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The View From The Trenches: Report On The Breakout Sessions At The 2005 National Conference On Appellate Justice, Arthur D. Hellman
The View From The Trenches: Report On The Breakout Sessions At The 2005 National Conference On Appellate Justice, Arthur D. Hellman
Articles
In November 2005, four prominent legal organizations sponsored the second National Conference on Appellate Justice. One purpose was to take a fresh look at the operation of appellate courts 30 years after the first National Conference. As part of the 2005 Conference, small groups of judges and lawyers gathered in breakout sessions to discuss specific issues about the operation of the appellate system. This article summarizes and synthesizes the participants' comments. The article is organized around three major topics, each of which builds on a different contrast with the 1975 conference.
First, the participants in the earlier conference apparently assumed …
The Supreme Court In Bondage: Constitutional Stare Decisis, Legal Formalism, And The Future Of Unenumerated Rights, Lawrence B. Solum
The Supreme Court In Bondage: Constitutional Stare Decisis, Legal Formalism, And The Future Of Unenumerated Rights, Lawrence B. Solum
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This essay advances a formalist conception of constitutional stare decisis. The author argues that instrumentalist accounts of precedent are inherently unsatisfying and that the Supreme Court should abandon adherence to the doctrine that it is free to overrule its own prior decisions. These moves are embedded in a larger theoretical framework--a revival of formalist ideas in legal theory that he calls "neoformalism" to distinguish his view from the so-called "formalism" caricatured by the legal realists (and from some other views that are called "formalist").
In Part II, The Critique of Unenumerated Constitutional Rights, the author sets the stage by …