Courts Commons^™

"Sir, Yes, Sir!": The Courts, Congress And Structural Injunctions, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is a deeply confused book. Not that the authors' stance is unclear: They have seen federal courts in action, and they don't like what they see. Their subject is federal judicial supervision of state and local governments through injunctive decrees. The authors' position wouldn't be confused - or at least would be confused in a different way - if they dealt with injunctive decrees aimed at enforcing what the judges took to be constitutional requirements. In such cases there's at least something coherent that can be said about judges displacing democratic decision-making. Sandler and Schoenbrod, though, don't deal with …

Remarks Of Seth P. Waxman At The Memorial Observance For Justice Byron R. White, United States Supreme Court, Seth P. Waxman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Members of the Court, members of the family, and friends of Justice White- Alone among today's speakers, I met Justice White only late in his life. Growing up in the law, my relationship with him was the one many kids today have with Michael Jordan - I wanted to be "like White" -like the kind of man he was. I still have that aspiration. Like Byron White, I served in the Department of Justice and was altered forever by that honorable institution. And - like Justice White, in my own lesser way, I strove within the walls of this institution …

Diversity Class Actions, Common Relief, And The Rule Of Individual Valuation, Steven S. Gensler

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Responding To Developments In Economics And The Courts: Entry In The Merger Guidelines, Jonathan Baker

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Research On Self-Represented Litigation: Preliminary Results And Methodological Considerations, Paula Hannaford-Agor, Nicole Mott

Faculty Publications

As various programs for self-represented litigants proliferate and costs increase, fund­ing agencies are beginning to demand that programs demonstrate their effectiveness through empirical evaluation. This article recounts some of the lessons learned from a National Center for State Courts' research project on improving access to justice for self-represented litigants. First, the article briefly describes the problems faced by courts as a result of the influx of self-represented litigants. The article then describes automated case-level data and litigant self-reported data from five jurisdictions and some preliminary findings. We conclude with a discussion of problems that we encoun­tered in analyzing those data.

Avoid Bald Men And People With Green Socks? Other Ways To Improve The Voir Dire Process In Jury Selection, Valerie P. Hans, Alayna Jehle

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

During jury selection, many courts adopt a minimal approach to voir dire questions, asking a small number of close-ended questions to groups of prospective jurors and requiring prospective jurors to volunteer their biases. This Article describes research evidence showing that limited voir dire questioning is often ineffective in detecting juror bias. To improve the effectiveness of voir dire, the authors make four recommendations: (1) increase the use of juror questionnaires; (2) incorporate some open-ended questions; (3) expand the types of questions that are asked; and (4) allow attorneys to participate in voir dire.

Thayerian Deference To Congress And Supreme Court Supermajority Rules: Lessons From The Past (Symposium: Congressional Power In The Shadow Of The Rehnquist Court: Strategies For The Future), Evan H. Caminker

Articles

Over the past eight years, the Supreme Court has been unusually aggressive in its exercise ofjudicial review over federal statutes challenged on federalism grounds. Eleven times the Court has invalidated provisions in federal statutes after determining that Congress exceeded the scope of its limited regulatory authority. In ten of the eleven cases, the vote was 5-4 with the identical five-Justice conservative majority (Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas) controlling the decision.

Further Thoughts On The Role Of Regulatory Purpose Under Article Iii Of The General Agreement On Tariffs And Trade: A Tribute To Bob Hudec, Donald H. Regan

Articles

My topic in this article is the role of regulatory purpose under Article III of the GATT, and I regard Bob [Hudec] as the patron saint of efforts to establish the relevance of purpose. His famous "Requiem for an 'Aims and Effects' Test" may have been called a requiem, but it was reluctant and sceptical. Bob thought dispute settlement tribunals ought to consider the regulator's purpose, and he thought they would do so, whatever they said. As decisions on Article III accumulate, we are in the process of learning that he was right on both counts.

