Courts Commons^™

Legal Integration In The Andes: Law-Making By The Andean Tribunal Of Justice, Laurence R. Helfer, Karen J. Alter

Faculty Scholarship

The Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ) is a copy of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), and the third most active international court. This article reviews our findings based on an original coding of all ATJ preliminary rulings from 1984 to 2007, and over forty interviews in the region. We then compare Andean and European jurisprudence in three key areas: whether the tribunals treat the founding integration treaties as constitutions for their respective communities, whether the ATJ and ECJ have implied powers for community institutions that are not expressly enumerated in the founding treaties, and how the tribunals conceive of …

Global Problems In Domestic Courts, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

We face an increasing number of problems that are essentially global in nature because they affect the world in its entirety: global cartels, climate change, crimes against humanity; to name a few. These problems require world courts, yet world courts in the institutional sense are largely lacking. Hence, domestic courts must function, effectively, as world courts. Given the unlikelihood of effective world courts in the future, our challenge is to establish under what conditions domestic courts can play this role of world courts effectively and legitimately.

What State Constitutional Law Can Tell Us About The Federal Constitution, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

Courts and scholars have long sought to illuminate the relationship between state and federal constitutional law. Yet their attention, like the relationship itself, has largely been one-sided: State courts have consistently adopted federal constitutional law as their own, and scholars have attempted to illuminate why this is, and why it should or should not be so. By contrast, federal courts tend not to look to state constitutional law, even for persuasive authority. Nor have scholars argued at any length that federal courts can or should look to state constitutional law for guidance in answering the many constitutional questions common to …

Who’S Afraid Of The Federal Circuit?, Arti K. Rai

Faculty Scholarship

In this brief Essay, Professor Rai responds to Professor Jonathan Masur's Yale Law Journal article "Patent Inflation." Professor Masur's argument rests on the assumption that U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ("PTO") behavior is determined almost entirely by a desire to avoid reversal by the Federal Circuit. Although the PTO is certainly a weak agency over which the Federal Circuit has considerable power, Masur overestimates the extent to which high-level PTO administrators are concerned about Federal Circuit reversals and underestimates institutional influences that are likely to operate in a deflationary direction. The PTO is influenced not only by the Federal Circuit …

Reasoning About The Irrational: The Roberts Court And The Future Of Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

Commentary on the future direction of the Roberts Court generally falls along lines that correlate with the commentators' political views on the desirability of the Court's recent decisions. A more informative approach is to look for opinions suggesting changes in the presuppositions with which the Justices approach constitutional decision making. In footnote 27 in his opinion for the Court in the District of Columbia v. Heller Second Amendment decision, Justice Scalia suggested a fundamental revision of the Court's assumptions about the role of judicial doctrine, and the concept of rationality, in constitutional law. Justice Scalia would eliminate the normative aspects …

Roberts’ Rules: The Assertiveness Of Rules-Based Jurisprudence, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Conflicted Assumptions Of Modern Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

Contribution to Symposium - The Nature of Judicial Authority: A Reflection on Philip Hamburger's Law and Judicial Duty

Flying Blind: The Lack Of Uniformity In Federal Pleading After Twombly And Iqbal, 44 J. Marshall L. Rev. 485 (2011), Ryan Charlson

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Case For Rebalancing Antitrust And Regulation, Howard A. Shelanski

Michigan Law Review

The continued growth of forensic DNA databases has brought about greater interest in a search method known as "familial" or "kinship" matching. Whereas a typical database search seeks the source of a crime-scene stain by making an exact match between a known person and the DNA sample, familial searching instead looks for partial matches in order to find potential relatives of the source. The use of a familial DNA search to identify the alleged "Grim Sleeper" killer in California brought national attention to the method, which has many proponents. In contrast, this Article argues against the practice of familial searching …

Currency Of Love: Customary International Law And The Battle For Same-Sex Marriage In The United States, 14 U. Pa. J.L. & Soc. Change 53 (2011), Sonia Bychkov Green

