Law Commons^™

When Police Volunteer To Kill, Alexandra L. Klein

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of lethal injection, yet states continue to struggle with drug shortages and botched executions. Some states have authorized alternative methods of execution, including the firing squad. Utah, which has consistently carried out firing squad executions throughout its history, relies on police officers from the jurisdiction where the crime took place to volunteer to carry out these executions. This represents a plausible-and probable method for other states in conducting firing squad executions.

Public and academic discussion of the firing squad has centered on questions of pain and suffering. It has not engaged with the …

The Beginning Of The End: Abolishing Capital Punishment In Virginia, Alexandra L. Klein

Faculty Articles

When thinking about the history of capital punishment in the United States, I suspect that the average person is likely to identify Texas as the state that has played the most significant role in the death penalty. The state of Texas has killed more than five hundred people in executions since the Supreme Court approved of states' modified capital punishment schemes in 1976. By contrast, Virginia has executed 113 people since 1976.

But Virginia has played a significant role in the history of capital punishment. After all, the first recorded execution in Colonial America took place in 1608 at Jamestown, …

Sorting: Legal Specialization And The Privatization Of The American Legal Profession, Michael S. Ariens

Faculty Articles

Beginning in the 1950s, legal specialization was promoted to the majority of the American legal profession, small firm and solo practice lawyers, by the elite of the bar as the future of legal professionalism. Legal specialization was a form of sorting lawyers, and sorting was contrary to the traditional understanding of an undivided legal profession. Over the course of the next thirty years, this effort succeeded. This new understanding of legal professionalism emphasized the idea of competence based on a deep but particularized knowledge of law. This resulted in a slipping away of the beliefs that law was a public …

Regulating Law Enforcement's Use Of Drones: The Need For State Legislation, Michael L. Smith

Faculty Articles

The recent rise of domestic drone technology has prompted privacy advocates and members of the public to call for the regulation of the use of drones by law enforcement officers. Numerous states have proposed legislation to regulate government drone use, and thirteen have passed laws that restrict the use of drones by law enforcement agencies. Despite the activity in state legislatures, commentary on drones tends to focus on how courts, rather than legislative bodies, can restrict the government's use of drones. Commentators call for wider Fourth Amendment protections that would limit government surveillance. In the process, in-depth analysis of state …

A Case For The Electoral College And For Its Faithless Elector, Stephen M. Sheppard

Faculty Articles

Every four years, the cry goes up to destroy the Electoral College. That cry is especially loud in years when a candidate is elected president who receives a minority of the votes. The election of a "minority president" happened with the election of 2000, but it had happened before. The Electoral College has elected three presidents whom a majority of the voters voted against: Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and George W. Bush in 2000. (A fourth president was also elected with a minority of the popular vote—John Quincy Adams in 1824—through that election was by …

Second Amendment Challenges To Student Housing Firearms Bans: The Strength Of The Home Analogy, Michael L. Smith

Faculty Articles

Public colleges and universities or state governments often ban the possession of firearms on public university or college property. These bans typically extend to student housing. While much has been written about campus bans on the carrying of concealed firearms, the topic of gun bans in the student housing context has been largely unaddressed in Second Amendment literature. This Comment seeks to fill that gap by evaluating potential student challenges to firearms bans in the student housing context in light of potential standards of review courts may apply and in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in District of …

Confronting The Myth Of State Court Class Action Abuses Through An Understanding Of Heuristics And A Plea For More Statistics, Patricia W. Moore

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court heard six cases involving class actions this term. One of these cases, Standard Fire Insurance Company v. Knowles, brought the Class Action Fairness Act to the Court for the first time. Petitioner insurance company and its numerous business-interest amici repeatedly claimed before the Court that "state court class action abuses" justified removal of the case (which was based on state law and filed in state court) to federal court.

The charge of a "flood" of "abusive state court class actions" echoed the same rhetoric that CAFA's supporters used a decade ago in their ultimately successful efforts to …

The Tao Of Pleading: Do Twombly And Iqbal Matter Empirically, Patricia W. Moore

Faculty Articles

In 2007, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, sending “shockwaves” through the federal litigation bar. Seemingly without prior warning, the Court abrogated “the accepted rule that a complaint should not be dismissed for failure to state a claim unless it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to relief”—the standard for deciding 12(b)(6) motions first stated fifty years earlier in Conley v. Gibson. To replace the old rule, the Court announced a new “plausibility” standard: that a complaint …

Tribute, Rehnquist, Innsbruck, And St. Mary’S University, Vincent R. Johnson

Faculty Articles

William H. Rehnquist served as the seventeenth Chief Justice of the United States. During this time, the Chief Justice taught for St. Mary’s University School of Law over four summers, two weeks each July in 1991, 1994, 1998, and 2000. Chief Justice Rehnquist lectured on the Supreme Court in United States History as part of the law school’s Institute on World Legal Problems in Innsbruck, Austria. Chief Justice Rehnquist felt welcome in Innsbruck, and had earned the St. Mary’s faculty’s fond regard and the students’ admiration.

The memories of the summers spent in Innsbruck with Chief Justice Rehnquist are shared …

Justice Tom C. Clark’S Legacy In The Field Of Legal Ethics, Vincent R. Johnson

Faculty Articles

Justice Tom C. Clark served as this nation’s Attorney General and as a Supreme Court Justice during a pivotal time in this nation’s history; however, his greatest legacy is the tremendous impact he and the Clark Report, whose development he oversaw, has in the area of lawyer discipline and ethics. Prior to the Clark Report, there existed a “scandalous situation” with respect to lawyer discipline; however, in the subsequent decades, revolutionary change has occurred. That change is largely attributable to Justice Clark, whether directly or indirectly, as was found in 1992 by the American Bar Association in its McKay Report. …

The Effect Of 8 U. S. C. 1324(D) In Transporting Prosecutions: Does The Confrontation Clause Still Apply To Alien Defendants, Donna F. Coltharp

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Writing In The Margins: Brennan, Marshall, And The Inherent Weaknesses Of Liberal Judicial Decision-Making (Essay), Donna F. Coltharp

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.