Courts Commons^™

Fig Leaves, Fairytales, And Constitutional Foundations: Debating Judicial Review In Britain, Lori A. Ringhand

Scholarly Works

This paper examines an ongoing debate about the origins and legitimacy of judicial review as practiced in Britain. I begin by examining how British law traditionally has attempted to justify judicial review of governmental actions. I then discuss how that orthodox view has been challenged, and how the proponents of the orthodoxy responded to that challenge. In doing so, I explain how the British debate has evolved into a far-reaching examination of the role of interpretive methodologies in legitimating judicial power. I conclude by exploring how the richness and depth of the British discussion can inform the larger debate about …

The Drafting Process For A Hague Convention On Jurisdiction And Judgements With Special Consideration Of Intellectual Property And E-Commerce, Knut Woestehoff

LLM Theses and Essays

This thesis is a study of the drafting process for the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction and Judgements. It will be demonstrated why the original goal of a broad treaty was given up in favor of a draft convention that only applies in international cases to exclusive choice of court agreements concluded in civil and commercial matters in the business-to-business setting. The reader will get an understanding of how the participating nations and interest groups influenced the negotiations and modified the outcome of the discussions. Special consideration was given to the matters of intellectual property and e-commerce, which were nearly completely …

Foreword: Rethinking Reconstruction After Iraq, Diane Marie Amann

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Foreword to a symposium held on March 12, 2004 by the UC Davis Journal of International Law & Policy. Entitled “Rethinking Reconstruction After Iraq,” the symposium was designated a regional meeting of the American Society of International Law and the American Branch of the International Law Association, and further was sponsored by the American National Section of the International Association of Penal Law and the International Human Rights Committee of the Bar Association of San Francisco.

An End Of Term Exam: October Term 2003 At The Supreme Court Of The United States, Peter B. Rutledge, Nicole L. Angarella

Scholarly Works

The goal of this Essay is to provide a resource of digestible proportions that any Court watcher (judge, lawyer, professor, student) can use to inform himself or herself about current developments at the Court. While the Essay discusses how the current Term compares to past ones, it does not do so simply as an exercise in dry social science. Instead, it highlights those trends of interest to both the scholar and the practitioner. Likewise, while the Essay discusses particular cases, it does not simply summarize facts and holdings. Instead, it places those doctrinal developments in a larger context, analyzes them, …

"May It Please The Camera,...I Mean The Court"--An Intrajudicial Solution To An Extrajudicial Problem, Lonnie T. Brown

Scholarly Works

This Article explores the depths of the ethical issues presented when lawyers zealously advocate on behalf of their clients to the media, as well as the negative public policy ramifications that such behavior generates. The latter effect most seriously signals the need for reform in this area. Part II of the Article provides insight into the principal source of the problem--the ineffectiveness of the existing regulatory devices. This section traces the evolution of the ethical rules that pertain to public commentary by lawyers from the early days of steadfast condemnation to the modern appraoch of cautious equivocation. It also considers …

Fifteen Famous Supreme Court Cases From Georgia, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

John Inscoe, UGA professor of history and editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia, invited Hosch Professor Dan T. Coenen to contribute a series of essays on the most significant U.S. Supreme Court cases that originated in the state of Georgia. This article, which proposes an unranked top 15 list, is built on this work.

Adrift On A Sea Of Uncertainty: Preserving Uniformity In Patent Law Post-Vornado Through Deference To The Federal Circuit, Larry D. Thompson

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Congress created the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in 1982, and granted that court exclusive appellate jurisdiction over civil actions arising under patent law. Congress's primary goals in creating the Federal Circuit were to produce a more uniform patent jurisprudence and to reduce forum shopping based on favorable patent law. But in the 2002 decision of Holmes Group, Inc. v. Vornado Air Circulation Systems, the Supreme Court held that patent counterclaims alone could not create Federal Circuit jurisdiction. This decision not only overruled the Federal Circuit's longstanding jurisdictional rule, but also opened the door for Regional …

Guantánamo, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

This article addresses not only offshore detainees at Guantánamo and elsewhere, but also the two Americans and one Qatari held in the United States as enemy combatants. It focuses on the critical issues in U.S. litigation - extraterritoriality and deference - yet also examines the scope of detention and the propriety of proposed special tribunals. After demonstrating that in the wake of September 11, 2001, no U.S. constitutional precedent governed these issues, the article then looks to norms drawn from international humanitarian and human rights law to aid decision. The Supreme Court increasingly consults such external norms as persuasive authority; …

