Law Commons^™

Why Terrorism? Whose Terror?, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

The author considers terrorism as a competitor for the legally constituted authority and power of governments.

How Not To Lie With Judicial Votes: Misconceptions, Measurement, And Models, Daniel E. Ho, Kevin M. Quinn

Faculty Articles

In Part I, we describe the formal spatial theory often invoked to justify the statistical approach. While spatial theory has the nice feature of synthesizing theory and empirics, legal scholars may remain skeptical of its strong assumptions. Fortunately, measurement models can be illuminating even if the spatial theory is questionable.

To illustrate this, Part II provides a nontechnical overview of the intuition behind measurement models that take merits votes as an input and return a summary score of Justice-specific behavior as an output. Such scores provide clear and intuitive descriptive summaries of differences in judicial voting.

Confusion abounds, however, and …

International Idealism Meets Domestic-Criminal-Procedure Realism, Stephanos Bibas, William W. Burke-White

All Faculty Scholarship

Though international criminal justice has developed into a flourishing judicial system over the last two decades, scholars have neglected institutional design and procedure questions. International criminal-procedure scholarship has developed in isolation from its domestic counterpart but could learn much realism from it. Given its current focus on atrocities like genocide, international criminal law’s main purpose should be not only to inflict retribution, but also to restore wounded communities by bringing the truth to light. The international justice system needs more ideological balance, more stable career paths, and civil-service expertise. It also needs to draw on the domestic experience of federalism …

Federal Circuit Patent Precedent: An Empirical Study Of Institutional Authority And Ip Ideology, David Pekarek-Krohn, Emerson H. Tiller

Faculty Working Papers

In this paper, we aim to better understand the institutional authority of the Federal Circuit as a source of law as well as the influence of pro-patent and anti-patent ideological forces at play between the Supreme Court, Federal Circuit, and the district courts. Our specific focus is on the district courts and how they cite Federal Circuit precedent relative to Supreme Court precedent to support their decisions, whether they be pro-patent or anti-patent. Using a variety of citation approaches and statistical tests, we find that federal district courts treat the Federal Circuit as more authoritative (compared to the Supreme Court) …

British Politics, The Welfare State, And Tort Liability Of Public Authorities, Dan Priel

All Papers

There has been a notable shift in the scope of negligence liability of public authorities in the Post War period. Notably there was a trend toward restriction of liability in the 1980s. This essay tries to explain why this happened not by focusing on changing legal formulas but by examining the political context of the law in this area. I begin the essay by demonstrating how changes in the attitudes toward the role of the state have led to the changes in the law in this area. I then go on to examine the impact of Thatcher’s ascent to power. …

A Critical Legal Rhetoric Approach To In Re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

In this paper I apply critical legal rhetoric to the judicial opinion rendered in response to the Defendants' Motion to Dismiss Plaintiffs' Second Amended and Consolidated Complaint in 'In Re African American Slave Descendants', a case concerning the efforts of a group of modern-day descendants of enslaved African-Americans to obtain redress for the harms of slavery. The chief methodological framework for performing critical legal rhetorical analysis comes from the work of Marouf Hasian, Jr. particularly his schema for analysis which he calls substantive units in critical legal rhetoric. Critical legal rhetoric is a potent tool for exposing the …

Disputing Limited Liability, Christina L. Boyd, David A. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

This project presents six years of hand-collected federal district court data to analyze the first representative sample of veil piercing litigation. Our method identifies veil piercing complaints through Westlaw's trial pleadings database and codes each case through a detailed examination of PACER records. We test a variety of hypotheses to understand how such litigations are resolved. We find that plaintiffs succeed quite often in veil piercing litigation, if success is defined as winning on motions that do not terminate a case. A variety of legal and extra-legal factors predict such interstitial veil piercing successes. Voluntary creditor causes of action promote …

All Rise! Standing In Judge Betty Fletcher’S Court, Thomas D. Rowe Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, based on a talk given at the Washington Law Review’s March 2009 symposium in honor of Senior Ninth Circuit Judge Betty Binns Fletcher and her three decades of service on that court, I selectively survey her opinions on justiciability issues: standing, ripeness, mootness, and political questions. A significant starting point for this survey is Professor Richard Pierce’s 1999 law review article, Is Standing Law or Politics?, arguing that many Supreme Court votes in standing cases generally, and appellate judges’ votes in environmental-standing cases specifically, can be explained better on the basis of politics than by reference to …