Courts Commons^™

Balancing The Federal Judiciary, Anne Bryant

University of Richmond Law Review

Since the American Association of University Women first published the associational brief "Balancing the Federal Judiciary" in 1988, two new Associate Justices (David Souter and Clarence Thomas) have joined the Supreme Court. The Court has continued to chip away at the rights of women and minorities, with damaging decisions in areas such as reproductive rights (e.g., Webster v. Reproductive Health Services) and employment discrimination(e.g., Wards Cove Packing Company v. Atonio). With a conservative majority in place on the Supreme Court until well into the next century and Reagan and Bush appointees comprising more than half of the nation's federal judges, …

The Supreme Court: New Hope For The Restoration Of Federalism, Beverly Lahaye, Ellen O. Smith

University of Richmond Law Review

The recent philosdphical shift of the Supreme Court toward a more restrained or "conservative" approach to constitutional adjudication brings with it hope for the revitalization of federalism as a constitutional and political principle.

Restoring The Common In The Law: Proposal For The Elimination Of Rules Prohibiting The Citation Of Unpublished Decisions In Kansas And The Tenth Circuit, Mark D. Hinderks, Steve A. Leben

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Road Not Taken: Criminal Contempt Sanctions And Grand Jury Press Leaks, James W. Fox Jr.

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Note examines the appropriate judicial responses to such news stories, focusing on the options available to counsel for the target of a grand jury investigation who is affected by the leaked information. Part I explains why dismissal and quashing are extremely difficult remedies to obtain, why internal investigations by the government are inadequate, and why, therefore, contempt sanctions are presently the most viable legal response to such leaks. Part II describes the general contours of both criminal and civil contempt actions and reviews specific applications of civil contempt actions in grand jury leak cases. Part III questions the functional …

Treaty-Based Rights And Remedies Of Individuals, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Treaties are frequently described as contracts between nations. As instruments of international law, they establish obligations with which international law requires the parties to comply. In the United States, treaties also have the status of law in the domestic legal system. The Supremacy Clause declares treaties to be the "supreme Law of the Land" and instructs the courts to give them effect. The status of treaties as law in two distinct legal orders has given rise to unusual conceptual problems. In recent years, it has produced confusion among the courts regarding the enforceability of treaties in the courts by individuals. …

Right To Be Present

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rules And Regulations

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Supreme Court Jurisdiction

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Special Relationship Rule: Is It Consistent With The Waiver Of Sovereign Immunity? - A Study Of Kircher V. City Of Jamestown, Brian T. Cohen

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Protective Sweep Incident To A Lawful Arrest: An Analysis Of Its Validity Under The Federal And New York State Constitution, Steven M. Fox

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Due Process

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Due Process

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Education Article

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bankruptcy In The Seventh Circuit: 1991, Douglass Boshkoff

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Settling For A Judge: A Comment On Clermont And Eisenberg, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

Trial by Jury or Judge: Transcending Empiricism,1 by Kevin Clermont and Theodore Eisenberg, is not only an important article, it is unique. To most Americans, trial means trial by jury. In fact, over half of all federal trials are conducted without juries2 (including 31% of trials in cases in which the parties have the right to choose a jury3), and the proportion of bench trials in state courts is even higher.4 And yet, while there is a large literature on the outcomes of jury trials and the factors that affect them,5 nobody else has systematically compared trials by jury to …

Litigation & Inequality: Federal Diversity Jurisdiction In Industrial America, 1870–1958, Edward A. Purcell Jr.

Books

Through the prism of litigation practice and tactics, Purcell explores the dynamic relationship between legal and social change. He studies changing litigation patterns in suits between individuals and national corporations over tort claims for personal injuries and contract claims for insurance benefits. Purcell refines the "progressive" claim that the federal courts favored business enterprise during this time, identifying specific manners and times in which the federal courts reached decisions both in favor of and against national corporations. He also identifies 1892-1908 as a critical period in the evolution of the twentieth century federal judicial system.

Introductory Remarks: Brown V. Board Of Education And Its Legacy: A Tribute To Justice Thurgood Marshall, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This issue of the Fordham Law Review presents Fordham Law School's tribute to one of the giants of American law and American history on the occasion of his retirement from the Supreme Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall. Because he decided to make the law his career and because of the way in which he pursued that career, the United States today is a remarkably different place than it was in 1933 when he began practice, and ours is a far more just society.

Justice Marshall made history repeatedly--as Chief Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as Judge of the United …

Thurgood Marshall: Courageous Advocate, Compassionate Judge, Susan Low Bloch

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Thurgood Marshall's life has spanned virtually the entire twentieth century, allowing him to witness its worst and its best. When he was born in 1908, segregation was legal and pervasive, and racial hatred extreme; in the year of his birth alone, eighty-nine black men were lynched. A grandson of slaves on both sides of his family, Marshall knew, from an early age, both the ugliness and the tenacity of racism. Determined to fight it, Marshall disregarded the difficulties and the dangers, and spent his life battling discrimination, earning the nickname "Mr. Civil Rights." His efforts, coupled with those of others …

Book Review Of Clement Haynsworth, The Senate, And The Supreme Court, Davison M. Douglas

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Advice And Consent: Ensuring Judicial Freedom, Patrick J. Leahy

University of Richmond Law Review

Throughout this nation's history, Americans have turned to the Supreme Court to protect their rights against excesses of the legislative and executive branches. To protect this crucial role of the Court, the Framers realized that neither the executive nor the legislature should have the power to cast the Court in its own image. To prevent this usurpation of one branch by another, the Framers wisely required the President to obtain the advice and consent of the Senate in making appointments to the Supreme Court.