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Rid Of Habeas Corpus - How Ineffective Assistance Of Counsel Has Endangered Access To The Writ Of Habeas Corpus And What The Supreme Court Can Do In Maples And Martinez To Restore It, 45 Creighton L. Rev. 185 (2011), Hugh Mundy

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

How Leadership In International Criminal Law Is Shifting From The United States To Europe And Asia: An Analysis Of Spending On And Contributions To International Criminal Courts, 55 St. Louis U. L.J. 953 (2011), Stuart K. Ford

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Freedom Of Information Act Trial, 61 Am. U. L. Rev. 217 (2011), Margaret B. Kwoka

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the paucity of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) cases that go to trial and courts' preference for resolving these disputes at the summary judgment stage. Using traditional legal analysis and empirical evidence, this Article explores whether we should expect FOIA cases to go to trial and how the scarcity of FOIA trials compares to the trial rate in civil litigation generally. It concludes that the unusual use of summary judgment in FOIA cases has unjustifiably all but eliminated FOIA trials, which occur in less than 1 % of FOIA cases. It further examines how conducting FOIA trials …

The Judicial Power And The Inferior Federal Courts: Exploring The Constitutional Vesting Thesis, A. Benjamin Spencer

Georgia Law Review

The Third Branch of our federal government has
traditionally been viewed as the least of the three in
terms of the scope of its power and authority. This
view finds validation when one considers the
extensive authority that Congress has been permitted
to exercise over the Federal Judiciary. From the
beginning, Congress has understood itself to possess
the authority to limit the jurisdiction of inferior
federal courts. The Supreme Court has acquiesced to
this understanding of congressional authority
without much thought or explanation.
It may be possible, however, to imagine a more
robust vision of the Judicial Power through closer …

Comparing And Contrasting The Constitutional Approaches Of Justice Scalia And Justice Breyer Through The Pending Supreme Court Case Schwarzenegger V Entertainment Merchants Association, Katherine E. Moran Ms.

CMC Senior Theses

The aim of this thesis is to explore the differences and similarities between Justice Antonin Scalia’s textualist approach to interpreting the Constitution and Justice Stephen Breyer’s Living Constitution approach (also called the evolutionist approach) by applying these disparate legal theories to Schwarzenegger v Entertainment Merchants Association, a case currently pending before the Supreme Court whose resolution centers on the interpretation of the First Amendment. The textualist approach relies primarily on interpreting the original meaning of the text of the Constitution, and attempting to decide cases in a way that is faithful to an amendment’s words as written (Rossum et …

Judicial Interference With Effective Assistance Of Counsel, Bennett L. Gershman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

A lawyer’s ineffective representation of a client may be attributable to a lawyer’s own personal failings. However, impairment of the right to effective assistance of counsel may also come from a trial judge’s conduct, and can takes many forms, and occur in varying circumstances. It is therefore difficult to formulate clear principles to cover all of the various situations in which a judge can undermine effective representation. The Borukhova and Mallayev case is only the most recent illustration of the way a ruling of a judge – forcing the lawyer to sum up his case without giving the lawyer adequate …

Comments On Paul R. Michel's Contributions To Justice, 10 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 279 (2011), James F. Holderman

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

Chief Judge Michel's Current And Future Contributions To Improving U.S. Intellectual Property Rights, 10 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 299 (2011), Herbert C. Wamsley

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

Veterans Benefits In 2010: A New Dialogue Between The Supreme Court And The Federal Circuit, Paul R. Gugliuzza

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Admissibility Of Eyewitness-Identification Expert Testimony In Oklahoma, Sean S. Hunt

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Family Court—A Short History, Merril Sobie

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The New York State Family Court was established in 1962. The framer's intent, which was largely achieved, was the formation of an omnibus tribunal capable of adjudicating every justiciable family related dispute. Accordingly, Family Court incorporated the former State Children's Courts, the domestic violence parts of the local criminal courts, and the paternity parts of the former Court of Special Sessions. In addition, Family Court was granted adoption and abandonment jurisdiction, concurrent child custody jurisdiction, and concurrent post-divorce modification and enforcement jurisdiction. This paper will outline the pre-Family Court history in synopsis form, and briefly describe the Court's post-1962 developments.

