Judges Commons^™

High Court Pretense, Lower Court Candor: Judicial Impartiality After Capterton V. Massey Coal Co., Lynne H. Rambo

Faculty Scholarship

Apolitical, impartial judging has always been our judicial ideal. In the last twenty years, however, special interest groups have sought power over (and through) judges by pouring millions into judicial elections, and the Court has recognized their first amendment right to do so. In the midst of this politicization of judicial elections, the Court five years ago reinforced the impartiality ideal, holding very broadly in Caperton v. Massey Coal Co. that it violates due process for a judge to sit whenever there is a “probability of bias,” i.e., whenever the average judge is unlikely to be neutral. Caperton involved a …

Supremes, Jennifer L. Behrens

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Grand Challenges, Grand Ideas: Ideas For Surmounting The Biggest Challenges Facing The Judiciary And The Legal Profession Today, David F. Levi

Faculty Scholarship

In delivering the Lloyd D. George Lecture on the Judicial Process at UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law last year, Duke Law School Dean David F. Levi laid out “The Grand Challenges for the Legal Profession and the Judiciary.” Following are his lecture and a roundtable discussion among judicial leaders who are responding to the call for new ideas and solutions for these Grand Challenges.

Barriers To Entry And Justice Ginsburg’S Criminal Procedure Jurisprudence, Lisa Kern Griffin

Faculty Scholarship

In her twenty plus years on the United States Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has issued momentous decisions and significant dissents concerning constitutional guarantees of equality. She is best known for her leadership – as an advocate, scholar, judge, and justice – on issues of gender discrimination. Although one might expect related commitments to civil liberties to shape cases concerning the criminal justice process, Justice Ginsburg’s mark on constitutional criminal procedure appears comparatively faint. Her contributions have been subtle, and her cautious opinions at first seem disconnected from the clear principles established in the discrimination cases.

Disruption And Deference, Olivier Sylvain

Faculty Scholarship

Online video streaming applications enable users to watch over the-air broadcast programs at any time and almost on any device. As such, they challenge the pertinence of traditional video distribution law and the broadcast network system on which it is based. Congress enacted the Transmit Clause of the 1976 Copyright Act to resolve the high-stakes tussle between broadcasters and cable providers. But, today, that provision is ill-suited to resolving whether unauthorized streaming infringes on broadcasters’ copyright to perform works publicly. Its scope is ambiguous enough that judges across the country were notably divided on whether it reaches online video distribution—that …

Legal Discourse And Racial Justice: The Urge To Cry ‘Bias!, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

One who is convinced that a judge wrongly decided a case may sometimes be tempted to accuse the judge of bias, referring to unconscious social-group stereotypes and/or cognitive biases that fall under the rubric of “implicit biases.” The rhetoric is problematic, however, for various reasons. One is that the term “bias” in this context may be misunderstood to mean something different and unintended – either a disqualifying bias under judicial conduct rules or a conscious prejudice. Another is that, even if the intended meaning is clear, a judge’s implicit biases cannot fairly be inferred from a single wrong decision. To …

Judge Jack Weinstein And The Allure Of Antiproceduralism, Howard M. Erichson

Faculty Scholarship

In one sense of the word proceduralist — a person with expertise in procedure — Judge Jack Weinstein is among the leading proceduralists on the federal bench. But in another sense of the word proceduralist — an adherent of proceduralism, or faithfulness to established procedures — he falls at a different end of the spectrum. Looking at four examples of Judge Weinstein’s work in mass litigation, this Article considers what it means to be an antiproceduralist, someone unwilling to let procedural niceties stand in the way of substantive justice. The allure of antiproceduralism is that it eschews technicalities in favor …

Coming Into The Anthropocene, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews Professor Jonathan Cannon’s Environment in the Balance. Cannon’s book admirably analyzes the Supreme Court’s uptake of, or refusal of, the key commitments of the environmental-law revolution of the early 1970s. In some areas the Court has adapted old doctrines, such as Standing and Commerce, to accommodate ecological insights; in other areas, such as Property, it has used older doctrines to restrain the transformative effects of environmental law. After surveying Cannon’s argument, this review diagnoses the historical moment that has made the ideological division that Cannon surveys especially salient: a time of stalled legislation, political deadlock, and …

Challenging The Randomness Of Panel Assignment In The Federal Courts Of Appeals, Adam S. Chilton, Marin K. Levy

Faculty Scholarship

A fundamental academic assumption about the federal courts of appeals is that the three-judge panels that hear cases have been randomly configured. Scores of scholarly articles have noted this “fact,” and it has been relied on heavily by empirical researchers. Even though there are practical reasons to doubt that judges would always be randomly assigned to panels, this assumption has never been tested. This Article fill this void by doing so.

