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Full-Text Articles in Law

Experts, Stories, And Information, Richard O. Lempert Nov 1993

Experts, Stories, And Information, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

In the infancy of the jury trial, there were no witnesses. The jury was self-informing. Members of the jury were drawn from the community. It was expected that they would know, either firsthand or on the basis of what they had heard, the true facts of any disputed incident, and they were gathered together to say what those facts were. Ronald Allen and Joseph Miller, in their insightful paper, see the ideal of the self-informing jury as very much alive today. Allen and Miller tell us that jurors ideally should experience firsthand the factual information needed to arrive at rational …


The Suspect Population And Dna Identification, Richard O. Lempert Sep 1993

The Suspect Population And Dna Identification, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

Forensic DNA analysis typically proceeds by first determining whether alleles (one of two or more alternative forms of a gene) found in DNA apparently left by the perpetrator of a crime at a crime scene (the "evidence sample") match alleles extracted from a sample of the suspected criminal's blood (the "suspect sample"). If alleles drawn from the two sources match, the next step is to provide information about the probative value of the match by estimating the probability that alleles extracted from the blood of some random individual would have matched the alleles in the evidence sample. Thinking in terms …


Dna, Science And The Law: Two Cheers For The Ceiling Principle, Richard O. Lempert Sep 1993

Dna, Science And The Law: Two Cheers For The Ceiling Principle, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

The ceiling principle is an intentionally conservative way of estimating the frequency with which individuals who share particular alleles appear in the general population. It establishes frequencies for each allele by taking random samples of 100 individuals from each of 15 to 20 populations and using the largest frequency with which the allele is found in any of these populations or 5 percent, whichever is larger, as an estimate of the allele's frequency in the population of interest. These frequencies are then multiplied to yield an estimate of the likelihood that a randomly selected person would exhibit the same allelic …


The Tension Between Rules And Discretion In Family Law: A Report And Reflection, Carl E. Schneider Jun 1993

The Tension Between Rules And Discretion In Family Law: A Report And Reflection, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

The history of law is many things. But one of them is the story of an unremitting struggle between rules and discretion. The tension between these two approaches to legal problems continues to pervade and perplex the law today. Perhaps nowhere is that tension more pronounced and more troubling than in family law. It is probably impossible to practice family law without wrestling with the imponderable choice between rules and discretion. Consider, for example, how many areas of family law are now being fought over in-just those terms. For decades we have lived with an abundantly discretionary way of resolving …


Should Active Euthanasia Be Legalized? No: Preserve Traditional Restraints, Yale Kamisar Jan 1993

Should Active Euthanasia Be Legalized? No: Preserve Traditional Restraints, Yale Kamisar

Articles

The distinction between letting people die and killing them by lethal injection is now an integral part of the medico-legal landscape. This is the compromise we have arrived at in the struggle to take a humane approach toward seriously ill patients while still preserving as many traditional restraints against killing as we possibly can. This may be neither the logician's or the philosopher's way to resolve the controversy, but it may nevertheless be a defensible pragmatic way to do so.


Preference Conundrums, James J. White, Daniel Israel Jan 1993

Preference Conundrums, James J. White, Daniel Israel

Articles

Every law teacher and many law students and practitioners understand the intellectual sport to be found in Section 547 on preference law. Because the preference rules are so intricate, rigorously logical-but really not logical-they command more than their fair attention, not only in law school but also in continuing legal education and even in the courts. Our purpose in this article is not to answer any of the difficult questions or to give a global explanation of preference law. Rather it is to confront a few of the conundrums in Section 547 and to follow the paths of those conundrums …


Eleonora V. Eckert, Christina B. Whitman Jan 1993

Eleonora V. Eckert, Christina B. Whitman

Articles

One day, relatively early in my term as Editor-in-Chief of the Michigan Law Review, Ele Eckert came to me with a draft of a student note that had been given to our secretary for typing. The secretary had turned to Ele in despair. Page after page of yellow legal paper had been filled with minuscule pencil scratches and then elaborately decorated with even more minuscule additions and emendations. Red lines and blue lines and green lines, overlapping each other and occasionally blurring together, wove in and out among the pencil scratches. I asked the editor who had produced this colorful, …


Revising Article 9 To Reduce Wasteful Litigation, James J. White Jan 1993

Revising Article 9 To Reduce Wasteful Litigation, James J. White

Articles

For reasons that are unclear to me, the committees reviewing the articles of the Uniform Commercial Code and drafting revisions are congenitally conservative. Perhaps these committees take their charge too seriously, namely, to revise, not to revolutionize. Perhaps their intimate knowledge of the subject matter exaggerates the importance of each section and consequently magnifies the apparent size of every change. In any case, my own experience with two such committees tells me that the members quickly become focused on revisions and amendments that any outsider would describe as modest. To the extent that the revision of any of the articles …


Defining "Disability": The Approach To Follow, Theodore J. St. Antoine Jan 1993

Defining "Disability": The Approach To Follow, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

