Law Commons^™

Judicial Criticism, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

Today I shall talk about the criticism of judicial opinions, especially of constitutional opinions. This may at first seem to have rather little to do with our larger topic, "The Constitution and Human Values," but I hope that by the end I will be seen to be talking about that subject too. In fact I hope to show that in what I call our "criticism," our "values" are defined and made actual in most important ways.

I will begin with a double quotation. I recently heard my friend and colleague Alton Becker, who writes about language and culture, begin a …

The Federal Government And A Program Of 'Advance Maintenance' In The United States, David L. Chambers

Book Chapters

Israel and several European nations including Austria, Denmark, Sweden, and West Germany, have adopted programs of ''advance maintenance''-programs under which, in varying forms, the state advances to a custodial parent the child support owed by an absent parent and then seeks to reimburse itself by collecting from the absent parent. The programs differ widely-,on the maximum that the government will advance to any one family, on the number of years an order of advance payments can remain in effect, on the efforts, if any, that the custodial parent must have made to collect from the absent parent-but all have in …

The Legal And Economic Implications Of Union-Management Cooperation: The Case Of Gm And The Uaw, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

'Cooperation' sounds too much like 'cooption.' 'Collaboration' recalls the Nazis in occupied Europe. Words are important in labor relations. A word we like is 'jointness.' Another is 'involvement.'

With comments like those, a top United Automobile Workers official recently pinpointed one of the most significant and controversial developments in contemporary industrial life-the substitution of a new union-management attitude of conciliation and togetherness for the parties' traditional adversarial stance.

In this paper I shall briefly trace the rise of participative management, as the process is often called, using the experience of General Motors and the UAW as my prime example. The …

Unpleasant Facts: The Supreme Court's Response To Empirical Research On Capital Punishment, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Book Chapters

Slowly at first, and then with accelerating frequency, the courts have begun to examine, consider, and sometimes even require empirical data. From 1960 to 1981, for example, use of the terms "statistics" and "statistical" in Federal District and Circuit Court opinions increased by almost 15 times.1 Of course, citation rates indicate only that a topic is considered worthy of mention, not that it is taken seriously, or even understood. Nonetheless, in a number of areas, such as jury composition and employment discrimination, the courts have come to rely on empirical data as a matter of course.

In the last 25 …

A Response To "Two Puzzles", Carl E. Schneider

Book Chapters

In his stimulating paper, Professor Mnookin suggests that the legal issue of neonatal euthanasia may be seen in terms of two puzzles: First, what accounts for the ''striking dichotomy between the law on the books, which apparently outlaws such conduct, and the law in action, which apparently permits it"? Second, why has "the treatment of severely handicapped newborns . . . evoked such a violent storm in the last few years"? Professor Mnookin resolves the first puzzle by suggesting that the ''dichotomy between the law on the books and the law in action may serve as a pragmatic, although not …

A Retrospective On The Criminal Trial Jury, 1200-1800, Thomas A. Green

Book Chapters

My recent book provided an overview of the history of the institutional aspects of the English criminal trial jury upon which all of the contributors to this volume have, tacitly or otherwise, commented. That tentative institutional background was intended both to stand on its own terms and to provide a framework for the studies on the relationship between law and society and on the history of ideas regarding the jury that made up the larger part of the volume. The two aspects of my book were joined: the socio-legal analysis and the history of ideas were to a large extent …

Exploring Computer Aided Generation Of Questions For Normalizing Legal Rules, Layman E. Allen, Charles S. Saxon

Book Chapters

The process of normalizing a legal rule requires a drafter to indicate where the intent is to be precise and where it is to be imprecise in expressing both the between-sentence and within-sentence logical structure of that rule. Three different versions of a legal rule are constructed in the process of normalizing it: (1) the logical structure of the present version, (2) the detailed marker version, and (3) the logical structure of the normalized version. In order to construct the third version the analyst must formulate and answer specific questions about the terms that are used to express the logical …