Law Commons^™

Anti-Plaintiff Bias In The Federal Appellate Courts, Kevin M. Clermont, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

A recent study of appellate outcomes reveals that defendants succeed significantly more often than plaintiffs on appeal from civil trials-especially from jury trials.

Don't Take His Eye, Don't Take His Tooth, And Don't Cast The First Stone: Limiting Religious Arguments In Capital Cases, John H. Blume, Sheri Lynn Johnson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Professors John H. Blume and Sheri Lynn Johnson explore the occurrences of religious imagery and argument invoked by both prosecutors and defense attorneys in capital cases. Such invocation of religious imagery and argument by attorneys is not surprising, considering that the jurors who hear such arguments are making life and death decisions, and advocates, absent regulation, will resort to such emotionally compelling arguments. Also surveying judicial responses to such arguments in courts, Professors Blume and Johnson gauge the level of tolerance for such arguments in specific jurisdictions. Presenting proposed rules for prosecutors and defense counsel who wish to employ religious …

Constitutional Change And International Government, Chantal Thomas

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Faith, Hope, And Rationality Or Public Choice And The Perils Of Occam's Razor, Cynthia R. Farina

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Product-Related Risk And Cognitive Biases: The Shortcomings Of Enterprise Liability, James A. Henderson Jr., Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Products liability law has witnessed a long debate over whether manufacturers should be held strictly liable for the injuries that products cause. Recently, some have argued that psychological research on human judgment supports adopting a regime of strict enterprise liability for injuries caused by product design. These new proponents of enterprise liability argue that the current system, in which manufacturer liability for product design turns on the manufacturer's negligence, allows manufacturers to induce consumers into undertaking inefficiently dangerous levels or types of consumption. In this paper we argue that the new proponents of enterprise liability have: (1) not provided any …

Approaches To Teaching Contracts: Enriching Case Reports, Robert A. Hillman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Regulatory Improvement Legislation: Risk Assessment, Cost-Benefit Analysis, And Judicial Review, Fred Anderson, Mary Ann Chirba-Martin, E. Donald Elliott, Cynthia R. Farina, Ernest Gellhorn, John D. Graham, C. Boyden Gray, Jeffrey Holmstead, Ronald M. Levin, Lars Noah, Katherine Rhyne, Jonathan Baert Weiner

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

As the number, cost, and complexity of federal regulations have grown over the past twenty years, there has been growing interest in the use of analytic tools such as risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis to improve the regulatory process. The application of these tools to public health, safety, and environmental problems has become commonplace in the peer-reviewed scientific and medical literatures. Recent studies prepared by Resources for the Future, the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis have demonstrated how formal analyses can and often do help government agencies achieve more protection against hazards …

Rights And Rules: An Overview, Matthew D. Adler, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Prior to recent decades, the United States Supreme Court often invoked the political question doctrine to avoid deciding controversial questions of individual rights. By the 1970s and 1980s, standing limits traced to Article III’s case-or-controversy language had replaced the political question doctrine as the favored justiciability device. Although both political question and standing doctrines remain tools in the Court’s arsenal of threshold decision making,3 in the last decade the Court has turned with increasing frequency to the distinction between facial and as-applied challenges to perform the gatekeeping function. However, although there is a considerable body of scholarship concerning the conventional …

The Heterogeneity Of Rights, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

What is the implication for the validity of governmental rules of the conclusion that the rule interferes with a constitutional right? This question has implications for two important doctrinal puzzles. The first is the question when, if ever, a litigant has a constitutional right to an exemption from a generally valid rule of law. Many constitutional rights are rule-dependent in the sense that they protect actors against certain kinds of governmental rules rather than shielding acts against governmental interference. This Article denies the claim by scholars and judges that this rule-dependence reflects a deep truth about the nature of constitutional …

Rules And Judicial Review, Emily Sherwin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Judicial review of statutes on constitutional grounds is affected by a cluster of doctrinal practices that are generally accepted, but not very well explained, by the courts and not entirely consistent with each other. Courts usually judge statutes “as applied” rather than as written; they favor “severance” of valid applications of statutes from invalid or possibly invalid applications when possible; and they interpret statutes in ways that avoid constitutional difficulty. These overlapping practices presumably are intended to preserve legislation, and hence are associated with a modest conception of the role of courts in government. Yet they are not always modest …

An Ethnography Of Abstractions?, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Amicus Brief: Kumho Tire V. Carmichael, Neil Vidmar, Richard O. Lempert, Shari Seidman Diamond, Valerie P. Hans, Stephan Landsman, Robert Maccoun, Joseph Sanders, Harmon M. Hosch, Saul Kassin, Marc Galanter, Theodore Eisenberg, Stephen Daniels, Edith Greene, Joanne Martin, Steven Penrod, James Richardson, Larry Heuer, Irwin Horowitz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This brief addresses the issue of jury performance and jury responses to expert testimony. It reviews and summaries a substantial body of research evidence about jury behavior that has been produced over the past quarter century. The great weight of that evidence challenges the view that jurors abdicate their responsibilities as fact finders when faced with expert evidence or that they are pro-plaintiff, anti-defendant, and anti-business.

