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Full-Text Articles in Law

Legislative Intent And Statutory Interpretation In England And The United States: An Assessment Of The Impact Of Pepper V. Hart, Michael P. Healy Jul 1999

Legislative Intent And Statutory Interpretation In England And The United States: An Assessment Of The Impact Of Pepper V. Hart, Michael P. Healy

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Statutory interpretation is the process of discerning the meaning of legislation, and U.S. law has permitted courts to find meaning through a variety of often contradictory interpretive approaches. As a result, U.S. litigants often are uncertain about the interpretive approach a court will apply to a statute, even though the choice of the interpretive approach may determine the outcome of the litigation. Until the recent decision in Pepper (Inspector of Taxes) v. Hart, English approaches to statutory interpretation were more circumscribed because English courts foreclosed the intentionalist approach. This Article considers the impact that Pepper has had on statutory …


Open Texture And The Possibility Of Legal Interpretation, David B. Lyons May 1999

Open Texture And The Possibility Of Legal Interpretation, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

This essay concerns the possibility of interpreting law. It is always possible to interpret law in the weak sense, which assigns meaning it is not assumed the law previously possessed. My concern here is interpretation in the strong sense, which, if successful, reveals meaning that lies hidden in the law. Theories of legal interpretation have recently received much theoretical attention. The received theory of law's open texture suggests that this interest is misplaced.


Agency Expertise, Alj Independence, And Administrative Courts: The Recent Changes In Louisiana's Administrative Procedure Act, Jay S. Bybee Jan 1999

Agency Expertise, Alj Independence, And Administrative Courts: The Recent Changes In Louisiana's Administrative Procedure Act, Jay S. Bybee

Scholarly Works

In the past two years, the Louisiana Legislature has adopted several structural changes in Louisiana's Administrative Procedure Act (“LAPA”). Most notably, Louisiana adopted what is known as a central panel or unified corps of administrative law judges (“ALJs”). The central panel system, which has been adopted in nearly half of the states and has been proposed for the federal system, has a central agency or office that hires and assigns all ALJs; the central agency rotates ALJs among agencies to ensure the ALJs' independence. Louisiana created the Division of Administrative Law, effective October 1, 1996, within the Department of State …


The Arkansas Supreme Court And The Civil War, L. Scott Stafford Jan 1999

The Arkansas Supreme Court And The Civil War, L. Scott Stafford

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Victims' Rights: Rethinking Our "Adversary System", William T. Pizzi Jan 1999

Victims' Rights: Rethinking Our "Adversary System", William T. Pizzi

Publications

No abstract provided.


Embracing Descent: The Bankruptcy Of A Business Paradigm For Conceptualizing And Regulating The Legal Profession, Jeffrey W. Stempel Jan 1999

Embracing Descent: The Bankruptcy Of A Business Paradigm For Conceptualizing And Regulating The Legal Profession, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Lawyers are said to travel in packs, or at least pairs, and in the popular parlance are often compared to hoards of locusts, herds of cattle, or unruly mobs. However, at least for purposes of assessing concerns with professionalism currently surrounding the bar and the public, whether attorneys are more or less social than other human animals does not matter. My point is simply that lawyers are social beings; like other human beings in social and occupational groups, lawyers behave largely in accordance with group norms, in much the same way peer pressure led Julian English toward juvenile delinquency in …


The Changing Face Of Legal Education: Implications For The Practice Of Law And The Courts, John W. Reed Jan 1999

The Changing Face Of Legal Education: Implications For The Practice Of Law And The Courts, John W. Reed

Other Publications

This is the last Conference of the Sixth Circuit in the 1900's. Though the Third Millennium technically does not begin until 2001, the turn of the "odometer" from the 1999 to 2000 leads us all to think of this as the end of a century and of a millennium. The pivotal date is yet sixth months away, but the pundits are already issuing their lists, both profound and trivial - the greatest inventions, the best books, the worst natural catastrophes, the trial of the century (of which there are at least a half dozen), the most influential thinkers, and on …


How Do Judges Think About Risk?, W. Kip Viscusi Jan 1999

How Do Judges Think About Risk?, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A sample of almost 100 judges exhibited well-known patterns of biases in risk beliefs and reasonable implicit values of life. These biases and personal preferences largely do not affect attitudes toward judicial risk decisions, though there are some exceptions, such as ambiguity aversion, misinterpretation of negligence rules, and retrospective risk assessments in accident cases, which is a form of hindsight bias. Although judges avoided many pitfalls exhibited by jurors and the population at large, they nevertheless exhibited systematic errors, particularly for small probability-large loss events. These findings highlighted the importance of judicial review and the input of expert risk analysts …