Daubert & Danger: The "Fit" Of Expert Predictions In Civil Commitments, Alex Scherr

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The opinions of experts in prediction in civil commitment hearings should help the courts, but over thirty years of commentary, judicial opinion, and scientific review argue that predictions of danger lack scientific rigor. The United States Supreme Court has commented regularly on the uncertainty of predictive science. The American Psychiatric Association has argued to the Court that "[t]he professional literature uniformly establishes that such predictions are fundamentally of very low reliability." Scientific studies indicate that some predictions do little better than chance or lay speculation, and even the best predictions leave substantial room for error about individual cases. The sharpest …

Opening Statement -- Making It Stick, Ronald L. Carlson, Michael S. Carlson

Popular Media

Every lawyer who sits down to plan her opening remarks for a coming trial has the same question: How far can I go in arguing my case during the opening statement? Can I mention the law? What about drawing a diagram of the accident on a blackboard? Will my opponent be able to stop me from displaying a couple of my dramatic exhibits to the jury?

Making one's theory of the case "stick" from the very start of the trial depends mightly on how far the lawyer can go in opening statement. Where the defense is primarily a legal or …

The Rehnquist Court, Structural Due Process, And Semisubstantive Constitutional Review, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

Semisubstantive review, as I use that label, entails four key features. First, the subject matter of judicial inquiry is not the process applied in adjudicating a discrete dispute; rather, the matter at hand is the constitutionality of a statute or other generalized expression of legal policy. Second, some procedural omission by the lawmaker -- rather than an incurably substantive flaw in the end product of its work -- lays the groundwork for a judicial intervention that invalidates the challenged rule or negates how that rule otherwise would operate. It may be, for example, that a federal statute read as a …

Federal Guilty Pleas Under Rule 11: The Unfilled Promise Of The Post-Boykin Era, Julian A. Cook

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Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure governs perhaps the most essential and common practice in the federal criminal justice system--the guilty plea. Despite the public's focus on the excitement and drama engendered by real and fictional criminal trials, the overwhelming majority of criminal matters reach a negotiated resolution. Indeed, the importance of the guilty plea to the judiciary, prosecutors, and even defense attorneys cannot be overstated. Without guilty pleas, the criminal justice system would malfunction; the system is simply incapable of accommodating the constitutional exercise of a defendant's trial right in each instance.

The federal plea process …

A Common Private Law For Europe, Alan Watson

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A satisfactory private law for Europe is not primarily to be sought for in the most common solutions, themselves the result of borrowing. Nor in established rules, themselves the result of longevity, and lack of governmental incentive in innovating. Nor should it be sought in intermediate positions of various mixed systems, themselves the results of the features just above described. Rather it is to be found in the need for authority. This means that a common law for Europe requires the acceptance of a uniform system of adjudicating differences within a standard framework of the necessary sources of law. Authority …

Outrageous Opponents: How To Stop Them In Closing Argument, Ronald L. Carlson, Michael S. Carlson

Popular Media

Most attorneys try to sum up their cases in a fashion that comports with accepted law and local practice. All too frequently, however, one has the misfortune of running into Rambo, the over-the-top opponent. Before his peroration is concluded, Rambo has trampled on the law of trial practice by making half a dozen improper arguments. He urges evidence that never came up at trial. He injects hearsay into the proceedings. He adds his own opinions about which witnesses were lying and the legal fault of your client. And, this is just the beginning. Adding insult to injury, the unjust tactics …

Calling Children To Account: The Proposal For A Juvenile Chamber In The Special Court For Sierra Leone, Diane Marie Amann

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In a unique proposal to the United Nations Security Council, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan recommended that a Juvenile Chamber of the Special Court have authority to try defendants as young as fifteen. The plan sparked immediate controversy. Sierra Leoneans wanted the worst perpetrators punished regardless of age, while human rights organizations argued that juvenile prosecutions would weaken rehabilitative efforts. The Security Council subsequently diluted the proposal; nevertheless, it merits examination, given the increasing use, in Africa and around the world, of children in combat.

