Jurisprudence Commons^™

Anti-Modalities, David E. Pozen, Adam Samaha

Faculty Scholarship

Constitutional argument runs on the rails of “modalities.” These are the accepted categories of reasoning used to make claims about the content of supreme law. Some of the modalities, such as ethical and prudential arguments, seem strikingly open ended at first sight. Their contours come into clearer view, however, when we attend to the kinds of claims that are not made by constitutional interpreters – the analytical and rhetorical moves that are familiar in debates over public policy and political morality but are considered out of bounds in debates over constitutional meaning. In this Article, we seek to identify the …

Charles Reich And The Legal History Of Privacy, Sarah Seo

Faculty Scholarship

Historians’ interest in Reich offers a case study of the relationship between historical and legal studies. What can legal scholars learn from historians, and what can historians learn from legal scholarship? This Essay will explore these two questions by focusing on Igo’s The Known Citizen since she encountered Reich not with the dual citizenship of a legal historian but as an intellectual historian. I will first highlight what legal scholars can learn from historians by summarizing the main arguments in The Known Citizen. Then, I will provide an alternative legal account to Igo’s history of privacy, which may clear …

Settled Law, G. Alexander Nunn, Alan M. Trammell

Scholarly Articles

“Settled law” appears frequently in judicial opinions—sometimes to refer to binding precedent, sometimes to denote precedent that has acquired a more mystical permanence, and sometimes as a substantive part of legal doctrine. During judicial confirmation hearings, the term is bandied about as Senators, advocacy groups, and nominees discuss judicial philosophy and deeper ideological commitments. But its varying and often contradictory uses have given rise to a concern that settled law is simply a repository for hopelessly disparate ideas. Without definitional precision, it risks becoming nothing more than empty jargon.

We contend that settled law is actually a meaningful concept, even …

Big Pharma, Big Problems: Covid-19 Heightens Patent-Antitrust Tension Caused By Reverse Payments, Hannah M. Lasting

Seattle University Law Review

In the wake of COVID-19, pharmaceutical companies rushed to produce vaccinations and continue to work on developing treatments, while the tension caused by reverse payments intensifies between patent and antitrust law. Lawmakers must address this tension, and the current pandemic should serve as a catalyst to prompt reform at the legislative level. By amending the Hatch-Waxman Act, lawmakers can ease the increasing strain between patent and antitrust policy concerns. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court attempted to resolve this tension in its landmark decision, F.T.C. v. Actavis, but the tension remains as lower courts struggle to produce a uniform standard …

Foreword, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Foreword.

The Deans' Roundtable, Dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Dean Danielle Conway, Dean Tamara Lawson, Dean Mario Barnes, Dean L. Song Richardson

Seattle University Law Review

The Deans' Roundtable.

Regents: Resurrecting Animus/Renewing Discriminatory Intent, William Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Aoc In The Age Of Covid - Pandemic Preparedness Planning In The Federal Courts, Zoe Niesel

Faculty Articles

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic created a crisis for American society—and the federal courts were not exempt. Court facilities came to a grinding halt, cases were postponed, and judiciary employees adopted work-from-home practices. Having court operations impacted by a pandemic was not a new phenomenon, but the size, scope, and technological lift of the COVID-19 pandemic was certainly unique.

Against this background, this Article examines the history and future of pandemic preparedness planning in the federal court system and seeks to capture some of the lessons learned from initial federal court transitions to pandemic operations in 2020. The Article begins by …

Scrutiny-Determination Avoidance In First Amendment Cases: Laudable Minimalism Or Condemnable Evasion?, Clay Calvert

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article examines the United States Supreme Court’s practice in First Amendment cases of not resolving the precise level of scrutiny that applies to measure a statute’s validity. Rather than opting for one of two tiers of scrutiny — one more rigorous than the other—the Court sometimes dodges the issue. It does this by concluding that a statute would not pass muster under the more lenient standard, thereby rendering it unnecessary to decide which test was, in fact, more appropriate. The Court thus adopts an “assuming-without-deciding” logic in such cases, simply supposing the lesser standard applies without definitively holding as …

What's The Deal With Revlon?, Zachary Gubler

Indiana Law Journal

Under the Revlon doctrine, courts are to apply a higher level of scrutiny in certain takeover situations in an attempt to control potential conflicts of interest that might prejudice target shareholders. However, the doctrine has always had sufficient “play in the joints” that one might reasonably wonder whether it has much of an effect in practice on short-term shareholder returns. Additionally, in recent years, the trend in Delaware’s Revlon jurisprudence seems to be to defer to the target board as long as there are no glaring conflicts of interest. Taken together, these facts raise concern over the continued relevance of …

A Biden Executive Branch And Its Supporters May Find The Federal Courts An Obstacle, Heather Elliott

Articles

No abstract provided.

