Law Commons^™

Constitutional Dignity And The Criminal Law, James E. Baker

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Criminal law is important because it helps to define who we are as a constitutional democracy. There is much that distinguishes our form of government from others, but certainly much of that distinction is found in the Bill of Rights and in two simple words: due process. All of which help to affirm the value and sanctity of the individual in our society. Broadly then, criminal law helps to define who we are as a nation that values both order and liberty.

That is what many of the greatest judicial debates are about, like those involving Holmes, Hand, Jackson, and …

The War On Terrorism And The Constitution, Michael I. Meyerson

All Faculty Scholarship

Discussion of civil liberties during wartime often omit the fact that there can be no meaningful liberty at all if our homes and offices are bombed or our loved ones are killed or injured by acts of terror. The Government must be given the tools necessary to accomplish its vital mission. The first priority must be to win the war against terrorism. There are, however, other priorities. The United States, in its just battle for freedom, must ensure that freedom is preserved during that battle as well. Moreover, care must be taken so that an exaggerated cry of “emergency” is …

The Law Of Nations And The Offenses Clause Of The Constitution: A Defense Of Federalism, Michael T. Morley

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

A Community Of Courts: Toward A System Of International Criminal Law Enforcement, William W. Burke-White

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Marbury And Judicial Deference: The Shadow Of Whittington V. Polk And The Maryland Judiciary Battle, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

On the 200th anniversary of Whittington and approaching the 200th anniversary of Marbury, this article revisits these two decisions and challenges legal scholars' assumptions that they were such strong precedents for judicial review.⁵ When one takes into account the broader contexts, both decisions were in fact judicial capitulations to aggressive legislatures and executives. The Maryland General Court asserted its judicial supremacy only in dicta, and the court failed to enforce judicial supremacy when it was legally justified. This article picks apart the court's reasoning step by step, using Whittington to illuminate Marbury and Marbury to illuminate Whittington. …

The Rehnquist Court, Structural Due Process, And Semisubstantive Constitutional Review, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

Semisubstantive review, as I use that label, entails four key features. First, the subject matter of judicial inquiry is not the process applied in adjudicating a discrete dispute; rather, the matter at hand is the constitutionality of a statute or other generalized expression of legal policy. Second, some procedural omission by the lawmaker -- rather than an incurably substantive flaw in the end product of its work -- lays the groundwork for a judicial intervention that invalidates the challenged rule or negates how that rule otherwise would operate. It may be, for example, that a federal statute read as a …

The Linguist On The Witness Stand: Forensic Linguistics In American Courts, Lawrence Solan, Peter Tiersma

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Steel Seizure Case: One Of A Kind?, Neal Devins, Louis Fisher

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Unhappy History Of Civil Rights Legislation, Fifty Years Later, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Seldom, if ever, have the power and the purposes of legislation been rendered so impotent.... All that is left today are afew scattered remnants of a once grandiose scheme to nationalize the fundamental rights of the individual.

These words were written fifty years ago by Eugene Gressman, now William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina School of Law, as a description of what the courts, primarily the Supreme Court of the United States, had done with the civil rights legislation passed by Congress in the wake of the Civil War. Professor Gressman's article, The Unhappy History of …

Juries, Justice And Multiculturalism, Nancy S. Marder

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Juries, Drug Laws & Sentencing (Symposium), Nancy S. Marder

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Federal Guilty Pleas Under Rule 11: The Unfilled Promise Of The Post-Boykin Era, Julian A. Cook

Scholarly Works

Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure governs perhaps the most essential and common practice in the federal criminal justice system--the guilty plea. Despite the public's focus on the excitement and drama engendered by real and fictional criminal trials, the overwhelming majority of criminal matters reach a negotiated resolution. Indeed, the importance of the guilty plea to the judiciary, prosecutors, and even defense attorneys cannot be overstated. Without guilty pleas, the criminal justice system would malfunction; the system is simply incapable of accommodating the constitutional exercise of a defendant's trial right in each instance.

The federal plea process …

Brief Amicus Curiae Of The Idaho Conservation League And The Louisiana Environmental Action Network In Support Of Neither Side, Republican Party Of Minnesota V. Kelly, No. 01-521 (U.S. Jan. 17, 2002), John D. Echeverria

U.S. Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

The Communities That Make Standards Of Care Possible, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Local Federal Civil Procedure For The Twenty-First Century, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Federal civil procedure is now byzantine. Lawyers and parties face, and federal judges apply, a bewildering panorama of requirements. There are strictures in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure as well as Title 28 of the United States Code and dozens of substantive statutes. A stunning array of local measures-including local rules; general, special, and scheduling orders; individual-judge practices; and mechanisms that courts adopted under the Civil Justice Reform Act (CJRA) of 1990 to reduce cost and delay-also govern cases in all ninety-four districts. Many of the provisions· are inconsistent or duplicative, while a significant percentage are difficult to discover, …

International Criminal Courts And Fair Trials: Difficulties And Prospects, Jacob Katz Cogan

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The question "Can international criminal courts provide defendants with fair trials?" is one that has barely been posed, let alone answered. The realm of international criminal justice is distinguished from domestic criminal justice not simply because accountability and sovereignty weigh heavier in this context, but also because of the absence of an effective counterweight to check these interests. One approach to the fair trial issue focuses on the rights delineated in the tribunals' statutes, rules of procedure and evidence, and case law. A second approach to the problem of fair trials asks, instead, whether these international courts have the independence …

The Impossible Dream Come True: A Criminal Law Professor Becomes Juror #7, Stacy Caplow

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Roundtable Discussion With Stephen L. Carter & Michael J. Gerhardt, Thomas E. Baker

Faculty Publications

Transcript of a discussion regarding the United States Supreme Court, the Supreme Court justices and justice nominees, the Senate process for confirming nominees and related issues such as fitness to serve on the court and judicial activism.

