Law Commons^™

Unplugged - When Do Supreme Court Justices Need To Just Sit Down And Be Quiet?, Sonja R. West

Popular Media

This article looks at Supreme Court justices providing their opinions on various legal topics prior to resigning from the bench.

Supreme Court Of The United States, October Term 2010 Preview, Update: December 7, 2010, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute

Supreme Court Overviews

No abstract provided.

Majoritarian Difficulty And Theories Of Constitutional Decision Making, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Recent scholarship in political science and law challenges the view that judicial review in the United States poses what Alexander Bickel famously called the "counter-majoritarian difficulty." Although courts do regularly invalidate state and federal action on constitutional grounds, they rarely depart substantially from the median of public opinion. When they do so depart, if public opinion does not eventually come in line with the judicial view, constitutional amendment, changes in judicial personnel, and/or changes in judicial doctrine typically bring judicial understandings closer to public opinion. But if the modesty of courts dissolves Bickel's worry, it raises a distinct one: Are …

Justice Souter And The Civil Rules, Scott Dodson

Faculty Publications

Justice Souter’s recent retirement from the Court after nearly twenty years presents a unique opportunity to comment on his legacy. No doubt others will eulogize or castigate him for his membership in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey troika, but there is much more to the man and his jurisprudence. Indeed, the danger is that Justice Souter will be pigeonholed into one opinion, an opinion that he wrote early in his Supreme Court career, to the detriment of understanding the complex justice that he was. And what it finds is a justice deeply committed to the fair treatment of the litigants …

Female Chiefs Have Words Of Advice: "Your Honor", Scott Graham

Ronald M. George Distinguished Lecture Series

No abstract provided.

Second Annual Chief Justice Ronald M. George Distinguished Lecture: Women Chief Justices

Ronald M. George Distinguished Lecture Series

Invitation and List of Sponsors for 2010.

Judicial Selection In Rhode Island: Assessing The Experience With Merit Selection: Response, Emily J. Sack

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Merit Selection On The Characteristics Of Rhode Island Judges, Michael J. Yelnosky

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Aliens On The Bench: Lessons In Identity, Race And Politics From The First "Modern" Supreme Court, Lori A. Ringhand

Scholarly Works

Every time a Supreme Court vacancy is announced, the media and the legal academy snap to attention. Even the general public takes note; in contrast to most of the decisions issued by the Court, a majority of Americans are aware of and have opinions about the men and women who are nominated to sit on it. Moreover, public opinion about the nominee has a strong influence on a senator's vote for or against the candidate. If the confirmation hearing held before the Senate Judiciary Committee is largely an empty ritual, why do so many people seem so enthralled by it? …

Do Judges Vary In Their Treatment Of Race?, David S. Abrams, Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan

All Faculty Scholarship

Are minorities treated differently by the legal system? Systematic racial differences in case characteristics, many unobservable, make this a difficult question to answer directly. In this paper, we estimate whether judges differ from each other in how they sentence minorities, avoiding potential bias from unobservable case characteristics by exploiting the random assignment of cases to judges. We measure the between-judge variation in the difference in incarceration rates and sentence lengths between African-American and White defendants. We perform a Monte Carlo simulation in order to explicitly construct the appropriate counterfactual, where race does not influence judicial sentencing. In our data set, …

Supreme Court Of The United States, October Term 2010 Preview, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute

Supreme Court Overviews

No abstract provided.

Speech Delivered To Unknown Group Re. Carter's Dissents

The Jesse Carter Collection

No abstract provided.

Re. Stop Signs On Butterfield Road

The Jesse Carter Collection

No abstract provided.

Has The Cause For Constitutional Liberties Become Unpopular? The Role Of The Supreme Court

The Jesse Carter Collection

No abstract provided.

Kate Chase, The "Sphere Of Women's Work," And Her Influence Upon Her Father's Dissent In Bradwell V. Illinois, Richard Aynes

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Kate Chase was said to be the most beautiful and the most intelligent woman of her age. Her father, Salmon P. Chase, is remembered today as Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury and as a chief judge of the U. S. Supreme Court. In his own time, Chase was considered one of the nation’s political giants; Abraham Lincoln described him as “one and a half times bigger than any other man” he had ever known. Carl Schurz’s summary still echoes today: “More than anyone else he looked the great man. Tall, broad-shouldered, and proudly erect, . . . he was a …

Why The Supreme Court Cares About Elites, Not The American People, Lawrence Baum, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

Supreme Court Justices care more about the views of academics, journalists, and other elites than they do about public opinion. This is true of nearly all Justices and is especially true of swing Justices, who often cast the critical votes in the Court’s most visible decisions. In this Article, we will explain why we think this is so and, in so doing, challenge both the dominant political science models of judicial behavior and the significant work of Barry Friedman, Jeffrey Rosen, and others who link Supreme Court decision making to public opinion.

