Law Commons^™

Jurisdiction To Adjudicate: A Revised Analysis, A. Benjamin Spencer

Faculty Publications

Personal jurisdiction doctrine as articulated by the Supreme Court is in disarray. As a constitutional doctrine whose contours remain imprecise, the law of personal jurisdiction has generated confusion, unpredictability, and extensive satellite litigation over what should be an uncomplicated preliminary issue. Many commentators have long lamented these defects, making suggestions for how the doctrine could be improved. Although many of these proposals have had much to offer, they generally have failed to articulate (or adequately justify or explain) a simple and sound approach to jurisdiction that the Supreme Court can embrace. This Article revises the law of personal jurisdiction by …

Should The Supreme Court Fear Congress?, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Bartnicki As Lochner: Some Thoughts On First Amendment Lochnerism, Howard M. Wasserman

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Homer Simpson Meets The Rule Against Perpetuities: The Controversial Use Of Pop-Culture In Legal Writing Pedagogy, Louis N. Schulze Jr.

Faculty Publications

Imagine that you have returned to your first year of law school. In your legal writing course, you are required to finish the year with an extensive brief analyzing a legal problem. After months in your doctrinal courses dealing with mind-bending legal issues such as liquidated damages, substantive due process, felony murder, personal jurisdiction, and shifting executory interests, you are ready to sink your teeth into a challenging legal writing assignment. You want to show your stuff and prove that your writing is law review caliber. Your assignment starts as follows: Greenacre is a parcel of land bounded on three …

Introduction To Vanishing Trial Symposium, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

This symposium shows that "vanishing trial" phenomena touch an extremely broad range of issues including transformations of society, courts, dispute resolution procedures, and even the nature of knowledge. These phenomena relate to decisions by litigants in particular cases, court systems, national policy, and international relations. This subject is too large and complex for any symposium to analyze fully, especially at this early stage of analysis. This symposium makes an important contribution to this study, with theories and evidence about the existence, nature, and extent of reductions in trials and similar proceedings. It elaborates a range of theories about possible causes …

Jurisdiction And The Internet: Returning To Traditional Principles To Analyze Network-Mediated Contacts, A. Benjamin Spencer

Faculty Publications

Courts have been evaluating the issue of personal jurisdiction based on Internet or "network-mediated" contacts for some time. The U.S. Supreme Court has remained silent on this issue, permitting the federal appeals courts to develop standards for determining when personal jurisdiction based on network-mediated contacts is appropriate. Unfortunately, the circuit approaches-which emphasize a Web site's "interactivity" and "target audience" -are flawed because they are premised on an outdated view of Internet activity as uncontrollably ubiquitous. This view has led courts to depart from traditional jurisdictional analysis and impose elevated and misguided jurisdictional standards. This article argues that courts should reinstitute …

Convicting The Innocent: Aberration Or Systemic Problem?, Rodney J. Uphoff

Faculty Publications

In practice, the right to adequate defense counsel in the United States is disturbingly unequal. Only some American criminal defendants actually receive the effective assistance of counsel. Although some indigent defendants are afforded zealous, effective representation, many indigent defendants and almost all of the working poor are not. The quality of representation a defendant receives generally is a product of fortuity, of economic status, and of the jurisdiction in which he or she is charged. For many defendants, the assistance of counsel means little more than counsel's help in facilitating a guilty plea. With luck, money, and location primarily determining …

Law, Ideology, And Strategy In Judicial Decisonmaking: Evidence From Securities Fraud Actions, Michael A. Perino

Faculty Publications

Legal academics and political scientists continue to debate whether the legal, attitudinal, or strategic model best explains judicial decision making. One limitation in this debate is the high-court bias found in most studies. This article, by contrast, examines federal district court decisions, specifically interpretations of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Initial interpretations of the Act articulated distinct liberal and conservative positions. The data compiled here support the hypothesis that the later emergence of an intermediate interpretation was the result of strategic statutory interpretation rather than simply judges acting consistently with their ideological preferences, although there is some …

Triptych: Sectarian Disputes, International Law, And Transnational Tribunals In Drinan's "Can God And Caesar Coexist?", Christopher J. Borgen

Faculty Publications

Can international law be used to address conflicts that arise out of questions of the freedom of religion? Modern international law was born of conflicts of politics and religion. The Treaty of Westphalia, the seed from which grew today's systems of international law and international relations, attempted to set out rules to end decades of religious strife and war across the European continent. The treaty replaced empires and feudal holdings with a system of sovereign states. But this was within a relatively narrow and historically interconnected community: Protestants and Catholics, yes, but Christians all. Europe was Christendom.

To what extent …

The 'Failure To Mitigate' Defense In Antitrust, Thom Lambert

Faculty Publications

The article begins with the premise that any failure to mitigate defense should aim to minimize the sum of three costs: the costs associated with inefficient behavior by defendants, the costs associated with inefficient behavior by plaintiffs, and the administrative costs of claim adjudication. If cost minimization is the goal, then whether a failure to mitigate defense exists, and the content of the antitrust plaintiff’s mitigation requirement, should differ depending on the type of damages the plaintiff is seeking to recover. The bulk of this article discusses how the defense should apply to different damages claims.The article proceeds as follows: …

Weyerhaeuser And The Search For Antitrust's Holy Grail, Thom Lambert

Faculty Publications

A general definition of exclusionary conduct has become a sort of Holy Grail for antitrust scholars. At present, four proposed definitions appear most promising: (1) conduct that could exclude an equally efficient rival; (2) conduct that raises rivals' costs unjustifiably; (3) conduct that, on balance, impairs consumer welfare by creating market power without providing countervailing consumer benefits; and (4) conduct that makes no economic sense but for its exclusionary effect on rivals.

How Much Justice Can We Afford?: Defining The Courts' Roles And Deciding The Appropriate Number Of Trials, Settlement Signals, And Other Elements Needed To Administer Justice, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

This article discusses how the U.S. court system can function optimally given declining trial rates and the limited resources available. The question of how much justice we can afford is a challenge that becomes more difficult as budgets fall behind the increasing demand for and cost of court services. Presumably most analysts would agree that courts should try cases when appropriate - and help litigants find just resolutions without trial when it is not needed. The courts' ability to provide trials in some cases is possible only if the vast majority of other cases are not tried.This article provides background …