Law Commons^™

Individualism In The Age Of Internationalism, Alyson Cole

Michigan Law Review

In the brief conclusion to The Empowered Self: Law and Society in the Age of Individualism, Thomas M. Franck asserts that he cannot satisfactorily summarize his book's argument. Even if it were achievable, he clarifies, he would not engage in such an endeavor, since it would "preempt the reader's autonomy and subvert his or her individual rights" (p. 278). That the author himself rejects the desirability of doing what reviewers generally do (i.e., condense and inevitably simplify complex tomes) is perhaps a somewhat awkward way to commence a discussion of his book. Nevertheless, this comment illustrates the extent to which …

Associate Professor Matthew J. Barrett '82, '85 J.D., Diploma Ceremony Address, Matthew J. Barrett

Commencement Programs

Commencement Address by Matthew J. Barrett, recipient of the 2001 Law School Distinguished Teaching Award

Secrets And Lies: The Need For A Definitive Rule Of Law In Pretext Cases, Catherine J. Lanctot

Louisiana Law Review

No abstract provided.

Why Are Employment Discrimination Cases So Hard To Win?, Michael Selmi

Louisiana Law Review

No abstract provided.

Slicing & Dicing Of Individual Disparate Treatment Law, Michael J. Zimmer

Louisiana Law Review

No abstract provided.

Admissibility Of Expert Testimony At Summary Judgment In Louisiana: Examining The Embers Of Independent Fire Insurance Co. V. Sunbeam Corp., J. Parker Layrisson

Louisiana Law Review

No abstract provided.

Oppress The Employee: Louisiana's Approach To Noncompetition Agreements, Carey C. Lyon

Louisiana Law Review

No abstract provided.

Community Property And The Copyright Act: Rodrigue's Recognition Of A Community Interest In Economic Benefits, Garth R. Backe

Louisiana Law Review

No abstract provided.

Averting Mistaken Executions By Adopting The Model Penal Code's Exclusion Of Death In The Presence Of Lingering Doubt, Margery Malkin Koosed

Northern Illinois University Law Review

This article urges adopting the Model Penal Code's exclusion of the death penalty when the evidence does not foreclose all doubt respecting the defendant's guilt. Adopting a modified version of the Code's section 210.6(1)(f) would both save innocent lives and lessen burdens on our justice system. While the trial jury may convict on proof beyond a reasonable doubt of capital murder, the case would not proceed to a penalty phase unless jurors found the elements proven by a stronger standard. Illinois is now reevaluating its system of capital punishment, desperately seeking means of averting the execution of innocents. That real …

Psychodrama And The Training Of Trial Lawyers: Finding The Story, Dana K. Cole

Northern Illinois University Law Review

I attempt in this article to make trial lawyers and trial advocacy teachers aware of this tool called psychodrama and how it is being used in preparation for trial and at trial. But psychodrama is an action method. Writing an article about psychodrama is like writing a manual on how to swim. You will have only a slightly better understanding of swimming after studying a Red Cross manual on how to perform the various strokes. It is not until you are in the water that you will begin to fully appreciate the concept. So it is with psychodrama. No article …

Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring 2001: Table Of Contents, Northern Illinois University Law Review

Northern Illinois University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Walking The Edge Of Death: An Annotated Bibliography On Juveniles, The Mentally Ill, The Mentally Retarded And The Death Penalty, Susan M. Boland

Northern Illinois University Law Review

The death penalty is not so monolithic as it seems at first glance. A storm of debate has centered around the application of this, the harshest criminal penalty of all, to the mentally ill, mentally retarded, and juveniles. They are our most vulnerable and least culpable citizens. This bibliography consists of annotated references to periodical articles, books, Web sites, and Supreme Court cases that examine the application of the death penalty to juveniles, the mentally ill, and the mentally retarded. It does not include newspaper articles, popular magazines, Web sites that offer no substantive content, or materials that are unobtainable …

Frozen Embryos And Divorce: Technological Marvel Meets The Human Condition, Thomas D. Arado

Northern Illinois University Law Review

Through the ingenuity of humankind, life can now be created in a petri dish and with it comes a genesis of the legal rights to that life. The 1978 birth of Louise Brown, the first child born using in vitro fertilization (IVF), opened up a new world of legal wrangling which culminated in the Tennessee Supreme Court decision of Davis v. Davis in 1992. The issue of frozen preembryos in divorce cases raises constitutional, property and contract issues, which courts will increasingly have to address. The constitutional issue pits the one party's right to procreate against the other party's right …

