Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
- Keyword
-
- Courts (21)
- Supreme Court (15)
- Jurisdiction (14)
- Judges (13)
- International law (12)
-
- Litigation (10)
- Constitutional Law (8)
- Constitutional law (8)
- Extradition (8)
- Criminal law (6)
- Discovery (6)
- Federal courts (6)
- International (6)
- Statutory interpretation (6)
- Abortion (5)
- First Amendment (5)
- Human rights (5)
- Immigration (5)
- Judiciary (5)
- Juries (5)
- Terrorism (5)
- ADR Scholarship (4)
- Arbitration (4)
- Civil procedure (4)
- Constitution (4)
- Contract (4)
- Convention (4)
- Court (4)
- Jurisprudence (4)
- Procedure (4)
Articles 1 - 30 of 181
Full-Text Articles in Law
Trouble’S Bruen: The Lower Courts Respond, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Brannon P. Denning
Trouble’S Bruen: The Lower Courts Respond, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Brannon P. Denning
Scholarly Works
New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n v. Bruen revolutionized the understanding of how Second Amendment cases are to be adjudicated. Rejecting the tiered-scrutiny analysis around which the lower courts had coalesced since the 2008 Heller decision, the Court instructed courts to look to history and tradition after it was determined that state or federal regulations limited activities that fell within the protections afforded by the Second Amendment's text. Justice Thomas's opinion, however, left open significant questions about how the history-and-tradition method is to operate in practice. The Court recently held oral arguments in United States v. Rahimi, in which …
The Right To Trial By Jury Shall Remain Inviolate: Jury Trials In Civil Actions In Georgia’S Courts, David E. Shipley
The Right To Trial By Jury Shall Remain Inviolate: Jury Trials In Civil Actions In Georgia’S Courts, David E. Shipley
Scholarly Works
Trials, though rare, “shape almost every aspect of procedure,” and the jury trial is a distinctive feature of civil litigation in the United States. The Seventh Amendment of the U.S. Constitution ‘preserves’ the right to jury trial “[i]n suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars.” Even though this amendment does not apply to the states, courts in the states “honor the right to the extent it is created in their constitutions or local statutes.”
The Georgia Constitution provides that “[t]he right to trial by jury shall remain inviolate,” and Georgia’s appellate courts have shown …
The Supreme Court’S Hands-Off Approach To Religious Questions In The Era Of Covid-19 And Beyond, Samuel J. Levine
The Supreme Court’S Hands-Off Approach To Religious Questions In The Era Of Covid-19 And Beyond, Samuel J. Levine
Scholarly Works
No abstract provided.
Systemic Risk Of Contract, Tal Kastner
Systemic Risk Of Contract, Tal Kastner
Scholarly Works
Complexity and uncertainty define our world, now more than ever. Scholars and practitioners have celebrated modular contract design as an especially effective tool to manage these challenges. Modularity divides complex structures into relatively discrete, independent components with simple connections. The benefits of this fundamental drafting approach are intuitive. Lawyers divide contracts into sections and provisions to make them easier to understand and reduce uncertainty. Dealmakers constructing complex transactions use portable agreements as building blocks to reduce drafting costs and enable innovation. Little attention, however, has been paid to the risks introduced by modularity in contracts. This Article demonstrates how this …
Requiring What’S Not Required: Circuit Courts Are Disregarding Supreme Court Precedent And Revisiting Officer Inadvertence In Cyberlaw Cases, Michelle Zakarin
Requiring What’S Not Required: Circuit Courts Are Disregarding Supreme Court Precedent And Revisiting Officer Inadvertence In Cyberlaw Cases, Michelle Zakarin
Scholarly Works
As the age of technology has taken this country by surprise and left us with an inability to formally prepare our legal system to incorporate these advances, many courts are forced to adapt by applying pre-technology rules to new technological scenarios. One illustration is the plain view exception to the Fourth Amendment. Recently, the issue of officer inadvertence at the time of the search, a rule that the United States Supreme Court has specifically stated is not required in plain view inquiries, has been revisited in cyber law cases. It could be said that the courts interested in the existence …
The Long Shadow Of United States V. Rosenberg: A Biographical Perspective On The Hon. Irving Robert Kaufman, Rodger D. Citron
The Long Shadow Of United States V. Rosenberg: A Biographical Perspective On The Hon. Irving Robert Kaufman, Rodger D. Citron
Scholarly Works
No abstract provided.
