Judges Commons^™

Appoint Candace Jackson-Akiwumi To The Seventh Circuit, Carl Tobias

University of Richmond Law Review

On November 30, Seventh Circuit Judge Joel Flaum assumed senior status when he completed over four decades of rigorous public service as a prominent jurist. On that day, the Senate resumed the prolonged lame duck session, which the GOP upper chamber majority began after voters had elected Joe Biden to replace former President Donald Trump. Trump correctly refrained from nominating Flaum’s successor. Four months later, President Biden dutifully announced that he would name Candace Jackson-Akiwumi to replace Flaum. Jackson-Akiwumi is a particularly qualified, mainstream nominee. Because she comprehensively answered senators’ complex, probing questions, and the Seventh Circuit lacks any people …

How President Biden Can Fill The Central District Of California Bench, Carl Tobias

University of Richmond Law Review

President Joseph Biden confronts an enormous opportunity to seat highly qualified, mainstream federal judges in plenty of appeals court and district court openings which former President Donald Trump neglected to fill in his four-year term. The remarkable California trial level vacant emergency slots, particularly in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, are the United States’ worst-case scenario and consummate promise. The Central District of California tribunal had experienced as many as ten lengthy open court slots among twenty-eight posts during the Trump administration, but it encounters six vacancies today.

A Music Industry Circuit Split: The De Minimis Exception In Digital Sampling, Michaela S. Morrissey

University of Richmond Law Review

When hip-hop icon Biz Markie released his album “All Samples Cleared!” he joked of the end of what was known as the “Golden Age” of digital sampling in the hip-hop and rap music industry. The Golden Age began in the late 1980s, and because there was no regulation of the practice, it was a period of musical enlightenment in which musicians could freely utilize digital sampling without legal repercussion. However, in 2005, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit handed down an opinion that sent shock waves across the music industry. In Bridgeport Music Inc. v. Dimension …

Table Of Contents

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Acknowledgments, Christopher J. Sullivan

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Overhauling Rules Of Evidence In Pro Se Courts, Andrew C. Budzinski

University of Richmond Law Review

State civil courtrooms are packed to the brim with litigants, but not with lawyers. Since the early 1990s, more and more litigants in state courts have appeared without legal counsel. Pro se litigation has grown consistently and enormously over the past few decades. State court dockets are dominated by cases brought by unrepresented litigants, most often in domestic violence, family law, landlord-tenant, and small claims courts.

Yet, the American courtroom is not designed for use by those unrepresented litigants—it is designed for use by attorneys. The American civil court is built upon a foundation of dense procedural rules, thick tomes …

Utilizing Tax Incentives To Increase Gender Parity On Corporate Boards, Mary E. Tursi

University of Richmond Law Review

Women are drastically underrepresented in positions of power and prominence in the United States. As of 2021, women hold only thirty percent of board seats on the S&P 500. The number is much smaller for private corporations. One study found that in 2020, women occupied only eleven percent of board seats for private corporations. Given these statistics, it is unsurprising that a 2021
study predicts that corporate boards will not reach gender parity until 2032.

This underrepresentation matters for several reasons. First, the lack of gender equity on corporate boards is blatantly sexist. This disparity should matter for anyone who …

Make Some Sense Of Scent Trademarks: The United States Needs A Graphical Representation Requirement, Gabrielle E. Brill

University of Richmond Law Review

When it comes to consumer loyalty, some businesses have decided to go beyond attracting the eyes. Why not keep customers via their nostrils? Accordingly, the scent marketing industry is booming. Jennifer Dublino, Vice President of Development at ScentWorld Events, remarks that “smell is one of the most unique of human senses. Scent enters the limbic system [of the brain] and bypasses all of the cognitive and logical thought processes and goes directly to the emotional and memory areas of the brain.” Companies like ScentAir have been created specifically to help stores design fragrances that best fit their image and objectives …

Pretextual Stops: The Rest Of The Story, J.E.B. Stuart Vi

University of Richmond Law Review

Pretextual stops made by law enforcement officers—stops aimed at serving some purpose other than the official reason for the stop—have received renewed attention in the public discourse following several high-profile law enforcement confrontations with people of color. Naturally, the conversations about pretextual stops have centered around their most horrid iteration: discriminatory stops made by bad cops. These stops are damaging to both motorists and officers, and conversations about them are undeniably important. But there is more to pretextual stops than the nefarious purposes attributed to them.

