Courts Commons^™

Race And Punishment: Demographic Disparities And Patterns In The Blue Earth County Court System, Aaron Guerdet, Alyssa Haugly, Kelsey Mischke

Public Sociology Publications and Projects

This study examines potential race and gender disparities in sentencing decisions in Blue Earth County, MN courts. Using qualitative field observations and a grounded theory approach, authors observed and analyzed court proceedings. In total, three researchers conducted seven weeks of observations; the final sample consisted of 95 observed court sessions, 50 of them being closed court cases. Results show little discrepancy in gender and charges and sentencing rates. Though there are racial discrepancies in charges that suggest discriminatory policing decisions, the data shows that minority members are being sentenced at a similar rate compared to white defendants. In all cases …

The Highly Political Supreme Court, Riley Lane Munks

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This paper investigates whether Republicans or Democrats support a strong Supreme Court and why. Furthermore, by analyzing data from the 2012 American National Election Survey, I will study support of the court based on gender, age, and race. Since the early 1980’s the court has taken a strong conservative direction, to the dismay of many liberals. Republicans feel comfortable sending a congressional dispute to the courts while Democrats may feel disenfranchised with the judicial process. I also believe that younger people believe the court is an outdated method of making laws and interpreting the constitution. Originally the Supreme Court was …

Road To Booker And Beyond: Constitutional Limits On Sentence Enhancements, John Gleeson

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Look Back At The Rehnquist Era And An Overview Of The 2004 Supreme Court Term, Erwin Chemerinsky

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is It Law Or Something Else?: A Divided Judiciary In The Application Of Fraudulent Transfer Law Under § 546(E) Of The Bankruptcy Code, Jaclyn Weissgerber

Pace Law Review

In Part I of this Note, I will provide a general overview of leveraged buyouts. The discussion of how and why LBOs are implemented is particularly relevant to the application of fraudulent transfer analysis. In Part II, I will discuss fraudulent transfer law as defined by the Bankruptcy Code. In Part III, I will discuss which transfers within the LBO should be attacked under fraudulent transfer law and why; this section will focus on the various stakes of the parties involved in the leveraged buyout transaction. I will provide an overview of the specific factors that bankruptcy and federal appellate …

Bigger Isn’T Always Better: An Analysis Of Court Efficiency Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling, Teresa Dalton, Jordan M. Singer

Pace Law Review

One important measure of trial court efficiency is overall case length—that is, the elapsed time from a case’s initial filing to its final disposition. Using a large, recent dataset from nearly 7000 federal civil cases, we find that two variables are particularly useful in predicting overall case length: the total number of attorneys filing an appearance in the case, and the number of authorized judgeships for a given district court. Further, we find a significant and surprising interaction between these two variables, indicating that smaller courts are more efficient than larger courts at processing civil cases when more than three …

Newsroom: Yelnosky On State Pension Dispute, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

European Economic Community - The Use Of Article 173(2) Of The Eec Treaty To Contest Actions Of The European Parliament, Partie Ecologiste 'Les Verts' (The Greens) V. European Parliament, [1987] 2 Comm. Mkt. L.R. 343 (1986)., Scott N. Carlson

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Section 337 And The Gatt: A Necessary Protection Or An Unfair Trade Practice?, Nathan G. Knight Jr.

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Suggestions For The Limited Acceptance Of Compulsory Jurisdiction Of The International Court Of Justice By The United States, Louis B. Sohn

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The Role Of The Courts In Time Of War, William C. Banks

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

The role of the courts in judging the actions of government in wartime has ranged from extreme deference to careful probing of alleged government excesses over more than two centuries. The courts’ record has reflected the nature of the armed conflicts the United States has engaged in and the legal bases for the actions at issue. In the aggregate, the courts have served as a necessary counterweight to government overreaching in times of national security crisis. It is easy to underestimate the institutional problems confronting judges who are asked to make momentous decisions in times of national crisis—difficulties of fact-finding …