To determine whether the circuit courts utilize random assignment, we have created what we believe to be the largest dataset of panel assignments of those courts constructed to date. …

The Constraint Of Legal Doctrine, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

As the dominant approach to legal analysis in the United States today, Legal Realism is firmly ensconced in the way scholars discuss and debate legal issues and problems. The phrase “we are all realists now” is treated as cliché precisely because it is in some ways taken to state an obvious reality about the mindset of American legal scholars. While Legal Realism came to represent a variety of different views, all of these views embodied a common theme, namely, the belief that legal doctrine is “more malleable, less determinate, and less causal of judicial outcomes” than is traditionally presumed. Judges …

Judicial Priorities, Bert I. Huang, Tejas N. Narechania

Faculty Scholarship

In an unprecedented move, the Illinois Supreme Court in the mid-1990s imposed hard caps on the state's appeals courts, drastically reducing the number of opinions they could publish, while also narrowing the formal criteria for opinions to qualify for publication. The high court explained that the amendment's purpose was to reduce the "avalanche of opinions emanating from [the] Appellate Court," which was causing legal research to become "unnecessarily burdensome, difficult and costly." This unusual and sudden policy shift offers the chance to observe the priorities of a common law court in its production of published opinions. The method we introduce …

Ideology, Qualifications, And Covert Senate Obstruction Of Federal Court Nominations, Ryan J. Owens, Daniel E. Walters, Ryan C. Black, Anthony Madonna

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars, policymakers, and journalists have bemoaned the emphasis on ideology over qualifications and party over performance in the judicial appointment process. Though, for years, the acrimony between the two parties and between the Senate and President remained limited to appointments to the United States Supreme Court, the modern era of judicial appointments has seen the so-called “appointments rigor mortis” spread throughout all levels of judicial appointments. A host of studies have examined the causes and consequences of the growing acrimony and obstruction of lower federal court appointments, but few rely on archival data and empirical evidence to examine the underlying …

Gerald Bard Tjoflat: A Profile, Daniel S. Bowling Iii

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Effectiveness Of International Adjudicators, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter, in the Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication, provides an overview of the burgeoning literature on the effectiveness of international courts and tribunals (ICs). It considers four dimensions of effectiveness that have engendered debates among scholars or received insufficient scrutiny. The first dimension, case-specific effectiveness, evaluates whether the litigants to a specific dispute change their behavior following an IC ruling, an issue closely linked to compliance with IC judgments. The second variant, erga omnes effectiveness, assesses whether IC decisions have systemic precedential effects that influence the behavior of all states subject to a tribunal’s jurisdiction. The third approach, embeddedness …

A Winner’S Curse?: Promotions From The Lower Federal Courts, Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati, Eric A. Posner

Faculty Scholarship

The standard model of judicial behavior suggests that judges primarily care about deciding cases in ways that further their political ideologies. But judicial behavior seems much more complex. Politicians who nominate people for judgeships do not typically tout their ideology (except sometimes using vague code words), but they always claim that the nominees will be competent judges. Moreover, it stands to reason that voters would support politicians who appoint competent as well as ideologically compatible judges. We test this hypothesis using a dataset consisting of promotions to the federal circuit courts. We find, using a set of objective measures of …

The Jury Wants To Take The Podium -- But Even With The Authority To Do So, Can It? An Interdisciplinary Examination Of Jurors' Questioning Of Witnesses At Trial, Mitchell J. Frank

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Judging Justice On Appeal, Marin K. Levy

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Are Damages Different? Bivens And National Security, Andrew Kent

Faculty Scholarship

Litigation challenging the national security actions of the federal government has taken a seemingly paradoxical form in recent years. Prospective coercive remedies like injunctions and habeas corpus (a kind of injunction) are traditionally understood to involve much greater intrusions by the judiciary into government functioning than retrospective money damages awards. Yet federal courts have developed and strictly applied doctrines barring Bivens damages actions against federal officials because of an asserted need to preserve the prerogatives of the political branches in national security and foreign affairs. At the same time, the courts have been increasingly assertive in cases involving coercive remedies, …

Brief For Amici Curiae Professors Of Law In Support Of Petitioner, Neil Vidmar, Lisa Kern Griffin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Review: American Jericho: A Book Review Of The Hanging Judge By Michael A. Ponsor, Giovanna Shay

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sotomayer's Supreme Court Race Jurisprudebce: 'Fidelity To The Law', Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

During the Senate confirmation hearings for Justice Sonia Sotomayor, concerns were persistently raised about her ability to be impartial. Conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh and many others railed against her nomination, proclaiming on talk radio broadcasts from coast-to-coast that she is a reverse-racist and nothing less than anti-white. A review of the Supreme Court record of race-related cases demonstrates Justice Sotomayor’s continued commitment to her stated judicial philosophy of fidelity to the law, inasmuch as she has not sought the unilateral imposition of her own personal racial policy preferences but has instead worked as a team player to scrupulously apply legal …