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 …

Demosprudence In Comparative Perspective, Brian E. Ray

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article critically examines the debate over demosprudence. It adopts a comparative - specifically South African - perspective to consider what it means for a court to act demosprudentially and why the practice may have particular value in developing democracies like South Africa. Guinier connects demosprudence to the broader concept of democratic constitutionalism developed by Reva Siegel and Robert Post. Democratic constitutionalism in turn is part of what Jack Balkin describes as "a renaissance of liberal constitutional thought that has emerged in the last five years." This renaissance is characterized by three major themes: constitutional fidelity, democratic constitutionalism, and redemptive …

Lawyering Decisions—October 2009 Term, Eileen Kaufman

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Respect My Authority: Analyzing Claims Of Diminished U.S. Supreme Court Influence Abroad, Aaron B. Aft

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This paper critiques the argument that the U.S. Supreme Court is losing influence among national and constitutional courts worldwide as a result of its nonparticipation in the emerging judicial globalization. It does so, inter alia, by reviewing two examples of how U.S. authority is cited abroad, and concludes that arguments of diminished influence appear overstated, and that changes in U.S. judicial influence are not likely due to attitudes toward citation of foreign law.

The Terrible TousaS: Opinions Test The Patience Of Corporate Lending Practices, Jessica D. Gabel

Faculty Publications By Year

Two diametrically opposed decisions pit creditors against debtors. The case of troubled homebuilder TOUSA has generated shockwaves through the lending industry. Set against the backdrop of the housing collapse and risky lending, the bankruptcy court’s decision left secured creditors with a mixture of shock, anger, and worry over the repercussions. In that opinion, the bankruptcy court unwound a nearly $1 billion transaction of liens and loan proceeds, on grounds that the transactions drove the debtor company into the ground. In other words, the court found that a fraudulent transfer had occurred. Not surprisingly, the lenders appealed and the next decision …

The Family Capital Of Capital Families: Investigating Empathic Connections Between Jurors And Defendants' Families In Death Penalty Cases, Jody L. Madeira

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Section 1983 Wrongful Death And Survival Actions In The Seventh Circuit: An Indiana Litigant's Guide To Claims After Russ V. Watts, Michelle R. Gough

Indiana Law Journal

The availability of survival and wrongful death damages in 42 U.S.C. § 1983 cases is an area that involves both changing precedent and unaddressed issues within the Seventh Circuit. In both of the aforementioned types of claims, the cases will necessarily involve the tangled application of both state and federal law, and the Seventh Circuit and other federal courts of appeals have struggled to provide a clear, coherent approach to these issues. Indeed, there is strong disagreement among the circuits. Dean Steven H. Steinglass offered the most comprehensive discussion of the nature of both types of claims under § 1983 …

Fundamental Versus Deferential: Appellate Review Of Terminations Of Parental Rights, Karen A. Wyle

Indiana Law Journal

Any attorney who handles or follows cases involving termination of parental rights will have often read, “This court has long had a highly deferential standard of review in cases concerning the termination of parental rights.” This article addresses several questions that arise from that familiar language:

• Does the Indiana Court of Appeals in fact have a tradition or practice of highly deferential review of termination orders?
• Is this deference greater than the court accords to trial court decisions in other family law matters or in non-family civil appeals?
• If so, on what legal analysis is this special deference based?
• Is …

Forum, Federalism, And Free Markets: An Empirical Study Of Judicial Behavior Under The Dormant Commerce Clause Doctrine, Mehmet K. Konar-Steenberg, Anne F. Peterson

Faculty Scholarship

This study examines judicial behavior under the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine by drawing on an original database of 459 state and Federal appellate cases decided between 1970 and 2009. The authors use logit regression to show that state judges are more likely to uphold state and local laws against dormant Commerce Clause attack than their Federal judicial counterparts, a result that is consistent with the interstate rivalry issues animating the doctrine. The study also finds that Republican-dominated judicial panels at the state level are more likely to side with tax challengers invoking the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine than are Democratic …