Law Commons^™

Constitutional Law—State Employees Have Private Cause Of Action Against Employers Under Family And Medical Leave Act—Nevada Department Of Human Resources V. Hibbs, 538 U.S. 721 (2003)., Gabriel H. Teninbaum

ExpressO

The Eleventh Amendment of the United States Constitution provides that non-consenting states are not subject to suit in federal court. Congress may, however, abrogate the states’ sovereign immunity by enacting legislation to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs, the Supreme Court of the United States considered whether Congress acted within its constitutional authority by abrogating sovereign immunity under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which allows private causes of action against state employers to enforce the FMLA’s family-leave provision. The Court held abrogation was proper under the FMLA and state …

Defining Dicta, Michael Abramowicz, Maxwell Stearns

ExpressO

The doctrine of stare decisis applies only to holdings of past cases, but scholars and courts have paid far more attention to stare decisis doctrine than to the distinction between holding and dicta, particularly in recent years. The lack of attention that the distinction receives may reflect a sense among legal analysts that they know dicta when they see it, but the problem is considerably more analytically complex than it may at first appear. In this Article, Professors Abramowicz and Stearns identify a number of structural problems that may affect whether statements in judicial opinions should be classified as holding …

Towards An Establishment Clause Theory Of Race-Based Allocation After Grutter: Administering Race-Conscious Financial Aid, Maurice R. Dyson

ExpressO

The novel application of the Establishment Clause doctrine by way of analogy to race0based financial aid after Grutter and Grats, while not identical, speaks to real issue of neutrality that is implicit in the debate of administering race-based scholarships that should be truthfully acknowledged. There is no concern about improper university indoctrination of race as the Grutter court has already established race-based diversity as worthy of a compelling state interest. Moreover, there is no concern that a college or university would establish an imprimatur on race-based scholarships merely or solely because it identifies potential candidates meeting specified eligibility criteria which …

Paradoxes Of Health And Equality: When A Boy Becomes A Girl, Noa Ben-Asher

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This paper is about an unusual child custody dispute between the parents of a six-year-old child and the child welfare services of Franklin County, Ohio. The conflict emerged when the child’s parents complied with their male child’s professed desire to be treated as a girl by attempting to enroll the child in the first grade as a girl. The paper treats this case as an exemplary test-case of contemporary co-dependence between scientific-medical discourse and liberal-rights discourse. The paper analyzes the positions of the two sides of the custody dispute according to the classic modern distinction between mind and body. On …

The Birth Of A Logical System: Thurman Arnold And The Making Of Modern Administrative Law, Mark Fenster

ExpressO

Much of what we recognize as contemporary administrative law emerged during the 1920s and 1930s, a period when a group of legal academics attempted to aid Progressive Era and New Deal regulatory efforts by crafting a legitimating system for the federal administrative state. Their system assigned competent, expert institutions—most notably administrative agencies and the judiciary—well-defined roles: Agencies would utilize their vast, specialized knowledge and abilities to correct market failures, while courts would provide a limited but crucial oversight of agency operations. This Article focuses both on this first generation of administrative law scholarship, which included most prominently Felix Frankfurter and …

Good Faith In The Cisg: Interpretation Problems In Article 7, Benedict C. Sheehy

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ABSTRACT: This article examines the dispute concerning the meaning of Good Faith in the CISG. Although there are good reasons for arguing a more limited interpretation or more limited application of Good Faith, there are also good reasons for a broader approach. Regardless of the correct interpretation, however, practitioners and academics need to have a sense of where the actual jurisprudence is going. This article reviews every published case on Article 7 since its inception and concludes that while there is little to suggest a strong pattern is developing, a guided pattern while incorrect doctrinally is preferable to the current …

Cyberspace Cartography: The Case Of On-Line Territorial Privacy, Daniel Benoliel

ExpressO

Territorial privacy, one of the central categories of privacy protection, involves setting limit boundaries on intrusion into an explicit space or locale. Initially, the Restatement (Second) of Torts, which defined the privacy tort of intrusion, as applied by courts, most notably designated two classes of excluded areas: “private” places in which the individual can expect to be free from intrusion, and “non-private” places, in which the individual does not have a recognized expectation of privacy. In the physical world, courts ultimately held almost uniformly that the tort of intrusion could not occur in a public place or in a place …

Textual Harassment: A New Historicist Reappraisal With Gender In Mind, Hila Keren

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No abstract provided.

