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Full-Text Articles in Law

Redefining Reproductive Rights And Justice, Leah Litman May 2020

Redefining Reproductive Rights And Justice, Leah Litman

Michigan Law Review

Review of Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories edited by Melissa Murray, Katherine Shaw, and Reva B. Siegel.


Small Crimes, Big Injustices, Stephanos Bibas Jan 2019

Small Crimes, Big Injustices, Stephanos Bibas

Michigan Law Review

Review of Alexandra Natapoff's Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal.


Which Radicals?, Cass R. Sunstein Jan 2019

Which Radicals?, Cass R. Sunstein

Michigan Law Review

Review of Jeremy McCarter's Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals.


Who Is Responsible For The Stealth Assault On Civil Rights?, Samuel R. Bagenstos Apr 2016

Who Is Responsible For The Stealth Assault On Civil Rights?, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Michigan Law Review

Staszak’s book does a great service in demonstrating the extent of the stealth assault on civil-rights litigation. As Staszak shows, procedural and remedial decisions fly under the public’s radar, but they have exceptionally important consequences. Indeed, one can draw a clear line between judicial decisions on such obscure topics as standing and qualified immunity and the persistent acts of police misconduct that have aroused great public concern in recent months. Any effort to ensure that civil-rights protections make a concrete difference in people’s lives must attend to the procedural and remedial issues Staszak discusses.


Criminal Justice, Local Democracy, And Constitutional Rights, Stephen J. Schulhofer Apr 2013

Criminal Justice, Local Democracy, And Constitutional Rights, Stephen J. Schulhofer

Michigan Law Review

Universally admired, and viewed with great affection, even love, by all who knew him, Harvard law professor Bill Stuntz died in March 2011 at the age of fifty-two, after a long, courageous battle with debilitating back pain and then insurmountable cancer. In a career that deserved to be much longer, Stuntz produced dozens of major articles on criminal law and procedure. He was a leader in carrying forward the work of scholars who had analyzed criminal justice through the lens of economic analysis, and he added his own distinctive dimension by insisting on the importance of political incentives, with their …


Rights Lawyer Essentialism And The Next Generation Of Rights Critics, Alan K. Chen Apr 2013

Rights Lawyer Essentialism And The Next Generation Of Rights Critics, Alan K. Chen

Michigan Law Review

Richard Thompson Ford does not care much for the current state of civil rights. In his provocative new book, Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality, Ford lends an original, if often misdirected, voice to the chorus of contemporary critics of the American legal regime of rights. Situating himself among "second generation" rights critics (p. 259), Ford lays out a comprehensive indictment of current approaches to civil rights litigation as well as civil rights activism. His work is both intriguing and provocative, and it raises a number of issues that are surely worth serious consideration and discussion. …


Facades Of Justice, Norman W. Spaulding Apr 2012

Facades Of Justice, Norman W. Spaulding

Michigan Law Review

Representing Justice is a book of encyclopedic proportions on the iconography of justice and the organization of space in which adjudication occurs. Professors Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis have gathered a provocative array of images, ranging from the scales of the Babylonian god Shamash-"judge of heaven and earth"-on a 4,200-year-old seal (pp. 18- 19 & fig. 23), and a 600-year-old painting of Saint Michael weighing the souls at the Last Judgment with sword and scales in hand (p. 23 fig. 25) to the tiny Cook County Courthouse in Grand Marais, Minnesota, 110 miles north of Duluth (p. 372 fig. 226), …


Agency And Equity: Why Do We Blame Clients For Their Lawyers' Mistakes, Adam Liptak Apr 2012

Agency And Equity: Why Do We Blame Clients For Their Lawyers' Mistakes, Adam Liptak

Michigan Law Review

If you were to ask a child whether it would be fair to execute a prisoner because his lawyer had made a mistake, the answer would be no. You might even get a look suggesting that you had asked a pretty stupid question. But judges treat the issue as a hard one, relying on a theory as casually accepted in criminal justice as it is offensive to principles of moral philosophy. This theory holds that the lawyer is the client's agent. What the agent does binds the principal. But clients and lawyers fit the agency model imperfectly. Agency law is …


