Courts Commons^™

Crossing The Toll Bridge: American Pipe And The Fate Of State Law Claims After Class Certification Denial In Federal Court, Alexander Schnur

Fordham Law Review

Rule 23(c)(1)(A) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) provides that, “At an early practicable time after a person sues . . . as a class representative, the court must determine by order whether to certify the action as a class action.” In American Pipe & Construction Co. v. Utah, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed the interplay of this FRCP 23(c)(1)(A) class certification decision and statutes of limitations, holding that the commencement of a putative class action suspends the statute of limitations for putative class members while class certification is pending. Over the last fifty years, the American …

Ai And Legal Malpractice: Are We Due For A Reckoning?, John Browning

Texas A&M Law Review

As the rate of AI adoption by lawyers steadily climbs, unfortunately so has the number of incidents of AI misuse by attorneys. For some time, courts satisfied themselves with giving offending lawyers warnings, ordering them to take additional CLE, and/or administering relatively nominal monetary sanctions. Lately, however, frustrated judges throughout the country have upped the ante by not only assessing increasingly higher sanctions but also imposing case dismissals and suspensions or disciplinary referrals for the lawyers involved. As this article discusses, with their negligence exposed to the public eye and the harsh gaze of their clients, lawyers who misuse AI …

الإجتهاد اللبناني, Poej

Proche-Orient, Études juridiques

No abstract provided.

L’Interprétation Par Le Juge Des Règles Écrites (Droit Libanais) : Du Fait Au Droit Et Du Droit Au Fait, Sélim Jahel

Proche-Orient, Études juridiques

No abstract provided.

الإجتهاد اللبناني, Poej

Proche-Orient, Études juridiques

No abstract provided.

Le Refus De Paiement Par Une Banque D’Un Compte Créditeur Ne Réalise Pas En Soi L’État De Cessation Des Paiements De La Dite Banque Au Regard De La Loi N° 2/67, Michel Soumrani

Proche-Orient, Études juridiques

No abstract provided.

La Notion D’Intérêt Pour Agir Dans Le Recours Pour Excès De Pouvoir, Antoine Moarbès

Proche-Orient, Études juridiques

No abstract provided.

La Représentation Successorale, Principe Général De La Loi De 1959 (À Propos De L'Arrêt De La 2e Ch. Civile De La Cour De Cassation N° 3/1980, Du 15 Juillet 1980), Ibrahim Najjar

Proche-Orient, Études juridiques

No abstract provided.

Les Rapports De La Doctrine Et De La Jurisprudence En Droit Public Libanais, Hassan-Tabet Rifaat, Antoine Kheir

Proche-Orient, Études juridiques

No abstract provided.

Les Réactions De La Doctrine À La Création Du Droit Par Les Juges : Droit International Privé, Pierre Gannagé

Proche-Orient, Études juridiques

No abstract provided.

Bibliographie, Ibrahim Najjar

Proche-Orient, Études juridiques

No abstract provided.

الإجتهاد اللبناني, Poej

Proche-Orient, Études juridiques

No abstract provided.

Le Droit Administratif Libanais, Est-Il Toujours Un Droit Non Écrit ?, Hassan-Tabet Rifaat

Proche-Orient, Études juridiques

No abstract provided.

On The Need To Recognize The Erga Omnes Effect In Fundamental Rights In Chilean Law, José Luis Guerrero Becar

Latin American & Caribbean Law Review

This article refers to the Chilean legal tradition of the relative effect of judgments, that is, their effects apply only to the parties involved in the litigation. This principle has an express exception in the Consumer Rights Protection Act, which mentions the erga omnes effect. Since 2010, this principle has come under scrutiny due to constitutional injunctions in social security matters administered by private companies known as ISAPRES (National Health Insurance Companies). These companies have increased the prices of health plans, using tables that apply factors based on age and sex. This has led to the filing of thousands of …

Whose Burden Is It Anyway? A Historical Resolution To Burden Allocation Under Federal Rule Of Civil Procedure 12(B)(3), Curtis Valencia

Northwestern University Law Review

Today, venue is generally treated as secondary to jurisdiction: statutory, waivable, and concerned with where litigation should proceed, rather than whether it should proceed at all. Yet the courts of appeals remain split over a basic question of federal venue procedure: who bears the burden of proof when a defendant moves to dismiss for improper venue under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(3)? Though seemingly technical, in practice, burden allocation can determine whether a suit survives.