Textual Harassment: A New Historicist Reappraisal, Hila Keren

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This year marks the four hundredth anniversary of the Parol Evidence Rule, the rule that dictates that the interpretation of a written contract should be determined solely according to its text and not influenced by prior contradictory external information. This article uses the occasion to offer a fresh interdisciplinary view of the Rule. The analysis presents a unique contribution to the heated debate regarding the desired levels of formalism and textualism in present-day contract law, by using New-Historicist tools.

Unexplored aspects of the roots of the Rule are illuminated through an in-depth investigation of the first case of the contractual …

Logic, Language And Legal Science: Are We Lagging Behind?, James S. Mcquade

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The central theme of this article is that modern notions of logic, deriving from computer logics and also from the language and logic movement in philosophy, provide a sound basis for legal science and hence for legal writing, law practice and legal education. Scepticism about legal formalism largely derives from the fact that the term logic is still taken to mean the syllogistic logic of Aristotle. Modern notions of logic, generally referred to as formalism or formal studies, view knowledge in general and science in particular in terms of game theory, applying word, number letter and iconic games to data …

Unraveling Unlawful Entrapment, Anthony M. Dillof

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No abstract provided.

Some Commonplace Confusions About Consent In Rape Cases, Peter Westen

ExpressO

Consent to sex matters, because it can transform coitus from being among the most heinous of criminal offenses into sex that is of no concern at all to the criminal law. Unfortunately, the normative task of making the law of rape more just is commonly impaired by conceptual confusion about what "consent" means. Consent is both a single concept in law and a multitude of opposing and cross-cutting conceptions of which courts and commentators tend to be only dimly aware. Thus, consent can be a mental state on a woman=s part, an expression by her, or both; it can consist …

Gentleman's Agreement: The Antisemitic Origins Of Restrictions On Stockholder Litigation, Lawrence E. Mitchell

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A deeply ingrained, seemingly ineradicable, hostility to plaintiffs’ lawyers and especially to plaintiffs’ lawyers in stockholder suits seems to have existed for most of the past century. This hostility is manifest not only in the tone of judicial opinions but in law review articles, the popular press, and, often, in legislation. This article analyzes the circumstances under which the first security-for-expense statute was adopted in New York in 1944, including the contemporaneous justification for the statute, focusing on the demographics of the New York bar at the time and the ethnic sociology of New York. In so doing, it concludes …

Predatory Systems Rivalry And Predatory Aftermarket Conduct, Richard S. Markovits

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No abstract provided.

What's Really Wrong With Compelled Association?, Seana V. Shiffrin

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What's Really Wrong With Compelled Association?

The article presents an original account of the value of freedom of association, one more intimately tied to freedom of speech values than the models of association implicit in much commentary and in such U.S. Supreme Court cases as Boy Scouts v. Dale and Roberts v. U.S. Jaycees. Standard models view the relationship between associations and free speech as instrumental. On these accounts, voluntary associations serve as sites for individuals with a defined point of view to congregate together and make their communication louder and more effective. While voluntary associations may sometimes serve this …

Lawyers, Guns And Money: Content Contextualism And The Cognitive Foundations Of Statutory Interpretation, Gary Blasi

ExpressO

The field of statutory interpretation is one of central importance to both lawyers and judges, perhaps even more central to their daily work than the analysis of appellate opinions. As a field of academic inquiry, however, the field has become rather stagnant and seems now at a stalemate between contending schools of thought, with most siding against the pure forms of textualism sometimes associated with Justice Scalia and arguing for some form of contextualism. What kinds of context should matter is disputed. Thus far, however, scholars have paid remarkably little attention to one crucial contextual factor: What is the statute …

Predatory Investments, Richard S. Markovits

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No abstract provided.

Citizens Of An Enemy Land: Enemy Combatants, Aliens, And The Constitutional Rights Of The Pseudo-Citizen, Juliet P. Stumpf

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No abstract provided.

Something Fishy, Tamara R. Piety

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The story of how one law professor encountered "Moby-Dick" and found therein a reading that offered an opportunity to introduce students to several general themes that resound in the study of law including the question of the function of law, the role of interpretation by analogy, formalism and many others.

