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Articles 1 - 30 of 46
Full-Text Articles in Law
Holmes' Failure, Louise Weinberg
Holmes' Failure, Louise Weinberg
Michigan Law Review
I have just set down the March 1997 Harvard Law Review, with its centennial celebration of Oliver Wendell Holmes' The Path of the Law. The Path of the Law is a grand thing, in my view Holmes' best thing. But just the same, I find myself surprised that on this occasion none of its celebrants raised what has always seemed to me a weakness of the piece, and of Holmes' much earlier book, The Common Law. This is a weakness that is at once a reflection and a forecast of the failure of its author. Writers today do seem to …
Evaluating Purely Reproductive Disorders Under The Americans With Disabilities Act, Todd Lebowitz
Evaluating Purely Reproductive Disorders Under The Americans With Disabilities Act, Todd Lebowitz
Michigan Law Review
Approximately 2.8 million American couples suffer from infertility, a condition generally defined by the medical community as the failure to conceive after one year of unprotected intercourse. During the past thirty years, diagnostic and therapeutic techniques for treating infertility have improved drastically, enabling many previously infertile couples to bear children. These techniques, however, involve considerable expense and inconvenience, frequently requiring patients to take time off from work. Disputes with employers may follow, sometimes resulting in the infertile employee's termination. Some terminated employees, claiming that infertility constitutes a disability, then sue their former employers under the Americans with Disabilities Act of …
A Question Of Intent: Aiding And Abetting Law And The Rule Of Accomplice Liability Under § 924©, Tyler B. Robinson
A Question Of Intent: Aiding And Abetting Law And The Rule Of Accomplice Liability Under § 924©, Tyler B. Robinson
Michigan Law Review
Firearms are common tools of the violent-crime and drugtrafficking trades. Their prevalence is reflected in the frequency with which federal prosecutors charge, juries apply, and courts review 18 U.S.C. §924(c). That provision imposes heavy penalties for either the use or carrying of a firearm "during and in relation to any crime of violence or drug trafficking crime," in addition to the punishment provided for the underlying violent or drug-related offense. A conviction under section 924(c) carries at the very least a mandatory, consecutive five-year sentence, even when the underlying crime already provides enhanced punishment for use of a dangerous weapon …
Pomobabble: Postmodern Newspeak And Constitutional "Meaning" For The Uninitiated, Dennis W. Arrow
Pomobabble: Postmodern Newspeak And Constitutional "Meaning" For The Uninitiated, Dennis W. Arrow
Michigan Law Review
A parody of postmodern writing.
A Tempered "Yes" To The "Exculpatory No", Scott D. Pomfret
A Tempered "Yes" To The "Exculpatory No", Scott D. Pomfret
Michigan Law Review
What circumstances trigger a person's duty to tell the truth? Immanuel Kant claimed without qualification that all circumstances require truthtelling, even when speaking the truth injures the speaker. John Henry Cardinal Newman made exceptions for lies that achieved some positive end. Hugo Grotius permitted lies to adversaries. The philosophy of twentieth-century common sense largely permits white lies. Perhaps surprisingly, some courts have found that Kant's absolute prohibition of falsehood more accurately characterizes a speaker's duty to tell the truth to the federal government under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 than these other, more relaxed standards. According to this view, the prohibition …
Startegy And Force In The Liquidation Of Secured Debt, Ronald J. Mann
Startegy And Force In The Liquidation Of Secured Debt, Ronald J. Mann
Michigan Law Review
The question of why parties use secured debt is one of the most fundamental questions in commercial finance. The commonplace answer focuses on force: A grant of collateral to a lender enhances the lender's ability to collect its debt by enhancing the lender's ability to take possession of the collateral by force and sell it to satisfy the debt. That perspective draws considerable support from the design of the major legal institutions that support secured debt: Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code and the less uniform state laws regarding real estate mortgages. Both of those institutions are designed solely …
Equal Protection, Class Legislation, And Colorblindness, Melissa L. Saunders
Equal Protection, Class Legislation, And Colorblindness, Melissa L. Saunders
Michigan Law Review
Scholars and judges have long assumed that the Equal Protection Clause is concerned only with state action that has the effect of singling out certain persons or groups of persons for special benefits or burdens. Under the traditional doctrinal framework, state action that has this purpose and effect bears a certain burden of justification under the clause, a burden whose stringency varies, depending on the criteria used to define the class being singled out for special treatment and the importance of the interest affected. But state action that lacks such a "discriminatory effect" is not, on the traditional understanding, subject …
The Path To Habeas Corpus Narrows: Interpreting 28 U.S.C. § 2254(D)(1), Sharad Sushil Khandelwal
The Path To Habeas Corpus Narrows: Interpreting 28 U.S.C. § 2254(D)(1), Sharad Sushil Khandelwal
Michigan Law Review
The enforcement of the U.S. Constitution within the criminal justice system is an odd subspecies of constitutional law. In areas other than criminal law, federal courts act as the ultimate guarantors of constitutional rights by providing remedies whenever violations occur. Criminal law, however, is different by necessity; the bulk of criminal justice occurs in state courthouses, leaving constitutional compliance largely to state judges. The U.S. Supreme Court, of course, may review these decisions if it chooses, but a writ of certiorari can be elusive, especially given the Court's shrinking docket. After World War II, however, this feature of criminal constitutional …
Recent Books, Michigan Law Review
Recent Books, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
A list of books recently received by the Michigan Law Review.