Confrontation In The Age Of Plea Bargaining [Comments], William Ortman

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

A Textualist Interpretation Of The Visual Artists Rights Act Of 1990, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

For numberless generations, jurisprudes waged total war in the

conflict among textualism, intentionalism, and purposivism.

Textualists insisted that courts must interpret statutes based on the

meaning of their text, intentionalists insisted on the intention of the

legislature, and purposivists insisted on the purpose of the statute.

Eventually, textualism prevailed. Courts universally recognize

that they are obligated to interpret statutes in light of their text, or

at least pretend that the text of the statute determined their

interpretation. And the few remaining heretics are swiftly identified

and corrected by their superiors. As Justice Kagan famously

observed, “We’re all textualists now.” Whether …

The Carbon Price Equivalent: A Metric For Comparing Climate Change Mitigation Efforts Across Jurisdictions, Gabriel Weil

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Climate change presents a global commons problem: Emissions reductions on the scale needed to meet global targets do not pass a domestic cost-benefit test in most countries. To give national governments ample incentive to pursue deep decarbonization, mutual interstate coercion will be necessary. Many proposed tools of coercive climate diplomacy would require a onedimensional metric for comparing the stringency of climate change mitigation policy packages across jurisdictions. This article proposes and defends such a metric: the carbon price equivalent. There is substantial variation in the set of climate change mitigation policy instruments implemented by different countries. Nonetheless, the consequences of …

The People's Court: On The Intellectual Origins Of American Judicial Power, Ian C. Bartrum

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This article enters into the modern debate between “consti- tutional departmentalists”—who contend that the executive and legislative branches share constitutional interpretive authority with the courts—and what are sometimes called “judicial supremacists.” After exploring the relevant history of political ideas, I join the modern minority of voices in the latter camp.

This is an intellectual history of two evolving political ideas—popular sovereignty and the separation of powers—which merged in the making of American judicial power, and I argue we can only understand the structural function of judicial review by bringing these ideas together into an integrated whole. Or, put another way, …

Assertion And Hearsay, Richard Lloret

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This article explores the characteristics and functions of assertion and considers how the term influences the definition of hearsay under Federal Rule of Evidence 801. Rule 801(a) defines hearsay by limiting it to words and conduct intended as an assertion, but the rule does not define the term assertion. Courts and legal scholars have focused relatively little attention on the nature and definition of assertion. That is unfortunate, because assertion is a robust concept that has been the subject of intense philosophic study over recent decades. Assertion is not a mere cypher standing in for whatever speech or conduct one …

From Parchment To Dust: The Case For Constitutional Skepticism (Introduction), Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is the introduction to a new book entitled "From Parchment to Dust: The Case for Constitutional Skepticism." The introduction sets out a preliminary case for constitutional skepticism and outlines the arguments contained in the rest of the book.

No, The Firing Squad Is Not Better Than Lethal Injection: A Response To Stephanie Moran’S A Modest Proposal, Michael Conklin

Seattle University Law Review

In the article A Modest Proposal: The Federal Government Should Use Firing Squads to Execute Federal Death Row Inmates, Stephanie Moran argues that the firing squad is the only execution method that meets the requirements of the Eighth Amendment. In order to make her case, Moran unjustifiably overstates the negative aspects of lethal injection while understating the negative aspects of firing squads. The entire piece is predicated upon assumptions that are not only unsupported by the evidence but often directly refuted by the evidence. This Essay critically analyzes Moran’s claims regarding the alleged advantages of the firing squad over …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

International Courts & Judicial Affairs, Sara L. Ochs, Paula Henin, Paola Patarroyo, Haydee Dijkstal, Ira Trako, Kabir Duggal, Chloe Fletcher, Alexander Witt, Marc Weitz

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter reviews some of the most significant developments made by international courts and tribunals in 2020.

I. International Court of Justice As of the time of writing (November 2020), this year, the International Court of Justice (Court) has rendered one order on provisional measures, two judgments on appeals from decisions of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Council, and two orders relating to expert evidence.

Deep Cuts: Four Critiques Of Legal Ideology, Justin Deystone, Akbar Rasulov

Publications

This Article begins an effort to rekindle the intellectual tradition of critical legal theory. The context for the project is significant. On the one hand is the grip of a social crisis, the contours of which continue to confound the commentariat. Racism, xenophobia, gendered violence, migration and nation, climate change, health pandemics, political corruption. The parade is as intimidating as it is spectacular. On the other hand, the very tools of criticism we depend upon in identifying these characters in the parade, much less the spectacle of the parade itself, are themselves in crisis. There is, in a word, a …

Choice Of Law And The Preponderantly Multistate Rule: The Example Of Successor Corporation Products Liability, Diana Sclar

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Most state rules of substantive law, whether legislative or judicial, ordinarily adjust rights and obligations among local parties with respect to local events. Conventional choice of law methodologies for adjudicating disputes with multistate connections all start from an explicit or implicit assumption of a choice between such locally oriented substantive rules. This article reveals, for the first time, that some state rules of substantive law ordinarily adjust rights and obligations with respect to parties and events connected to more than one state and only occasionally apply to wholly local matters. For these rules I use the term “nominally domestic rules …

