Courts Commons^™

A Referee Without A Whistle: Magistrate Judges And Discovery Sanctions In The Seventh Circuit, Landyn Wm. Rookard

Indiana Law Journal

This Note ultimately argues that, if the Seventh Circuit is not willing to reverse its holdings in Alpern v. Lieb and Retired Chicago Police Ass'n v. City of Chicago in light of recent developments, Congress should again clarify its intent. In the face of the crushing "costs of discovery [that] threaten to exceed the amount at issue in all but the largest cases," it is the Seventh Circuit's responsibility to employ all just and legal devices to comply with Congress's mandate "to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding."

Expert Prevalence, Persuasion And Price: What Trial Participants Really Think About Experts, Andrew W. Jurs

Indiana Law Journal

By measuring how expert witnesses are actually used in court, this study offers important new data about what makes expert effective and suggests that some commonly held beliefs about experts are misguided. In doing so, the data establishes an important new baseline for measuring expert witnesses in court, updating and expanding on prior research in the field.

Filling The D.C. Circuit Vacancies, Carl W. Tobias

Indiana Law Journal

Partisanship undermines judicial nominations to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. With three of eleven judgeships vacant during Barack Obama’s first term, he was the only President in a half century not to appoint a jurist to the nation’s second-most important court. Confirming accomplished nominees, thus, became imperative for the circuit’s prompt, economical, and fair case disposition. In 2013, Obama submitted excellent candidates. Patricia Millett had argued thirty-two Supreme Court appeals; Cornelia Pillard successfully litigated numerous path-breaking matters; and Robert Wilkins had served on the D.C. District bench for three years. The purportedly shrinking tribunal …

Duty To Defend And The Rule Of Law, Gregory F. Zoeller

Indiana Law Journal

This Article challenges Eric Holder’s and William Pryor’s views and explains the proper role of a state attorney general when a party challenges a state statute. In short, an attorney general owes the state and its citizens, as sovereign, a duty to defend its statutes against constitutional attack except when controlling precedent so overwhelmingly shows that the statute is unconstitutional that no good-faith argument can be made in its defense. To exercise discretion more broadly, and selectively to pick and choose which statutes to defend, only erodes the rule of law. (introduction)

Surrogate Testimony After Williams: A New Answer To The Question Of Who May Testify Regarding The Contents Of A Laboratory Report, Jennifer Alberts

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Judicial Selection In Congress’ Lame Duck Session, Carl W. Tobias

Indiana Law Journal

This Article first scrutinizes the Obama Administration confirmation and nomination processes. It then critically explores selection and concludes that Republican obstruction instigated the most open positions the longest time. Because this deficiency undermines swift, economical, and fair case resolution, the Article suggests ideas to promptly decrease the remaining unoccupied judgeships after the session commences.

Screening Out Innovation: The Merits Of Meritless Litigation, Alexander A. Reinert

Indiana Law Journal

Courts and legislatures often conflate meritless and frivolous cases when balancing the desire to keep courthouse doors open to novel or unlikely claims against the concern that entertaining ultimately unsuccessful litigation will prove too costly for courts and defendants. Recently, significant procedural and substantive barriers to civil litigation have been informed by judicial and legislative assumptions about the costs of entertaining meritless and frivolous litigation. The prevailing wisdom is that eliminating meritless and frivolous claims as early in a case’s trajectory as possible will focus scarce resources on the truly meritorious cases, thereby ensuring that available remedies are properly distributed …

Beyond The Verdict: Why The Courts Must Protect Jurors From The Public Before, During, And After High-Profile Cases, Scott Ritter

Indiana Law Journal

In a time when more and more criminal trials are saturated in news coverage, media outlets race to get as much information as possible to the public. That access to the criminal justice system is a right protected by the First Amendment. But where does the access stop? This Note explores those limits, and the intersection between the First and Fourth Amendments.

