Law Commons^™

Balancing Deterrence, Comity Considerations, And Judicial Efficiency: The Use Of The D.C. Circuit's Proximate Cause Standards For Determining Subject Matter Jurisdiction Over Extraterritorial Antitrust Cases, Stephanie Casy

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

U.S. Supreme Court’S 2004 Term Includes Significant Land Use Decisions With A Trilogy Of Takings Cases, Patricia E. Salkin

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Environmental Law In The Supreme Court: Highlights From The Blackmun Papers, Robert V. Percival

Faculty Scholarship

The papers of the late Justice Harry A. Blackmun provide a remarkably rich archive that documents how the Court, for nearly a quarter century, handled environmental cases during a period crucial to the development of environmental law. This Article reviews highlights of what the Blackmun papers reveal about the U.S. Supreme Court’s handling of environmental cases during Justice Blackmun’s service on the Court from 1970 to 1994. The Article first examines what new light the Blackmun papers shed on some of the principal findings of the author’s October 1993 article Environmental Law in the Supreme Court: Highlights from the Marshall …

Judicial Predilections, John Paul Stevens

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

A Theory In Search Of A Court, And Itself: Judicial Minimalism At The Supreme Court Bar, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Cass Sunstein has prominently and provocatively advocated a theory of judicial minimalism. He has claimed that minimalism provides both an accurate descriptive account of how the Supreme Court decides constitutional cases and a persuasive normative theory of how the Justices should exercise their power of judicial review. In fact, he has written that the October 2003 Term demonstrates the Court's commitment to judicial minimalism.

In this Article, I demonstrate a deep tension between Professor Sunstein's aspiration that minimalism serve as an empirically testable (and thus descriptively accurate) account of the Supreme Court's work, and his ambition that minimalism provide a …

Supreme Court Watch, Reginald Oh

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Discusses the March 1, 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding the constitutionality of the death penalty in Roper v. Simmons, 125 S. Ct. 1183 (2005). The Court held that the death penalty cannot be applied to individuals under the age of eighteen at the time the crime was committed without violating the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Supreme Court Overview, October Term 2004, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute, Kelly Falls

Supreme Court Overviews

No abstract provided.

Preventing The Subversion Of Devlin V. Scardelletti, Brian Wolfman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Devlin v. Scardelletti that objecting class members could appeal a federal district court’s approval of a class settlement without first intervening in the litigation. Public interest lawyer Brian Wolfman says the ruling was a victory for both objectors and the integrity of class action procedure: Objectors, he argues, help keep fairness hearings fair.

But a number of courts are now ruling that Devlin only applies to non-opt-out class actions, rather than the much more numerous ones that give class members opt-out rights. In this article, Wolfman details the exact wording of the …

Supreme Court Watch, Reginald Oh

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Discusses the case in the 2004-05 U.S. Supreme Court Term which decided a constitutional challenge to the State of California's practice of temporarily racially segregating its prisoners. On November 2, 2004, the Court heard oral arguments in Johnson v. California, a lawsuit brought by an African-American prison inmate in the California Department of Corrections. The petitioner contends that the state's longstanding policy of racially segregating prisoners for sixty days violates the Equal Protection Clause. On February 23, 2005, the Court issued its opinion in ]ohnson v. California, 125 S. Ct. 1141 (2005), and held that the policy of …

Michigan Supreme Court Overturns Landmark Eminent Domain Case, Patricia E. Salkin

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Review Of Agency Interpretations: The Difference Discovers Itself, Marla E. Mansfield

ExpressO

The Supreme Court regularly reviews agency interpretations of statutes. For many years, the official dogma of the Court was one of deference to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes – the so-called “Chevron doctrine.” After Mead and Christensen, the Court was open to other levels of respect for agency interpretations. Recently, cases have so emphasized the particular statutory construction methods of the individual justices that the agency interpretation of a statute is now on the level of legislative history or other aids to interpretation, such as canons, which may or may not be used at a justice’s option. The array …

The Judicial Nominations Wars, William P. Marshall

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Federal Judicial Selection: The First Decade, Maeva Marcus

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bork Was The Beginning: Constitutional Moralism And The Politics Of Federal Judicial Selection, Gary L. Mcdowell

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Judicial Selection As . . . Talk Radio, Michael J. Gerhardt

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

From Pin Point To The Legal Pinnacle, Tory L. Lucas

Faculty Publications and Presentations

In Judging Thomas: The Life and Times of Clarence Thomas, author Ken Foskett argues that “the key to unlocking Justice Thomas’s decision making is not dissecting the opinions but understanding the man who wrote them.” Capturing the essence of Judging Thomas, this quote forms the premise for this book review. A person cannot always be understood by his accomplishments. Instead, we sometimes must look beyond the person himself, and look into that person’s family history. That is precisely what this Thomas biography attempts to do.

This book review, entitled From Pin Point to the Legal Pinnacle, briefly outlines how Thomas …

What Hath Raich Wrought? Five Takes, Brannon Denning, Glenn Reynolds

College of Law Faculty Scholarship

Written for a paper symposium on Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005), we describe the effects of the decision on what had seemed a renewed interest on the part of the Court to limit federal power.