Commercial Speech And The Unconstitutional Conditions Doctrine: A Second Look At "The Greater Includes The Lesser", Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Semtek, Forum Shopping, And Federal Common Law, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Quiet Rebellion Ii: An Empirical Analysis Of Declining Federal Drug Sentences Including Data From The District Level, Frank O. Bowman, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This is the second of two articles in which we seek an explanation for the hitherto unexamined fact that the average length of prison sentences imposed in federal court for narcotics violations declined by more than 15% between 1991-92 and 2000.

Our first article, Quiet Rebellion? Explaining Nearly a Decade of Declining Federal Drug Sentences, 86 Iowa Law Review 1043 (May 2001) ( "Rebellion I" ), examined national sentencing data in an effort to determine whether the decline in federal drug sentences is real (rather than a statistical anomaly), and to identify and analyze possible causes of the decline. We …

U.S. Jury Reform: The Active Jury And The Adversarial Ideal, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In many countries, lay people participate as decision makers in legal cases. Some countries include their citizens in the justice system as lay judges or jurors, who assess cases independently. The legal systems of other nations combine lay and law-trained judges who decide cases together in mixed tribunals. The International Conference on Lay Participation in the Criminal Trial in the 21st Century provided useful contrasts among different methods of incorporating lay voices into criminal justice systems worldwide. Systems with inquisitorial methods are more likely to employ mixed courts, whereas adversarial systems more often use juries. Research presented at the Conference …

Inter-American System, Diego Rodriguez-Pinzon

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Plaintiphobia In The Appellate Courts: Civil Rights Really Do Differ From Negotiable Instruments, Kevin M. Clermont, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Professors Clermont and Eisenberg conducted a systematic analysis of appellate court behavior and report that defendants have a substantial advantage over plaintiffs on appeal. Their analysis attempted to control for different variables that may affect the decision to appeal or the appellate outcome, including case complexity, case type, amount in controversy, and whether there had been a judge or a jury trial. Once they accounted for these variables and explored and discarded various alternate explanations, they came to the conclusion that a defendants' advantage exists probably because of appellate judges' misperceptions that trial level adjudicators are pro-plaintiff.

A Symposium Précis, Thomas E. Baker

Faculty Publications

This article is an introduction and overview of the Drake University Law School symposium Judicious Choices: Nominating and Confirming Supreme Court Justices held in March of 2002. It identifies important constitutional law issues in nominating and confirming the President's appointments to Supreme Court Justices in the United States.

The Role Of Jury In Modern Malpractice Law, Philip G. Peters Jr.

Faculty Publications

This article explores the policy issues raised by the choice between a custom-based standard of care and a jury-determined reasonability standard. The author examines not only traditional legal arguments but also the recent findings of cognitive psychology, jury performance studies, and health industry research. Not surprisingly, this analysis reveals that both options are imperfect. However, the author cautiously recommends the reasonable physician standard. The revolutionary transformation of the health care industry in last quarter of a century has transferred considerable power from physicians to the health insurance industry, an industry that has not yet earned the privilege of self-regulation. Unlike …

Special Division Agonistes, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

When the independent counsel law sank, the casualties included a special "division" of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. This division was the special court that Congress had created "for the purpose of appointing independent counsels." The now-expired 1994 independent counsel statute had, like its three predecessors, directed the Chief Justice of the United States to appoint three judges from the Supreme Court and/or the federal Courts of Appeals to serve on the special court for two-year terms. This independent counsel court, which was located for administrative purposes in the United States Court of …

Respecting Pandora's Box, Erica Beecher-Monas

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

The Business Of Expression: Economic Liberty, Political Factions And The Forgotten First Amendment Legacy Of Justice George Sutherland, 10 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 249 (2002), Samuel R. Olken

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

In The Business of Expression: Economic Liberty, Political Factions And The Forgotten First Amendment Legacy of Justice George Sutherland, Samuel Olken traces the dichotomy that emerged in constitutional law in the aftermath of the Lochner era between economic liberty and freedom of expression. During the 1930s, while a deeply divided United States Supreme Court adopted a laissez faire approach to economic regulation, it viewed with great suspicion laws that restricted the manner and content of expression. During this period, Justice George Sutherland often clashed with the majority consistently insisting that state regulation of private economic rights bear a close and …

A Preferable Approach For The Ninth Circuit, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

United States Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) recently introduced Senate Bill 2184, which would split the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit into two circuits. This measure differs from Senate Bill 253 that embodies the recommendations submitted to Congress by the Commission on Structural Alternatives for the Federal Courts of Appeals after its one-year study. The Commission found "no persuasive evidence that the Ninth Circuit ... is not working effectively" and clearly rejected bifurcation. However, the Commission recommended that Congress impose a divisional restructuring on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and authorize the …