The definition of "disability" has once again become a central issue in workers' compensation law. I am partly responsible. A decade ago I served as the Governor's Special Counselor on Workers' Compensation. In my Reportto the Cabinet Council on Jobs and Economic Development, I stated: "If I could write on a clean slate, I would prefer to see the Michigan definition brought even closer into the mainstream of American law by declaring that 'disability' means a 'limitation of an employee's wage earning capacity in work suitable to his or her qualifications and training resulting from a personal injury or work …


The Romance Of Revenge: Capital Punishment In America, Samuel R. Gross Jan 1993

The Romance Of Revenge: Capital Punishment In America, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

On February 17, 1992, Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced to 15 consecutive terms of life imprisonment for killing and dismembering 15 young men and boys (Associated Press 1992a). Dahmer had been arrested six months earlier, on July 22, 1991. On January 13 he pled guilty to the fifteen murder counts against him, leaving open only the issue of his sanity. Jury selection began two weeks later, and the trial proper started on January 30. The jury heard two weeks of testimony about murder, mutilation and necrophilia; they deliberated for 5 hours before finding that Dahmer was sane when he committed these …


Are Laws Against Assisted Suicide Unconstitutional?, Yale Kamisar Jan 1993

Are Laws Against Assisted Suicide Unconstitutional?, Yale Kamisar

Articles

On 15 February of this year, shortly after the number of people Dr. Jack Kevorkian had helped to commit suicide swelled to fifteen, the Michigan legislature passed a law, effective that very day, making assisted suicide a felony punishable by up to four years in prison. The law, which is automatically repealed six months after a newly established commission on death and dying recommends permanent legislation, prohibits anyone with knowledge that another person intends to commit suicide from "intentionally providing the physical means" by which the other person does so or from "intentionally participat[ing] in a physical act" by which …


The Law And Arbitration: The Model Employment Termination Act, Theodore J. St. Antoine Jan 1993

The Law And Arbitration: The Model Employment Termination Act, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

The Model Employment Termination Act(META), which the Uniform Law Commissioners have recommended for adoption by all state legislatures, could provide the most significant legal change of this quarter century in the American workplace. In addition, if the annual case load of grievance arbitrations in this country now stands at somewhere around 65,000, the Act holds the potential for at least quadrupling that figure. Our colleague Jack Stieber has calculated that there are 60 million U.S. employees who are not protected by union contracts or civil service laws, and are thus subject to the employment-at-will doctrine. They can be fired for …


Limiting The Role Of Patents In Technology Transfer, Rebecca S. Eisenberg Jan 1993

Limiting The Role Of Patents In Technology Transfer, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Federal policy since 1980 has reflected an increasingly confident presumption that patenting discoveries made in the course of government-sponsored research is the most effective way to promote technology transfer and commercial development of those discoveries in the private sector. Whereas policymakers in the past may have thought that the best way to achieve widespread use of government-sponsored research was to make the results freely available to the public, the new propatent policy stresses the need for exclusive rights as an incentive for industry to undertake the further investment to bring new products to market. Although this propatent policy may make …


The Scholar As Advocate, Rebecca S. Eisenberg Jan 1993

The Scholar As Advocate, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Academic freedom in this country has been so closely identified with faculty autonomy that the two terms are often used interchangeably, especially by faculty members who are resisting restraints on their freedom to do as they please. While there may be some dispute as to whether or how far academic freedom protects the autonomy of universities or of students, the autonomy of faculty members seems to lie close to the core of the traditional American conception of academic freedom. As elaborated by the American Association of University Professors, this conception of academic freedom calls for protecting individual faculty members from …


Limiting The Role Of Patents In Technology Transfer, Rebecca Sue Eisenberg Jan 1993

Limiting The Role Of Patents In Technology Transfer, Rebecca Sue Eisenberg

Articles

Federal policy since 1980 has reflected an increasingly confident presumption that patenting discoveries made in the course of government-sponsored research is the most effective way to promote technology transfer and commercial development of those discoveries in the private sector. Whereas policymakers in the past may have thought that the best way to achieve widespread use of government-sponsored research was to make the results freely available to the public, the new propatent policy stresses the need for exclusive rights as an incentive for industry to undertake the further investment to bring new products to market. Although this propatent policy may make …


The Case Of The Disappearing Briefs: A Study In Preservation Strategy, Margaret A. Leary Jan 1993

The Case Of The Disappearing Briefs: A Study In Preservation Strategy, Margaret A. Leary

Articles

Federal appellate court records and briefs are significant to researchers in many disciplines, but academic law libraries are discarding them. Ms. Leary chronicles the demise of paper holdings in law libraries, the rise of microforms, and the contents and usage of the National Archives and Records Administration's files. She then derives principles for preservation strategies that may apply to other categories of legal material.