What Hath Raich Wrought? Five Takes, Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Scholarly Works

The Court's decision in Gonzales v. Raich provides an opportunity to reflect on the Rehnquist Court's apparent run at establishing a judicially-enforceable federalism. Two of the most visible symbols of this effort were the decisions in United States v. Lopez and United States v. Morrison, in which the Court twice struck down acts of Congress as beyond the scope of its commerce power. Now, nearly ten years after Lopez and five years after Morrison, Raich leaves many wondering whether the Court provided an answer to John Nagle's question whether Lopez was destined to be a watershed or a "but see …

Substantive Versus Process-Based Formalism In Claim Construction, Timothy R. Holbrook

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in recent years has embraced the use of bright-line formalistic rules in the interest of increasing certainty in patent law. This formalistic approach pervades the court's jurisprudence and extends far beyond claim construction. The Supreme Court has also expressed an interest in certainty in patent law, but its approach has varied from that of the Federal Circuit. Whereas the Federal Circuit has articulated bright-line substantive rules that are outcome determinative, the Supreme Court has articulated process-based formalistic rules, such as the use of rebuttable presumptions, which do not preordain a certain …

Medellin V. Dretke: Federalism And International Law, Curtis A. Bradley, Lori Fisler Damrosch, Martin Flaherty

Faculty Scholarship

This is an edited version of a debate held at Columbia Law School on February 21, 2005.

The Great Writ Of Incoherence: An Analysis Of Supreme Court's Rulings On "Enemy Combatants", Gregory Dolin

All Faculty Scholarship

On June 28, 2004, the United States Supreme Court released its much awaited decisions in the cases posing a challenge to the Executive's self-professed authority to detain and indefinitely hold individuals designated as "enemy combatants." The cases arose from the "war on terrorism" that was launched after the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001. When each decision is looked at individually, the result seems to make sense and, given the outcome (affording detainees rights of judicial review), feels good. Yet when these decisions are looked at collectively, it is hard to believe that they were issued by …

“Testimonial” And The Formalistic Definition: The Case For An “Accusatorial” Fix, Robert P. Mosteller

Faculty Scholarship

The definition that the Supreme Court ultimately gives to the concept of testimonial statements will obviously be of critical importance in determining whether the new Confrontation Clause analysis adopted by Crawford affects only a few core statements or applies to a broader group of accusatorial statements knowingly made to government officials and perhaps private individuals at arm's length from the speaker. I contend that the broader definition is more consistent with the anti-inquisitorial roots of the Confrontation Clause when that provision is applied in the modern world. If my sense of the proper scope of the clause is roughly correct, …

Reflections On The Teaching Of Constitutional Law, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Playing Hot Potato With Copa: The Supreme Court Defers Deciding Whether The Child Online Protection Act Is Constitutional Once Again, Anne S. Johnston

Saint Louis University Public Law Review

No abstract provided.

Walking The Walk Of Plain Text: The Supreme Court’S Markedly More Solicitous Treatment Of Title Vii Following The Civil Rights Act Of 1991, Harold S. Lewis Jr.

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

God In The Machine: A New Structural Analysis Of Copyright's Fair Use Doctrine, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

Recognition of the structural role of fair use has the potential to mitigate some of the uncertainty of current fair use jurisprudence. The statutory framework for fair use both mitigates and causes uncertainty. It mitigates uncertainty by providing a consistent framework of analysis the four statutory factors. However, when judges apply the statutory factors without articulating or justifying their own assumptions, they increase uncertainty. The statutory factors mean nothing without certain a priori assumptions as to the scope of the copyright owner's rights. A more stable and predictable fair use jurisprudence would begin to emerge if those assumptions were made …

The Majoritarian Difficulty: Affirmative Action, Sodomy, And Supreme Court Politics, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

This Article challenges liberal and conservative assessments of Lawrence, Gratz, and Grutter. Although the outcome of these cases might indeed prove helpful to the agendas of social movements for racial and sexual justice, progressive scholars and activists should not receive these cases with elation. Instead, the research of constitutional theorists, critical legal scholars, and political scientists allows for a more contextualized and guarded account of and reaction to these decisions. Instead of representing extraordinary victories for oppressed classes, these cases reflect majoritarian and moderate views concerning civil rights, and the opinions contain many doctrinal elements that reinforce, …

Ten Commandments, Nine Judges, And Five Versions Of One Amendment - The First. (“Now What?”), William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the variety of opinions expressed by the Justices in the two “Ten Commandments” cases, specifically Justice O’Connor’s dissent and Justice Breyer’s concurrence in Van Orden v. Perry.

Duck When A Conflict Of Interest Blinds You: Judicial Conflicts Of Interest In The Matters Of Scalia And Ginsburg, Marianne M. Jennings, Nim Razook

University of San Francisco Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of International Human Rights Developments On Sexual Minority Rights, Arthur S. Leonard

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.