The Origin, Development, And Regulation Of Norms, Richard H. Mcadams
The Origin, Development, And Regulation Of Norms, Richard H. Mcadams
Michigan Law Review
For decades, sociologists have employed the concept of social norms to explain how society shapes individual behavior. In recent years, economists and rational choice theorists in philosophy and political science have started to use individual behavior to explain the origin and function of norms. For many in this group, the focus of study is the interaction of law and norms, of formal and informal rules. Exemplified by Robert Ellickson's Order Without Law, this literature uses norms to develop more robust explanations of behavior and to predict more accurately the effect of legal rules. Norms turn out to matter in legal …
Ignorance Of Law Is An Excuse - But Only For The Virtuous, Dan M. Kahan
Ignorance Of Law Is An Excuse - But Only For The Virtuous, Dan M. Kahan
Michigan Law Review
It's axiomatic that "ignorance of the law is no excuse." My aim in this essay is to examine what the "mistake of law doctrine" reveals about the relationship between criminal law and morality in general and about the law's understanding of moral responsibility in particular. The conventional understanding of the mistake of law doctrine rests on two premises, which are encapsulated in the Holmesian epigrams with which I've started this essay. The first is liberal positivism. As a descriptive claim, liberal positivism holds that the content of the law can be identified without reference to morality: one needn't be a …
The Political Economy Of The Bankruptcy Reform Act Of 1978, Eric A. Posner
The Political Economy Of The Bankruptcy Reform Act Of 1978, Eric A. Posner
Michigan Law Review
These are the goals of this article. In particular, this article analyzes the legislative history of the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 19783 and related materials, in the hope of describing the influence of interest groups on the final statute. It has, of course, long been assumed that certain narrow provisions of the 1978 Act reflect the influence of interest groups - for example, the section that gives special protection to security and lease interests in aircraft. This article goes farther and argues that fundamental elements of the 1978 Act reflect political compromises among competing interest groups. In particular, I claim …
Recent Books, Michigan Law Review
Recent Books, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
Books recently received by the Michigan Law Review.
The Empty Circles Of Liberal Justification, Pierre Schlag
The Empty Circles Of Liberal Justification, Pierre Schlag
Michigan Law Review
American liberal thinkers are fascinated with the justification of the liberal state. It is this question of justification that inspires and organizes the work of such leading liberal thinkers as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Frank Michelman, and Bruce Ackerman. The manifest import and prevalence of the question of justification among liberal thinkers makes it possible to speak here of a certain "practice of liberal justification." This practice displays a certain order and certain recursive characteristics. It is composed of a common ontology and a common narrative. It poses for itself a series of recursive intellectual problems answered with a stock …
Antidisestablishmentarianism: Why Rfra Really Was Unconstitutional, Jed Rubenfeld
Antidisestablishmentarianism: Why Rfra Really Was Unconstitutional, Jed Rubenfeld
Michigan Law Review
Two months ago, the Supreme Court struck down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), handing down its most important church-state decision, and one of its most important federalism decisions, in fifty years. Through RFRA, Congress had prohibited any state actor from "substantially burden[ing] a person's exercise of religion" unless imposing that burden was the "least restrictive means" of furthering "a compelling governmental interest." RFRA was a response to Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, in which the Supreme Court abandoned the very same compelling interest test that RFRA mandated. Smith, overturning decades-old precedent, held …
Response: Between Economics And Sociology: The New Path Of Deterrence, Dan M. Kahan
Response: Between Economics And Sociology: The New Path Of Deterrence, Dan M. Kahan
Michigan Law Review
The explosive collision of economics and sociology has long illuminated the landscape of deterrence theory. It is a debate as hopeless as it is spectacular. Economics is practical but thin. Starting from the simple premise that individuals rationally maximize their utility, economics generates a robust schedule of prescriptions - from the appropriate size of criminal penalties,1 to the optimal form of criminal punishments, to the most efficient mix of private and public investments in deterrence. Yet it is the very economy of economics that ultimately subverts it: its account of human motivations is too simplistic to be believable, and it …
Deterrence's Difficulty, Neal Kumar Katyal
Deterrence's Difficulty, Neal Kumar Katyal
Michigan Law Review
We all crave simple elegance. Physicists since Einstein have been searching for a grand unified theory that will tie everything together in a simple model. Law professors have their own grand theories - law and economics's Coase Theorem and constitutional law's Originalism immediately spring to mind. Criminal law is no different, for the analogue is our faith in deterrence - the belief that increasing the penalty on an activity will mean that fewer people will perform it. This theory has much to commend it. After all, economists and shoppers have known for ages that a price increase in a good …
