Law Commons^™

Symposium: This Case Is Moot, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Adam Samaha

Faculty Scholarship

Forget guns for a moment. Imagine that, once upon a time, Boca Raton had a rule that prohibited its residents from transporting their golf clubs to driving ranges outside the city. Boca’s finest golfers challenged the constitutionality of the rule in court. Now imagine that the city thought twice and repealed the rule and that Florida then passed a statute authorizing people to transport their clubs to the driving ranges of their choice. The golfers could live happily ever after.

Simplified Courts Can't Solve Inequality, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter

Faculty Scholarship

State civil courts struggle to handle the volume of cases before them. Litigants in these courts, most of whom are unrepresented, struggle to navigate the courts to solve their problems. This access-to-justice crisis has led to a range of reform efforts and solutions. One type of reform, court simplification, strives to reduce the complexity of procedures and information used by courts to help unrepresented litigants navigate the judicial system. These reforms mitigate but do not solve the symptoms of the larger underlying problem: state civil courts are struggling because they have been stuck with legal cases that arise from the …

Ad Hoc Procedure, Pamela K. Bookman, David L. Noll

Faculty Scholarship

Ad hoc procedure” seems like an oxymoron. A traditional model of the civil justice system depicts courts deciding cases using impartial procedures that are defined in advance of specific disputes. This model reflects a process-based account of the rule of law in which the process through which laws are made helps to ensure that lawmakers act in the public interest. Judgments produced using procedures promulgated in advance of specific disputes are legitimate because they are the product of fair rules of play designed in a manner that is the opposite of ad hoc.

Actual litigation frequently reveals the inadequacy of …

Litigation Isolationism, Pamela K. Bookman

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past two decades, U.S. courts have pursued a studied avoidance of transnational litigation. The resulting litigation isolationism appears to be driven by courts’ desire to promote separation of powers, international comity, and the interests of defendants. This Article demonstrates, however, that this new kind of “avoidance” in fact frequently undermines not only these values but also other significant U.S. interests by continuing to interfere with foreign relations and driving plaintiffs to sue in foreign courts.

This Article offers four contributions: First, it focuses the conversation about transnational litigation on those doctrines designed to avoid it—that is, doctrines that …

Trial Jurors And Variables Influencing Why They Return The Verdicts They Do - A Guide For Practicing And Future Trial Attorneys, Mitchell J. Frank, Osvaldo F. Morera

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Narrative, Truth, And Trial, Lisa Kern Griffin

Faculty Scholarship

This Article critically evaluates the relationship between constructing narratives and achieving factual accuracy at trials. The story model of adjudication— according to which jurors process testimony by organizing it into competing narratives—has gained wide acceptance in the descriptive work of social scientists and currency in the courtroom, but it has received little close attention from legal theorists. The Article begins with a discussion of the meaning of narrative and its function at trial. It argues that the story model is incomplete, and that “legal truth” emerges from a hybrid of narrative and other means of inquiry. As a result, trials …

Professionalism And Advocacy At Trial – Real Jurors Speak In Detail About The Performance Of Their Advocates, Mitchell J. Frank, Osvaldo F. Morera

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.