Theorizing Community Justice Through Community Courts, Jeffery Fagan, Victoria Malkin

Faculty Scholarship

Community justice practitioners argue that the justice system has long ignored its biggest clients-citizens and neighborhoods that suffer the everyday consequences of high crime levels. One response from legal elites has been a package of court innovations and new practices known as "community justice," part of a broader appeal to "community" and "partnership" common now in modern discourse on crime control. This concept incorporates several contemporary visions and expressions of justice within the popular and legal literatures: problem-solving courts (such as drug courts, mental health courts, domestic violence courts, gun courts, and, of course, juvenile courts); the inclusion of victims …

Advancing U.S. Interests With The International Criminal Court, David J. Scheffer

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

It is a great pleasure to be here in this beautiful lecture hall at Vanderbilt University Law School and to have the opportunity to speak to you this afternoon about the International Criminal Court (ICC). In recent months, one newspaper or magazine article after another, in examining the foreign policy of the current administration and the gulf (which seems to be so pronounced now) between the United States and even its closest allies throughout the rest of the world, has listed a basic set of treaties as being partly explanatory of that gulf. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, is always …

The Ftaia And Subject Matter Jurisdiction Over Foreign Transactions Under The Antitrust Laws: The New Frontier In Antitrust Litigation, Edward D. Cavanagh

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The aggressive antitrust enforcement activities by the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division against international cartels in the last decade, coupled with the increasingly global character of commercial markets, have spawned significant private antitrust treble damages litigation in American courts by foreign plaintiffs. Not surprisingly, the jurisdictional reach of the Sherman Act has been a threshold issue in these cases. While jurisdictional questions are not new to American courts, this latest round of antitrust cases has posed novel issues of subject matter jurisdiction, including the extent to which foreign plaintiffs claiming antitrust damages based on foreign transactions may …

Musical Courts: Plaintiff Picks A Court But Can Defendant Trump The Choice? An Analysis Of Breuer V. Jim's Concrete Of Brevard, Inc., Barbara J. Fick

Journal Articles

This article previews the Supreme Court case Brewer v. Jim's Concrete of Brevard, 538 U.S. 691 (2003). The author expected the Court to address the issue of whether the language of the Fair Labor Standards Act providing that "an action . . . may be maintained in any federal or state court" constitutes an express provision prohibiting removal to federal court when the plaintiff has chosen to maintain its lawsuit in state court.

Citations To Authority By The Arkansas Appellate Courts, 1950-2000, A. Michael Beaird

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Designing Judicial Review: A Comment On Schauer, Emily Sherwin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In his characteristically lucid paper, Neutrality and Judicial Review, Frederick Schauer revisits the meaning and plausibility of Herbert Wechsler’s argument for neutral principles in constitutional adjudication. Unlike some critics, Schauer takes the argument seriously, on its own terms, and does an excellent job of sorting through the different ideas that lie behind it. Schauer identifies four different versions of the argument for neutrality. At least three of these are drawn from Wechsler’s 1959 article. Schauer is particularly interested in a fourth version, which favors neutrality in the design and management of the institution of judicial review.

How Employment-Discrimination Plaintiffs Fare In The Federal Courts Of Appeals, Kevin M. Clermont, Theodore Eisenberg, Stewart J. Schwab

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Employment-discrimination plaintiffs swim against the tide. Compared to the typical plaintiff, they win a lower proportion of cases during pretrial and after trial. Then, many of their successful cases are appealed. On appeal, they have a harder time in upholding their successes, as well in reversing adverse outcome.

This tough story does not describe some tiny corner of the litigation world. Employment-discrimination cases constitute an increasing fraction of the federal civil docket, now reigning as the largest single category of cases at nearly 10 percent.

In this article, we use official government data to describe the appellate phase of this …

Judging Global Justice: Assessing The International Criminal Court, Diane Orentlicher

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Inter-American System, Diego Rodriguez-Pinzon

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Statutory Inflation And Institutional Choice, Lawrence Solan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Mixed Up About Mixed Motive: What Will Trigger A "Mixed Motive" Analysis In Title Vii Cases? An Analysis Of Desert Palace, Inc. V. Costa, Barbara J. Fick

Journal Articles

This article previews the Supreme Court case Desert Palace, Inc. v. Costa, 539 U.S. 90, 2003. The author expected the Court to clarify and define the circumstances in which it is appropriate to use the "mixed-motive model" to prove a violation of Title VII under the disparate treatment theory.