Judicial Consensus: Why The Supreme Court Should Decide Its Cases Unanimously, David Orentlicher
Judicial Consensus: Why The Supreme Court Should Decide Its Cases Unanimously, David Orentlicher
Scholarly Works
Like Congress and other deliberative bodies, the Supreme Court decides its cases by majority vote. If at least five of the nine Justices come to an agreement, their view prevails. But why is that the case? Majority voting for the Court is not spelled out in the Constitution, a federal statute, or Supreme Court rules.
Nor it is obvious that the Court should decide by a majority vote. When the public votes on a ballot measure, it typically makes sense to follow the majority. The general will of the electorate ought to govern. But judicial decisions are not supposed to …
What Did Those Sixteen Justices Say?, Leslie C. Griffin
What Did Those Sixteen Justices Say?, Leslie C. Griffin
Scholarly Works
Everyone is finally noticing that the current Supreme Court is changing its jurisprudence on religious freedom. The commentators are finally paying more attention to the fact that seven of the Court's current Justices were raised Catholic. What role have Catholics played in the Supreme Court's history? This article traces their contributions on religious freedom and civil rights, starting with Chief Justice Taney and ending with Justice Barrett.
Seeking Economic Justice In The Face Of Enduring Racism, Deseriee A. Kennedy
Seeking Economic Justice In The Face Of Enduring Racism, Deseriee A. Kennedy
Scholarly Works
No abstract provided.
The Elastics Of Snap Removal: An Empirical Case Study Of Textualism, Thomas O. Main, Jeffrey W. Stempel, David Mcclure
The Elastics Of Snap Removal: An Empirical Case Study Of Textualism, Thomas O. Main, Jeffrey W. Stempel, David Mcclure
Scholarly Works
This article reports the findings of an empirical study of textualism as applied by federal judges interpreting the statute that permits removal of diversity cases from state to federal court. The “snap removal” provision in the statute is particularly interesting because its application forces judges into one of two interpretive camps—which are fairly extreme versions of textualism and purposivism, respectively. We studied characteristics of cases and judges to find predictors of textualist outcomes. In this article we offer a narrative discussion of key variables and we detail the results of our logistic regression analysis. The most salient predictive variable was …
Talking Back In Court, M. Eve Hanan
What Is The Meaning Of "Plain Meaning", Jeffrey W. Stempel
What Is The Meaning Of "Plain Meaning", Jeffrey W. Stempel
Scholarly Works
The American approach to construing texts (statutes, regulations, contracts and documents generally) stresses decision through determining the “plain meaning” of the document based on the court’s reading of the text. Where the court finds plain meaning on the face of text, it generally refuses to consider additional contextual information or extrinsic evidence of meaning.