Civil Rights Equity: An Introduction To A Theory Of What Civil Rights Has Become, John Valery White

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article argues that civil rights law is better understood as civil rights equity. It contends that the four-decade-long project of restricting civil rights litigation has shaped civil rights jurisprudence into a contemporary version of traditional equity. For years commentators have noted the low success rates of civil rights suits and debated the propriety of increasingly restrictive procedural and substantive doctrines. Activists have lost faith in civil rights litigation as an effective tool for social change, instead seeking change in administrative forums, or by asserting political pressure through social media and activism to compel policy change. As for civil rights …

Social Justice And The Supreme Court: Lessons From The Past, Vicki Lens

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

This article revisits over sixty years of Supreme Court decisions that have affected the poor and racial minorities, using a novel approach that considers the synergistic relationship between different doctrinal areas rather than focusing on one area. Specifically, I appraise the Supreme Court’s doctrinal contributions from 1953 to the present across three foundational elements of social justice on behalf of the poor and people of color: the school integration cases under the Equal Protection Clause, a series of cases under the Fourth Amendment which sanctioned the police tactic of stop-and-frisk, and attempts to secure economic security for the poor through …

Mediation Ethics After The Singapore Convention, Zachary R. Calo

Scholarly Works

The aim of this essay is to consider the shape of mediation ethics after the Singapore Convention. It assesses the role of ethics with the Convention framework, as well as how the Convention can inform broader conversations about mediation ethics. The international commercial mediation landscape initiated by the Convention commends certain approaches to ethics for its effective and efficient operation. In particular, it is argued that the Convention system is best complemented by codes of ethics that are clear and standardized in their norms as well as modest in the scope of their regulatory ambitions. An ethical system defined by …

Globalization And Privatization Of Federal Corporate Prosecutions: The Pressures Eroding Fifth Amendment Rights, Katarina Resar Krasulova

Touro Law Review

Over the past several decades, our society has continued to become even more globalized and interconnected. The dynamic put increasing pressure on the fairness of criminal trials in domestic courts. This Article discusses two recent phenomena that illustrate this evolution and their impact on the defendants’ rights against selfincrimination: the globalization and privatization of the federal prosecutions. Globalization is understood as the United States’ Government’s increased reliance on foreign authorities in prosecution of cross-border crimes, while privatization denotes the Government’s reliance on private actors in conducting investigations. Investigations conducted by private entities and foreign governments, and the evidence those investigations …

Applying Mediation To The Complexities Of Surrogacy Agreements, Aude-Mazarine Lestienne

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

In the late part of the twentieth century, assisted reproductive technologies ("ART") offered new hope to individuals who were infertile, could not carry a pregnancy, or whose attempts to form non-biological families were rejected. At the same time, advances in ART transformed and strained the traditional notions of family, as well as the legal concepts surrounding it. If utilized for the negotiation of the terms of surrogacy agreements, mediation could provide a creative alternative to time-worn legalistic approaches to solving the problems raised by these complex new family dynamics.

Religious Roots Of Corporate Organization, Amanda Porterfield

Seattle University Law Review

Religion and corporate organization have developed side-by-side in Western culture, from antiquity to the present day. This Essay begins with the realignment of religion and secularity in seventeenth-century America, then looks to the religious antecedents of corporate organization in ancient Rome and medieval Europe, and then looks forward to the modern history of corporate organization. This Essay describes the long history behind the entanglement of business and religion in the United States today. It also shows how an understanding of both religion and business can be expanded by looking at the economic aspects of religion and the religious aspects of …

The Rise Of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: Opportunities And Challenges, Aaron J. Wright

Articles

The article explores the rise of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), highlighting their potential to transform traditional organizational structures through blockchain technology and smart contracts. DAOs offer operational efficiencies, such as decentralized governance and transparent decision-making, but face significant legal challenges, including lack of recognition, liability concerns, and regulatory uncertainties. The article argues that U.S. business law, with its emphasis on private ordering, could accommodate DAOs, but legal adaptations are necessary to address their unique characteristics and ensure widespread adoption.

The Morality Of Fiduciary Law, Paul B. Miller

Journal Articles

Recent work of fiduciary theory has provided conceptual synthesis requisite to understanding core fiduciary principles and the structure of fiduciary liability. However, normative questions have received only sporadic attention. What values animate fiduciary law? How does, or ought, fiduciary law prove responsive to them?

Where in other areas of private law theory – notably, tort theory – pioneering scholars went directly at normative questions like these, fiduciary theory has been exceptional for the reticence shown toward them. The reticence is sensible. Fiduciary principles are the product of equity’s most extended and convoluted program of supplementing surrounding law. They span several …