Common Law Commons^™

Case For A Constitutional Definition Of Hearsay: Requiring Confrontation Of Testimonial, Nonassertive Conduct And Statements Admitted To Explain An Unchallenged Investigation, The, James L. Kainen, Carrie A. Tendler

Faculty Scholarship

Crawford v. Washington’s historical approach to the confrontation clause establishes that testimonial hearsay inadmissible without confrontation at the founding is similarly inadmissible today, despite whether it fits a subsequently developed hearsay exception. Consequently, the requirement of confrontation depends upon whether an out-of-court statement is hearsay, testimonial, and, if so, whether it was nonetheless admissible without confrontation at the founding. A substantial literature has developed about whether hearsay statements are testimonial or were, like dying declarations, otherwise admissible at the founding. In contrast, this article focuses on the first question – whether statements are hearsay – which scholars have thus far …

Geier V. American Honda Motor Co.: A Story Of Statutes, Regulation And The Common Law, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

This essay was written as a contribution to one of Foundation's "Story" series. In Geier, a lawsuit had been brought on behalf of a teenager whose injuries from an accident might have been lessened if her car had contained an airbag. Plaintiffs sued on the straightforward basis that the design choice to omit a safety device of proven merit made the car unreasonably hazardous. Federal safety regulations had required the maker of her car to install some such device as an airbag in at least 10% of the cars it made the year it made her car – but her …

From Judging Culture To Taxing 'Indians': Tracing The Legal Discourse Of The 'Indian Mode Of Life', Constance Macintosh

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In this article I consider how judicial decision making characterizes Indigenous peoples’ culture outside the context of determinations under section 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982. I am concerned with how contemporary jurisprudence sometimes subjects Indigenous people to stereotyped tests of Aboriginality when they seek to exercise legislated rights. These common law tests of Aboriginality tend to turn on troubling oppositional logics, such as whether or not the Indigenous person engages in waged labour or commercial activities. These tests arose in historic legislation and policy that were premised on social evolutionary theory and were directed at determining whether an Indigenous …

What Is The Erie Doctrine? (And What Does It Mean For The Contemporary Politics Of Judicial Federalism?), Adam N. Steinman

Faculty Scholarship

As when Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins was decided seventy years ago, federal courts today are seen as more favorable to corporate and business interests than many of their state-court brethren. The current situation is due in no small part to federal courts' comparatively pro-defendant approaches to summary judgment, class certification, and other procedural issues. The Court's decision in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, which tilts federal pleading standards in favor of defendants, will likely have similar federalism implications. This Article presents a straightforward argument that the Erie doctrine may require federal courts to follow state-law standards on summary judgment, …

Procedural Common Law, Amy Coney Barrett

Journal Articles

Debates about the common lawmaking power of the federal courts focus exclusively on substantive common law. But federal common law is not limited to matters of substance; it reaches matters of procedure as well. Federal law includes a robust body of what might be called procedural common law - common law primarily concerned with the regulation of internal court processes rather than substantive rights and obligations. This body of law includes many doctrines that are fixtures in the law of procedure and federal courts. For example, abstention, forum non conveniens, remittitur, stare decisis, and preclusion can all fairly be characterized …

Why The Supreme Court Lied In Plessy, David S. Bogen

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

The Protection Of Religious Freedom Under The American Constitution, Robert A. Sedler

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Common Law Police Powers And The Rule Of Law, Steve Coughlan

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Common law police powers have long been a source of some dispute in the Canadian criminal justice system. On the one hand, their existence is difficult to reconcile with predictability in the law, since in any individual case where a new power is created (generally referred to as use of the "ancillary powers doctrine"), it would not have been possible to know in advance that the police were actually acting legally. On the other hand the benefit for society purchased with that ambiguity is a more tailored response to the particular problem, which might also lead to better results in …