The Petitioners and amici on behalf of petitioners make a number of overlapping, but empirically unsupported, assertions about jury behavior in response to expert testimony, namely that juries are frequently incapable of critically evaluation …

What's Half A Lung Worth? Civil Jurors' Accounts Of Their Award Decision Making, Nicole L. Mott, Valerie P. Hans, Lindsay Simpson

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Jury awards are often criticized as being arbitrary and excessive. This paper speaks to that controversy, reporting data from interviews with civil jurors' accounts of the strategies that juries use and the factors that they consider in arriving at a collective award. Jurors reported difficulty in deciding on awards, describing it as "the hardest part" of jury service and were surprised the court did not provide more guidance to them. Relatively few jurors entered the jury deliberation room with a specified award figure in mind. Once in the deliberation room, however, they reported discussing a variety of relevant factors such …

Legal Institutions In Professor H.L.A. Hart's Concept Of Law, Robert S. Summers

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Justice Delayed?: An Empirical Analysis Of Civil Case Disposition Time, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article addresses the need to understand better our civil justice system by exploring possible determinants of disposition time for civil cases that reach a jury trial. This study uses one year of civil jury case outcomes from 45 of the nation's 75 most populous counties and identifies locale as one important variable, along with certain case types, results, and characteristics. An empirically moored understanding of the causes of case disposition time will assist public policy and reform efforts that seek to make civil justice speedier and, as a consequence, more inexpensive and just. Findings from this study call into …

The Persistent Problem Of Obligation In International Law, Eduardo M. Peñalver

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Globalization And The Reproduction Of Hierarchy, Chantal Thomas

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Empirical Methods And The Law, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

One can divide empirical analysis of legal issues into three major branches: (1) the use of scientific empirical analysis by litigants to attempt to prevail in individual cases, (2) the use of social scientific empirical analysis in individual cases, and (3) the use of the empirical methods to describe the legal system’s operation. The first two uses present difficulties that reflect a fundamental limitation on using statistical methods in law: the difference between establishing statistical association and establishing actual causation in an individual case filtered through our adversary legal system. The third use encounters no such obstacle and can aid …

Permitting Jury Discussions During Trial: Impact Of The Arizona Reform, Paula Hannaford-Agor, Valerie P. Hans, G. Thomas Munsterman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

A field experiment tested the effect of an Arizona civil jury reform that allows jurors to discuss evidence among themselves during the trial. Judges, jurors, attorneys, and litigants completed questionnaires in trials randomly assigned to either a Trial Discussions condition, in which jurors were permitted to discuss the evidence during trial, or a No Discussions condition, in which jurors were prohibited from discussing evidence during trial according to traditional admonitions. Judicial agreement with jury verdicts did not differ between conditions. Permitting jurors to discuss the evidence did affect the degree of certainty that jurors reported about their preferences at the …

International Debt Forgiveness And Global Poverty Reduction, Chantal Thomas

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Aba And Mdps: Context, History, And Process, Charles W. Wolfram

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

State Attorney General Actions, The Tobacco Litigation, And The Doctrine Of Parens Patriae, Richard P. Ieyoub, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

On November 23, 1998, a master settlement agreement settled the lawsuits of forty-six states against the tobacco industry. The settlement brings about historic public health initiatives, such as the end to outdoor advertising, the ban on using cartoon characters in advertisements, and the creation of public education trusts. It also provides that the settling tobacco manufacturers will pay over $200 billion over the next twenty-five years. Some of the legal theories upon which states relied have implications beyond the tobacco litigation. Of particular importance is the application of the theory of parens patriae in the tobacco litigation. That theory may …

No Federalists Here: Anti-Federalism And Nationalism On The Rehnquist Court, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Drug Treatment Courts And Emergent Experimentalist Government, Michael C. Dorf, Charles Frederick Sabel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Despite the continuing "war on drugs," the last decade has witnessed the creation and nationwide spread of a remarkable set of institutions, drug treatment courts. In drug treatment court, a criminal defendant pleads guilty or otherwise accepts responsibility for a charged offense and accepts placement in a court-mandated program of drug treatment. The judge and court personnel closely monitor the defendant's performance in the program and the program's capacity to serve the mandated client. The federal government and national associations in turn monitor the local drug treatment courts and disseminate successful practices. The ensemble of institutions, monitoring, and pooling exemplifies …

David Peterson Mar, What Trouble I Have Seen: A History Of Violence Against Wives, Cynthia Grant Bowman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Whipped By Whiplash? The Challenges Of Jury Communication In Lawsuits Involving Connective Tissue Injury, Valerie P. Hans, Nicole Vadino

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Keeping The Sex In Sex Education: The First Amendment's Religion Clauses And The Sex Education Debate, Gary J. Simson, Erika A. Sussman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Legal Limbo Of The Student Intern: The Responsibility Of Colleges And Universities To Protect Student Interns Against Sexual Harassment, Cynthia Grant Bowman, Marybeth Lipp

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Emotional Economy Of Capital Sentencing, Stephen P. Garvey

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

You often hear that one reason capital jurors condemn capital defendants is that jurors don't empathize with defendants. And one reason they don't empathize is that the process of capital sentencing is rigged against empathy. Using data from the South Carolina segment of the Capital Jury Project, I try to examine the role emotion plays in capital sentencing.

Without entering here all the important and necessary caveats, I find that the self-reported emotional responses jurors have toward capital defendants run the gamut from sympathy and pity at one extreme, to disgust, anger, and fear at the other. What causes these …

The Timing Of Opinion Formation By Jurors In Civil Cases: An Empirical Examination, Paula Hannaford-Agor, Valerie P. Hans, Nicole L. Mott, G. Thomas Munsterman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The question of when and how jurors form opinions about evidence presented at trial has been the focus of seemingly endless speculation. For lawyers, the question is how to capture the attention and approval of the jury at the earliest possible point in the trial. Their goal is to maximize the persuasiveness of their arguments--or at least to minimize the persuasiveness of those of the opposing side. Judges, in contrast, are more concerned about prejudgment. They regularly admonish jurors to suspend judgment until after all the evidence has been presented and after the jurors have been instructed on the law. …