Stare Decisis And Due Process, Amy Coney Barrett

Journal Articles

In this Article, I argue that the preclusive effect of precedent raises due-process concerns, and, on occasion, slides into unconstitutionality. The Due Process Clause requires that a court give a person notice and an opportunity for a hearing before depriving her of life, liberty or property. Because of this requirement, courts have held in the context of issue preclusion that as a general rule, judicial determinations can bind only parties. The preclusion literature asserts that this parties only requirement does not apply to stare decisis because stare decisis, in contrast to issue preclusion, is a flexible doctrine. Yet stare decisis …

From A Cattle Ranch To The Supreme Court, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Review of Sandra Day O'Connor, Lazy B: Growing Up On A Cattle Ranch In The American Southwest (2002).

The Norm Of Prior Judicial Experience And Its Consequences For Career Diversity On The U.S. Supreme Court, Lee Epstein, Jack Knight, Andrew D. Martin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dialectic And Revolution: Confronting Kelsen And Gadamer On Legal Interpretation, Hans Lindahl

Cardozo Law Review

This paper examines the general structure and conditions of legal interpretation that arise from confronting Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics with a determinate conception of legal interpretation suggested by Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law. The Gadamerian question, "What defines legal interpretation as interpretation?", suggests that Kelsen's reference to legal norms as "schemes of interpretation" must be radicalized: a hermeneutic circularity or dialectic is at work in the law, such that the legal interpretation of reality also changes, to a lesser or greater extent, the principle of interpretation - the legal norm. The Kelsenian question, "What defines interpretation as legal interpretation?", suggests …

Inter-American System, Claudia Martin

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Helping The Pro Se Litigant: A Changing Landscape, Paula Hannaford-Agor

Faculty Publications

This article describes how the influx of self-represented litigants has forced many within the court and legal communities to reconsider some of the fundamental premises on which the civil justice system is based and to respond in new and creative ways to changing litigant demands on existing court and legal resources. It focuses on changes to the delivery of legal services to low- and moderate-income people, especially the emergence of “unbundled” legal services, and addresses the practical implications related to the distinction between legal information and legal advice. Finally, it describes how judges and court staff are rethinking the conceptual …

Problem-Solving Courts: From Innovation To Institutionalization, Michael C. Dorf, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

The phenomenal growth of drug courts and other forms of "problem-solving" courts has followed a pattern that is characteristic of many successful innovations: An individual or small group has or stumbles upon a new idea; the idea is put into practice and appears to work; a small number of other actors adopt the innovation and have similar experiences; if there is great demand for the innovation – for example, because it responds to a widely-perceived crisis or satisfies an institutional need and resolves tensions within organizations that adopt it – the innovation rapidly diffuses through the networks in which the …

Criminal Defenders And Community Justice: The Drug Court Example, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

The Community Justice idea and its core institution – the Community Court – is an ambitious innovation intended to generate new solutions and practices. It thus inevitably calls for adaptation of the established roles associated with the court system, and especially the criminal justice system. It asks practitioners to learn new skills, to accept new conventions, and to participate in the elaboration of a rapidly evolving experiment.

It is thus not surprising that many lawyers are anxious about the system. It remains an interesting question, however, whether their anxiety represents something more than the discomfort that change and challenge typically …

Why Defenders Feel Defensive, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

The newest version of problem-solving courts has scarcely reached adolescence. Many of these courts remain in the "model" stage, attempting to create a structure and vision that will have a transformative, systemic effect. Others, drug courts in particular, have proliferated across the country and are on the verge of going to scale in many states. Lawyers representing individual clients in these courts are struggling to identify, define and perform their professional duties, at the same time that the courts are being created. To understand why it is a struggle, we need to contextualize the lawyers' experiences: what is it about …

Engaging With The State: The Growing Reliance On Lawyers And Judges To Protect Battered Women, Jane C. Murphy

All Faculty Scholarship

The passage of the federal Violence Against Women Act of 2000 (“VAWA II”) marked an important milestone in the evolution of the domestic violence movement. VAWA II created, among other things, a complex system for state and federal funding in all fifty states to provide civil legal assistance to battered women. Its passage completed a process that began in the early 1980s when domestic violence advocates shifted their focus from grass roots efforts to help battered women and their children leave abusive partners to building alliances with government and advocating for legal remedies to assist battered women. This paper looks …

A Unified Family Court, Barbara A. Babb

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.