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Full-Text Articles in Law
Fee Shifting, Nominal Damages, And The Public Interest, Maureen Carroll
Fee Shifting, Nominal Damages, And The Public Interest, Maureen Carroll
Law & Economics Working Papers
As the Supreme Court recognized in its 2021 decision in Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, nominal damages can redress violations of “important, but not easily quantifiable, nonpecuniary rights.” For some plaintiffs who establish a violation of their constitutional rights, nominal damages will be the only relief available. In its 1992 decision in Farrar v. Hobby, however, the Court disparaged the nominal-damages remedy. The case involved the interpretation of federal fee-shifting statutes, which enable prevailing civil rights plaintiffs to recover a reasonable attorney’s fee from the defendant. According to Farrar, a plaintiff can prevail by obtaining the “technical” remedy of nominal damages, but …
Aals Federal Courts Section Newsletter, Katherine Mims Crocker, Celestine Richards Mcconville
Aals Federal Courts Section Newsletter, Katherine Mims Crocker, Celestine Richards Mcconville
Popular Media
No abstract provided.
Let The Right Ones In: The Supreme Court's Changing Approach To Justiciability, Richard L. Heppner
Let The Right Ones In: The Supreme Court's Changing Approach To Justiciability, Richard L. Heppner
Law Faculty Publications
The power of federal courts to act is circumscribed not only by the limits of subject matter jurisdiction, but also by various justiciability doctrines. Article III of the Constitution vests the judicial power of the United States in the Supreme Court and such inferior courts as Congress creates. That power is limited to deciding cases and controversies. It does not permit federal courts to provide advisory opinions when there is not a real dispute between the parties. Based on that constitutional limit, and related prudential concerns, the Court has developed a variety of justiciability requirements limiting which cases can be …
Brief Of Law Professors As Amici Curiae In Support Of Plaintiff-Appellee, Evan J. Criddle
Brief Of Law Professors As Amici Curiae In Support Of Plaintiff-Appellee, Evan J. Criddle
Briefs
No abstract provided.
The Constitution As A Source Of Remedial Law, Carlos Manuel Vázquez
The Constitution As A Source Of Remedial Law, Carlos Manuel Vázquez
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In Equity’s Constitutional Source, Owen W. Gallogly argues that Article III is the source of a constitutional default rule for equitable remedies—specifically, that Article III’s vesting of the “judicial Power” “in Equity” empowers federal courts to afford the remedies traditionally afforded by the English Court of Chancery at the time of the Founding, and to develop such remedies in an incremental fashion. This Response questions the current plausibility of locating such a default rule in Article III, since remedies having their source in Article III would be available in federal but not state courts and would apply to state-law …
Thoughts On Law Clerk Diversity And Influence, Todd C. Peppers
Thoughts On Law Clerk Diversity And Influence, Todd C. Peppers
Scholarly Articles
It is my great good fortune to have been asked to comment on the remarkable Article Law Clerk Selection and Diversity: Insights from Fifty Sitting Judges of the Federal Courts of Appeals by Judge Jeremy D. Fogel, Professor Mary S. Hoopes, and Justice Goodwin Liu. Drawing on a rich vein of data gathered pursuant to a carefully crafted research design and extensive interviews, the authors provide the most detailed account to date regarding the selection criteria used by federal appeals court judges to select their law clerks. The authors pay special attention to the role that diversity plays in picking …
Macro-Judging And Article Iii Exceptionalism, Merritt E. Mcalister
Macro-Judging And Article Iii Exceptionalism, Merritt E. Mcalister
UF Law Faculty Publications
Over the last half-century, the federal courts have faced down two competing crises: an increase in small, low-value litigation thought unworthy of Article III attention and an increase in the numbers and complexity of “big” cases thought worthy of those resources. The choice was what to prioritize and how, and the answer the courts gave was consistent across all levels of the federal judiciary. Using what this Article calls “macro-judging,” Article III judges entrenched their own power and autonomy to focus on the work they deemed most “worthy” of their attention, while outsourcing less “important” work to an array of …
The Shape Of Citizenship: Extraordinary Common Meaning And Constitutional Legitimacy, David N. Mcneill, Emily Tucker
