Law Commons^™

Women's Jury Service: Right Of Citizenship Or Privilege Of Difference?, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Supreme Court recently declared that peremptory challenges based on sex, like those based on race, violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In this note, Joanna Grossman argues that the Court has finally established the right of women to serve on juries. Women's rights advocates had fought for this right for more than a century, but courts refused to recognize that women were harmed by exclusion from juries and denied any connection between women's jury service and citizenship. Instead, courts focused on gender difference and only eliminated legal barriers to women's jury service when it was necessary …

Legal Indeterminacy, Judicial Discretion And The Mexican-American Litigation Experience: 1930-1980, George A. Martinez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This article explores a jurisprudential point: legal indeterminacy in the context of Mexican-American civil rights litigation. The article argues that because of legal uncertainty or indeterminacy the resolution of key issues was not inevitable. Judges often had discretion to reach their conclusions. In this regard, the article concludes that the courts generally exercised their discretion by taking a position on key issues against Mexican-Americans. The article points out that exposing the exercise of judicial discretion and the lack of inevitability in civil rights cases is important for two major reasons. At one level, exposing the exercise of judicial discretion is …

Mortgaging The American Dream: A Critical Evaluation Of The Federal Government's Promotion Of Home Equity Financing, Julia Patterson Forrester Rogers

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In this Article, I advocate elimination of federal promotion of home equity financing, recommending that the federal government permit home equity financing without encouraging it. In Part Il of this Article, I discuss some of the problems caused by federal promotion of home equity financing. While home equity loans carry a risk to the borrowers of losing their homes, homeowners cannot properly assess this risk due to their tendency to underestimate the probability of default and foreclosure. Homeowners who do lose their homes to foreclosure may be devastated, both financially and psychologically. Despite the risks of a home equity loan, …

Book Review: Taking The People Seriously, Lackland H. Bloom Jr.

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Intelligible Constitution by Joseph Goldstein. Oxford University Press. 1992.

The subtitle of Professor Goldstein's timely and important book is "The Supreme Court's Obligation to Maintain the Constitution as Something We the People Can Understand." Essentially, Professor Goldstein contends that the Court must explain its constitutional decisions in a manner that is comprehensible to the public because continuing public consent is the true source of the Court's legitimacy and authority. Professor Goldstein analyzes several relatively recent and significant Supreme Court opinions to illustrate how the Court has frequently neglected this responsibility. He concludes by offering a short set of canons …