Courts Commons^™

A Call For The End Of The Doctrine Of Realignment, Jacob S. Sherkow

Michigan Law Review

In Indianapolis v. Chase National Bank, 1941, the Supreme Court established the doctrine of realignment, requiring federal courts to examine the issues in dispute and realign each party as plaintiff or defendant if necessary. Due to the complete diversity requirement, realignment gave the federal courts the ability to both create and destroy diversity jurisdiction. Since 1941, the federal courts have struggled to interpret the central holding in Indianapolis, and have created several competing "tests" for realignment. This confusion has made the doctrine of realignment unworkable. Realignment along with each of the present tests-encourages jurisdictional abuses by forcing the federal …

Patients As Consumers: Courts, Contracts, And The New Medical Marketplace, Mark A. Hall, Carl E. Schneider

Michigan Law Review

The persistent riddle of health-care policy is how to control the costs while improving the quality of care. The riddle's oncepromising answer-managed care-has been politically ravaged, and consumerist solutions are now winning favor This Article examines the legal condition of the patient-as-consumer in today's health-care market. It finds that insurers bargain with some success for rates for the people they insure. The uninsured, however, must contract to pay whatever a provider charges and then are regularly charged prices that are several times insurers'pricesa nd providers' actual costs. Perhaps because they do not understand the healthcare market, courts generally enforce these …

Focus On Batson: Let The Cameras Roll, Mimi Samuel

Faculty Articles

While the Supreme Court outlawed discrimination in jury selection over 40 years ago, both empirical studies and candid interviews show that lawyers routinely rely on characteristics such as race, gender, and religion in striking prospective jurors. In large part, this practice continues because, when challenged, attorneys proffer non-verbal factors such as facial expressions, inattentiveness, eye contact (or lack thereof), or even laughing or coughing to justify their peremptory strikes. Without a way to assess the validity of these reasons, the trial judge and then the appellate court on review, have little ability to enforce the anti-discrimination prohibition set forth in …

John Calmore’S America, Robert S. Chang, Catherine Smith

Faculty Articles

In their contribution to this symposium honoring Professor John Calmore, Professors Robert Chang and Catherine Smith analyze the recent school desegregation case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, through the lens of Professor Calmore's work. In particular, they locate this case as part of what Professor Calmore calls the Supreme Court's Racial Project. Understood as a political project that reorganizes and redistributes resources along racial lines, the Supreme Court's Racial Project creates a jurisprudence around race that solidifies the work of the new right and neoconservatives. Borrowing from Calmore's methodology, Professors Chang and Smith clarify …

From Bad To Worse?: Some Early Speculation About The Roberts Court & The Constitutional Fate Of The Poor, Andy Siegel

Faculty Articles

Conventional wisdom - supported in large measure by blackletter law - suggests that discrimination on the basis of wealth or class largely escapes constitutional sanction. If the conventional wisdom is correct, then issues of class and equal protection represent one area in which advocates of a more robust individual rights jurisprudence have little to fear from the Roberts Court. In this essay, prepared for a Symposium on "The Roberts Court and Equal Protection: Gender, Race, and Class," Professor Siegel offers a contrary view. He makes three related observations. First, existing caselaw is more complex than usually acknowledged, offering substantial interstitial …

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em: A Pragmatic Approach To Nonprecedential Opinions In The Federal Appellate Courts, Amy E. Sloan

All Faculty Scholarship

For many years, judges and academics have debated the pros and cons of non-precedential judicial opinions in the federal appellate courts. Although the utility, necessity, and advisability of non-precedential opinions remain interesting issues to debate, at this point they are somewhat beside the point. Academics have lost the debate on non-precedential opinions. Judges control whether non-precedential opinions are permissible, and judges are not going to give them up anytime soon.