Appointment Process To The Bench Is Not Sacrosanct, Susan Rutberg

Publications

No abstract provided.

Remarks At Memorial Service For The Honorable Morris E. Lasker, U.S. District Court, Southern District Of New York, Nicholas A. Robinson

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Remarks At Memorial Service For The Honorable Morris E. Lasker, U.S. District Court, Southern District Of New York, Michael B. Mushlin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Finding Data And Statistics On Judges, Leslie A. Street

Library Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

"Our Cities Institutions" And The Institution Of The Common Law, Bernadette Meyler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The audiences of early modern English drama were multiple, and they intersected with the legal system in various ways, whether through the cross-pollination of the theaters and the Inns of Court, the representations of the sovereign’s justice performed before him, or the shared evidentiary orientations of jurors and spectators. As this piece written for a symposium on “Reasoning from Literature” contends, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure addressed to these various audiences the question of whether the King should judge in person. In doing so, it drew on extant political theories suggesting that the King refrain from exposing himself to public censure …

Making Stuff Up, Richard H. Underwood

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Beginning with an article in this Journal almost thirty years ago, Professor Underwood continues to research and write about legal ethics and litigation. In this Commentary, he offers a witty look at several cases where, in his opinion, the judge allowed improper arguments to the jury.

The Twist Of Long Terms: Judicial Elections, Role Fidelity, And American Tort Law, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

The received wisdom is that American judges rejected strict liability through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To the contrary, a majority of state courts adopted Rylands v. Fletcher and strict liability for hazardous or unnatural activities after a series of flooding tragedies in the late nineteenth century. Federal judges and appointed state judges generally ignored or rejected Rylands, while elected state judges overwhelmingly adopted Rylands or a similar strict liability rule.

In moving from fault to strict liability, these judges were essentially responding to increased public fears of industrial or man-made hazards. Elected courts were more populist: they were …

Procuring ‘Justice’?: Citizens United, Caperton, And Partisan Judicial Elections, André Douglas Pond Cummings

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, two inextricably connected issues have received a great deal of attention in both United States political discourse and in the legal academic literature. One issue of intense legal debate and frustration has been that of judicial recusal, including an examination of the appropriate standards that should necessarily apply to judges that seem conflicted or biased in their role as neutral arbiter. A second issue that has spawned heated commentary and great dispute over the past decade is that of campaign finance law, including examination of the role that powerful and wealthy benefactors play in American electioneering. Both …

Sacrificing Diversity For “Quality”: How Judicial Performance Evaluations Are Failing Women & Minorities, Rebecca Wood, Sylvia R. Lazos, Mallory Waters

Scholarly Works

Because voters rely on judicial performance evaluations when casting their ballots, it is important that policymakers work diligently to compile valid, reliable and unbiased information about our sitting judges. This paper analyzes attorney surveys of judicial performance in Nevada from 1998‐2008. The survey instrument is similar to those used throughout the country for judicial evaluation programs. Unfortunately, none of the readily‐obtainable objective measures of judicial performance can explain away difference in scores based on race and sex. Minority judges and female judges score consistently and significantly lower than do their white male counterparts, all other things equal. These results are …

Attorney Admissions Ceremony — United States District Court For The Northern District Of New York, Roger J. Miner '56

Bar Admissions

No abstract provided.

Judicial Recusal & Expanding Notions Of Due Process, Andrey Spektor, Michael A. Zuckerman

Cornell Law School J.D. Student Research Papers

The merits of judicial elections have been litigated in journals around the country. In light of the recent Supreme Court decisions in White and Caperton, this debate will only intensify. Rather than revisit the arguments for and against electing judges, this Article argues that applying the Mathews v. Eldridge test in cases where a litigant’s due process is threatened by an elected judge—a possibility that the Court initially dismissed in White against Justice Ginsburg’s protests, and then took head on in Caperton—will balance First Amendment rights that judicial elections breed against the rights of the litigants that the Constitution protects. …

Supreme Court Of The United States, October Term 2009 Preview, Update: February 22, 2010, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute

Supreme Court Overviews

No abstract provided.

California Judicial Council's "Commission For Impartial Courts", Ronald B. Robie, Richard Fybel, Mary-Beth Moylan

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Will The Real Elena Kagan Please Stand Up? Conflicting Public Images In The Supreme Court Confirmation Process, Keith J. Bybee

Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics, and the Media at Syracuse University

What images of judging did the Kagan confirmation process project?

My response to this question begins with a brief overview of existing public perceptions of the Supreme Court. I argue that a large portion of the public sees the justices as impartial arbiters who can be trusted to rule fairly. At the same time, a large portion of the public also sees the justices as political actors who are wrapped up in partisan disputes. Given these prevailing public views, we should expect the Kagan confirmation process to transmit contradictory images of judicial decisionmaking, with a portrait of judging as a …