Visualizing Foreseeability, Patricia K. Fitzsimmons, Bridget Genteman Hoy

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Stock Market Volatility And 401 (K) Plans, Colleen E. Medill

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Many workers today depend on their 401(k) plan to provide them with an adequate income during retirement. For these workers to achieve retirement income security, their 401(k) plan investments must perform well over their working lifetime. Employers' selection of investment options for the 401(k) plan, a fiduciary duty under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), plays a critical role in determining investment performance. In this Article, Professor Medill uses a series of hypothetical litigation scenarios to illustrate how interpretation of the employer's duty of prudence and duty of loyalty under ERISA present different policy choices for the …

Pinocchio In Littleton, William A. Kell

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In this Article, Professor Kell proposes a substantial change in policy direction in the wake of school shootings and other tragedies involving young people's abilities to make mature decisions. First, the Article questions the current state of the law which exclusively deems young people to be mature based on "birthdays and bad acts, " rather than on any concept of demonstrated or earned levels of responsibility. Next, an alternative legal framework is envisioned recognizing young people as increasingly competent citizens who must develop psychosocial maturity, including learning how to judge and utilize advice from others such as parents and peers, …

Ten Truths About Tax Shelters, David A. Weisbach

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

This paper advances ten propositions about tax shelters and tax avoidance. The first four propositions argue that tax shelters must be analyzed solely by the consequences of shelters and the responses, rejecting reasoning based on notions such as the right to tax plan, legitimate tax planning, or statutory interpretation. The next three propositions analyze the consequences of tax shelters by viewing shelters as unintentional gaps in the tax base and attacks on shelters as similar to broadening the base. At the margin, the benefits of broadening the base must be set equal to the administrative costs of doing so and …

What Has The Visual Arts Rights Act Of 1990 Accomplished?, William M. Landes

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

This paper presents an economic analysis of the Visual Arts Rights Act of 1990 (VARA) which provides attribution and integrity rights, commonly called moral rights, for defined types of artistic works. The paper shows that these laws may actually harm artists by adding contracting and transaction costs in the art market. For most works, these costs will be trivial because collectors have a strong self-interest in preserving the works in good condition. These costs are likely to be significant, however, for works subject to destruction or alteration in the future, such as sitespecific works and works installed in buildings, because …

Information Technology And Non-Legal Sanctions In Financing Transactions, Ronald J. Mann

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Essay investigates the effect of advances in information technology on the private institutions that businesses use to resolve information asymmetries in financing transactions. The first part of the Essay discusses how information technology can permit direct verification of the information, obviating the problem entirely; the Essay discusses the example of the substitution of the debit card for the check, which provides an immediate payment that obviates the need for the merchant to consider whether payment will be forthcoming when the check is presented to the bank on which it is drawn.

The second part of the Essay discusses how …

Toward Fundamental Fairness In The Kangaroo Courtroom: The Due Process Case Against Statutes Presumptively Closing Juvenile Proceedings, Stephen E. Oestreicher Jr.

Vanderbilt Law Review

Today's juvenile courtroom functions quite differently than did its 1899 Chicago ancestor. During every decade since the 1960s, the juvenile court system has undergone a number of fundamental, structural changes. The most recent of these "mega change[s]" came during the 1990s, when a number of states abandoned their existing presumptive closure statutes and mandated that juvenile delinquency proceedings be held in the open for the press and the public to see.

The policy reviews of this development have been mixed. Some commentators criticize the recent trend, asserting that open proceedings enervate the juvenile system's ultimate goal of rehabilitating wayward youths. …

Retelling Allotment: Indian Property Rights And The Myth Of Common Ownership, Kenneth H. Bobroff

Vanderbilt Law Review

The division of Native American reservations into individually owned parcels was an unquestionable disaster. Authorized by the General Allotment Act of 1887, allotment cost Indians two-thirds of their land and left much of the remainder effectively useless as it passed to successive generations of owners. The conventional understanding, shared by scholars, judges, policymakers, and activists alike, has been that allotment failed because it imposed individual ownership on people who had never known private property. Before allotment, so this story goes, Indians had always owned their land in common. Because Indians had no conception of private property, they were unable to …

Missouri’S Sacrificial Lamb: Political Party Contributions And Campaign Finance Reform In Missouri Republican Party V. Lamb, Jeremy Marsh