So, as the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Rather than continue to debate the merits of non-precedential opinions, the better course of action is to find …

Climate Change In The Supreme Court, Lisa Heinzerling

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court confronted the issue of climate change for the first time. The Court held that the Clean Air Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate greenhouse gases and that the agency may not decline to exercise this authority based either on factors not present in the statute or inconclusive gestures toward uncertainty in the science of climate change. I had the privilege of serving as the lead author of the winning briefs in this case. This Article provides an insider's perspective on the choices that went into bringing and …

Waiting For The Other Shoe: Hudson And The Precarious State Of Mapp, David A. Moran

Articles

I have no idea whether my death will be noted in the New York Times. But if it is, I fear the headline of my obituary will look something like: "Professor Dies; Lost Hudson v. Michigan' in Supreme Court, Leading to Abolition of Exclusionary Rule." The very existence of this Symposium panel shows, I think, that my fear is well-grounded. On the other hand, I am not quite as fearful that Hudson foreshadows the complete overruling of Mapp v. Ohio2 and Weeks v. United States3 as I was when I published an article just three months after the Hudson decision …

The Other Delegate: Judicially Administered Statutes And The Nondelegation Doctrine, Margaret H. Lemos

Faculty Scholarship

The nondelegation doctrine is the subject of a vast and everexpanding body of scholarship. But nondelegation literature, like nondelegation law, focuses almost exclusively on delegations of power to administrative agencies. It ignores Congress's other delegate-the federal judiciary.

This Article brings courts into the delegation picture. It demonstrates that, just as agencies exercise a lawmaking function when they fill in the gaps left by broad statutory delegations of power, so too do courts. The nondelegation doctrine purports to limit the amount of lawmaking authority Congress can cede to another institution without violating the separation of powers. Although typically considered only with …

Virginia Law: It’S Online, But Should You Use It?, Timothy L. Coggins

Law Faculty Publications

A judge asks you to present her with a copy of the Virginia Code section you are referencing in court, or she asks you to provide a copy of the Supreme Court of Virginia opinion you cited. You used Virginia state government websites to find both the code section and the court opinion. This is easy, right? You give her the copy of what you found online. But could there be a problem? Is the court opinion that you retrieved from the court website considered an official version of the court opinion? Has the Virginia Code section that you provided …

Dear President Bush: Leaving A Legacy On The Federal Bench, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

The appointments of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito were milestones in your stated quest to transform the courts. Appreciating that a critical duty assigned to the president by the Constitution is nominating and, with Senate advice and consent, appointing judges, you vowed to recommend "strict constructionists." Selection has enhanced importance, given modern perceptions that judges are essentially the final arbiters of societal disputes, including such questions as terrorism and affirmative action. The Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and Grutter v. Bollinger opinions as well as the public school desegregation and Schiavo litigation trenchantly illuminate those notions.

You can still …

Natural Justice: A Case For Uniform Rigour, Siyuan Chen, Lionel Leo

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This note considers if there is a discernible framework in which courts resolve alleged claims of breaches of natural justice. On the one hand, once it has been ascertained that the rules of natural justice apply, the court will look at all the circumstances of the case to determine if there has been any u nfairness. On the other hand, it has been suggested th even assuming the rules of natural justice apply, there can be varying degrees of rigour in which they are enforced, a sliding scale of sorts.

Book Review Of Establishing Justice In Middle America: A History Of The United States Court Of Appeals For The Eighth Circuit, Scott Dodson

Faculty Publications

This book review of Jeffrey Morris’s Establishing Justice in Middle America argues that although Morris makes an important contribution to the understudied Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, he fails to engage the reader in the personalities that populated the court, eschews the development of coherent themes running through the court’s membership changes and temporal scope, and omits important cases that helped define the court as an independent judicial body.

