Judges Commons^™

Proportionality V. Categorization: The Issue Of Judicial Balancing Of Rights, Akram Mohamed

Theses and Dissertations

The fact that there is a constant conflict between individual rights and state or social interests has historically provoked the question of how to balance or harmonize such conflicting interests? On what basis shall the legislator or the judge decide in favor of this or that right in his legislation or judgement? Where shall we, for example, draw the line between the right to freedom of expression and the right to protect one’s honor and reputation? How could the legislator find the compromise between the state duty to protect fetus life and its obligation not to interfere with woman’s right …

Justice Ginsburg's Journey To Dissents And Influence On Reproductive Rights, Songo Wawa

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s advocacy for gender equity, evidenced by her nationally famous dissents, began long before her 27 years on the Supreme Court. Prior to becoming a Supreme Court Justice, Attorney Ginsburg’s early experiences of gender inequity led to her advocacy for women’s rights as a law professor and as co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project. 1 Attorney Ginsburg’s legal strategy encompassed her pragmatic approach to voicing her opinions about gender equality. 2 In Gonzales v. Carhart, both her dissent announcement and written dissent demonstrated Justice Ginsburg’s commitment to women’s reproductive autonomy.3 Without Justice Ginsburg’s …

The New Laboratories Of Democracy, Gerald S. Dickinson

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

No abstract provided.

Acknowledgements, Matthew L. Brock

University of Richmond Law Review

Each year, in a tradition dating back twenty-three years to Volume 33, the Editor-in-Chief of the University of Richmond Law Review authors acknowledgements to be included in their volume’s final publication. In keeping with tradition, I offer below my gratitude to those who have contributed to this publication and to the overall success of the Law Review, and reflect upon the fifty-seventh volume of our journal.

The Intersection Of Judicial Interpretive Methods And Politics In Supreme Court Justices’ Due Process Opinions, Julie Castle

The Compass

The Supreme Court, a nine seat bench of unelected and lifetime tenured Justices, determines the constitutionality of dozens of cases each year. In this thesis, I research to what extent the political affiliation of the Justices affects the judicial decision making process and, ultimately, case outcomes. Using pattern matching, I evaluate due process opinions from Justice Breyer, Justice O’Connor, and Justice Scalia, all of whom have established constitutional analysis methods, in order to determine if they reasonably adhere to their established method. Due to the highly political nature of due process cases, variance between the expected (adherence to the Justices’ …

Forcing Supreme Court Review By The Federal Circuit, Jeremy W. Bock

Buffalo Law Review

From time to time, a federal court of appeals may want the Supreme Court to take a case because it is stuck: there is an unresolved issue that is important to the day-to-day administration of justice, but an en banc sitting would be futile. The Supreme Court, however, has a haystack problem: it receives several thousand certiorari petitions each year, of which approximately 1% receive plenary review. The literature suggests that the selection of the certworthy needles in this petition haystack is a black-box process affected by discretion and situational factors that make timely review unpredictable and difficult to obtain. …

Foreword: Toward A New Compact With Rural America, Anthony F. Pipa

University of Richmond Law Review

The interpretation of United States laws and policies, and the extent to which they obstruct or support rural places and people to take advantage of opportunity, are at the nexus of our nation’s ability to reweave the social fabric and create a new compact between its rural areas and the rest of the country. It requires recognizing our interdependencies, our mutual interests, and our shared humanity. The Articles contained herein get us started—it is incumbent that we build on these contributions to take their ideas forward and provoke new and constructive policy debates.

Enhancing Rural Representation Through Electoral System Diversity, Henry L. Chambers Jr.