The Immigrant "Other": Racialized Identity And The Devaluation Of Immigrant Family Relations, Anita Maddali

Indiana Law Journal

This Article explores how current terminations of undocumented immigrants’ parental rights are reminiscent of historical practices that removed early immigrant and Native American children from their parents in an attempt to cultivate an Anglo-American national identity. Today, children are separated from their families when courts terminate the rights of parents who have been, or who face, deportation. Often, biases toward undocumented parents affect determinations concerning parental fitness in a manner that, while different, reaps the same results as the removal of children from their families over a century ago. This Article examines cases in which courts terminated the parental rights …

Doctrinal Conversation: Justice Kagan's Supreme Court Opinions, Laura K. Ray

Indiana Law Journal

In her first two terms on the Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan has crafted a distinctive judicial voice that speaks to her readers in a remarkably conversational tone. She employs a variety of rhetorical devices: invocations to “remember” or “pretend”; informal and even colloquial diction; a diverse assortment of similes and metaphors; and parenthetical interjections that guide the reader’s response. These strategies engage the reader in much the same way that Kagan as law professor may well have worked to engage her students, and in the context of judicial opinions they serve several purposes. They make Kagan’s opinions accessible to …

Justice Scalia's Truthiness And The Virtues Of Judicial Center, Allen K. Rostron

Indiana Law Journal

Antonin Scalia is by far the Supreme Court’s greatest wit and most colorful personality. When I choose audio clips from the Court’s oral arguments to play in my constitutional law classes, I would like to offer a balanced sample of views from the left and right sides of the Court. But I cannot resist loading up on Scalia sound bites, because in almost every major case he serves up the sharpest questioning and most imaginative hypotheticals. His judicial opinions are also remarkably passionate and frank. If he thinks a lawyer’s or even a fellow Justice’s argument is nonsense, he will …

Introduction: Invited Essays On The Implications Of Windsor And Perry

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Further Standing Lessons, Heather Elliott

Indiana Law Journal

Professor Elliott wrote a piece for the Indiana Law Journal in 2012 (available here). In this article, she updates her analysis and explores the implications of both the health-care and marriage equality cases on the Court’s standing doctrine.

Windsor, Shelby County, And The Demise Of Originalism: A Personal Account, Dawn E. Johnsen

Indiana Law Journal

Essays on the Implication of Windsor and Perry

Evolving Values, Animus, And Same-Sex Marriage, Daniel O. Conkle

Indiana Law Journal

In this Essay, I contend that a Fourteenth Amendment right to same-sex marriage will emerge, and properly so, when the Supreme Court determines that justice so requires and when, in the words of Professor Alexander Bickel, the Court’s recognition of this right will “in a rather immediate foreseeable future . . . gain general assent.” I suggest that we are fast approaching that juncture, and I go on to analyze three possible justifications for such a ruling: first, substantive due process; second, heightened scrutiny equal protection; and third, rational basis equal protection coupled with a finding of illicit “animus.” I …

Standing To Appeal And Executive Non-Defense Of Federal Law After The Marriage Cases, Ryan W. Scott

Indiana Law Journal

Essays on the Implications of Windsor and Perry

Is The Full Faith And Credit Clause Still "Irrelevant" To Same-Sex Marriage?: Toward A Reconsideration Of The Conventional Wisdom, Steve Sanders

Indiana Law Journal

Essays on the Implications of Windsor and Perry

Leveling Up After Doma, Deborah A. Widiss

Indiana Law Journal

Essays on the Implication of Windsor and Perry

Citizens United, States Divided: An Empirical Analysis Of Independent Political Spending, Douglas M. Spencer, Abby Wood

Indiana Law Journal

What effect has Citizens United v. FEC had on independent spending in American politics? Previous attempts to answer this question have focused solely on federal elections, where there is no baseline for comparing changes in spending behavior. We overcome this limitation by examining the effects of Citizens United as a natural experiment on the states. Before Citizens United, about half of the states banned corporate independent expenditures and thus were “treated” by the Supreme Court’s decision, which invalidated these state laws. We rely on recently released state-level data to compare spending in “treated” states to spending in the “control” states, …

Removal Reform: A Solution For Federal Question Jurisdiction, Forum Shopping, And Duplicative State-Federal Litigation, Martha A. Field

Indiana Law Journal

Federal court procedural, especially jurisdictional ones, need to be governed by clear, effective, and fair rules. Yet twentieth century doctrines and reforms, even when made in the name of pragmatism, have produced decidedly unpragmatic results: a vague and disputed doctrine of federal question jurisdiction that excludes from federal court many cases where federal law controls the outcome, rules that facilitate forum shopping by plaintiffs and make it impossible to predict in advance what law will apply to decide one’s case, and the stunning waste of a system in which the exact same issues are simultaneously litigated in state and federal …

The Jurisdiction Of The Court Of Federal Claims And Forum Shopping In Money Claims Against The Federal Government, Gregory C. Sisk

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The False Promise Of The Converse-1983 Action, John F. Preis