Is Military Justice Sentencing On The March? Should It Be? And If So, Where Should It Head? Court-Martial Sentencing Process, Practice, And Issues, James E. Baker

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article starts with a sketch of the military justice system to orient readers. Understanding that structure, the article then describes the sentencing process for special and general courts-martial. The article follows by identifying two core military sentencing questions: First, should commanders have authority to grant clemency? Second, should the military justice system adopt sentencing guidelines? With respect to each topic presented, the article does not attempt to answer the questions nor offer prescriptions. Rather, it seeks to identify the principal fault lines around which debate should, or will likely, fall. The article next presents ‘‘nutshell’’ introductions to additional sentencing …

Jury Voting Paradoxes, Jason Iuliano

Michigan Law Review

The special verdict is plagued by two philosophical paradoxes: the discursive dilemma and the lottery paradox. Although widely discussed in the philosophical literature, these paradoxes have never been applied to jury decision making. In this Essay, I use the paradoxes to show that the special verdict’s vote-reporting procedures can lead judges to render verdicts that the jurors themselves would reject. This outcome constitutes a systemic breakdown that should not be tolerated in a legal system that prides itself on the fairness of its jury decision-making process. Ultimately, I argue that, because the general verdict with answers to written questions does …

Market Power Without Market Definition, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Antitrust law has traditionally required proof of market power in most cases and has analyzed market power through a market definition/market share lens. In recent years, this indirect or structural approach to proving market power has come under attack as misguided in practice and intellectually incoherent. If market definition collapses in the courts and antitrust agencies, as it seems poised to do, this will rupture antitrust analysis and create urgent pressures for an alternative approach to proving market power through direct evidence. None of the leading theoretic approaches—such as the Lerner Index or a search for supracompetitive profits—provides a robust …

Patent Claim Interpretation Review: Deference Or Correction Driven?, Christopher A. Cotropia

BYU Law Review

This Article examines the Federal Circuit’s review of claim constructions by lower tribunals to determine whether the Federal Circuit defers to lower court constructions or is making its own, independent determination as to the “correct” construction and ultimate result in the case.

The data collected from 2010 to 2013 indicates that the Federal Circuit affirms about 75% of lower court claim interpretations. While this finding is itself surprising, even more surprising is that these reviews do not appear to be driven by deference. Instead, the Federal Circuit is less likely to correct constructions that resulted in a patentee loss below, …

A Spectrum Of International Criminal Procedure: Shifting Patterns Of Power Distribution In International Criminal Courts And Tribunals, Jessica Peake

Pace International Law Review

Using the pure adversarial model expounded in part I (a) as the baseline for analysis, Parts II, III and IV of this article will explore the procedural evolution that has taken place at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (II), the International Criminal Court (III) and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (IV). Part V will then plot the structural and procedural shifts that have taken place at those courts onto the spectrum of procedure identified in part I (c), before concluding, in Part VI, with what these shifts teach us about the convergence of adversarial …

Excuses, Justifications, And Duress At The International Criminal Tribunals, Noam Wiener

Pace International Law Review

This article examines the application of the defense of duress by international criminal tribunals through analyzing opposing theoretical approaches to justifications and excuses. The purpose of this examination is twofold. First, the article offers a framework for duress’s application by examining scholarly approaches to duress and by analyzing the application of the defense by international tribunals. This analysis includes the tribunals constituted following the Second World War and International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Second, the article provides insight into the underlying rationales that guide judges at the international tribunals in the last decade through the judges’ application …

Archcity Defenders: Municipal Courts White Paper, Thomas Harvey, John Mcannar, Michael-John Voss, Megan Conn, Sean Janda, Sophia Keskey

All Faculty Scholarship

ArchCity Defenders represents St. Louis' indigent on a pro bono basis in criminal and civil legal matters while working closely with social service providers to connect clients with services. Our primary goal is to remove the legal barriers preventing our clients from accessing the housing, job training, and treatment they need to get on with their lives.