Beyond Reparations: An American Indian Theory Of Justice, William C. Bradford

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The number of states, corporations, and religious groups formally disowning past records of egregious human injustice is mushrooming. Although the Age of Apology is a global phenomenon, the question of reparations—a tort-based mode of redress whereby a wrongdoing group accepts legal responsibility and compensates victims for the damage it inflicted upon them—likely consumes more energy, emotion, and resources in the U.S. than in any other jurisdiction. Since the final year of the Cold War, the U.S. and its political subdivisions have apologized or paid compensation to Japanese-American internees, native Hawaiians, civilians killed in the Korean War, and African American victims …

The Aretaic Turn In Constitutional Theory, Lawrence B. Solum

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“The Aretaic Turn in Constitutional Theory” argues that an institutional approach to theories of constitutional interpretation ought to be supplemented by explicit focus on the virtues and vices of constitutional adjudicators.

Part I, “The Most Dysfunctional Branch,” advances the speculative hypothesis that politicization of the judiciary has led the political branches to exclude consideration of virtue from the nomination and confirmation of Supreme Court Justices and to select Justices on the basis of the strength of their commitment to particular positions on particular issues and the fervor of their ideological passions.

Part II, “Institutionalism and Constitutional Interpretation,” engages Cass Sunstein …

The Role Of Purposivism In The Delegation Of Rulemaking Authority To The Courts, Michael Rosensaft

ExpressO

The courts are often used by Congress as a “political lightning rod,” when Congress cannot decide how to resolve an issue. Congress relies on administrative agencies for their expertise, and it also makes sense for Congress to delegate some rulemaking authority to the courts, relying on a court’s expertise in developing caselaw in an incremental basis. However, this authority should not be lightly implied. A court can tell that Congress has delegated rulemaking authority to it when the purpose of the statute is clear and the text is broadly worded. It thus makes sense in these cases that purposivism should …

Beyond Rights: Legal Process And Ethnic Conflicts, Elena A. Baylis

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Unresolved ethnic conflicts threaten the stability and the very existence of multi-ethnic states. The realities of ethnic conflict are daunting: ethnic disputes tend to be both persistent and complex, and efforts to use democracy or ethnic-blind policies to deal with those conflicts tend to fail. While multi-ethnic states have struggled to devise political solutions for ethnic conflict, they have largely ignored the role that legal processes might play in resolving ethnic discord. But at certain crucial moments in the development of ethnic conflicts, legal processes such as mediation, adjudication, and constitutional interpretation might effectively address these disputes.

This article explores …

The Disenchantment Of Logically Formal Legal Rationality Or Max Weber's Sociology In The Genealogy Of The Contemporary Mode Of Western Legal Thought, Duncan Kennedy

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Max Weber began his sociology of law with a description of the then present of Western legal thought, along with a brief summary of its previous stages. This appreciation begins with a summary description of the Western legal thought of Weber's time, as it looks from our present 100 years later, emphasizing the contrast between the mainstream of his time, now called Classical Legal Thought, and its critics in the social current. Part II presents Weber's sociology of law, comparing and contrasting his approach with that of the social current. The most striking thing about Weber's sociology of law, from …

Entrapment And The Problem Of Deterring Police Misconduct, Dru Stevenson

ExpressO

Many the states currently use a version of the entrapment defense known as the “objective test,” which focuses solely on the extent of police overreaching in the case, and seeks to deter police misconduct by acquitting the defendant. Acquitting defendants as a means of deterring undercover police misconduct, however, is a public policy fraught with problems, and these problems have not been adequately addressed in the literature to date. This article applies the insights of modern deterrence theory to wrongful activity by police in undercover operations. In doing so, three general problems emerge. First, the objective test relies on an …

Procedural Justice, Lawrence B. Solum

ExpressO

The real work of procedure is to guide conduct. It is sometimes said that the regulation of primary conduct is the work of the general and abstract norms of substantive law—clauses of the constitution, statutes, regulations, and common law rules of tort, property, and contract. But substance cannot effectively guide primary conduct without the aid of procedure. This is true because of three problems: (1) the problem of imperfect knowledge of law and fact, (2) the problem of incomplete specification of legal norms, and (3) the problem of partiality. The solution to these problems is particularization by a system of …

Immaturity, Normative Competence, And Juvenile Transfer: How (Not) To Punish Minors For Major Crimes, David O. Brink

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This essay critically examines the national trend to get tough on juvenile crime by making it easier to transfer juvenile offenders to adult criminal court. It assesses this trend in light of different rationales for punishment, arguing that immaturity provides retributive, deterrent, and corrective reasons to punish juvenile crime differently than otherwise similar adult crime. Insofar as retributive concepts determine whom to punish and how much to punish, it is especially important that immaturity involves diminished normative competence and, hence, diminished responsibility. In defending a traditional approach to juvenile criminal justice against the reforms embodied in the transfer trend, the …