University of Richmond Law Review

Rural Virginians face disparities in outcomes regarding healthcare, access to important infrastructure, and other services. Some disparities may be related to rurality. The sparseness of population in rural areas may limit the sites where people may access services, triggering the need to travel significant distances to obtain goods and services in such areas. Limited access may lead to disparities even when the quality of goods and services in rural areas is high. The disparities affect all rural Virginians, but disproportionately affect rural Virginians of color. The causes of the disparities are complex and myriad, and may be based on race, …

Duped By Dope: The Sackler Family’S Attempt To Escape Opioid Liability And The Need To Close The Non-Debtor Release Loophole, Bryson T. Strachan

University of Richmond Law Review

The opioid epidemic continues to rage on in the United States, ravaging its rural populations. One of its main causes? OxyContin. Purdue Pharma (“Purdue”), the maker of OxyContin, aggressively marketed opioids to the American public while racking up a fortune of over $13 billion dollars for its owners,3 the Sackler family. As a result, roughly 3,000 lawsuits were filed against Purdue and members of the Sackler family. Generally, the lawsuits alleged that Purdue and members of the Sackler family knew OxyContin was highly addictive yet aggressively marketed high dosages of the drug and misrepresented the drug as nonaddictive and without …

Opioid Litigation Panel, Rick Mountcastle, Paul Farrell, Eric Eyre, Patrick C. Mcginley

University of Richmond Law Review

On February 17, 2023, the University of Richmond Law Review hosted a symposium entitled Overlooked America: Addressing Legal Issues in Rural America. A portion of the event focused on the ongoing opioid epidemic in the United States, including the causes and effects of certain actions taken by players in the pharmaceutical industry. The Opioid Litigation Panel, transcribed below, brought together four of the most prominent leaders in the fight for justice in the opioid epidemic: Mr. Rick Mountcastle, Mr. Paul Farrell, Mr. Eric Eyre, and Professor Patrick McGinley. The University of Richmond Law Review was so honored to have …

Table Of Contents

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Acknowledgments, Kelly M. Boppe

University of Richmond Law Review

The University of Richmond Law Review is honored to present its 2023 Symposium Issue: Overlooked America: Addressing Legal Issues Facing Rural United States. Each year, the University of Richmond Law Review hosts a Symposium for scholars and practitioners to engage with a specific area of law. In a time when our country seems more divided than ever, discussions surrounding law and policy frequently diverge not just on political lines, but on regional lines as well. Rural regions of the United States are routinely evoked in the political sphere, but rarely are the problems and disparities that exist in rural …

Rural Bashing, Kaceylee Klein, Lisa R. Pruitt

University of Richmond Law Review

Anti-rural sentiment is expressed in the United States in three major threads. The first is a narrative about the political structure of our representative democracy—an assertion that rural people are over-represented thanks to the structural features of the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College. Because rural residents are less than a fifth of the U.S. population, complaints about this situation are often framed as “minority rule.”

The second thread is related to the first: rural people and their communities get more than their fair share from federal government coffers. The argument, often expressed in terms of “subsidies,” is that rural …

With A Wink And A Nod: How Politicians, Regulators, And Corrupt Coal Companies Exploited Appalachia, Patrick C. Mcginley

University of Richmond Law Review

Environmental regulators treated America’s leading coal companies like Wall Street’s mismanaged banks leading to the “Great Recession”—big coal companies that produced millions of tons of coal were simply too big to fail. With a wink and a nod, federal and state regulators ignored a core provision of federal law that was intended to prevent coal companies from continuing their past practices of plundering Appalachia’s mineral wealth while ravaging her environment.

