Law Commons^™

#Sowhitemale: Federal Procedural Rulemaking Committees, Brooke D. Coleman

Faculty Articles

Of the 630 members of a specialized set of committees responsible for drafting the federal rules for civil and criminal litigation, 591 of them have been white. That is 94 percent of the committee membership. Of that same group, 513—or 81 percent—have been white men. Decisionmaking bodies do better work when their members are diverse; these rulemaking committees are no exception. The Federal Rules of Practice and Procedure are not mere technical instructions, nor are they created by a neutral set of experts. To the contrary, the Rules embody normative judgments about what values trump others, and the rulemakers—while experts—are …

Judging Law In Election Cases, Michael S. Kang, Joanna Shepherd

Faculty Articles

In Part I, we introduce our earlier work on election cases and judicial partisanship before setting forth our new approach to studying the influence of law on judicial decisionmaking. We describe the special nature of the election cases in our database that allow more persuasive inferences of judicial partisanship than typically derived in empirical work on judicial behavior. We then explain our new approach for measuring case strength based on counterpartisan decisionmaking by judges. In Part II, we apply our approach to case strength to our dataset and present our results. In a nutshell, partisanship appears to matter as expected …

The Long Shadow Of Bush V. Gore: Judicial Partisanship In Election Cases, Michael S. Kang, Joanna M. Shepherd

Faculty Articles

Bush v. Gore decided a presidential election and is the most dramatic election case in our lifetime, but cases like it are decided every year at the state level. Ordinary state courts regularly decide questions of election rules and administration that effectively determine electoral outcomes hanging immediately in the balance. Election cases like Bush v. Gore embody a fundamental worry with judicial intervention into the political process: outcome-driven, partisan judicial decisionmaking. The Article investigates whether judges decide cases, particularly politically sensitive ones, based on their partisan loyalties more than the legal merits of the cases. It presents a novel method …

Judicial Education And Regulatory Capture: Does The Current System Of Educating Judges Promote A Well-Functioning Judiciary And Adequately Serve The Public Interest?, S. I. Strong

Faculty Articles

This phenomenon suggests a pressing need for further scrutiny into matters relating to the education of judges in this country. This Essay therefore considers of a number of fundamental issues relating to judicial education in the United States so as to consider, at least as a preliminary matter, whether regulatory capture exists. Given the scope of this Essay, some issues are necessarily excluded. Nevertheless, this Essay hopes to trigger a deeper debate about judicial education in this country.

The structure of the analysis is as follows. First, the Essay considers certain obstacles to research concerning judicial education as a means …