Law Commons^™

Disability Rights And The Discourse Of Justice., Samuel Bagenstos

Articles

Although the ADA has changed the built architecture of America and dramatically increased the visibility of disabled people, it has not meaningfully increased disability employment rates. And the statute continues to provoke a backlash. Disability rights advocates and sympathizers offer two principal stories to explain this state of affairs. One, the “lost-bipartisanship” story, asserts that disability rights were once an enterprise broadly endorsed across the political spectrum but that they have fallen prey to the massive rise in partisan polarization in the United States. The other, the “legal-change-outpacing-social- change” story, asserts that the ADA was essentially adopted too soon—that the …

Treating Wrongs As Wrongs: An Expressive Argument For Tort Law, Scott Hershovitz

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The idea that criminal punishment carries a message of condemnation is as commonplace as could be. Indeed, many think that condemnation is the mark of punishment, distinguishing it from other sorts of penalties or burdens. But for all that torts and crimes share in common, nearly no one thinks that tort has similar expressive aims. And that is unfortunate, as the truth is that tort is very much an expressive institution, with messages to send that are different, but no less important, than those conveyed by the criminal law. In this essay, I argue that tort liability expresses the judgment …

Factors In Fairness And Emotion In Online Case Resolution Systems, Youyang Hou, Cliff Lampe, Maximilian Bulinski, J. J. Prescott

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Courts are increasingly adopting online information and communication technology, creating a need to consider the potential consequences of these tools for the justice system. Using survey responses from 209 litigants who had recently used an online case resolution system, we investigate factors that influenced litigants’ experiences of fairness and emotional feelings toward court officials. Our results show that ease of using the online case resolution system, the outcome of the case, and a litigant’s perceptions of procedural justice are positively associated both with whether the litigant views the process as fair and whether the litigant ultimately feels positive emotions toward …

Universalism And Civil Rights (With Notes On Voting Rights After Shelby), Samuel R. Bagenstos

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After the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, voting rights activists proposed a variety of legislative responses. Some proposals sought to move beyond measures that targeted voting discrimination based on race or ethnicity. They instead sought to eliminate certain problematic practices that place too great a burden on voting generally. Responses like these are universalist, because rather than seeking to protect any particular group against discrimination, they formally provide uniform protections to everyone. As Bruce Ackerman shows, voting rights activists confronted a similar set of questions—and at least some of them opted for a universalist approach—during the campaign …

Job's Justice, Arthur J. Jacobson

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The essay proposes that the book of Job offers nothing less than the anticipation and critique of certain elements in the constitution of Athens, as we understand the constitution of Athens in the works of its principal philosophers.

What Does Tort Law Do? What Can It Do?, Scott Hershovitz

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It’s not hard to describe what tort law does. As a first approximation, we might say that tort empowers those who suffer certain sorts of injuries or invasions to seek remedies from those who brought about those injuries or invasions. The challenge is to explain why tort does that, or to explain what tort is trying to do when it does that. After all, it is not obvious that we should have an institution specially concerned with the injuries and invasions that count as torts.

Slavery And The Law In Atlantic Perspective: Jurisdiction, Jurisprudence, And Justice, Rebecca J. Scott

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The four articles in this special issue experiment with an innovative set of questions and a variety of methods in order to push the analysis of slavery and the law into new territory. Their scope is broadly Atlantic, encompassing Suriname and Saint-Domingue/Haiti, New York and New Orleans, port cities and coffee plantations. Each essay deals with named individuals in complex circumstances, conveying their predicaments as fine-grained microhistories rather than as shocking anecdotes. Each author, moreover, demonstrates that the moments when law engaged slavery not only reflected but also influenced larger dynamics of sovereignty and jurisprudence.

