concerned about "junk science"? What mechanisms can promote better decision making in scientific cases? Even a cursory scan of the literature shows the recent explosion of interest in these issues, precipitating new treatises, hundreds of articles, and countless conferences for judges, practitioners, and academics. To this literature, Professor Tal Golan adds Laws of Men …

Herbert Hart Elucidated, A. W. Brian Simpson

Michigan Law Review

There are a number of good biographies of judges, but very few of individual legal academics; indeed, so far as American legal academics are concerned, the only one of note that comes to mind is William Twining's life of Karl Llewellyn. Llewellyn was, of course, a major figure in the evolution of American law, and his unusual life was a further advantage for his biographer. In this biography, Nicola Lace has taken as her subject an English academic who also had an unusual career, one whose contribution was principally not to the evolution of the English legal system but to …

The United Kingdom Bill Of Rights 1998: The Modernisation Of Rights In The Old World, Clive Walker, Russell L. Weaver

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Into a steadfastly conservative constitutional landscape, the United Kingdom Parliament has now introduced a Bill of Rights, the Human Rights Act of 1998, which takes effect in October 2000. The Act provides for a full catalogue of civil and political rights which are enforceable by the courts. This development raises two questions in evaluating the future of English law. First, does this signify the dawn of a new British radicalism? And second, why has it happened now? In answering these questions in relation to England and Wales, Part I of this Article provides an introduction to the traditional treatment of …

Law's Territory (A History Of Jurisdiction), Richard T. Ford

Michigan Law Review

Pop quiz: New York City. The United Kingdom. The East Bay Area Municipal Utilities District. Kwazulu, South Africa. The Cathedral of Notre Dame. The State of California. Vatican City. Switzerland. The American Embassy in the U.S.S.R. What do the foregoing items have in common? Answer: they are, or were, all territorial jurisdictions. A thesis of this Article is that territorial jurisdictions - the rigidly mapped territories within which formally defined legal powers are exercised by formally organized governmental institutions - are relatively new and intuitively surprising technological developments. New, because until the development of modern cartography, legal authority generally followed …

Revenge For The Condemned, Sara Sun Beale, Paul H. Haagen

Michigan Law Review

A Review of V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868

English Law In The Age Of The Black Death, 1348-1381: A Transformation Of Governance And Law, Daniel B. Kosove

Michigan Law Review

A Review of English Law in the Age of the Black Death, 1348-1381: A Transformation of Governance and Law by Robert C. Palmer

Caught Between Rocks And Hard Places: The Plight Of Reinsurance Intermediaries Under U.S. And English Law, Stephen W. Schwab, Peter G. Gallanis, David E. Mendelsohn, Bradley V. Ritter

Michigan Journal of International Law

Accordingly, Part I of this article provides a review of the role intermediaries have played in the recent spate of insurance company insolvencies and an overview of intermediary rights and duties. Part II then progresses to a discussion of English intermediary law, analyzing how the general English rules apply to intermediaries when a cedent or reinsurer becomes insolvent. Part III addresses the same issues under U.S. law, tracing the most recent statutory developments from their cause and considering their effect on reinsurance transactions. This article concludes with a discussion of how English and U.S. law interact in reinsurance transactions, pointing …

Hail Britannia?: Institutional Investor Behavior Under Limited Regulation, Bernard S. Black, John C. Coffee Jr.

Michigan Law Review

The two authors of this article have been on opposite sides of this debate, but both recognize that no single explanation is complete and that other factors, such as the self-interest of fund managers, the conflicts of interest faced by institutions who want to retain corporate business, cultural forces, collective action problems, and what we can call path dependence- the difficulty of changing the structure and behavior of highly evolved and specialized institutions - have causal roles in explaining shareholder passivity. The central question in research on American corporate governance is how these forces interact to produce the characteristic …

Executive Detention In Time Of War, Richard A. Posner

Michigan Law Review

A Review of In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention Without Trial in Wartime Britain by A.W. Brian Simpson

Strings Attached--Violin Fraud And Other Deceptions, Carla J. Shapreau

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Violin Fraud: Deception, Forgery, Theft, and the Law by Brian W. Harvey

The Emerging International Consensus As To Criminal Procedure Rules, Craig M. Bradley

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article will demonstrate that these general claims, as well as certain observations about specific countries, were, with one significant exception, substantially wrong when they were written. More importantly, due to significant developments in several countries in the years since those reports came out, they are even more wrong now. That is, not only have the U.S. concepts of pre-interrogation warnings to suspects, a search warrant requirement, and the use of an exclusionary remedy to deter police misconduct been widely adopted, but in many cases other countries have gone beyond the U.S. requirements.