In the five years we have been doing this work, we have primarily focused on representation in the municipal courts that have jurisdiction over infractions for mostly traffic-related offenses. Our direct representation of clients in these courts and the stories they shared of …

Closing The Doors To Justice: A Critique Of Pimentel V. Dreyfus And The Application Of Legal Formalism To The Elimination Of Food Assistance Benefits For Legal Immigrants, Hannah Zommick

Seattle University Law Review

This Comment contends that the Ninth Circuit’s opinion in Pimentel v. Dreyfus employed a legal formalist approach and that by applying this framework, the court prevented legal immigrants, who were caught between the strict eligibility restrictions of welfare reform, from asserting their rights through the justice system. The legal formalist approach “treats the law as a set of scientific formulae or principles that are derived from the study of case law. These principles create an internal analytical framework which, when applied to a set of facts, leads the decision maker, through logical deduction, to the correct outcome in a case.” …

Federal Civil Rights Litigation Pursuant To 42 U.S.C. §1983 As A Correlate Of Police Misconduct, Philip M. Stinson, Steven L. Brewer Jr, Theresa M. Lanese, Mallorie A. Wilson

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

Police officers acting in their official capacity are subject to being sued in federal court pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §1983 for violating constitutional rights under the color of law. Using data obtained in a larger study on police crime in the United States, names of more than 5,500 nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers who were arrested during the years 2005-2011 were checked against the civil case party master name index of the federal courts’ Public Access to Courts Electronic Records (PACER) system. Findings indicate that more than 20% of the police officers who were arrested for committing one or more …

An Innovative Approach To Improving Father-Child Relationships For Fathers Who Are Noncompliant With Child Support Payments: A Mixed Methods Evaluation, John R. Gallagher, Joan R. Rycraft, Tommy Jordan

Journal of Adolescent and Family Health

Mixed methods were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the Fathers Offering Children Unfailing Support (FOCUS) program. FOCUS is a diversion program which is designed to offer an alternative to incarceration for fathers who are noncompliant with child support payments. Quantitative data were collected through a pretest/posttest design (n = 55) and qualitative data were collected through telephone interviews with FOCUS instructors (n = 2) and community key stakeholders (n = 5) and focus groups with FOCUS participants (n = 76). FOCUS appears to be benefiting children by increasing their fathers’ emotional support, strengthening co-parenting relationships, and promoting their fathers’ …

Employment Discrimination In The United States In 1989: Revisions Or A Pause, Josef Rohlik

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Extradition Treaties - International Law - The United States Supreme Court Approves Extraterritorial Abduction Of Foreign Criminals - United States V. Alvarez-Machain, 112 S. Ct. 2188 (1992), Michael R. Wing

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Supreme Court, Bronx County, People V. Butler, Courtney Weinberger

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Court Of Appeals Of New York, Courtroom Television Network, Llc V. New York, Courtney Weinberger

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Genocide Treaty - Ethnic Cleansing - Substantive And Procedural Hurdles In The Application Of The Genocide Convention To Alleged Crimes In The Former Yugoslavia, John Webb

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

An International Crimes Court: Further Tales Of The King Of Corinth, Jose A. Baez

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act - Commercial Activity Exception - United States May Exercise Jurisdiction Over A Foreign Sovereign Who Has Issued Promissory Notes To A U.S. Corporation. Shapiro V. Republic Of Bolivia, 930 F.2d 1013 (2d Cir. 1991)., Gregory Jay

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Extradition - International Law - The United States Night Circuit Court Of Appeals Holds Government-Sponsored Abduction Abroad Is Not A Lawful Alternative To Extradition. United States V. Verdugo-Urquidez, 939 F.2d 1341 (9th Cir. 1991), Thomas L. Horan

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

A Desired Birth: The Court Of First Instance Of The European Communities, Georges Vandersanden

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.