Trick Or Treat: The Ethics Of Mediator Manipulation, Jim Coben, Lela P. Love

Articles

Much of what good mediators do can be characterized as “helpful interventions” that assist the parties towards legitimate goals such as a better understanding, a platform for developing options, and (where the parties choose) an agreement or settlement. However, all such “helpful interventions” are inevitably "manipulative," in the sense that the mediator is, often unilaterally, making “moves” with profound impact on the parties’ bargaining. To evaluate the ethics of any individual move, the authors propose asking two questions: 1) does the move further or help a legitimate party or process goal that advances party self-determination in decision-making; and 2) is …

Procedural Injustice: How The Practices And Procedures Of The Child Welfare System Disempower Parents And Why It Matters, Vivek Sankaran, Itzhak Lander

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Many of us appear surprised when families involved in the child protective system do not reunify. A parent’s path to reunification seems straightforward. Upon a finding of neglect, the court prescribes a basic regimen, typically consisting of parenting classes, counseling, drug testing, and a psychological evaluation, that a parent must fulfill prior to having the child returned to his/her custody. If a parent successfully completes these seemingly minimal requirements, the law requires reunification unless the return poses a “substantial risk of harm” to the child. With such high stakes involved, a clearly defined path for success, and the prospect of …

Legal Commitments And Religious Commitments, Jospeh Vining

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In his elegant and accessible new book, Law's Quandary, Steven Smith groups our various senses of what is real for us into ontological families: the mundane; the scientific, including mathematics; and the religious. These supply "lumberyards," as it were, for thought and discussion about the world and action in it. Law itself is not one of them. Those involved in law, as citizens or professionals practicing law or speaking for or about law, are presented in the book as looking out from law to the ontological resources available in the lumberyards he describes.

The Riddle Of Hiram Revels, Richard A. Primus

Articles

In 1870, a black man named Hiram Revels was named to represent Mississippi in the Senate. Senate Democrats objected to seating him and pointed out that the Constitution specifies that no person may be a senator who has not been a citizen of the United States for at least nine years. Before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, the Democrats argued, Revels had not been a citizen on account of the Supreme Court's 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Thus, even if Revels were a citizen in 1870, he had held that status for only two years. …

Authority: An Hommage To Jacques Derrida And Mary Quaintance, Arthur J. Jacobson

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This essay, in a symposium celebrating the publication 25 years ago of Jacques Derrida's "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,'" traces the themes of that work through the struggle between Derrida and his translator, Mary Quaintance, for authority over the translation. In the end, neither wins the struggle: Authorship of the translation - authority - must be ceded to a third. Derrida reacts to this loss of authority by signing the translation, taking responsibility for the translation even when it is the product of forces beyond his control and of decisions he only imperfectly understands. He thus enacts …

Preface To The Justice In Mediation Symposium, Lela P. Love

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No abstract provided.

What They Say At The End: Capital Victims' Families And The Press, Samuel R. Gross, Daniel J. Matheson

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Perhaps the most common complaint by American crime victims and their families is that they are ignored-by the police, by the prosecutors, by the courts and by the press. However true that may be for capital cases in general, there is at least one consistent exception: the great majority of newspaper accounts of executions include at least some description of the reactions of the victims' families and of any surviving victims. It seems to have become an item on the checklist, part of the "who, what, where, when, why, and how" of execution stories. When no family members are available, …

Competing Frameworks For Assessing Contemporary Holocaust-Era Claims, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

There are many angles from which to perceive the contemporary holocaust-era claims. In 1997, Time magazine quoted Elie Wiesel as saying that, [i]f all the money in all the Swiss banks were turned over, it would not bring back the life of one Jewish child. But the money is a symbol. It is part of the story. If you suppress any part of the story, it comes back later, with force and violence.

Wiesel touches on two perspectives: first, what has been described as litigating the holocaust, with all that that implies about the law's questionable capacity to adjudicate issues …

Uncoupling The Law Of Takings, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier

Articles

The law of takings couples together matters that should be treated independently. The conventional view, shared by courts and commentators alike, has been that any takings case can be resolved in one of two ways: either there is a taking and compensation is due, or there is no taking and no compensation is due. These results are fine as long as one holding or the other serves the two central concerns of the Takings Clause - eficiency and justice. But a problem arises when the two purposes behind the law of takings come into cordhct, as they readily might. It …

Making Something Out Of Nothing: The Law Of Takings And Phillips V. Washington Legal Foundation, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier

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Phillips v. Washington Legal Foundation held that interest on principal amounts deposited into IOLTA accounts is the property of the various clients who handed over the money but expressed no view as to whether the Texas IOLTA program worked a taking, or, if it did, whether any compensation was due. The debates among the justices about the meaning of private property, argued in terms of contextual and conceptual severance, are unlikely to prove fruitful. We elaborate a better approach in terms of the underlying purposes of just compensation. We conclude that efficiency and justice are best served by uncoupling matters …