This Article examines how the coal industry successfully evaded compliance with that law. The consequences of this evasion include mass bankruptcies, thousands of acres of mined land laying unclaimed, …

Rural America As A Commons, Ann M. Eisenberg

University of Richmond Law Review

With many ready to dismiss non-urban life as a relic of history, rural America’s place in the future is in question. The rural role in the American past is understandably more apparent. As the story of urbanization goes in the United States and elsewhere, the majority of the population used to live in rural places, including small towns and sparsely populated counties. A substantial proportion of those people worked in agriculture, manufacturing, or extractive industries. But trends associated with modernity—mechanization, automation, globalization, and environmental conservation, for instance—have reduced the perceived need for a rural workforce. Roughly since the industrial revolution …

Those Who Need The Most, Get The Least: The Challenge Of, And Opportunity For Helping Rural Virginia, Andrew Block, Antonella Nicholas

University of Richmond Law Review

Rural America, as has been well documented, faces many challenges. Businesses and people are migrating to more urban and suburban regions. The extraction and agricultural economies that once helped them thrive—mining, tobacco, textiles—are dying. And, as we discuss below, residents of rural communities tend to be older, poorer, less credentialed in terms of their education, less healthy, and declining in population.

On a regular basis, political leaders on both sides of the aisle, and on national and state levels, make commitments to rural areas to help improve the quality of life for residents, to listen, and to help. Even with …

Rucho In The States: Districting Cases And The Nature Of State Judicial Power, Chad M. Oldfather

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

No abstract provided.

2023 Ruth Bader Ginsburg Essay/Art Contest, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Conditional Purging Of Wills, Mark Glover

University of Richmond Law Review

The laws of most states unconditionally purge a testamentary gift to an individual who serves as an attesting witness to the will. Under this approach, the will is valid despite the presence of an interested witness, but the witness forfeits all, some, or none of her gift, depending on the particularities of state law. While the outcome of the interested witness’s gift varies amongst the states that adhere to this majority approach, the determination of what the interested witnesses can retain is the same. The only consideration is whether the beneficiary is also a witness; whether her gift is purged …

Grandma Got Arrested: Police, Excessive Force, And People With Dementia, Rashmi Goel

University of Richmond Law Review

Recent events have shone a light on the particular vulnerability of people with dementia to police violence. Police are arresting people with dementia and using excessive force to do it—drawing their firearms, deploying tasers, and breaking bones.

To date, little attention has been paid to the burgeoning number of people with dementia, one of society’s most vulnerable populations, and their experiences with the criminal justice system. This Article examines how dementia leads people to engage in activity that appears criminal (shoplifting (forgetting to pay), and trespass (wandering), for instance) and the disproportionate response of police. In several cases where people …

Resolving Regulatory Threats To Tenure, Joseph W. Yockey

University of Richmond Law Review

Many lawmakers and public university governing boards are looking to curb faculty tenure. Driven by both ideological and economic motives, recent efforts range from eliminating tenure systems altogether to interfering when schools seek to tenure individual, often controversial scholars. These actions raise serious questions about higher education law and policy and have important implications for the future of academic freedom. Indeed, if they gain further traction, current regulatory threats to tenure will jeopardize the ability of American universities to remain at the forefront of global research and intellectual progress.

This Article examines the growing anti-tenure sentiment among state officials and …

“Fundamental Fairness”: Finding A Civil Right To Counsel In International Human Rights Law, Meredith Elliott Hollman

University of Richmond Law Review

Every other Western democracy now recognizes a right to counsel in at least some kinds of civil cases, typically those involving basic human rights. The World Justice Project’s 2021 Rule of Law Index ranked the United States 126th of 139 countries for “People Can Access and Afford Civil Justice.” Within its regional and income categories, the United States was dead last. The United Nations and other international treaty bodies have urged the United States to improve access to justice by providing civil legal aid. How did we fall behind, and what can we learn from the rest of the world? …

Cftc & Sec: The Wild West Of Cryptocurrency Regulation, Taylor Anne Moffett

University of Richmond Law Review

Over the past few years, a turf war has been brewing between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) over which agency should regulate cryptocurrencies. Both agencies have pursued numerous enforcement actions over the cryptocurrencies they believe to be within their jurisdiction. This turf war has many moving components, but the focus always comes back to one question: which cryptocurrencies are commodities, and which cryptocurrencies are securities? The distinction is important because the CFTC has statutory authority to regulate commodities, whereas the SEC has statutory authority to regulate securities. This Comment rejects the pursuit …

Zombies Attack Inadvertent Partnerships!—How Undead Precedents Killed By Uniform Statutes Still Roam The Reporters, Joseph K. Leahy

University of Richmond Law Review

Recently, the Texas Supreme Court breathed new life into some ancient zombies—zombie precedents, that is!—which have long lurked in the shadows of the nation’s partnership formation caselaw. This Article tells the story of those undead cases—describing them, debunking them, and plotting their demise.

