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Supreme Court Justices, Empathy, And Social Change: A Comment On Lani Guinier's Demosprudence Through Dissent, Linda C. Mcclain
Supreme Court Justices, Empathy, And Social Change: A Comment On Lani Guinier's Demosprudence Through Dissent, Linda C. Mcclain
Faculty Scholarship
Justice Souter's imminent retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court provides President Obama with his first opportunity for a judicial nomination to the high court. President Obama's remarks about the relevance of life experience and of empathy are sparking discussion of relevant judicial qualifications. This Essay examines Professor Lani Guinier's recent argument that dissenting justices, particularly through the use of oral dissents, may spur ordinary people to action and that such dissents may expand the range of democratic action, as part of what she and Gerald Torres call "demosprudence." That controversial decisions by the United States Supreme Court can spur dissenting …
Constitutional Limits On Punitive Damages Awards: An Analysis Of Supreme Court Precedent, Dorothy S. Lund
Constitutional Limits On Punitive Damages Awards: An Analysis Of Supreme Court Precedent, Dorothy S. Lund
Faculty Scholarship
Over the last fifteen years, the Supreme Court has formulated new constitutional principles to constrain punitive damages awards imposed by state courts, invoking its authority under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This intervention has been controversial from the start, generating dissents from several Justices asserting that the actions of the Court are unwarranted and amount to unjustified judicial activism. Over the ensuing years lower courts and commentators have criticized the Court’s prescription of procedural and substantive limitations, finding them to be vague and unnecessarily restrictive of state common law prerogatives. Some observers with an economic orientation have …
Justice Ginsburg's Footnotes, Jay D. Wexler
Justice Ginsburg's Footnotes, Jay D. Wexler
Faculty Scholarship
In this short article written for the New England School of Law's March Symposium on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I report on what happened when I embarked on a project of trying to read every single footnote Justice Ginsburg has ever written as a justice on the Supreme Court. As the article relates, this project was impossible to complete because Justice Ginsburg, it turns out, has written a lot, lot, lot of footnotes. Instead, I ended up reading all of Justice Ginsburg's footnotes from three of her terms. In the article, I develop a nine-part taxonomy of Supreme Court footnotes …