Legal History Commons^™

An Examination Of Strategic Anticipation Of Appellate Court Preferences By Federal District Court Judges, Christina L. Boyd, James F. Spriggs

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Essay tackles the complicated relationships within the federal judicial hierarchy with a focus on the relatively understudied connection between the Supreme Court and district courts.

Guarding The Guardians: Judges' Rights And Virginia's Judicial Inquiry And Review Commission, Jeffrey D. Mcmahan Jr.

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Justice Kennedy's Short-Lived Libertarian Revolution: A Brief History Of Supreme Court Libertarian Ideology, Stephen O'Hanlon

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

This paper contends that Justice Anthony Kennedy did not initiate a libertarian jurisprudential revolution following Lawrence v. Texas. The article begins with an overview of constitutional fundamental rights jurisprudence and examines similarities with libertarian theory.

The paper then assesses the legal decisions of Justice Kennedy but concludes that Justice Kennedy is not a libertarian. This provides the basis for critiquing Professor Randy Barnett's assertion that Justice Kennedy was the instigator of a libertarian revolution in U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence. The fact that Justice Kennedy is not a libertarian is apparent from his reasoning in the recent partial birth abortion …

“Militant Judgement?: Judicial Ontology, Constitutional Poetics, And ‘The Long War’”, Penelope J. Pether

Working Paper Series

This Article, a contribution to the Cardozo Law Review symposium in honor of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, uses Badiou’s theorizing of the event and of the militant in Being and Event as a basis for an exploration of problems of judicial ontology and constitutional hermeneutics raised in recent decisions by common law courts dealing with the legislative and executive confinement of “Islamic” asylum seekers, “enemy combatants” and “terrorism suspects,” and certain classes of criminal offenders in spaces beyond the doctrines, paradigms and institutions of the criminal law. The Article proposes an ontology and a poetics of judging equal to …

The Virtue Of Judicial Statesmanship, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Some of America's most important judges have emphasized or embodied the practice of judicial statesmanship. Yet from the examples they set, it is not particularly clear what judicial statesmanship is or why it matters. In this Article, I conceptualize the elusive phenomenon of judicial statesmanship, and I defend statesmanship as a core, if under appreciated, dimension of judicial role.

I argue that judicial statesmanship defines a virtue in the role of a judge. Statesmanship charges judges with approaching cases so as to facilitate the capacity of the legal system to legitimate itself over the long run and with respect to …

William Thaddeus Coleman, Jr.: Breaking The Color Barrier At The U.S. Supreme Court, Todd C. Peppers

Scholarly Articles

The purpose of this essay is twofold: It will endeavor to succinctly summarize the important events of Coleman’s life and professional career, while making the argument that these achievements were as groundbreaking in the legal community as Robinson’s were to baseball. Admittedly, looking to our national pastime is hardly an original literary maneuver; The myriad similarities and links between baseball and the law have offered rich material for many legal writers.2 Moreover, this article does not wish to diminish Coleman’s accomplishments by comparing them to a mere “game.” By drawing upon the sixtieth anniversary of Robinson’s debut, my hope is …

A New (And Better) Interpretation Of Holmes's Prediction Theory Of Law, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

Holmes's famous 1897 theory that law is a prediction of what courts will do in fact slowly changed the way law schools taught law until, by the mid-1920s legal realism took over the curriculum. The legal realists argued that judges decide cases on all kinds of objective and subjective reasons including precedents. If law schools wanted to train future lawyers to be effective, they should be exposed to collateral subjects that might influence judges: law and society, law and literature, and so forth. But the standard interpretation has been a huge mistake. It treats law as analogous to weather forecasting: …

Ditching "The Disposal Plan": Revisiting Miranda In An Age Of Terror, 20 St. Thomas L. Rev. 155 (2008), Kim D. Chanbonpin

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sandisk Corp. V. Stmicroelectronics, Inc., Patrick R. Colsher

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Indian Nations And The Federal Government: What Will Justice Require In The Future? Claims Against The Sovereign 20th Jusicial Conference Of The United States Court Of Federal Claims, Charles Wilkinson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Judicial Compensation And The Definition Of Judicial Power In The Early Republic, James E. Pfander

Michigan Law Review

Article III's provision for the compensation of federal judges has been much celebrated for the no-diminution provision that forecloses judicial pay cuts. But other features of Article Ill's compensation provision have largely escaped notice. In particular, little attention has been paid to the framers' apparent expectation that Congress would compensate federal judges with salaries alone, payable from the treasury at stated times. Article III's presumption in favor of salary-based compensation may rule out fee-based compensation, which was a common form of judicial compensation in England and the colonies but had grown controversial by the time of the framing. Among other …

Blinking On The Bench: How Judges Decide Cases, Chris Guthrie, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Andrew J. Wistrich

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

How do judges judge? Do they apply law to facts in a mechanical and deliberative way, as the formalists suggest they do, or do they rely on hunches and gut feelings, as the realists maintain? Debate has raged for decades, but researchers have offered little hard evidence in support of either model. Relying on empirical studies of judicial reasoning and decision making, we propose an entirely new model of judging that provides a more accurate explanation of judicial behavior. Our model accounts for the tendency of the human brain to make automatic, snap judgments, which are surprisingly accurate, but which …

Umpires At Bat: On Integration And Legitimation, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

During his confirmation hearings. Chief Justice Roberts captured the public's imagination when he offered an interpretation of the role that judges play in our society when interpreting the Constitution. Judges and Justices are servants of the law, not the other way around, he said. Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules, they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see an umpire.