On-Call Time Under The Fair Labor Standards Act, Eric Phillips
On-Call Time Under The Fair Labor Standards Act, Eric Phillips
Michigan Law Review
Economic pressures, changing family structures, and technology have increasingly blurred the line between work time and personal time. The rise of independent contracting, the growing number of families in which both parents work, and the. expanding reach of computer networks, fax machines, pagers, and mobile telephones, to provide a few examples, have blurred the once-familiar distinction between work time and leisure time. This distinction is particularly unclear for on-call employees. An on-call employee is one who may be physically away from the workplace but who remains connected to it by telephone, beeper, computer, or radio, and who must respond to …
Recent Books, Michigan Law Review
Recent Books, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
A list of books recenlty received by Michigan Law Review.
Securities Disclosure In A Globalizing Market: Who Should Regulate Whom, Merritt B. Fox
Securities Disclosure In A Globalizing Market: Who Should Regulate Whom, Merritt B. Fox
Michigan Law Review
One of the most dramatic examples of increasing interaction across national boundaries in recent years has been the burgeoning volume of transnational transactions in corporate equities. Most developed capitalist countries impose affirmative obligations on issuers of corporate equity to disclose certain information about themselves. While these obligations are imposed on issuers, they are triggered by transactions. The growth in transnational transactions is thus increasingly raising difficult issues concerning the reach of differing national regimes. Given the magnitude of legal resources devoted to compliance with such disclosure regulations, they promise to feature prominently in the larger discussion of the role of …
Suspect Linkage: The Interplay Of State Taxing And Spending Measures In The Application Of Constitutional Antidiscrimination Rules, Dan T. Coenen, Walter Hellerstein
Suspect Linkage: The Interplay Of State Taxing And Spending Measures In The Application Of Constitutional Antidiscrimination Rules, Dan T. Coenen, Walter Hellerstein
Michigan Law Review
This article examines an important and recurring question that courts frequently resolve, but rarely analyze: whether taxing and spending measures should be viewed together when a state imposes a nondiscriminatory tax but also affords relief to some taxpayers through government spending. The answer to this question will often determine whether the state's actions violate constitutional strictures against discriminatory taxation. The taxing measure and the spending measure will generally pass muster if viewed in isolation. After all, courts rarely invalidate nondiscriminatory taxing measures on constitutional grounds. And true government spending measures, if considered alone, plainly fall outside the reach of constitutional …
Awarding Attorney's Fees To Pro Se Litigants Under Rule 11, Jeremy D. Spector
Awarding Attorney's Fees To Pro Se Litigants Under Rule 11, Jeremy D. Spector
Michigan Law Review
Among the myriad rules and statutes designed to curb litigation abuse, Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure ("FRCP") is "the most widely used and most controversial of the sanctions rules." The increased use of Rule ll during the last fifteen years and the recent proliferation of fee-shifting provisions in federal statutes4 have led to an onslaught of motions for attorney's fees in the federal district courts. Simultaneously, these courts are seeing an increasing number of pro se litigants appear before them. The confluence of these two trends has produced the seemingly paradoxical result of pro se parties …
The Immovable Object Versus The Irresistable Force: Rethinking The Relationship Between Secured Credit And Bankruptcy Policy, Lawrence Ponoroff, F. Stephen Knippenberg
The Immovable Object Versus The Irresistable Force: Rethinking The Relationship Between Secured Credit And Bankruptcy Policy, Lawrence Ponoroff, F. Stephen Knippenberg
Michigan Law Review
The last leaf in O. Henry's classic short story was hanging by a delicate thread, but it never fell. It never fell, of course, because it wasn't real; Old Behrman had painted it (and caught pneumonia for his trouble) in order to give Johnsy the will to live. The Supreme Court's decision in Dewsnup v. Timm is also hanging by a thread, following a barrage of scholarly criticism and more than four years of limiting case law and legislative incursions on the case's core conceptual rationale. But the holding in Dewsnup, unlike the last leaf, is very real. It has …
The "Solely Criminal Purpose" Defense To The Enforcement Of Irs Summonses, Darius J. Mehraban
The "Solely Criminal Purpose" Defense To The Enforcement Of Irs Summonses, Darius J. Mehraban
Michigan Law Review
Recent years have witnessed a gradual erosion of the practical distinctions between the civil and criminal investigations performed by federal administrative agencies. This trend arose naturally from a growing number of federal statutes and regulations that carry both civil and criminal penalties for their violation. Administrative agencies today wield investigative summons power almost as expansive as the grand jury subpoena power and can use that power to investigate without first deciding whether criminal or civil liability ultimately will be sought. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has participated to some extent in this intermingling of civil and criminal inquiry - with …
Recent Books, Michigan Law Review
Recent Books, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
A list of books recenlty received by Michigan Law Review.