As a former police officer who regularly made pretextual stops for reasons entirely unrelated …

The Future Of The Allen Charge In The New Millennium, Caleb Epperson

Arkansas Law Review

"In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same." Following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, social and political movements grew rapidly nationwide to combat the prevalence of police brutality against African-American communities. The impact of the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement has been observed in both cities across the United States and in related movements internationally. This movement highlights the necessity for police reform and catalyzes the public’s growing call for greater criminal justice reform. To achieve the goals …

To Stay Or Not To Stay: Competing Motions In The Shadow Of Multidistrict Litigation, Emily M. Dowling

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note proceeds in three parts. Part I provides a basic overview of the inherent power, with an emphasis on the interaction between inherent power and jurisdiction. In Part II, it reintroduces the Opioid outcome and describes the mechanisms producing it by summarizing district courts’ varied approaches to resolving competing motions to remand or stay. In Part III, it identifies the flaws of those approaches and proposes an alternative solution, applying jurisdictional resequencing doctrine to the ordering inquiry and concluding that the remand must go first.

How In The World Could They Reach That Conclusion?, Hon. Carlton Reeves

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

No abstract provided.

Rwu Law News: The Newsletter Of Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michael M. Bowden, Gregory W. Bowman, Brooklyn Crockton

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Location, Location, Location: The Federal Sentencing Guidelines' Abduction Enhancement And The Meaning Of "Different Location", Sabrina Jemail

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Trauma: Community Of Color Exposure To The Criminal Justice System As An Adverse Childhood Experience, André Douglas Pond Cummings, Todd J. Clark, Caleb Gregory Conrad, Amy Dunn Johnson

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Judicial Impartiality In The Judicial Council Act 2019: Challenges And Opportunities, Brian M. Barry Dr

Articles

The Judicial Council is tasked with promoting and maintaining high standards of judicial conduct. The Judicial Council Act 2019 identifies judicial impartiality as a principle of judicial conduct that Irish judges are required to uphold and exemplify. Despite its ubiquity, judicial impartiality is perhaps under-explained and under-examined.

This article considers the nature and scope of judicial impartiality in contemporary Irish judging. It argues that the Judicial Council ought to take a proactive, multi-faceted approach to promote and maintain judicial impartiality, to address contemporary challenges that the Irish judiciary face including increasingly sophisticated empirical research into judicial performance, the proliferation of …

Law School News: Meet The Rbg Essay Contest Winners! 03-22-2022, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Rebuilding The Federal Circuit Courts, Merritt E. Mcalister

Northwestern University Law Review

The conversation about Supreme Court reform—as important as it is—has obscured another, equally important conversation: the need for lower federal court reform. The U.S. Courts of Appeals have not seen their ranks grow in over three decades. Even then, those additions were stopgap measures built on an appellate triage system that had outsourced much of its work to nonjudicial decision-makers (central judicial staff and law clerks). Those changes born of necessity have now become core features of the federal appellate system, which distributes judicial resources—including oral argument and judicial scrutiny—to a select few. This Article begins to reimagine the courts …

Table Of Contents

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

State Spoliation Claims In Federal District Courts, Jeffrey A. Parness

Catholic University Law Review

The increasing amounts of electronically stored information (ESI) relevant to civil litigation, and the ease of their loss, caused federal lawmakers explicitly to address the possible consequences of certain pre-suit or post-suit ESI losses. These lawmakers acted in both 2006 and 2015 through Federal Civil Procedure (FRCP) 37(e). But they acted only on certain ESI. Their actions have prompted increasing attention to the significant risks of pre-suit and post-suit losses of all ESI, and of non-ESI, otherwise discoverable in civil actions. In addition, their actions have spurred increasing attention to the availability of substantive law claims involving spoliation of information …

Endogenous And Dangerous, Brian N. Larson

Faculty Scholarship

Empirical studies show that courts frequently cite cases that the parties did not cite during briefing and oral arguments—endogenous cases. This Article shows the cognitive and rational dangers of endogenous cases and presents an empirical study of their use. I contend that judges should avoid using endogenous cases in their reasoning and opinions. This Article’s first significant contribution is to provide the first exhaustive treatment in the American legal literature of the rational bases upon which defeasible legal deductions and legal analogies may be built and the critical questions or defeaters that can weaken or bring them down. As far …

The Unbearable Emptiness Of Formalism: Autonomy, Equality, And The Future Of Affirmative Action, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