Towards A Common Law Originalism, Bernadette Meyler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Originalists' emphasis upon William Blackstone's "Commentaries on the Laws of England" tends to suggest that the common law of the Founding era consisted in a set of determinate rules that can be mined for the purposes of constitutional interpretation. This Article argues instead that disparate strands of the common law, some emanating from the colonies and others from England, some more archaic and others more innovative, co-existed at the time of the Founding. Furthermore, jurists and politicians of the Founding generation were not unaware that the common law constituted a disunified field; indeed, the jurisprudence of the common law suggested …

The Use Of Prior Convictions After Apprendi, Colleen P. Murphy

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Face To Face': Rediscovering The Right To Confront Prosecution Witnesses, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the right of an accused 'to confront the witnesses against him'. The United States Supreme Court has treated this Confrontation Clause as a broad but rather easily rebuttable rule against using hearsay on behalf of a criminal prosecution; with respect to most hearsay, the exclusionary rule is overcome if the court is persuaded that the statement is sufficiently reliable, and the court can reach that conclusion if the statement fits within a 'firmly rooted' hearsay exception. This article argues that this framework should be abandoned. The clause should not be regarded …

Incorporating Common Law Into The Constitution Of Canada: Egale V. Canada And The Status Of Marriage, Mark D. Walters

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Recent decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada raise complicated questions about the relationship between the common law and the Constitution. In particular, a distinction may now be drawn between constitutional common law concepts that are "incorporated" by the Constitution and those that are "free-standing" or "text-emergent." The author explores the significance of these distinctions by examining the argument, accepted in the recent case of EGALE V. Canada, that the reference to marriage in section 91(26) of the Constitution serves to incorporate the common law definition of marriage into the Constitution, thus preventing federal or provincial legislation from legalizing same-sex …

A Measure Of Freedom, James W. Nickel

Articles

No abstract provided.

Stare Decisis As A Constitutional Requirement, Thomas Healy

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Gestation Of Birthright Citizenship, 1868-1898: States' Rights, The Law Of Nations, And Mutual Consent, Bernadette Meyler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article considers the inheritance of the seventeenth-century English common law conception of the subject in nineteenth-century America and, ultimately, in the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). It examines the claims for birthright citizenship derived from British common law and the three principal arguments against them. These latter included: objections to the assertion of a federal common law of citizenship from the perspective of state sovereignty; arguments that the United States should embrace citizenship by blood rather than by birth in order to conform to the practice of the law of nations and other …

Constitutionality Of "No-Citation" Rules, Salem M. Katsh, Alex V. Chachkes

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No-citation rules raise serious constitutional concerns. Assuming that it is constitutional to designate an opinion as nonprecedential, it is not constitutional to prohibit citing an opinion. No-citation rules are unconstitutional for two reasons. The first, citation prohibitions interfere with a litigant’s First Amendment right of speech and petition. Second, citation prohibitions violate the separation of powers.

Publicity And The Judicial Power, Daniel N. Hoffman

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

The judicial branch was created in order to ensure that the rule of law and not the rule of man prevailed. Judges must use reasoning and analysis to fulfill this role. Making decisions based on mere coin tosses or without giving a reason for the decision detracts from the rule of law. Issuing decisions that cannot be published or cited also detracts the judicial role of ensuring that law rules the land.

Free-Standing Due Process And Criminal Procedure: The Supreme Court's Search For Interpretive Guidelines, Jerold H. Israel

Articles

When I was first introduced to the constitutional regulation of criminal procedure in the mid-1950s, a single issue dominated the field: To what extent did the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment impose upon states the same constitutional restraints that the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments imposed upon the federal government? While those Bill of Rights provisions, as even then construed, imposed a broad range of constitutional restraints upon the federal criminal justice system, the federal system was (and still is) minuscule as compared to the combined systems of the fifty states. With the Bill of Rights provisions …

The Idea Of The Common Law In West Virginia Jurisprudential History: Morningstar V. Black & Decker Revisited, James Audley Mclaughlin

