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Full-Text Articles in Law
Should Justices Ever Switch Votes?: Miller V. Albright In Social Choice Perpsective, Maxwell L. Stearns
Should Justices Ever Switch Votes?: Miller V. Albright In Social Choice Perpsective, Maxwell L. Stearns
Faculty Scholarship
This article will consider the implications of a rare, but conceptually significant, phenomenon in Supreme Court decision making. The Supreme Court has occasionally issued opinions in which the justices’ own assessments of the relationships between and among identified dispositive issues, and the votes cast by the individual justices over those issues, demonstrate a logical voting path leading to the dissenting result. In an even rarer group of just three known cases, one or more justices has attempted to avoid the undesirable consequence of a Supreme Court ruling that is in a significant sense at odds with itself by conceding to …
Agency, Equality, And Antidiscrimination Law , Tracy E. Higgins, Laura A. Rosenbury
Agency, Equality, And Antidiscrimination Law , Tracy E. Higgins, Laura A. Rosenbury
Faculty Scholarship
The Supreme Court increasingly has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause as a mandate for the state to treat citizens as if they were equal-as a limitation on the state's ability to draw distinctions on the basis of characteristics such as race and, to a lesser extent, gender. In the context of race, the Court has struck down not only race-specific policies designed to harm the historically oppressed, but race conscious policies designed to foster racial equality. Although in theory the Court has left open the possibility that benign uses of race may be constitutional under some set of facts, in …
Discontinuous Tradition Of Sentencing Discretion: Koon's Failure To Recognize The Reshaping Of Judicial Discretion Under The Guidelines, The, Ian Weinstein
Faculty Scholarship
Can a judge exercise discretion and follow the law? Some think it impossible, seeing discretion as the opposite of law. Others have harmonized the two ideas, viewing discretion as the exercise of judgment according to and within the bounds of the law. Those who decry judicial discretion urge legislatures to enact more specific laws and leave less room for the vice of inconsistent results. Those who defend discretion would channel it to achieve the virtue of individualized justice. The tension between individualization and uniformity in the law is often unnecessarily heightened by an inadequate analysis of judicial discretion. The exercise …
Deterrence And Distribution In The Law Of Takings, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier
Deterrence And Distribution In The Law Of Takings, Michael A. Heller, James E. Krier
Faculty Scholarship
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 …