This Note offers the first historically grounded approach to resolving Rule 12(b)(3)’s burden allocation problem and argues that the circuit majority approach rests on …

Arbitration In Name Only, Myriam Gilles

Northwestern University Law Review

Modern arbitration clauses hide a dirty secret: many don’t actually provide for genuine arbitration. These provisions masquerade as mutual commitments to fair and efficient private dispute resolution but, in truth, are mere imitations of genuine arbitration provisions. Some reserve for the drafter the power to amend or terminate the clause at will without notice or consent; others design the arbitration process to ensure bias from the start; still others depart so radically from the bilateral, informal model blessed by the Supreme Court that they scarcely resemble arbitration at all. These arrangements are arbitration in name only, falling outside the Federal …

Fake News From Fake Dudes: Why State Statutes Regulating Political Deepfakes Are Both Necessary And Constitutional, Jay Kennedy

Northwestern University Law Review

As technology advances and more Americans use the internet to get their news, AI-generated “deepfakes” have become a powerful tool for misinformation. One common use of deepfakes is to make fake, but convincing, videos of electoral candidates or government officials. Deepfakes pose particular harm to local governments and officials because, unlike federal leaders, local leaders usually do not have the financial resources to fund the counterspeech sufficient to disprove deepfakes. Thus, to help defend the integrity of local governments, this Note argues that every state should enact legislation prohibiting deepfakes of public officials and proposes a First Amendment-compliant framework for …

Originalism's General-Law Turn, Nina Varsava, Bill Watson

Northwestern University Law Review

Originalists are increasingly turning to a general-law theory of constitutional rights. Under this theory, constitutional enactment declared but did not create constitutional rights. The content of those rights was, and remains, a question of general law—a species of common law, regularly employed at the Founding, that transcends jurisdictional boundaries. This preoccupation with general law has precipitated a wave of scholarship developing general-law accounts of various constitutional rights. Yet the nature of general law itself remains poorly understood.

This Article offers a theory of general law. Using philosophical methods to reexamine early American cases and recent work in legal history, the …

The Role Of Reliance In Stare Decisis Doctrine, Rochelle Hestnas

Fordham Law Review

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent treatment of reliance interests in stare decisis doctrine is in flux. The Court has overruled long-standing precedent such as Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey with scant analysis as to how reliance interests factor into stare decisis doctrine, despite continuing to name reliance as a factor that should be considered. Arguments for whether and how reliance interests deserve protection are inherently challenging because it cannot be the case that every precedent should stand. Using Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as a case study, this Note analyzes the Court’s claim …

Rekonstruksi Pengawasan Peradilan Substantif Atas Perjanjian Penundaan Penuntutan Korporasi Dalam Perspektif Civic Trust Dan Reintegrative Shaming, Merlin Swantamalo Magna, Ariesta Wibisono Anditya

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

Law Number 20 of 2025 on the Criminal Procedure Code introduces the Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) as a special mechanism for corporate offenders. Article 328(8) grants judges substantive authority to assess proportionality, the impact on the national economy, and the suspect's ability to meet the agreed conditions—yet provides no clear parameters. This absence risks legal uncertainty, judicial formalism, and abuse of power, while colliding with the presumption of innocence within Indonesia's civil-law tradition, in which judges have traditionally played a passive role. This study aims to construct a dogmatic framework for judges' substantive judicial-supervision authority in the DPA mechanism. Employing …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Criminal Law Scholars And Legal Organizations In Support Of Petitioner, Alabama Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, Florida Association Of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Kentucky Association Of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Criminal Defense Attorneys Of Michigan, North Carolina Advocates For Justice, Virginia Association Of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Due Process Institute, Ira P. Robbins, Kyle Singhal

Amicus Briefs & Court Filings

SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT: The Sentencing Guidelines are, in practice, the most consequential legal text in federal criminal law. Yet this Court has abstained from interpreting the Guidelines for decades. That practice is anomalous in the federal judiciary and should end. District courts must correctly calculate every defendant’s guideline range at every sentencing hearing. Courts of Appeals routinely hear appeals asserting guideline mistakes. And differences of appellate opinion over purely legal, highly consequential questions often arise. This Court apparently declines to hear such cases because the Sentencing Commission could resolve those conflicts. See Braxton v. United States,500 U.S. 344, …

The New Economic Liberties, Daniel B. Rodriguez

Northwestern University Law Review

Despite the lack of serious interrogation at the federal constitutional level of economic regulations, there continues to be a fairly robust, energetic attention at the level of state constitutional law to so-called economic liberties. In a number of key cases, including, for example, matters involving occupational licensing, state courts have looked to unique features of their respective state constitutions to assess whether and to what extent regulations undertaken under the police power go too far. The rationales for evaluating and, in some cases, invalidating regulations under economic liberties principles are creative, and also controversial. The development of new interpretive approaches …

Court Reform And State Constitutions, Bryna Godar, Miriam Seifter

Northwestern University Law Review

State legislatures regularly propose and enact laws that seek to shape the substantive outcomes of state courts. These maneuvers, including court-packing, jurisdiction-stripping, and more creative changes to judicial selection or authority, would amount to legal earthquakes at the federal level. At the state level, these efforts often receive virtually no attention.