Judicial Nullification? Judicial Compliance And Non-Compliance With Jury Improvement Efforts, Paula Hannaford-Agor

Faculty Publications

The present article explores the formal and informal factors that contribute to variation in state and local jury trial practices, and especially judicial compliance with mandatory practices and prohibitions. Part II describes the State-of­ the-States Survey of Jury Improvement Efforts, its methodology, and its basic findings concerning the variation in use of different trial practices. Part III discusses how various formal and informal factors affect the judicial use of those practices. Because the practice of permitting jurors to submit written questions to witnesses has received greater attention, and generated greater debate and dissension in both case law and state and …

Promoting Prosecutorial Accountability, Independence And Effectiveness, Timothy W. Waters, Belinda Cooper

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

Promoting Prosecutorial Accountability, Independence and Effectiveness assists readers in identifying and understanding best practices, and serves as a reference for policymakers, senior prosecutors, academics, and civil society leaders.

The publication should also guide and enrich national debates on prosecutorial reform, especially in countries—such as Bulgaria—which have recently transitioned to democracy.

No Two-Stepping In The Laboratories: State Deference Standards And Their Implications For Improving The Chevron Doctrine, Michael Pappas

Publications

No abstract provided.

Cooper's Quiet Demise (A Short Response To Professor Strauss), Frederic M. Bloom

Publications

No abstract provided.

State Courts Unbound, Frederic M. Bloom

Publications

We may not think that state courts disobey binding Supreme Court precedent, but occasionally state courts do. In a number of important cases, state courts have actively defied apposite Supreme Court doctrine, and often it is the Court itself that has invited them to.

This Article shows state courts doing the unthinkable: flouting Supreme Court precedent, sometimes at the Court's own behest. The idea of state court defiance may surprise us. It is not in every case, after all, that state courts affirmatively disobey. But rare events still have their lessons, and we should ask how and why they emerge. …

The Accounting: Habeas Corpus And Enemy Combatants, Emily Calhoun

Publications

The judiciary should impose a heavy burden of justification on the executive when a habeas petitioner challenges the accuracy of facts on which an enemy combatant designation rests. A heavy burden of justification will ensure that the essential institutional purposes of the writ--and legitimate, separated-powers government--are preserved, even during times of national exigency. The institutional purposes of the writ argue for robust judicial review rather than deference to the executive. Moreover, the procedural flexibility traditionally associated with the writ gives the judiciary the tools to ensure that a heavy burden of justification can be imposed.

The Early History Of The Colorado Court Of Appeals, Robert M. Linz, Claire E. Munger

Publications

No abstract provided.

Ideological Cohesion And Precedent (Or Why The Court Only Cares About Precedent When Most Justices Agree With Each Other), Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

This Article examines the profound role that ideological cohesion plays in explaining the Supreme Court's willingness to advance a coherent vision of the law - either by overruling precedents inconsistent with that vision or by establishing rule-like precedents intended to bind the Supreme Court and lower courts in subsequent cases. Through case studies of the New Deal, Warren, and Rehnquist Courts, this Article calls attention to key differences between Courts in which five or more Justices pursue the same substantive objectives and Courts which lack a dominant voting block. In particular, when five or more Justices pursue the same substantive …

Perpetual Dissents, Allison Orr Larsen

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Letting Guidelines Be Guidelines (And Judges Be Judges), Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

In a prescient New York Times op-ed piece entitled "Let Guidelines be Guidelines," written in response to the Supreme Court's decision in Blakely v. Washington, before certiorari was granted in United States v. Booker, Bill Stuntz of Harvard and Kate Stith Cabranes of Yale urged that the best solution for the constitutional crisis facing the United States Sentencing Guidelines would be to treat the Guidelines as guidelines, and not as a straightjacket. The Supreme Court evidently took a similar view, deciding in Booker that the Guidelines were constitutional only to the extent that they were not mandatory. The recent follow-up …

Dole’S Future: A Strategic Analysis, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

As the U.S. Supreme Court imposes federalism-based limits on congressional power under the Commerce Clause and Section Five of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress may be tempted to turn to the conditional spending power in order to achieve goals that it cannot realize directly. In this article I address whether a danger exists, as some suggest, that such use of the Spending Clause would render the Court more likely to cut back on its scope, narrowing or overruling South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987). Using doctrinal analysis and game theory, I conclude that Congress should proceed with some but …