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Judgement As A Matter Of Law On Punitive Damages, Colleen P. Murphy

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Should State Corporate Law Define Successor Liability - The Demise Of Cercla's Federal Common Law, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

During the 1980s and early 1990s, a series of decisions broadly interpreting the liability provisions of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCIA) appeared destined to transform corporate law practice. CERCIA does not directly address successor liability, but the statute's complex and contradictory legislative history arguably implies that Congress wanted federal courts to apply broad liability principles to achieve the statute's fundamental remedial goal of making polluters and their successors pay for cleaning up hazardous substances.

Notably, a number of courts rejected state corporate law principles that usually limit the liability of successor corporations and instead …

Recovering The Original Fourth Amendment, Thomas Y. Davies

Michigan Law Review

Claims regarding the original or intended meaning of constitutional texts are commonplace in constitutional argument and analysis. All such claims are subject to an implicit validity criterion - only historically authentic assertions should matter. The rub is that the original meaning commonly attributed to a constitutional text may not be authentic. The historical Fourth Amendment is a case in point. If American judges, lawyers, or law teachers were asked what the Framers intended when they adopted the Fourth Amendment, they would likely answer that the Framers intended that all searches and seizures conducted by government officers must be reasonable given …

Confrontation Confronted, Richard D. Friedman, Margaret A. Berger, Steven R. Shapiro

Articles

The following article is an edited version of the amicus curiae brief filed with the Supreme Court of the United States in the October Term, 1998, in the case of Benjamin Lee Lilly v. Commonwealth of Virginia (No. 98-5881). "This case raises important questions about the meaning of the confrontation clause, which has been a vital ingredient of the fair trial right for hundreds of years," Professor Richard Friedman and his co-authors say. "In particular, this case presents the Court with an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between the confrontation clause and the law of hearsay." On June 10 the …

Ultra Vires Takings, Matthew D. Zinn

Michigan Law Review

When does legislative or administrative regulatory action "go[] too far" and effectively amount to an .appropriation of private property for which the Fifth Amendment requires just compensation? This question has turned out to be one of the thorniest in American constitutional law. The Supreme Court has identified several circumstances in which one can expect to find a regulatory taking, but its numerous pronouncements on the subject give no clear rule to distinguish compensable takings from noncompensable interference with property rights. Notwithstanding its volume, the commentary on the Takings Clause by and large addresses only proper governmental action that rises to …

Off Broadway: The Supreme Court's Criminal Law Decisions In The 1996 Term Take Second Stage In An Historic Term, William E. Hellerstein

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Governmental Takings, Court Of Appeals: Kim V. City Of New York

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Gasperini In Line With Erie: New York Law Determines Excessiveness Of Verdict In Diversity Cases, Edie C. Grinblat

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of People, For Michigan Republic, Ex Rel V. State Of Michigan, 30 J. Marshall L. Rev. 937 (1997), Phillip A. Hendges

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of The Personal Use Principle Under Copyright Law, Hsin-Chih Cheng

LLM Theses and Essays

Personal use is when an individual uses a copyrighted work for private purposes, such as learning or entertainment. Personal use is a right given in the Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution, however, an issue arises when the individual wants to make a copy of the copyrighted work. New technologies like photocopying and videotaping make this issue more prominent today. Some copyright owners think that the individual’s copying for private use is harmful to their potential market and they argue for compensation. Does the individual have the right under the personal use principle to reproduce the copyrighted work for private …

Common Law Elements Of The Section 1983 Action, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the role of the common law in Supreme Court interpretation and application of § 1983, which grants a cause of action for violations of constitutional rights committed "under color of any [state] statute, ordinance, regulation, custom or usage."' I argue that the common law has served primarily to narrow the reach of § 1983, and that this is inappropriate in light of the broad statutory language and the absence of good evidence that the enacting Congress intended a narrower application than the statutory language indicates.