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Full-Text Articles in Law
Hard Cases And The Politics Of Righteousness, Carl E. Schneider
Hard Cases And The Politics Of Righteousness, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
The law of bioethics has been the law of cases. Interpreting the common law and the Constitution, judges have written the law of informed consent, abortion, and assisted suicide. Reacting to causes célèbres, legislatures have written the law of advance directives and end of life decisions. The long, sad death of Terri Schiavo eclipsed even the long, sad deaths of Karen Ann Quinlan and Nancy Beth Cruzan in the duration and strength of the attention and passions it evoked. What are Schiavo’s lessons? Hard cases, lawyers say, make bad law. Why? First, hard cases are atypical cases. They present abnormal …
Schiavo And Klein (Symposium), Evan H. Caminker
Schiavo And Klein (Symposium), Evan H. Caminker
Articles
When teaching federal courts, I sometimes find that students are slow to care about legal issues that initially seem picayune, hyper-technical, and unrelated to real-world concerns. It takes hard work to engage students in discussion of United States v. Klein,1 notwithstanding its apparent articulation of a foundational separation of powers principle that Congress may not dictate a "rule of decision" governing a case in federal court. A Civil War-era decision about the distribution of war spoils, one the Supreme Court has hardly ever cited since and then only to distinguish it, in cases involving takings and spotted owls? Yawn.