Indiana Law Journal

The federal government is out of control. At least that’s what many states will tell you. Not only is the federal government passing patently unconstitutional legislation, but its street-level officers are ignoring citizens’ constitutional rights. How can states stop this federal juggernaut? Many are advocating a “repeal amendment,” whereby two-thirds of the states could vote to repeal federal legislation. But the repeal amendment will only address unconstitutional legislation, not unconstitutional actions. States can’t repeal a stop-and-frisk that occurred last Thursday. States might, however, enact a so-called “converse-1983” action. The idea for converse-1983 laws has been around for some time but …

Step Aside, Mr. Senator: A Request For Members Of The Senate Judiciary Committee To Give Up Their Mics, Paul E. Vaglicia

Indiana Law Journal

In 1995, a law professor at the University of Chicago Law School dubbed the Supreme Court confirmation hearings “vapid and hollow” and added that they, as implemented, “serve little educative function, except perhaps to reinforce lessons of cynicism that citizens often glean from government.” Ironically, this same law professor, Elena Kagan, later endured the confirmation hearings as a nominee and currently sits as the 112th Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. While she may be one of the few to ever reach a seat on the High Court, she is not alone in her assessment of the Supreme Court’s lackluster …

Building The Federal Judiciary (Literally And Legally): The Monuments Of Chief Justices Taft, Warren And Rehnquist, Judith Resnik

Indiana Law Journal

The “federal courts” took on their now familiar contours over the course of the twentieth century. Three chief justices—William Howard Taft, Earl Warren, and William Rehnquist—played pivotal roles in shaping the institutional, jurisprudential, and physical premises. Taft is well known for promoting a building to house the U.S. Supreme Court and for launching the administrative infrastructure that came to govern the federal courts. Earl Warren’s name has become the shorthand for a jurisprudential shift from state toward federal authority; the Warren Court offered an expansive understanding of the role federal courts could play in enabling access for a host of …

Standing Lessons: What We Can Learn When Conservative Plaintiffs Lose Under Article Iii Standing Doctrine, Heather Elliott

Indiana Law Journal

The Supreme Court’s Article III standing doctrine has plagued liberal groups for nearly forty years. Recently, however, the doctrine has blocked a number of conservative lawsuits opposing gay marriage, the 2010 health care law, and the expansion of federal funding for stem cell research.

What can we learn from these cases? Because contemporary criticisms of standing doctrine have usually come from the left and defenses from the right, it is commonplace to associate arguments for broad standing with left-wing political agendas.

But, as some scholars have shown, a version of narrow standing helped liberals protect New Deal legislation in the …

Televising The Supreme Court: Why Legislation Fails, R. Patrick Thornberry

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Fulfilling The Promise Of Payne: Creating Participatory Opportunities For Survivors In Capital Cases, Megan A. Mullett

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Not The Crime But The Cover-Up: A Deterrence-Based Rationale For The Premeditation-Deliberation Formula, Michael J. Zydney Mannheimer

Indiana Law Journal

Beginning with Pennsylvania in 1794, most American jurisdictions have, at one time or another, separated the crime of murder into two degrees based on the presence or absence of premeditation and deliberation. An intentional, premeditated, and deliberate murder is murder of the first degree, while second-degree murder is committed intentionally but without premeditation or deliberation. The distinction was created in order to limit the use of the death penalty, which generally has been imposed only for first-degree murder.

Critics have attacked the premeditation-deliberation formula on two fronts. First, they have charged that the formula is imprecise as a measure of …

Procedure's Ambiguity, Mark Moller

Indiana Law Journal

By leaving the meaning of a statute—or procedural rule—undecided, ambiguous appellate decisions create space for lower courts to adopt a blend of conflicting approaches, yielding an average result that trims between competing preferences. While compromising in this way may seem to flout basic norms of good judging, this Article shows that opaque “compromise” opinions have plausible normative appeal, given premises about good interpretation often labeled “pluralist.” Judicial pluralists think courts should decide cases in ways interest groups would, hypothetically, accept. To demonstrate the pluralist appeal of opaque decisions, I develop, in turn, two related claims: First, interest groups, under the …

The Costs Of Heightened Pleading, Alexander A. Reinert

Indiana Law Journal

In Conley v. Gibson, the Supreme Court announced its commitment to a liberal pleading regime in federal civil cases, and for decades thereafter was steadfast in resisting ad hoc heightened pleading rules adopted by lower courts. Thus, from 1957 until a few years ago, most litigants could count on surviving a motion to dismiss a complaint for failure to state a claim so long as their pleading provided some minimal notice to the defendant of the nature of their claim. Enter Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly. Iqbal and Twombly, by many accounts, two-stepped the Court from …