From Blackstone To Bentham: Common Law Versus Legislation In Eighteenth-Century Britain, James Oldham

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth Century Britain by David Lieberman

Justice, Mercy, And Late Medieval Governance, Pat Mccune

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Kingship, Law, and Society: Criminal Justice in the Reign of Henry V by Edward Powell

Coordinated Transnational Interaction In Civil Litigation And Arbitration, Peter F. Schlosser

Michigan Journal of International Law

About fifteen years ago, an English shipowner chartered his vessel, the Mareva, to time charterers. After a while, the charterers discontinued payment on the charter and the shipowner instituted court proceedings against them. The plaintiff, concerned about the ability and willingness of the defendants to satisfy an expected judgment, simultaneously applied for a preliminary injunction restraining the defendants from disposing of a subcharter which had been paid into their London bank account. The injunction was granted. Since then, injunctions of this kind have been denominated "Mareva injunctions," although it was the second, rather than the first, case where such an …

Transfers Of Property In Eleventh-Century Norman Law, William John Gallagher

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Transfers of Property in Eleventh-Century Norman Law by Emily Zack Tabuteau

The Beginning Of The Constitutional Era: A Bicentennial Comparative Study Of The American And French Constitutions, Rett R. Ludwikowski

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article is intended only to be introductory. The author is quite aware that the period surrounding the creation of the American Constitution has been profoundly studied; thorough analysis has been provided concerning both the origin and historical development of the American Constitution, as well as the intellectual background of the "founding generation." Characteristically, these studies have focused on the "American constitutional tradition," which means that they have been limited to little more than two centuries of colonial experience. This essay follows a different vein of inquiry. The author's purpose is not to add another article to the numerous works …

Prejudice, Politics, And Proof, Peter Tillers

Michigan Law Review

In the last fifteen years there has been a great resurgence of interest in fundamental theoretical analysis of the nature of factual proof in litigation. Many serious scholars, both in the law school world and outside it, have turned their energies in this direction. William L. Twining, Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, has been a major figure in this growing movement. He recently published a painstaking and scholarly study of Bentham's and Wigmore's theories of evidence, inference, and proof in adjudication. This book is part of Twining's broader, long-term effort to develop a general theoretical framework for …

Freedom Of Speech, Melissa H. Maxman

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Freedom of Speech by Eric Barendt

Crime And The Courts In England 1660-1800, Frank C. Shaw

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800 by J.M. Beattie

Preventative Pretrial Detention And The Failure Of Interest-Balancing Approaches To Due Process, Albert W. Alschuler

Michigan Law Review

This article, echoing Highmore's treatise of 1783, maintains that neither a legitimate nor a very important governmental interest can justify preventive detention in the absence of significant proof of past wrongdoing or an inability to control one's behavior. Both the Supreme Court's neglect of this issue and Congress' similar neglect in the preventive detention provisions of the Federal Bail Reform Act of 1984 reveal the extent to which cost-benefit analysis has captured American law and threatened core concepts of individual dignity.

The article does not oppose all forms of preventive pretrial detention. To the contrary, it recognizes that the detention …

Conscience And The Law: The English Criminal Jury, Robert C. Palmer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Verdict According to Conscience by Thomas Andrew Green

Their Litigious Society, A.W. Brian Simpson

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Whilton Dispute, 1264-1380: A Social-Legal Study of Dispute Settlement in Medieval England by Robert C. Palmer

The Servants, Stephan Landsman

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Barristers' Clerks, the Law's Middlemen by John Flood

The Unnecessary Doctrine Of Necessaries, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that neither the traditional nor the modem necessaries doctrines are justifiable in contemporary society. Part I investigates the practical effects of both the traditional and contemporary necessaries doctrines and demonstrates that neither is an effective mechanism for providing support to a needy spouse. While a more successful support remedy might be devised to replace modem and traditional versions of the necessaries rule, Part II shows that yet another reformulation would not be worthwhile because the theoretical underpinnings of the doctrine are faulty. There is no persuasive evidence to establish the existence of the narrow support problem the …