Theorizing American Freedom, Anthony O'Rourke Apr 2012

Theorizing American Freedom, Anthony O'Rourke

Michigan Law Review

Some intellectual concepts once central to America's constitutional discourse are, for better and worse, no longer part of our political language. These concepts may be so alien to us that they would remain invisible without carefully reexamining the past to challenge the received narratives of America's constitutional development. Should constitutional theorists undertake this kind of historical reexamination? If so, to what extent should they be willing to stray from the disciplinary norms that govern intellectual history? And what normative aims can they reasonably expect to achieve by exploring ideas in our past that are no longer reflected in the Constitution's …


Understanding Pleading Doctrine, A. Benjamin Spencer Oct 2009

Understanding Pleading Doctrine, A. Benjamin Spencer

Michigan Law Review

Where does pleading doctrine, at the federal level, stand today? The Supreme Court's revision of general pleading standards in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly has not left courts and litigants with a clear or precise understanding of what it takes to state a claim that can survive a motion to dismiss. Claimants are required to show "plausible entitlement to relief' by offering enough facts "to raise a right to relief above the speculative level." Translating those admonitions into predictable and consistent guidelines has proven illusory. This Article proposes a descriptive theory that explains the fundaments of contemporary pleading doctrine in …


Classic Revisited: Penal Theory In Paradise Lost, Jillisa Brittan, Richard A. Posner Apr 2007

Classic Revisited: Penal Theory In Paradise Lost, Jillisa Brittan, Richard A. Posner

Michigan Law Review

Milton's great poem can be enjoyed as a supernatural adventure story in the epic tradition-indeed almost as a science-fiction fantasy. An incredibly powerful supernatural figure-call him Father-lives on planet Heaven somewhere in outer space, surrounded by lesser supernatural beings, called Angels. Father begets Son asexually, and declares his intent to give him vice regal authority. Infuriated at Son's being promoted over him, the foremost Angel, L leads a third of the Angels in violent rebellion against Father and Son. At first it seems the rebels will best the loyal Angels. But Father sends in Son to defeat the rebels all …


On Dworkin And Borkin, Tom Lininger Apr 2007

On Dworkin And Borkin, Tom Lininger

Michigan Law Review

This Essay will use Dworkin's and Davis's scholarship as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the Supreme Court nomination process. I argue that while Dworkin's and Davis's books, when read together, expose a significant problem with the current nomination process, a possible solution to this predicament may lie in a change to the judicial code of ethics and the procedural rules for confirmation of judges. My analysis will proceed in four steps. Part I will address Dworkin's arguments. Part II will evaluate the analysis and evidence in Davis's book. Part III will consider an additional variable to which neither …


Meaning's Edge, Love's Priority, Patrick Mckinley Brennan May 2003

Meaning's Edge, Love's Priority, Patrick Mckinley Brennan

Michigan Law Review

The story is told of an American wending his way through the British Museum. Reaching the Rosetta Stone, he reached right over the railing, touched the scarred slab, and lamented: "It doesn't feel meaningful." Whereupon an old Briton was heard to mumble: "The poor American's got this old thing confused with the Blarney Stone." A bully presses his case, but meaning is much more modest. Powerless to insist upon itself, meaning lies in wait of discovery. What distinguishes the Rosetta Stone from other rocks of the same kind and size is that it was someone's - or rather a group's …


Farewell To An Idea? Ideology In Legal Theory, David Charny Jan 1999

Farewell To An Idea? Ideology In Legal Theory, David Charny

Michigan Law Review

In 1956, Morocco inaugurated a constitutional democratic polity on the Western model. Elections were to be held, and political parties formed, with voters to be registered by party. The Berbers, however, did not join the parties as individual voters. Each Berber clan joined their chosen party as a unit. To consecrate (or, perhaps, to accomplish) the clan's choice, a bullock was sacrificed. These sacrificial rites offer a useful parable about the relationship between law and culture. The social order imposed by law depends crucially on the "culture" of the participants in the system - their habits, dispositions, views of the …


Criminal Procedure, Justice, Ethics, And Zeal, Darryl K. Brown Jun 1998

Criminal Procedure, Justice, Ethics, And Zeal, Darryl K. Brown

Michigan Law Review

William Stuntz's recent article, The Uneasy Relationship Between Criminal Procedure and Criminal Justice, offers a series of thoughtful observations on the reasons that criminal procedure doctrines designed to protect defendants have done so little to improve the criminal justice system. Stuntz's article describes the unintended effects of attempts by the United States Supreme Court to improve criminal justice by closely regulating criminal procedure. That procedural focus has had perverse effects because, in a dynamic criminal justice system, other institutional players have responded to procedural rules in ways that undermine appellate courts' goals. Specifically, legislatures have reacted by expanding substantive criminal …