Judiciary: Know Thy Place, Thomas L. Jipping

University of Richmond Law Review

Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist No.78 that the judiciary "has no influence over ... the purse."' Yet in Missouri v. Jenkins, the Supreme Court approved indirect judicial taxation. Hamilton wrote that the judiciary "will always be the least dangerous" and "beyond comparison the weakest" branch of government. Yet in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court created out of nothing a right to choose abortion, invalidated the abortion laws of all fifty states developed over more than a century, and shut millions of Americans out of the process of developing public policy on this important political issue. Hamilton wrote that …

Judicial Lobbying And Court Reform: U.S. Magistrate Judges And The Judicial Improvements Act Of 1990, Christopher E. Smith

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Proposals For Judicial Reform In Chile, Robert Vaughn

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This Article explores the implications of different proposals for reforms by emphasizing a perspective that relates the proposals to the performance of the judiciary during the military regime in Chile. Part I of this Article describes the role of the judiciary prior to the coup and discusses its response to the human rights abuses of the military regime. Part II presents the principal proposals for reform and discusses them against this historic background. Part III of this Article suggests that these proposals offer a more radical change in the role of the judiciary in Chile than an examination of the …

Real Jurors' Understanding Of The Law In Real Cases, Alan Reifman, Spencer M. Gusick, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Articles

A survey of 224 Michigan citizens called for jury duty over a 2-month period was conducted to assess the jurors' comprehension of the law they had been given in the judges' instructions. Citizens who served as jurors were compared with a base line of those who were called for duty but not selected to serve, and with those who served on different kinds of cases. Consistent with previous studies of mock jurors, this study found that actual jurors understand fewer than half of the instructions they receive at trial. Subjects who received judges' instructions performed significantly better than uninstructed subjects …

The Supreme Court's First One Hundred Charter Of Rights Decisions: A Statistical Analysis, F. L. Morton, Peter H. Russell, Michael J. Withey

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This study presents a descriptive statistical analysis of the Supreme Court of Canada's first one hundred Charter of Rights decisions (1982-1989). Charter appeals now constitute one-quarter of the Court's annual caseload. The Court has abandoned the judicial self-restraint that shaped its pre-Charter civil liberties jurisprudence. It has upheld rights claimants in 35 percent of its decisions and declared nineteen statutes void. Seventy-five percent of the Court's Charter work dealt with legal rights and criminal justice, but more provincial statutes were declared invalid than federal. After an initial period of consensus, the Court divided into identifiable voting blocs, with wide discrepancies …

National Socialism And The Rule Of Law, Donald P. Kommers

Journal Articles

Ingo Muller's book, originally published in 1987 as Furchtbare Juristen: Die unbewaltigte Vergangenheit unserer Justiz (literally "Dreadful Jurists: The Remorseless Past of Our Judiciary"), describes the moral collapse of the German legal profession and its role in facilitating the construction and maintenance of the Nazi regime. Gracefully translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider, Hitler's Justice seeks, first, to show how legal professionals betrayed their trust as lawyers, prosecutors, and judges and, second, to assess the degree to which Germany in the postwar period reformed its legal system, purged the judiciary of former Nazis, and rededicated itself to the rule of law. …

A Reply: Imperfect Bargains, Imperfect Trials, And Innocent Defendants, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

To understand what is and is not wrong with plea bargaining, one must understand the relationship of bargains to trials. Unsurprisingly, we disagree with much of what Judge Frank Easterbrook and Professor Stephen Schulhofer say about that relationship. Most of those disagreements need not be rehearsed here; readers attentive enough to wade through their essays and ours will pick up the key points readily enough. But there is one point where the dispute is at once sharp and hidden. It has to do with the fact that both trials and bargains are flawed.

That fact might seem obvious, but the …

The Supreme Court’S Administrative Law Docket: Proceedings From The Administrative Conference Of The United States, Marshall J. Breger

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Standards Of Persuasion And The Distinction Between Fact And Law, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

The invitation to respond in these pages to Gary Lawson's very interesting article, Proving the Law, was tempting enough. But what made it irresistible was Professor Lawson's comment that he is "addressing, with a brevity that borders on the irresponsible, subjects well beyond [his] depth." Now, that's the kind of debate I really like. Let me jump right in. A principal question raised by Lawson, which I find quite interesting, may be phrased in general, and purposefully ambiguous, terms as follows: Before an actor treats a proposition as a valid2 proposition of law, what standard of persuasion should that proposition …

An Emerging Conception Of Fundamental Rights In Contemporary Russia, Mary Holland

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The article explores the emergence of a new conception of fundamental rights in post-Soviet Russia, marking a significant shift from a totalitarian regime to a more democratic, rule-of-law-based system. This transformation is evident through the adoption of key legal documents: the Declaration of Rights and Freedoms, the Conception of Judicial Reform, and the Law on the Constitutional Court. These reforms reflect a rejection of the Soviet legal tradition, alignment with international human rights standards, and a re-emergence of pre-revolutionary Russian legal ideals. The article argues that these developments signify a fundamental change in the Russian legal framework, emphasizing individual rights …