Law Commons^™

Appellate Courts, Historical Facts, And The Civil-Criminal Distinction, Chad M. Oldfather

Vanderbilt Law Review

Among the pieties of our legal system is the notion that appellate courts do not engage in factual evaluation. Murky though the distinction between "fact" and "law" may be,' there is general agreement that somewhere along the fact-law spectrum lies a point beyond which appellate courts ought not venture. Past it exist questions of "historical fact," the "who, when, what, and where" series of questions that we have deemed only juries or trial judges to be capable of answering.

Just as well accepted is the reasoning behind this juridical line in the sand. Simply put, we believe that appellate courts …

"Issue Voting" By Multimember Appellate Courts: A Response To Some Radical Proposals, John M. Rogers

Vanderbilt Law Review

A judge on a multimember appellate court can vote against the result of his or her own reasoning by deferring to a majority on a subissue on which the judge differs. When Justice White did just this in Pennsylvania v. Union Gas,' soon followed by a similarly anomalous vote by Justice Kennedy in Arizona v. Fulminante, I examined the pool of United States Supreme Court cases in which this kind of voting was possible. Out of more than one hundred fifty earlier cases where one or more of the justices might have voted in such a way, only two justices …

Law Reform And Legal Education, Robert E. Keeton

Vanderbilt Law Review

Painfully slow as the mills of law reform grind, they have moved faster in our generation than in most. This appraisal may seem overly generous to our own day when we reflect on the difficulties and delays encountered in achieving some particular reform. But if we measure progress in another way--comparing what has happened in the last dozen years with what happened in other time periods of similar length--differences emerge. The most easily documented difference concerns the performance of appellate courts of last resort in reforming private law by candidly overruling precedents. In the last dozen years, there have been …