Retroactive Trials And Justice, Stephan Landsman May 1998

Retroactive Trials And Justice, Stephan Landsman

Michigan Law Review

Seamus Heaney's moving words remind us that we live in an extraordinary time when, at sites of grave injustice ranging from the halls of government of Argentina and South Africa to the killing fields of Bosnia and Rwanda, "The longed-for tidal wave/Of justice can rise up,/And hope and history rhyme." Writers have attempted, in very different ways, to come to terms with the swelling of the tide of justice. For example, the philosopher Alan Rosenbaum, in a recent book about the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, argues that virtually every person implicated in the Nazis' genocidal assault on Europe's Jews …


Review Of Caring For Justice, By Robin West, Michael T. Cahill May 1998

Review Of Caring For Justice, By Robin West, Michael T. Cahill

Michigan Law Review

If the sexes are indeed from different planets, as the title of a recent bestseller informs us, one wonders that those planets were like before their inhabitants made the trek to Earth. Did the citizens of the all-female Venus structure their lives, work, moral commitments, and political systems differently from the males over on Mars? If so, what happened when these cultural worlds collided to form our own? Does our culture represent a synthesis of these two separate systems into a new and better, or perhaps worse, one, or is it the result of one planet's wholesale conquest of the …


Whose Justice? Which Victims?, Lynne Henderson May 1996

Whose Justice? Which Victims?, Lynne Henderson

Michigan Law Review

A Review of George Fletcher, With Justice for Some: Victim's Rights in Criminal Trials


Benign Neglect* Of Racism In The Criminal Justice System, Angela J. Davis May 1996

Benign Neglect* Of Racism In The Criminal Justice System, Angela J. Davis

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Michael Tonry, Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America


The Rooster's Egg: On The Persistence Of Prejudice, Elise M. Bruhl May 1996

The Rooster's Egg: On The Persistence Of Prejudice, Elise M. Bruhl

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Patricia J. Williams, The Roosters' Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice


Transcendental Deconstruction, Transcendent Justice, J. M. Balkin Mar 1994

Transcendental Deconstruction, Transcendent Justice, J. M. Balkin

Michigan Law Review

A meaningful encounter between two parties does not change only the weaker or the stronger party, but both at once. We should expect the same from any encounter between deconstruction and justice. It might be tempting for advocates of deconstruction to hope that deconstruction would offer new insights into problems of justice, or, more boldly, to assert that "the question of justice" can never be the same after the assimilation of deconstructive insights. But, as a deconstructionist myself, I am naturally skeptical of all such blanket pronouncements, even - or perhaps especially - pronouncements about the necessary utility and goodness …


Equality And Partiality, Daniel A. Cohen May 1993

Equality And Partiality, Daniel A. Cohen

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Equality and Partiality by Thomas Nagel


Administering Justice In A Consensus-Based Society, Koichiro Fujikura May 1993

Administering Justice In A Consensus-Based Society, Koichiro Fujikura

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Authority Without Power: Law and the Japanese Paradox by John O. Haley


The Quest For Justice, James S. Fishkin May 1992

The Quest For Justice, James S. Fishkin

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Affirmative Action and Justice: A Philosophical and Constitutional Inquiry by Michel Rosenfeld


Justice, Mercy, And Late Medieval Governance, Pat Mccune May 1991

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


Gender Justice Without Foundations, Marion Smiley May 1991

Gender Justice Without Foundations, Marion Smiley

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Feminism/Postmodernism edited by Linda J. Nicholson and Justice and the Politics of Difference by Iris Marion Young


Criminal Justice In The Lower Courts: A Study In Continuity, Gerald Caplan May 1991

Criminal Justice In The Lower Courts: A Study In Continuity, Gerald Caplan

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Philadelphia, 1800-1880 by Allen Steinberg


Justice, Gender And The Family, Christine A. Pagac May 1990

Justice, Gender And The Family, Christine A. Pagac

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Justice, Gender and the Family by Susan Moller Okin


Just Punishment In An Imperfect World, Stephen J. Schulhofer May 1989

Just Punishment In An Imperfect World, Stephen J. Schulhofer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Questioning Authority: Justice and Criminal Law by David L. Bazelon


And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest For Racial Justice, Kevin Edward Kennedy May 1988

And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest For Racial Justice, Kevin Edward Kennedy

Michigan Law Review

A Review of And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice by Derrick A. Bell