The Hanging Judge By Michael A. Ponsor -- A Book Review: Capital Punishment -- Is The Death Penalty Worth The Price?, Beth D. Cohen, Pat K. Newcombe

Faculty Scholarship

In 2000-2001, Judge Ponsor presided over the first death penalty case in Massachusetts in nearly 50 years, United States v. Gilbert. Gilbert’s trial marked only the third time that a federal capital case had gone to trial in a state without the death penalty. According to Ponsor, he felt a particularly heavy responsibility to ensure that both the government and the defense got a fair trial. In fact, in 2001, after the conclusion of the trial, Ponsor did something somewhat unusual for a judge; he wrote a lengthy editorial about the death penalty. He wrote: “[t]he simple question - not …

An Empirical Method For Harmless Error, D. Alex Winkelman, David V. Yokum, Lisette C. Cole, Shelby C. Thompson, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

Trials are often imperfect. When inadmissible evidence is introduced or the jury is incorrectly instructed, judges must determine whether the error was prejudicial or merely harmless. In making that assessment, judges resort to speculation about the counterfactual question of whether the error changed the outcome, compared to the decision of a properly informed and instructed jury. These decisions are likely colored by confirmation and status quo biases, along with “mental contamination” of the error itself. Even when appellate judges perform these analyses accurately, their decisions appear conclusory. Scholars and judges have roundly criticized this doctrine, but no solution has emerged. …

The Coming Constitutional Yo-Yo? Elite Opinion, Polarization, And The Direction Of Judicial Decision Making, Mark A. Graber

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers a more sophisticated account of elite theory that incorporates the crucial insights underlying claims that Justices with life tenure will protect minority rights and claims that the Supreme Court follows the election returns. Put simply, the direction of judicial decision making at a given time reflects the views of the most affluent and highly educated members of the dominant national coalition. The values that animate the elite members of the dominant national coalition help explain the direction of judicial decision making for the last eighty years. During the mid-twentieth century, most Republican and Democratic elites held more …

Why Cant We Be Friends Preserving Public Confidence In The Judiciary Through Limited Use Of Social Networking, Helia Garrido Hull

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

How Well Do Measures Of Judicial Ability Translate Into Performance?, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner

Faculty Scholarship

Diverse measures are used as proxies for judicial ability, ranging from the college and law school a judge attended to the rate at which her decisions are cited by other judges. Yet there has been little serious examination of which of these ability measures is better or worse at predicting the quality of judicial performance—including the management and disposition of cases. In this article, we attempt to evaluate these measures of ability by examining a rich group of performance indicators. Our innovation is to derive performance measures from judicial decisions other than case outcomes (which are inherently difficult to evaluate): …

Judicial Attention As A Scarce Resource: A Preliminary Defense Of How Judges Allocate Time Across Cases In The Federal Courts Of Appeals, Marin K. Levy

Faculty Scholarship

Federal appellate judges no longer have the time to hear argument and draft opinions in all of their cases. The average annual filing per active judgeship now stands at 330 filed cases per year — more than four times what it was sixty years ago. In response, judges have adopted case management strategies that effectively involve spending significantly less time on certain classes of cases than on others. Various scholars have decried this state of affairs, suggesting that the courts have created a “bifurcated” system of justice with “separate and unequal tracks.” These reformers propose altering the relevant constraints of …

The Politics Of Statutory Interpretation, Margaret H. Lemos

Faculty Scholarship

In a new book, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, Justice Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner describe and defend the textualist methodology for which Justice Scalia is famous. For Scalia and Garner, the normative appeal of textualism lies in its objectivity: by focusing on text, context, and canons of construction, textualism offers protection against ideological judging—a way to separate law from politics. Yet, as Scalia and Garner well know, textualism is widely regarded as a politically conservative methodology. The charge of conservative bias is more common than it is concrete, but it reflects the notion that textualism narrows the …

Faithful Agency Versus Ordinary Meaning Advocacy, James J. Brudney

Faculty Scholarship

This Article contends that ordinary meaning analysis based on dictionaries and language canons cannot be reconciled with the faithful agent model. Fidelity to Congress as a principal entails fidelity to its lawmaking enterprise, not to words or sentences divorced from that enterprise. Congress has indicated that it does not value dictionaries as part of its lawmaking process, and it ascribes at most limited weight to language canons in that process. Further, Justices advocating ordinary meaning analysis too often use dictionary definitions, and language canons such as the rule against surplusage, the whole act rule, and ejusdem generis, in ways that …

Ripples Against The Other Shore: The Impact Of Trauma Exposure On The Immigration Process Through Adjudicators, Kate Aschenbrenner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.