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Full-Text Articles in Law

Select Criminal Law And Procedure Cases From The U.S. Supreme Court's 2018-2019 Term, Eve Brensike Primus, Kristin Froehle Dec 2019

Select Criminal Law And Procedure Cases From The U.S. Supreme Court's 2018-2019 Term, Eve Brensike Primus, Kristin Froehle

Articles

Although the 2018-19 Term at the Supreme Court did not include any blockbuster rulings like Carpenter v. United States, the Court issued a number of significant criminal law and procedure rulings. It addressed warrantless blood-alcohol testing, the dual-sovereignty doctrine, the right to trial by jury, ineffective assistance of trial counsel, questions of incorporation, prisoners' competence to be executed, permissible methods of execution, and some important statutory interpretation questions. Looking back on the Term, Justice Gorsuch clearly solidified his position as the libertarian "swing" vote in criminal procedure cases. He joined the liberals to uphold a defendant's right to trial …


Spoiler Alert: When The Supreme Court Ruins Your Brief Problem Mid-Semester, Margaret Hannon Sep 2019

Spoiler Alert: When The Supreme Court Ruins Your Brief Problem Mid-Semester, Margaret Hannon

Articles

Partway through the winter 2019 semester,1 the Supreme Court ruined my favorite summary judgment brief problem while my students were working on it. I had decided to use the problem despite the Court granting cert and knowing it was just a matter of time before the Court issued its decision. In this Article, I share some of the lessons that I learned about the risks involved in using a brief problem based on a pending Supreme Court case. I conclude that, while I have not typically set out to base a problem on a pending Supreme Court case, doing so …


How The Boogeyman Saved Brett Kavanaugh, Cathren Page Jul 2019

How The Boogeyman Saved Brett Kavanaugh, Cathren Page

Articles

We love to hate these boogeymen. When the societal narrative creates these invisible boogeymen, people can pour their rage against sexual abuse into these faceless antagonists. At the same time, the enraged survivors and protectors avoid conflicts with family, neighbors, colleagues, and social acquaintances who might actually commit or enable sexual abuse. We can dodge sticky questions regarding how a churchgoer, a judge, or an Ivy Leaguer could have committed a heinous act. The survivors can avoid all the victim-blaming backlash, threats of violence, and invalidation that accompanies reporting a sexual offense. Moreover, having less power on their own, survivors …


Janus's Two Faces, Kate Andrias Jun 2019

Janus's Two Faces, Kate Andrias

Articles

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus is the god of beginnings, transitions, and endings. He is often depicted as having two faces, one looking to the future and one to the past. The Supreme Court’s Janus v AFSCME case of last Term is fittingly named.1 Stunning in its disregard of principles of stare decisis, Janus overruled the forty-yearold precedent Abood v Detroit Board of Education. 2 The Janus decision marks the end of the post–New Deal compromise with respect to public sector unions and the FirstAmendment.Looking to the future, Janus lays the groundwork for further attack on labor rights—as …


Location Tracking And Digital Data: Can Carpenter Build A Stable Privacy Doctrine?, Evan H. Caminker Jun 2019

Location Tracking And Digital Data: Can Carpenter Build A Stable Privacy Doctrine?, Evan H. Caminker

Articles

In Carpenter v United States, the Supreme Court struggled to modernize twentieth-century search and seizure precedents for the “Cyber Age.” Twice previously this decade the Court had tweaked Fourth Amendment doctrine to keep pace with advancing technology, requiring a search warrant before the government can either peruse the contents of a cell phone seized incident to arrest or use a GPS tracker to follow a car’s long-term movements.


Dignity And Civility, Reconsidered, Leah Litman May 2019

Dignity And Civility, Reconsidered, Leah Litman

Articles

People often talk about the Chief Justice, Justice Kagan, and Justice Breyer as the institutionalists on the modern Supreme Court. And that’s true, they are. Those Justices care about the Court as an institution and the Court’s reputation. They do not want people to look at the Court as a set of politicians in robes; and they do not want people to see judges as having ideological or partisan agendas. That is how they think of themselves, and they are willing to make compromises to maintain that image of the Court, and to set aside their personal beliefs in order …


Neglecting Nationalism, Gil Seinfeld May 2019

Neglecting Nationalism, Gil Seinfeld

Articles

Federalism is a system of government that calls for the division of power between a central authority and member states. It is designed to secure benefits that flow from centralization and from devolution, as well as benefits that accrue from a simultaneous commitment to both. A student of modern American federalism, however, might have a very different impression, for significant swaths of the case law and scholarly commentary on the subject neglect the centralizing, nationalist side of the federal balance. This claim may come as a surprise, since it is obviously the case that our national government has become immensely …


New Metrics And The Politics Of Judicial Selection, Jeremy Kidd Jan 2019

New Metrics And The Politics Of Judicial Selection, Jeremy Kidd

Articles

Recent Supreme Court nomination hearings have become increasingly rancorous, revealing the increasing political importance of the judiciary in our system of government. We need to know more about those who are chosen to wield this power, but those being considered have strong incentives to obscure all but the most basic characteristics of integrity, decorum, intellect, and courtesy. One of the most important decisions in our democracy is therefore made with far less information than would be ideal. Only through development of new metrics and refinement of existing metrics can we begin to cut through obfuscation and identify the goals and …


Christian Legislative Prayers And Christian Nationalism, Caroline Mala Corbin Jan 2019

Christian Legislative Prayers And Christian Nationalism, Caroline Mala Corbin

Articles

No abstract provided.


State Constitutional General Welfare Doctrine, Gerald S. Dickinson Jan 2019

State Constitutional General Welfare Doctrine, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

It is black-letter law that the U.S. Supreme Court’s takings doctrine presupposes exercises of eminent domain are in pursuit of valid public uses that require just compensation. But, neither federal doctrine nor the text of the Takings Clause offers any additional constraints. The story of the Supreme Court’s takings jurisprudence is, in other words, incomplete and deserves reexamination. However, the usual protagonists, such as the Supreme Court or federal courts, are not central to this Article’s reexamination. Instead, this Article’s narrative is federalism, its characters are state courts, and its script is state constitutions.

In the post-Kelo v. New London …


The Uncertain Path Of Class Action Law, Sergio J. Campos Jan 2019

The Uncertain Path Of Class Action Law, Sergio J. Campos

Articles

For the past ten terms the Supreme Court has increased its focus on the law of class actions. In doing so, the Court has revised the law to better accord with a view of the class action as an exception to an idealized picture of litigation. This "exceptional" view of the class action has had a profound impact not only on class action law, but on procedural and substantive law in general. However, in the October 2015 term the Court decided three class action cases that support an alternative, 'functional" view of the class action, one that does not view …


Opportunistic Originalism And The Establishment Clause, Caroline Mala Corbin Jan 2019

Opportunistic Originalism And The Establishment Clause, Caroline Mala Corbin

Articles

This Article argues that the Supreme Court's use of originalism is opportunistic because sometimes the Court relies on it, and sometimes it does not. This inconsistency is evident in two recent decisions with significant Establishment Clause consequences: Town of Greece v. Galloway (2014) and Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer (2017). In Town of Greece, the Supreme Court applied an originalist analysis to uphold the government's policy of sponsoring predominantly Christian prayers before town meetings. In Trinity Lutheran Church, the Supreme Court failed to conduct an originalist analysis of direct government funding to churches before ordering a state to award a …