This Essay brings the potent category of outcome-shaping state court reform measures into focus and evaluates it as a question of state constitutional law. We argue that state constitutions, organized around principles of popular sovereignty, do not bar measures that align state courts with popular preferences or the public’s …

Textual (In)Difference In State Search-And-Seizure Provisions, Quinn Yeargain

Northwestern University Law Review

Over the past 250 years, state constitutional drafters have refined the scope of rights and liberties protected by their constitutions’ texts. Today, all state constitutions include a search-and-seizure provision—and though only a minority follow the layout, text, and context of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, most of them bear a striking resemblance to it. However, textual variations abound. Some of them may seem minor, like using the word “possessions” instead of “effects,” or mandating that warrants describe their intended targets “as nearly as may be” instead of requiring that they “particularly describ[e]” them. But others, like the addition …

State Constitutionalism's Fragile Wall, Adam B. Sopko

Northwestern University Law Review

The adequate and independent state grounds (AISG) doctrine has long demarcated the perimeter of the U.S. Supreme Court’s authority to review state court decisions, limiting review to questions of federal law. AISG maintains the Court’s primacy over federal law and state courts’ supremacy over state law. A comprehensive review of all filings on the Court’s docket from state courts over the last twenty years reveals that recent applications of AISG consist of subtle but significant departures from existing norms that, together, suggest a reformulation of the Court’s power over state courts that threatens their sovereign law development role. This Essay …

Foreword: Fifty-One Constitutions In An Evolving Federal Order, Misha Bogdanov, Olivia Christ

Northwestern University Law Review

On November 6 and 7, 2025, the Northwestern University Law Review, along with the Brennan Center for Justice and State Court Report, convened for its annual symposium, titled The Power of State Constitutional Rights. The symposium brought together judges, practitioners, and scholars to consider the substantive rights protected by state constitutions, the institutions charged with enforcing them, and the democratic processes through which state constitutional law changes. Across conversations about reproductive freedom, criminal procedure, labor, economic liberty, LGBTQ+ rights, voting, federalism, and judicial design, one proposition repeatedly, and emphatically, came into view: American constitutional law is not exhausted by the …

Child Labor And State Constitutionalism, Andrew Hammond, Helen Hershkoff

Northwestern University Law Review

Almost ninety years after Congress banned “oppressive” child labor as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act, employers are pushing state legislatures to let them put children to work in dangerous poultry plants, at hazardous construction sites, and during late shifts on school nights. Perversely, calls to rollback federal protections are camouflaged in the rhetoric of parents’ rights, casting child labor regulation as intrusive, paternalistic, and even socialist—echoing the same corporate arguments used a century ago when the Child Labor Amendment to the U.S. Constitution went down in defeat. These arguments mask the desperate economic circumstances of a parent claiming …

State Greenhouse Gas Emissions Disclosure Laws And The Dormant Commerce Clause: Leveraging The State Interest In Protecting Residents From Deception To Pass The Pike Balancing Test, Matthew Macphail

Northwestern University Law Review

Misleading corporate claims about greenhouse gas emissions pose a high risk of consumer deception, as there is currently no uniform federal standard governing how companies must measure or disclose those emissions. Without a national regulatory scheme, firms can selectively report, use inconsistent methodologies, or market vague “carbon neutral” claims, making it difficult for consumers to assess accuracy or compare companies’ representations.

In 2023, California introduced legislation requiring companies doing business in the state to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to bring transparency to this area. But such state-level mandates face a constitutional obstacle: the Dormant Commerce Clause, …

Geduldig's Footnote: Five-Plus Decades Of State Courts Reckoning With Federal Pregnancy Discrimination Doctrine, Martha F. Davis

Northwestern University Law Review

In Geduldig v. Aiello (1974), the U.S. Supreme Court held that pregnancy discrimination does not constitute sex discrimination. The decision’s constitutional logic has recently been applied in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and United States v. Skrmetti. Yet over five decades, state courts have overwhelmingly rejected Geduldig’s rationale—both in construing state employment discrimination statutes and in interpreting state constitutional equality provisions. Courts in at least sixteen states have rejected Geduldig’s rationale in construing state employment discrimination laws, while only four states have followed it. Of the ten states with Equal Rights Amendments that have addressed whether …

State Constitutional Rights And Judicial Power, Zachary D. Clopton

Northwestern University Law Review

On the one hand, we are in a moment when interest in state courts and state constitutional law is growing. Especially, though not exclusively, among those who question the Supreme Court of the United States, there are increasing calls for state supreme courts to rely on state constitutions to expand rights. On the other hand, we are in a moment when interest in reducing the power of the courts is growing. Especially, though not exclusively, among those who question the Supreme Court of the United States, there are increasingly calls for reining in judicial power.

This Essay is not an …