Notwithstanding its status as the dominant approach to interpretation, the plain meaning concept has not been well defined or operationalized. Despite judicial confidence in the plain meaning approach, courts have wisely been willing to sidestep it and eschew the rather clear facial meaning of text when …
Hands-Off Religion In The Early Months Of Covid-19, Samuel J. Levine
Hands-Off Religion In The Early Months Of Covid-19, Samuel J. Levine
Scholarly Works
For decades, scholars have documented the United States Supreme Court’s “hands-off approach” to questions of religious practice and belief, pursuant to which the Court has repeatedly declared that judges are precluded from making decisions that require evaluating and determining the substance of religious doctrine. At the same time, many scholars have criticized this approach, for a variety of reasons. The early months of the COVID-19 outbreak brought these issues to the forefront, both directly, in disputes over limitations on religious gatherings due to the virus, and indirectly, as the Supreme Court decided important cases turning on religious doctrine. Taken together, …
Should I Stay Or Should I Go: Student Housing, Remote Instruction, Campus Policies And Covid-19, Patricia E. Salkin, Pamela Ko
Should I Stay Or Should I Go: Student Housing, Remote Instruction, Campus Policies And Covid-19, Patricia E. Salkin, Pamela Ko
Scholarly Works
In March 2020, as the world scrambled to understand and address myriad public health and economic challenges unfolding from the novel coronavirus labeled COVID-19, higher education was forced into a tailspin. This article examines the legal and policy challenges that result from, among other issues, the congregate housing situations existing for on- and off-campus housing at colleges and universities. The legal issues demonstrate federalism at work and include; at the federal level, regulations and guidance from the White House, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Education; at the State level from gubernatorial executive orders, state …
Fines, Fees, And Filing Bankruptcy, Pamela Foohey
Fines, Fees, And Filing Bankruptcy, Pamela Foohey
Scholarly Works
This essay was written in conjunction with the “Court Debt”: Fines, Fees, and Bail, Circa 2020 symposium held during the Association of American Law Schools' 2019 annual meeting. The essay details the extent to which "court debt" -- civil and criminal fines, fees, and interest -- can be dealt with by filing bankruptcy. In short, although filing bankruptcy on balance may help people deal with court debt and other debts, the barriers that people face to filing raise questions about the accessibility of civil courts and suggest that the consumer bankruptcy system itself is yet another place in which race …
Snap Removal: Concept; Cause; Cacophony; And Cure, Jeffrey W. Stempel, Thomas O. Main, David Mcclure
Snap Removal: Concept; Cause; Cacophony; And Cure, Jeffrey W. Stempel, Thomas O. Main, David Mcclure
Scholarly Works
So-called “snap removal” – removal of a case from state to federal court prior to service on a forum state defendant – has divided federal trial courts for 20 years. Recently, panels of the Second, Third and Fifth Circuits have sided with those supporting the tactic even though it conflicts with the general prohibition on removal when the case includes a forum state defendant, a situation historically viewed as eliminating the need to protect the outsider defendant from possible state court hostility.
Consistent with the public policy underlying diversity jurisdiction – availability of a federal forum to protect against defending …
“Remarkable Influence”: The Unexpected Importance Of Justice Scalia’S Deceptively Unanimous And Contested Majority Opinions, Linda L. Berger, Eric C. Nystrom
“Remarkable Influence”: The Unexpected Importance Of Justice Scalia’S Deceptively Unanimous And Contested Majority Opinions, Linda L. Berger, Eric C. Nystrom
Scholarly Works
What constitutes judicial influence and how should it be measured? Curious about the broader role that rhetoric plays in judicial influence over time, we undertook a rhetorical-computational analysis of the 282 majority opinions that Justice Scalia wrote during his 30 years on the Supreme Court. Our analysis is the first to examine the full majority opinion output of a Supreme Court justice using a unique “medium data” approach that combines rhetorical coding with quantitative analysis relying on Shepard’s Citations and LexisNexis headnotes. The resulting study casts doubt on the ability of judicial authors, including Justice Scalia, to control the extent …
Conversion Therapy: A Brief Reflection On The History Of The Practice And Contemporary Regulatory Efforts, Tiffany C. Graham
Conversion Therapy: A Brief Reflection On The History Of The Practice And Contemporary Regulatory Efforts, Tiffany C. Graham
Scholarly Works
No abstract provided.