State Responses To Task Force Reports On Race And Ethnic Bias In The Courts, Suellyn Scarnecchia Jan 1993

State Responses To Task Force Reports On Race And Ethnic Bias In The Courts, Suellyn Scarnecchia

Articles

While several states have embarked on studies of race and ethnic bias in their courts, Minnesota is only the sixth to publish its report to date. As Minnesota joins the ranks of states with published reports, it is worthwhile to assess the impact of the five earlier published reports from other states. Final reports have been published in Michigan (1989), Washington (1990), New York (1991), Florida (1991) and New Jersey (1992). The published reports make findings and provide several specific recommendations for change. This article will review the published findings and recommendations of the task forces and will discuss the …


Letter To Judge Harry Edwards, James J. White Jan 1993

Letter To Judge Harry Edwards, James J. White

Articles

Dear Harry: I write to second your statements concerning the disjunction between legal education and the legal profession and also to quibble with you. By examining the faculty, the curriculum, and the research agenda at Michigan, your school and mine, I hope to illustrate the ways in which you are right and to suggest other ways in which you and your clerk informants may be too pessimistic.


Social Justice And Fundamental Law: A Comment On Sager's Constitution, Terrance Sandalow Jan 1993

Social Justice And Fundamental Law: A Comment On Sager's Constitution, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

Professor Sager begins his very interesting paper by identifying what he considers a puzzling phenomenon: the Constitution, as interpreted by courts, is not coextensive with "political justice." "This moral shortfall," as he refers to it, represents not merely a failure of achievement, but a failure of aspiration: as customarily interpreted, the Constitution does not even address the full range of issues that are the subject of political justice. Sager regards that failure as surprising-so surprising that, in his words, it "begs for explanation."'


Thomas G. S. Christensen, Theodore J. St. Antoine Jan 1993

Thomas G. S. Christensen, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Exactly twenty years ago, I had the privilege of introducing Tom Christensen at the annual meeting of the ABA's Labor Relations Law Section. I had not known Tom well for any length of time (I still feel hesitant about calling him "Chris"), but we shared similar backgrounds, and there had been and would continue to be numerous intersections in our careers. We both were kids from the hinterlands (Tom from Iowa, and I from Vermont) who had succumbed to the bright lights of the east coast. Tom had also published my very first article as a rookie law teacher.


Employment-At-Will—Is The Model Act The Answer?, Theodore J. St. Antoine Jan 1993

Employment-At-Will—Is The Model Act The Answer?, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Over the last quarter century, the most significant development in the field of labor and employment law has been a nationwide movement toward a revision of the at-will employment doctrine. Courts in over forty-five jurisdictions have used one or more of three main theories to carve out exceptions to the previously allpervasive principle. Unfortunately, though one can applaud the values embodied in these decisions, there are serious deficiencies in the common law modifications. The purpose of this Article is to outline those defects and to demonstrate that the interests of employees and employers alike would be better served by new …


Cornerstones Of The Judicial Process, Jerold H. Israel Jan 1993

Cornerstones Of The Judicial Process, Jerold H. Israel

Articles

Under our federated system of government, each state and the federal government have their own criminal justice processes. The federal system must comply with the constitutional prerequisites set forth in the Bill of Rights, and the state systems must comply with those Bill of Rights' provisions made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment,1 but those constitutional prerequisites allow considerable room for variation from one jurisdiction to another. In many respects, the fifty states and the federal government have used that leeway to produce considerable diversity in their respective criminal justice processes. At the same time, however, one can …


Wayne R. Lafave: Search And Seizure Commentator At Work And Play, Yale Kamisar, Jerold H. Israel Jan 1993

Wayne R. Lafave: Search And Seizure Commentator At Work And Play, Yale Kamisar, Jerold H. Israel

Articles

Starting in 1969,1 we have had the honor and pleasure of co-authoring a goodly number of casebooks, texts, treatises, pocket parts, and annual supplements (more than twenty) with Wayne LaFave.2 On each occasion we have been impressed by the quality of his mind and the judiciousness of his temperament, and impressed as well (and sometimes amazed) by his speed and efficiency.


Harry Edward's Nostalgia, Paul D. Reingold Jan 1993

Harry Edward's Nostalgia, Paul D. Reingold

Articles

Until fairly recently, the work of people who thought and wrote about the law in its broadest cultural sense, and the work of those who thought and wrote about the law as it was practiced, did not intersect very much. The broad cultural issues tended to be the province of philosophers or political theorists or other academic social critics, while traditional legal scholarship - as it appeared in law school journals - remained firmly rooted in lawyers' questions. This is not to suggest that legal academics wrote nothing but practice manuals, but it is true that until the last twenty …


Active V. Passive Euthanasia: Why Keep The Distinction?, Yale Kamisar Jan 1993

Active V. Passive Euthanasia: Why Keep The Distinction?, Yale Kamisar

Articles

In the past two decades, we have witnessed a "sea change in public, medical, and legislative judgments" about "letting die" and the "right to die." But it is no less true today than it was 35 years ago, when I first wrote about this subject, that in Anglo-American jurisprudence active euthanasia (what used to be called "mercy killing") is murder.