Debates over affirmative action in higher education generally focus on equality interests under the Fourteenth Amendment but ignore liberty interests under the First Amendment. That tendency persists, even though the academic freedom to enroll a diverse student body has allowed colleges and universities to defend race-conscious admissions programs against legal challenges for decades. Today, the rise of formalism in judicial interpretation poses new perils for these programs. Justice Powell’s seminal decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke was a pragmatic compromise that used diversity to temper the polarized debate over equality that sharply divided the Court. In …

Acknowledgments, Ren Warden

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Unmet Legal Needs As Health Injustice, Yael Cannon

University of Richmond Law Review

In Part I, this Article examines the health justice framework through which laws are understood as determinants of health equity. In Part II, this Article argues that when unaddressed for low-income individuals, legal needs serve as social determinants of health. Applying the health justice framework, the Article examines the major domains of social determinants of health (“SDOH”) and identifies areas of law for which unmet legal needs contribute to poor health and health inequity. Specifically, it analyzes how the five major domains of SDOH of the Healthy People 2030 paradigm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) …

The Future Of Wastewater Monitoring For The Public Health, Natalie Ram, Lance Gable, Jeffrey L. Ram

University of Richmond Law Review

This Article thus expands the extant literature by considering the legal and ethical dimensions of wastewater surveillance more thoroughly and more broadly. It arrives at an auspicious time, as the United States moves into a vaccine-mediated phase in which COVID-19 is less likely to give rise to broad stay-at-home orders and more likely to trigger narrower, more targeted interventions. It seeks to offer guidance for the legal and ethical use of wastewater surveillance along two dimensions. The first dimension considers the circumstances under which wastewater monitoring should be deployed for detecting and responding to COVID-19 specifically. The second dimension zooms …

Trustworthy Digital Contact Tracing, Emily Berman, Leah R. Fowler, Jessica L. Roberts

University of Richmond Law Review

This Article takes a closer look at digital contact tracing in the United States during the coronavirus pandemic and why it failed. It begins by explaining the shortcomings of traditional analog methods and the resulting need for digital contact tracing. It then turns to the norms regarding consent, the scope of the data collected, and the limits on subsequent use necessary for cooperative surveillance. We argue that any successful digital contact-tracing program must incorporate these elements. Yet while necessary, those strategies alone may not be sufficient. People justifiably lack trust in public health authorities, in new technologies, and in the …

Imagining A Better Public Health (Law) Response To Covid-19, Evan Anderson, Scott Burris

University of Richmond Law Review

This Article is not a thorough-going history of the pandemic response. By way of critique and suggesting a way forward for public health, we are going to imagine how public health—both the official agencies and the interconnected nodes in academia and health systems—might have approached COVID-19 differently. This is a story that focuses on good judgment as the lynchpin of optimal pandemic response and allows us to think about where good judgment seems to have been lacking, and how public health culture and institutions might change to improve the chances of better judgment next time.

Reforming Age Cutoffs, Govind Persad

University of Richmond Law Review

This Article examines the use of minimum age cutoffs to define eligibility for social insurance, public benefits, and other governmental programs. These cutoffs are frequently used but rarely examined in detail. In Part I, I examine and catalogue policies that employ minimum age cutoffs. These include not only Medicare and Social Security but also other policies such as access to pensions and retirement benefits, eligibility for favorable tax treatment, and eligibility for discounts on governmentally provided goods and services. In Part II, I examine different rationales underlying eligibility and discuss the imperfect fit between these rationales and the use of …

Expanding Medicaid In The Postpartum Period, Madison P. Harrell

University of Richmond Law Review

This Comment will discuss how the current Medicaid law is insufficient to address the issue of disappointing maternal health outcomes in the United States and how the federal government should begin to remedy the problem. First, I will shed light on the maternal health crisis in the United States, before discussing the history of pregnancy and postpartum Medicaid coverage. Then, I will outline the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, the subsequent court battle over its constitutionality, and the effects of that decision on the current landscape of pregnancy and postpartum Medicaid coverage. Finally, I will detail my proposal for …

Endogenous And Dangerous, Brian N. Larson

Nevada Law Journal

Empirical studies show that courts frequently cite cases that the parties did not cite during briefing and oral arguments—endogenous cases. This Article shows the cognitive and rational dangers of endogenous cases and presents an empirical study of their use. I contend that judges should avoid using endogenous cases in their reasoning and opinions. This Article’s first significant contribution is to provide the first exhaustive treatment in the American legal literature of the rational bases upon which defeasible legal deductions and legal analogies may be built and the critical questions or defeaters that can weaken or bring them down. As far …