Naked Politics, Federal Courts Law, And The Canon Of Acceptable Arguments, Michael Wells

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In this Article, I argue that there is a wide gap between the aspirations and the actual operation of Federal Courts law. I maintain that, despite the conversational rule forbidding it, raw substance in fact wields significant influence in the resolution of Federal Courts issues. For example, the familiar argument that federal courts should be favored because they are more "sympathetic" to federal claims is really an appeal to naked politics. The empirical premise of this and other arguments of naked politics is that there are structural differences between federal and state courts which affect the outcomes of close cases, …

Who's Afraid Of Henry Hart?, Michael Wells

Scholarly Works

No law book has enjoyed greater acclaim from distinguished commentators over a sustained period than has Hart & Wechsler's The Federal Courts and the Federal System. Indeed, the praise seems to escalate from one edition to the next. Reviewing the first edition, published forty-three years ago, Philip Kurland called it "the definitive text on the subject of federal jurisdiction." Paul Mishkin added that "the analysis is of an order difficult to match anywhere." In his review of the second edition, published in 1973, Henry Monaghan began by praising the first for having "deservedly achieved a reputation that is extraordinary among …

Judicial Review As A Tool For The Safeguard Of Human Rights: Prospects And Problems Of The U.S. Model In Malawi, Janet Laura Banda

LLM Theses and Essays

Judicial review is a judicial action that involves the review of an inferior legislative or executive act for conformity with a higher legal norm, with the possibility that the inferior norm may be invalidated or suspended if necessary. Although judicial review has been explicitly provided for in some written post-independence African constitutions, such review has not developed into a significant principle of African juridical democracy. This lack of development can be attributed to the emergence of dictatorships in the post-colonial era. However, Malawi’s weak judiciary system was remedied by the 1994 Constitution which gave the Malawian judiciary a central position, …

International Jurisdiction In Products Liability Cases (Analysis Of Asahi And Post-Asahi Cases), Tsutomu Kuribayashi

LLM Theses and Essays

With the increase of foreign trade, there has also been an increase in the number of foreign manufacturers and distributors involved in product liability litigation in the United States. In many cases, the products from these foreign manufacturers and distributors reach the forum states through the stream of commerce, and are distributed to the customers by regional distributors, wholesalers, and retailers. Therefore, in many product liability cases where defective products from these foreign manufacturers and distributors cause injuries to people in the United States, those foreign companies do not have a direct relationship with the forum states. In these cases, …

The Issue Of The Legal Validity Of Using Economic Sanctions To Enforce Human Rights, Thomas Hailu

LLM Theses and Essays

The international legal regime as it pertains to human rights is neither as established nor as definitive as it appears. It suffers from many disadvantages, the first and most important of which is the fact that the international legal regime has never been capable of effectively enforcing its rules or instituting appropriate remedies for its breaches. Some states have attempted to make up for this inability on behalf of international law by undertaking an enforcement mechanism either unilaterally or multilaterally; economic sanctions are often regarded as valuable tools of enforcement to be used against countries which are allegedly engaged in …

Original Intent And Article Iii, Michael L. Wells, Edward J. Larson

Scholarly Works

Article III of the United States Constitution sets limits on the ability of the legislature to expand or contract the jurisdiction of the federal courts. The Supreme Court has generally held that Article III's restraints on the power of the legislature to restrict the jurisdiction of the federal courts are few and extremely permissive. Many scholars, however, argue that Article III imposes some strong limitations on the legislature's ability to define federal jurisdiction. Strangely, both sides of the debate rely on originalist arguments. This Article argues that reliance on the Framers' intent to resolve issues of federal courts law is …

Positivism And Antipositivism In Federal Courts Law, Michael Wells

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What is the proper role of rules in federal courts law? Some scholars associated with the Legal Process assert that rules are unimportant here. They believe that the values of principled adjudication and reasoned elaboration should take precedence over the making and application of rules. The area is, in the jargon of jurisprudence, "antipositivist." Others maintain that rules do, or at any rate should, count heavily in federal courts' decisionmaking. In this Article, I argue that Legal Process scholars are right to spurn formalism in most parts of federal courts law. But the Legal Process model of federal courts law …

The Fourth Amendment Protection Against Unreasonable Searches And Seizures And The French Experience, Florence Sophie Boreil