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Budding Translation, Milner S. Ball

Michigan Law Review

Among the American classics in my library, Black Elk Speaks is one of the least willing to rest closed on the shelf. It is the story of a vision, the duty that accompanies the vision, and the life of those whom the vision would animate. It can be justly read as tragedy, indictment, and struggle with the past. But it can also be read as affirmation and as invocation of hope for the future, possibilities that present themselves on this revisit. There are risks in making Black Elk Speaks the subject of a Classics Revisited, more risks than in Kenji …

Morgan Kousser's Noble Dream, Heather K. Gerken

Michigan Law Review

J. Morgan Kousser, professor of history and social science at the California Institute of Technology, is an unusual academic. He enjoys the respect of two quite different groups - historians and civil rights litigators. As a historian, Kousser has written a number of important works on the American South in the tradition of his mentor, C. Vann Woodward, including a foundational book on southern political history, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910. Many of his writings have become seminal texts among election law scholars. Kousser has also used his historical skills …

Democratic Justice In Transition, Marion Smiley

Michigan Law Review

Ruti Teitel's Transitional Justice and Ian Shapiro's Democratic Justice come out of very different academic traditions. But they both develop a view of justice that might loosely be called pragmatic by virtue of its treatment of justice as a value that is simultaneously grounded in practice and powerful in bringing about social and political change. Moreover, they both use this shared pragmatic view of justice to provide us with two things that are of great importance to the study of transitional justice and democracy in general. The first is an explanatory framework for understanding how legal institutions and claims about …

Ever The Twain Shall Meet, Fred S. Mcchesney

Michigan Law Review

Instinctively, corruption is deplorable. Nobody likes private citizens paying governmental officials for special favors. Few have deplored corruption longer or in greater detail than economist Susan Rose-Ackerman. In Corruption and Government, Professor Rose-Ackerman discusses how corruption starts ("causes"), why it is bad ("consequences"), and how to stop it ("reform"), principally from an economic perspective. Professor Rose-Ackerman's interest in corruption derives partly from her outside work with international agencies, especially time spent at the World Bank - "a transformative experience" (p. xi). Her twenty-two page bibliography ranges across sources in economics and politics, plus many documents from the World Bank and …

Where Is My Body? Stanley Fish's Long Goodbye To Law, Richard Delgado

Michigan Law Review

Stanley Fish, author of Doing What Comes Naturally, Is There a Text in This Class?, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too, and other paradigm-shifting books, and who recently left law teaching for a position in university administration, has written one last volume giving his colleagues in the profession he left behind something to think about. In his previous work, Fish, who taught English and law at Duke University, addressed central legal issues such as meaning, communication, and textual interpretation, challenging such received wisdoms as that every text has a single, determinate meaning, or …

Usa 2050: Identity, Critical Race Theory, And The Asian Century, Adrien Katherine Wing

Michigan Law Review

Robert Chang, a promising young scholar, has given us the first book on Asian Critical Race Theory, or AsianCrit, in his short, readable volume Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation-State. It is a loosely woven collection of essays divided into three parts, drawing upon work Professor Chang published in several earlier law review articles. This book is part of the Critical America Series of New York University Press. The general editors are Critical Race Theory (CRT) senior scholar Professor Richard Delgado of the University of Colorado Law School and his wife, legal researcher Jean Stefancic. The series has produced …

Finding Gold In The Rainbow Rights Movement, Shayna S. Cook

Michigan Law Review

In her history of the past fifty years of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement, Patricia Cain recounts the litigation successes and failures that contributed to the legal status of gays and lesbians in the Untied States today. Clearly an insider who has marched with the movement every step of the way, Cain provides a comprehensive account of all fronts of the battle in state and federal courts since 1950. But while Rainbow Rights serves as a good primer on the legal challenges and the key themes uniting them, the book reads like an account of a struggle ending …

How To Plot Love On An Indifference Curve, Brian H. Bix

Michigan Law Review

In From Partners to Parents: The Second Revolution in Family Law, June Carbone offers nothing less than a whirlwind tour of the current doctrinal and policy debates of Family Law - an astounding feat in a book whose main text (excluding endnotes and appendices) does not reach 250 pages. There seem to be few controversies about which Carbone has not read widely and come to a conclusion, and usually a fair-minded one: from the effect of no-fault divorce reforms on the divorce rate, to the long-term consequences of slavery for the African-American family (pp. 67-84), to whether the Aid to …