The Devil And The One Drop Rule: Racial Categories, African Americans, And The U.S. Census, Christine B. Hickman
The Devil And The One Drop Rule: Racial Categories, African Americans, And The U.S. Census, Christine B. Hickman
Michigan Law Review
For generations, the boundaries of the African-American race have been formed by a rule, informally known as the "one drop rule," which, in its colloquial definition, provides that one drop of Black blood makes a person Black. In more formal, sociological circles, the rule is known as a form of "hypodescent" and its meaning remains basically the same: anyone with a known Black ancestor is considered Black. Over the generations, this rule has not only shaped countless lives, it has created the African-American race as we know it today, and it has defined not just the history of this race …
An Implied Cause Of Action Under The Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, Christopher L. Sagers
An Implied Cause Of Action Under The Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, Christopher L. Sagers
Michigan Law Review
John and Janet lived for most of their early years together in a townhouse in Manhattan. It was a rental, a two-story walk-up on the Upper West Side with barely enough room for the two of them, and it ate up most of their income so that they were barely able to save anything. "Wait a minute," John said one day, "we're paying almost as much for this dump as we'd pay for a mortgage on a nice house!" So the two of them looked over their finances. Not much there. A few thousand and a 401(k) at Janet's work. …
The Idea Of Fairness In The Law Of Enterprise Liability, Gregory C. Keating
The Idea Of Fairness In The Law Of Enterprise Liability, Gregory C. Keating
Michigan Law Review
The theory and practice of enterprise liability are oddly disjoined. On the one hand, case rhetoric insists that considerations of fairness are among the primary justifications for imposing enterprise liability. On the other hand, normatively inclined and theoretically ambitious scholarship on enterprise liability is overwhelmingly economic in cast. Economically inclined scholars have flocked to the field, while other kinds of tort theorists have shunned it, implicitly or explicitly conceding it to economic analysis. This paper argues that, contrary to this consensus, there is a powerful and important fairness case to be made for enterprise liability. This case fits the rhetoric …
The Unwelcome Judicial Obligation To Respect Politics In Racial Gerrymandering Remedies, Jeffrey L. Fisher
The Unwelcome Judicial Obligation To Respect Politics In Racial Gerrymandering Remedies, Jeffrey L. Fisher
Michigan Law Review
Like it or not, the attack on "bizarrely" shaped majority-minority electoral districts is now firmly underway. Nearly four years have passed since the Supreme Court first announced in Shaw v. Reno that a state's redistricting plan that is "so extremely irregular on its face that it rationally can be viewed only as an effort to segregate the races for purposes of voting" may violate the Equal Protection Clause. Such a district, the Court held, reinforces racial stereotypes, carries us further from the goal of a political system in which race no longer matters, and "threatens to undermine our system of …
The Casey Standard For Evaluating Facial Attacks On Abortion Statutes, John Christopher Ford
The Casey Standard For Evaluating Facial Attacks On Abortion Statutes, John Christopher Ford
Michigan Law Review
Since the Supreme Court declared in 1973 that the Constitution grants women a limited right to an abortion, the Justices have decided abortion cases with reference to such weighty matters as religious freedom, the disadvantaged position of women in society, and the proper role of the judiciary. Understandably, the Supreme Court's writings on abortion deal extensively with these large themes. The Court, and certainly others, view abortion cases as rivaling Brown v. Board of Education in their importance to the nation. While the Court has focused on the big issues, however, it has neglected an equally important, if less emotionally …