Defining Law, Tal Kastner
Defining Law, Tal Kastner
Scholarly Works
Commenting on Chaim Saiman’s book, Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law, this essay views the difficulty of defining halakha as indicative of the universal challenge of defining the bounds of what constitutes “law.” Considering the dynamic of contingent norms, social context, history, and narrative that shapes the meaning of law, it focuses on a series of decisions by a federal district court judge in connection with the case of Bayless v. United States (1996) involving the sufficiency of reasonable suspicion to justify a police stop. Tracing the slippage in this case between holding and dicta, among other sources of authority …
Justice As Fair Division, Ian C. Bartrum
Justice As Fair Division, Ian C. Bartrum
Scholarly Works
The current hyperpoliticization of the Court grows out of a feedback loop between politicized appointments and politicized decision-making. This Article suggests a change in the internal procedures by which the Court hears and decides particular cases. A three-Justice panel hears and decides each case. Appeal to an en banc sitting of the entire Court would require a unanimous vote of all non-recused Justices. This Article explores several possible approaches in selecting the three-Justice panel. This Article proposes that applying a fair division scheme to the Court's decision-making process might act to reverse this loop and work to depoliticize the Court …
Invisible Adjudication In The U.S. Courts Of Appeals, Michael Kagan, Rebecca Gill, Fatma Marouf
Invisible Adjudication In The U.S. Courts Of Appeals, Michael Kagan, Rebecca Gill, Fatma Marouf
Scholarly Works
Non-precedent decisions are the norm in federal appellate courts, and are seen by judges as a practical necessity given the size of their dockets. Yet the system has always been plagued by doubts. If only some decisions are designated to be precedents, questions arise about whether courts might be acting arbitrarily in other cases. Such doubts have been overcome in part because nominally unpublished decisions are available through standard legal research databases. This creates the appearance of transparency, mitigating concerns that courts may be acting arbitrarily. But what if this appearance is an illusion? This Article reports empirical data drawn …
Short-Circuiting The New Major Questions Doctrine, Kent H. Barnett, Christopher J. Walker
Short-Circuiting The New Major Questions Doctrine, Kent H. Barnett, Christopher J. Walker
Scholarly Works
In Minor Courts, Major Questions, Michael Coenen and Seth Davis advance perhaps the most provocative proposal to date to address the new major questions doctrine articulated in King v. Burwell. They argue that the Supreme Court alone should identify “major questions” that deprive agencies of interpretive primacy, prohibiting the doctrine’s use in the lower courts. Although we agree that the Court provided little guidance about the doctrine’s scope in King v. Burwell, we are unpersuaded that the solution to this lack of guidance is to limit its doctrinal development to one court that hears fewer than eighty cases per year. …
Judicial Federalism In The European Union, Michael Wells
Judicial Federalism In The European Union, Michael Wells
Scholarly Works
This article compares European Union judicial federalism with the American version. Its thesis is that the European Union’s long-term goal of political integration probably cannot be achieved without strengthening its rudimentary judicial institutions. On the one hand, the EU is a federal system in which judicial power is divided between EU courts, of which there are only three, and the well-entrenched and longstanding member state court systems. On the other hand, both the preamble and Article 1 of the Treaty of Europe state that an aim of the European Union is “creating an ever closer union among the peoples of …
Jury Simulation Goals, Jonathan J. Koehler, John B. Meixner Jr.
Jury Simulation Goals, Jonathan J. Koehler, John B. Meixner Jr.