This zombie tale begins with the supposed black-letter law of partnership formation. In nearly every state, formation of a general partnership is governed by one of two uniform partnership acts. Under both acts, a business relationship ripens into a partnership whenever the statutory definition of partnership is satisfied. The parties’ intent to become “partners” (or not) is …

The Legal Ethics Of Family Separation, Milan Markovic

University of Richmond Law Review

On April 6, 2018, the Trump administration announced a “zero tolerance” policy for individuals who crossed the U.S. border illegally. As part of this policy, the administration prosecuted parents with minor children for unlawful entry; previous administrations generally placed families in civil removal proceedings. Since U.S. law does not allow children to be held in immigration detention facilities pending their parents’ prosecution, the new policy caused thousands of children to be separated from their parents. Hundreds of families have yet to be reunited.

Despite a consensus that the family separation policy was cruel and ineffective, there has been minimal focus …

Solving Slapp Slop, Nicole J. Ligon

University of Richmond Law Review

In a substantial minority of states, wealthy and powerful individuals can, without much consequence, bring defamation lawsuits against the press and concerned citizens to silence and intimidate them. These lawsuits, known as “strategic lawsuits against public participation” (“SLAPP”s), are brought not to compensate a wrongfully injured person, but rather to discourage the defendants from exercising their First Amendment rights. In other words, when well resourced individuals feel disrespected by public criticism, they sometimes sue the media or concerned citizens, forcing these speakers to defend themselves in exorbitantly expensive defamation actions. In states without anti-SLAPP statutes—statutes aimed at protecting speakers from …

“If You Build It, They Will Come”: Reverse Location Searches, Data Collection, And The Fourth Amendment, Matthew L. Brock

University of Richmond Law Review

On January 6, 2021, the world looked on, stunned, as thousands of rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on live television in support of then-President Donald Trump. In the days and weeks that followed, federal law enforcement scrambled to identify those involved in the attack, in what has become the largest criminal investigation in American history. Whereas even 20 years prior it would have been difficult to identify those involved, as of February 2023, more than 950 people have been identified and charged in relation to the January 6th Capitol attack. Many of these individuals were identified using a wide array …

Memorizing Trade Secrets, Timothy E. Murphy

University of Richmond Law Review

The earliest trade secret cases recognized that remembered information raised unique issues in trade secret misappropriation claims. However, courts struggled with exactly how to address remembered information, as opposed to information taken in tangible form. The modern trend, according to one case from the Washington Supreme Court, is to ignore the distinction and treat remembered information the same as information taken in tangible form for purposes of trade secret misappropriation claims. However, this case may have prematurely signaled the demise of remembered information’s relevance to a trade secret claim. Particularly during the pandemic era, where increased employee mobility is placing …

Jazz Improvisation And The Law: Constrained Choice, Sequence, And Strategic Movement Within Rules, William W. Buzbee

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article argues that a richer understanding of the nature of law is possible through comparative, analogical examination of legal work and the art of jazz improvisation. This exploration illuminates a middle ground between rule of law aspirations emphasizing stability and determinate meanings and contrasting claims that the untenable alternative is pervasive discretionary or politicized law. In both the law and jazz improvisation settings, the work involves constraining rules, others’ unpredictable actions, and strategic choosing with attention to where a collective creation is going. One expects change and creativity in improvisation, but the many analogous characteristics of law illuminate why …