The Shape Of Citizenship: Extraordinary Common Meaning And Constitutional Legitimacy, David N. Mcneill, Emily Tucker
CPT Papers & Reports
The United States, it is widely believed, is at a moment of constitutional crisis. At no time since the Civil War era has it seemed more likely that what James Madison called the “experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people”—the experiment in democratic constitutional self-governance—will fail. This article argues that one reason for this state of affairs is that the ‘people’ sense that they are no longer active participants in the experiment. While the historical etiology of this crisis is complex, and the forces involved not confined to the US, this article focuses on the crisis in the …
Religious Convictions, Anna Offit
Religious Convictions, Anna Offit
Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters
The Anglo-American jury emerged at a time when legal and religious conceptions of justice were entwined. Today, however, though the American public remains comparatively religious, the country’s legal system draws a distinction between legal and religious modes of determining culpability and passing judgment. This Article examines the doctrine that governs the place of religious belief and practice in U.S. jury selection proceedings. It argues that the discretion afforded to judges with respect to applying the Batson antidiscrimination doctrine has given these beliefs and practices an ambiguous status. On the one hand, judges aim to protect prospective religious jurors from discrimination. …
Bottom-Rung Appeals, Merritt E. Mcalister
Bottom-Rung Appeals, Merritt E. Mcalister
UF Law Faculty Publications
There are haves and have-nots in the federal appellate courts, and the haves get more attention. For decades the courts have used a triage regime where they distribute judicial attention selectively: some appeals receive a lot of judicial attention, some appeals receive barely any. What this work unearths is that this triage system produces demonstrably unequal results depending on the circuit handling the appeal and whether the appellant has counsel or not. Together, these two factors produce dramatic disparities: in one circuit, for example, an unrepresented appellant receives, on average, a decision less than a tenth the length of a …
The Mystery Of The Leavenworth Oaths, M H. Hoeflich, Stephen M. Sheppard
The Mystery Of The Leavenworth Oaths, M H. Hoeflich, Stephen M. Sheppard
Faculty Articles
Lawyers have sworn an oath to be admitted to the Bar since the beginnings of the Anglo-American legal profession. The oath serves several extremely important purposes. First, it is the formal act that admits an individual into the Bar and confers upon the oath taker the right to perform the duties of an attorney in the jurisdiction in which the oath is given. Second, the oath admits the new attorney to the broader world of the legal profession and signifies that the new attorney has been judged by the oath giver as worthy of the right to practice law. Third, …
How Biden Can Continue Making The Federal Courts Better, Carl Tobias
How Biden Can Continue Making The Federal Courts Better, Carl Tobias
Law Faculty Publications
From 2017 until 2020, former President Donald Trump and the Republican Senate majority nominated and confirmed record-breaking numbers of appellate court judges. This emphasis undermined ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, and experiential diversity as well as ideological balance on these courts and neglected to address persistent district court and emergency vacancies. Moreover, to achieve these historic confirmation levels, the GOP Senate majority eviscerated or altered certain rules and customs of regular order, which included the creation of a circuit-level exception to the blue slip process. President Joe Biden, in turn, has pledged to rectify the damage to the courts and the …
There Is No Such Thing As Circuit Law, Thomas B. Bennett
There Is No Such Thing As Circuit Law, Thomas B. Bennett
Faculty Publications
Lawyers and judges often talk about “the law of the circuit,” meaning the set of legal rules that apply within a particular federal judicial circuit. Seasoned practitioners are steeped in circuit law, it is said. Some courts have imagined that they confront a choice between applying the law of one circuit or another. In its strong form, this idea of circuit law implies that each circuit creates and interprets its own body of substantive law that is uniquely applicable to disputes that arise within the circuit’s borders.
This article argues that the notion of circuit law is nonsensical and undesirable …