LLM Theses and Essays

Under the American approach to criminal justice, freedom of the individual is of the utmost importance. The American criminal justice system reflects a distrust of abuse of power and an emphasis on protection of personal freedom. However, the French take a contrary approach; under French law, freedom is achieved through the State. This paper examines the protection of individuals’ rights in American and French criminal procedure. Focus will be given to tracking the police investigatory powers in each country through searches and seizures, and the impact that those powers have on individuals’ rights. This paper will assert that the police …

French And American Judicial Opinions, Michael Wells

Scholarly Works

In this Article, I examine the foundations of American judicial form, in particular the proposition that powerful instrumental considerations support the issuance of reasoned opinions. This project proceeds from the belief that the form of judicial opinions deserves serious scholarly attention despite the broad consensus about its value, because it frames the terms of debate on every issue courts confront. My analysis is built on the view that critical insights into the nature of one's own legal system can be gleaned only by "understand[ing] what [one's] system is not," a task that requires putting aside the internal perspective of a …

The Georgia Jury And Negligence: The View From The Trenches, R. Perry Sentell Jr.

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This is the third part of a project devoted to analyzing the Georgia negligence jury. The project employed as its original point of departure the extensive Chicago Jury Study of the 1960s, directed by Chicago Law Professor Harry Kalven, Jr. That Study's immortality derives principally from its famous first premise: Meaningful evaluation of the jury system must originate from within the system itself. That premise propelled Professor Kalven through a massive national survey of trial judges. The judges' responses, under Kalven's insightful analysis, yielded an unprecedented profile of the American jury. In foundational fashion, those responses indelibly etched into legal …

The Stare Decisis "Exception" To The Chevron Deference Rule, Rebecca White

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In this article, the author discusses how Chevron intersects with one important competing norm - stare decisis. Stare decisis counsels the Court to adhere to its own decisions, particularly statutory ones, absent substantial justification for departure. To what extent should stare decisis apply when an agency's interpretation of a statute, otherwise deserving of deference under Chevron, conflicts with a prior interpretation of the statute by the Supreme Court?

This article suggests the following answer: If the Court's prior opinion upheld the agency's interpretation as one reasonable reading of the statute, but not the only one possible, and the agency thereafter …

The Georgia Jury And Negligence: The View From The (Federal) Bench, R. Perry Sentell Jr.

Scholarly Works

This is the second part of a two-part inquiry into the quality of jury performance in Georgia negligence cases. Evaluation begins from within. That is an especially prominent truth in respect to the trial of negligence cases. The lay-professional partnership composing the civil trial system is unique. the professional's continuity provides a point of perfect perspective on the transient lay component--both its capacity and its performance. If the professional will share that perspective, it can structure a benchmark for foundational appraisal. To their great credit, the state and federal trial judges of Georgia are unstinting in assisting to construct that …

Behind The Parity Debate: The Decline Of The Legal Process Tradition In The Law Of Federal Courts, Michael L. Wells

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Whether there is parity between federal and state courts has become a central question in the law of federal courts, dividing judges and commentators into two well-defined camps. Although the issue rarely arose thirty years ago, it now enters into virtually every discussion of the rules concerning access to federal court for constitutional claims. On one side of the debate, advocates of broad federal jurisdiction over constitutional challenges to state action claim that federal courts are better than state courts at adjudicating these controversies. On the other side, advocates of state court jurisdiction insist that state courts are fully adequate …

The Constitutional Case Against Intracircuit Nonacquiescence, Dan T. Coenen

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A cornerstone of the United States Constitution is its separation of powers among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the national government. The Framers of the Constitution reasoned that separated powers would guard against tyranny by blocking the undue concentration of authority in any single governmental department. In crafting the Constitution, however, the Framers could not anticipate every dispute their scheme of separated powers might engender. One modern separation-of-powers conflict not specifically anticipated by the constitutional text involves so-called "intracircuit nonacquiescence.”

Intracircuit nonacquiescence occurs when executive-branch decision makers refuse to follow a circuit court's precedents even when acting subject …

Against An Elite Federal Judiciary: Comments On The Report Of The Federal Courts Study Committee, Michael L. Wells

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No doubt some reform of the federal courts is essential if they are to cope with the proliferation of litigation over the past thirty years and the resulting "congestion, delay, expense, and expansion" in the federal courts. While the problem may not amount to an "impending crisis", the burgeoning caseload surely poses a threat, at least in the long run, to the ability of the federal courts to function effectively. The hard question is not whether something should be done, but what to do about it. There is no shortage of interesting ideas. Some of the ideas that clamor for …