Scholarly Works
What are the goals that researchers who conduct jury simulations have or should have? Drawing on Pennington and Hastie (1981), we identify three primary goals: (1) develop theory, (2) describe how juries perform, and (3) improve the jury process. Where basic theory matters most, studies should be designed in ways that stress internal validity. Where describing the behaviors of real juries or persuading policy makers about changes that should be made, studies should focus on external and ecological validity as well. We urge researchers who are interested in describing jury behavior and improving the jury process to conduct ecologically valid …
Which Supreme Court Cases Influenced Recent Supreme Court Ip Decisions? A Citation Study, Joseph S. Miller
Which Supreme Court Cases Influenced Recent Supreme Court Ip Decisions? A Citation Study, Joseph S. Miller
Scholarly Works
The U.S. Supreme Court has decided an increasing number of intellectual property cases — especially patent cases — over the last several terms. Which prior cases influence the stated reasoning in these recent Supreme Court IP cases? A handful of citation studies of supreme courts in the U.S., both state and federal, conducted over the last 40 years suggest that the Court would most often cite its own prior cases; that it would cite its more recent cases more often than its older cases; and that a small number of its prior cases would receive a large share of the …
Telling Stories In The Supreme Court: Voices Briefs And The Role Of Democracy In Constitutional Deliberation, Linda H. Edwards
Telling Stories In The Supreme Court: Voices Briefs And The Role Of Democracy In Constitutional Deliberation, Linda H. Edwards
Scholarly Works
On January 4, 2016, over 112 women lawyers, law professors, and former judges told the world that they had had an abortion. In a daring amicus brief that captured national media attention, the women “came out” to their clients; to the lawyers with or against whom they practice; to the judges before whom they appear; and to the Justices of the Supreme Court.
The past three years have seen an explosion of such “voices briefs,” 16 in Obergefell and 17 in Whole Woman’s Health. The briefs can be powerful, but their use is controversial. They tell the stories of non-parties—strangers …
The Use And Abuse Of Mutual-Support Programs In Drug Courts, Sara Gordon
The Use And Abuse Of Mutual-Support Programs In Drug Courts, Sara Gordon
Scholarly Works
There is a large gap between what we know about the disease of addiction and its appropriate treatment, and the treatment received by individuals who are ordered into treatment as a condition of participation in drug court. Most medical professionals are not appropriately trained about addiction and most addiction treatment providers do not have the education and training necessary to provide appropriate evidence-based services to individuals who are referred by drug courts for addiction treatment. This disconnect between our understanding of addiction and available addiction treatment has wide-reaching impact for individuals who attempt to receive medical care for addiction in …
Standing For (And Up To) Separation Of Powers, Kent H. Barnett
Standing For (And Up To) Separation Of Powers, Kent H. Barnett
Scholarly Works
The U.S. Constitution requires federal agencies to comply with separation-of-powers (or structural) safeguards, such as by obtaining valid appointments, exercising certain limited powers, and being sufficiently subject to the President’s control. Who can best protect these safeguards? A growing number of scholars call for allowing only the political branches — Congress and the President — to defend them. These scholars would limit or end judicial review because private judicial challenges are aberrant to justiciability doctrine and lead courts to meddle in minor matters that rarely effect regulatory outcomes.
This Article defends the right of private parties to assert justiciable structural …
An Empirical Research Agenda For The Forensic Sciences, Jonathan J. Koehler, John B. Meixner Jr.
An Empirical Research Agenda For The Forensic Sciences, Jonathan J. Koehler, John B. Meixner Jr.
Scholarly Works
After the National Academy of Sciences issued a stunning report in 2009 on the unscientific state of many forensic science subfields, forensic science has undergone internal and external scrutiny that it had managed to avoid for decades. Although some reform efforts are underway, forensic science writ large has yet to embrace and settle upon an empirical research agenda that addresses knowledge gaps pertaining to the reliability of its methods. Our paper addresses this problem by proposing a preliminary set of fourteen empirical studies for the forensic sciences. Following a brief discussion of the courtroom treatment of forensic science evidence, we …
Crossing The Line: Daubert, Dual Roles, And The Admissibility Of Forensic Mental Health Testimony, Sara Gordon
Crossing The Line: Daubert, Dual Roles, And The Admissibility Of Forensic Mental Health Testimony, Sara Gordon
Scholarly Works
Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals often testify as forensic experts in civil commitment and criminal competency proceedings. When an individual clinician assumes both a treatment and a forensic role in the context of a single case, however, that clinician forms a dual relationship with the patient—a practice that creates a conflict of interest and violates professional ethical guidelines. The court, the parties, and the patient are all affected by this conflict and the biased testimony that may result from dual relationships. When providing forensic testimony, the mental health professional’s primary duty is to the court, not to the patient, …