Deterrence And Distribution In The Law Of Takings, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier

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Supreme Court decisions over the last three-quarters of a century have turned the words of the Takings Clause into a secret code that only a momentary majority of the Court is able to understand. The Justices faithfully moor their opinions to the particular terms of the Fifth Amendment, but only by stretching the text beyond recognition. A better approach is to consider the purposes of the Takings Clause, efficiency and justice, and go anew from there. Such a method reveals that in some cases there are good reasons to require payment by the government when it regulates property, but not …

Can Rights, Democracy, And Justice Be Reconciled Through Discourse Theory? Reflections On Habermas's Proceduralist Paradigm Of Law, Michel Rosenfeld

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No abstract provided.

Pragmatism, Pluralism, And Legal Interpretation: Posner's And Rorty's Justice Without Metaphysics Meets Hate Speech, Michel Rosenfeld

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No abstract provided.

Reply To Daniel Polsby (Symposium: The New York Death Penalty In Context), Samuel R. Gross

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I'd like to offer a few words in response to Professor Polsby's articulate, forceful and amusing essay in favor of capital punishment.

Property Rules And Liability Rules: The Cathedral In Another Light, James E. Krier, Stewart J. Schwab

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Ronald Coase's essay on "The Problem of Social Cost" introduced the world to transaction costs, and the introduction laid the foundation for an ongoing cottage industry in law and economics. And of all the law-and-economics scholarship built on Coase's insights, perhaps the most widely known and influential contribution has been Calabresi and Melamed's discussion of what they called "property rules" and "liability rules."' Those rules and the methodology behind them are our subjects here. We have a number of objectives, the most basic of which is to provide a much needed primer for those students, scholars, and lawyers who are …

On The Topology Of Uniform Environmental Standards In A Federal System And Why It Matters (Symposium: Environmental Federalism), James E. Krier

Articles

Uniform standards are much favored among the makers of federal environmental policy in the United States, which is to say, among the members of Congress. By and large-judging at least from the legislation it has enacted-Congress expects the air and water eventually to meet the same minimum levels of quality in every state in the country, and expects each pollution source in any industrial category or subcategory to be controlled just as much as every other such source, notwithstanding the source's location or other peculiar characteristics. There are exceptions to these generalizations, but they are exceptions and not the rule.1 …

State Responses To Task Force Reports On Race And Ethnic Bias In The Courts, Suellyn Scarnecchia

Articles

While several states have embarked on studies of race and ethnic bias in their courts, Minnesota is only the sixth to publish its report to date. As Minnesota joins the ranks of states with published reports, it is worthwhile to assess the impact of the five earlier published reports from other states. Final reports have been published in Michigan (1989), Washington (1990), New York (1991), Florida (1991) and New Jersey (1992). The published reports make findings and provide several specific recommendations for change. This article will review the published findings and recommendations of the task forces and will discuss the …

Social Justice And Fundamental Law: A Comment On Sager's Constitution, Terrance Sandalow

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Professor Sager begins his very interesting paper by identifying what he considers a puzzling phenomenon: the Constitution, as interpreted by courts, is not coextensive with "political justice." "This moral shortfall," as he refers to it, represents not merely a failure of achievement, but a failure of aspiration: as customarily interpreted, the Constitution does not even address the full range of issues that are the subject of political justice. Sager regards that failure as surprising-so surprising that, in his words, it "begs for explanation."'

Autopoiesis And Justice, Michel Rosenfeld

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No abstract provided.

Derrida, Law, Violence And The Paradox Of Justice, Michel Rosenfeld

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No abstract provided.

Suicide And Justice, Arthur J. Jacobson

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No abstract provided.

Gideon V. Wainwright A Quarter-Century Later, Yale Kamisar

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In a brief working paper sent to all conference participants, Professor Burt Neuborne suggested that we might consider several themes, among them "Gideon Celebrated," "Gideon Fulfilled," and "Gideon Betrayed." I think these are useful headings.

Not Beyond Justice: A Reply To Heller And Eisele, Arthur J. Jacobson

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No abstract provided.