In this inquiry, I identify some tensions between the …

Embracing The Living Constitution: Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's Move Away From A Conservative Methodology Of Constitutional Interpretation, Lisa K. Parshall

North Carolina Central Law Review

No abstract provided.

Heuristics And Biases In Bankruptcy Judges, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Chris Guthrie, Andrew J. Wistrich

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Do specialized judges make better decisions than judges who are generalists? Specialized judges surely come to know their area of law well, but specialization might also allow judges to develop better, more reliable ways of assessing cases. We assessed this question by presenting a group of specialized judges with a set of hypothetical cases designed to elicit a reliance on common heuristics that can lead judges to make poor decisions. Although the judges resisted the influence of some of these heuristics, they also expressed a clear vulnerability to others. These results suggest that specialization does not produce better judgment.

Interrogation Of Detainees: Extending A Hand Or A Boot?, Amos N. Guiora

ExpressO

The so called “war on terror” provides the Bush administration with a unique opportunity to both establish clear guidelines for the interrogation of detainees and to make a forceful statement about American values. How the government chooses to act can promote either an ethical commitment to the norms of civil society, or an attitude analogous to Toby Keith’s “American Way,” where Keith sings that “you’ll be sorry that you messed with the USofA, ‘Cuz we’ll put a boot in your ass, It’s the American Way.”

No aspect of the “war on terrorism” more clearly addresses this balance than coercive interrogation. …

Jutstice Kennedy And The Environment: Property, States' Rights, And The Search For Nexus, Michael Blumm

ExpressO

Justice Anthony Kennedy, now clearly the pivot of the Roberts Court, is the Court’s crucial voice in environmental and natural resources law cases. Kennedy’s central role was never more evident than in the two most celebrated environmental and natural resources law cases of 2006: Kelo v. New London and Rapanos v. U.S., since he supplied the critical vote in both: upholding local use of the condemnation power for economic development under certain circumstances, and affirming federal regulatory authority over wetlands which have a significant nexus to navigable waters. In each case Kennedy’s sole concurrence was outcome determinative.

Justice Kennedy has …

Birth Of An Institution: Horace Gray And The Lost Law Clerks, Todd C. Peppers

Scholarly Articles

In a vault hidden away in a downtown Boston bank rests a large silver loving cup. The cup was presented to Associate Justice Horace Gray on March 22, 1902 by his law clerks, and engraved on its tarnished surface are the names of the nineteen Harvard Law School graduates who served as Justice Gray’s law clerks. While the details surrounding the presentation of the cup have been lost to history, the gift was likely prompted by the failing health of Justice Gray and his future departure from the Supreme Court. The loving cup is still held by the Gray family, …

In Re Simone D., Erin E. Martin

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

An External Perspective On The Nature Of Noneconomic Compensatory Damages And Their Regulation, Ronald J. Allen, Alexia Brunet, Susan Spies Roth

Publications

No abstract provided.

Inside The Bankruptcy Judge's Mind, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Chris Guthrie, Andrew J. Wistrich

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In this paper, we extend our prior work on generalist judges to explore whether specialization leads to superior judicial decision making. To do so, we report the results of a study of federal bankruptcy judges. In one prior study of bankruptcy judges, Ted Eisenberg reported evidence suggesting that bankruptcy judges, like generalist judges, are susceptible to the "self-serving" or "egocentric" bias when making judgments. Here, we report evidence showing that bankruptcy judges are vulnerable to anchoring and framing effects, but appear largely unaffected by the omission bias, a debtor's race, a debtor's apology, and "terror management" or "mortality salience."'

Because …

A Complete Property Right Amendment, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

The trend of the eminent domain reform and "Kelo plus" initiatives is toward a comprehensive Constitutional property right incorporating the elements of level of review, nature of government action, and extent of compensation. This article contains a draft amendment which reflects these concerns.

Radicals In Robes: A Review, Dru Stevenson

ExpressO

This essay reviews and critiques Cass Sunstein’s new book about conservative activists in the federal judiciary. After a discussion of Sunstein’s (somewhat misleading) rhetorical nomenclature, this essay argues that Sunstein’s proposed “minimalist” methodology in constitutional jurisprudence is beneficial, but not for the reasons Sunstein suggests. Sunstein alternatively justifies judicial restraint or incrementalism on epistemological self-doubt (cautiousness being an outgrowth of uncertainty) and his fear that accomplishments by Progressives in the last century will be undone by conservative judges in the present. Constitutional incrementalism is more convincingly justified on classical economic grounds. While affirming Sunstein’s overall thesis, this essay offers an …

Searches & The Misunderstood History Of Suspicion & Probable Cause: Part One, Fabio Arcila

ExpressO

This article, the first of a two-part series, argues that during the Framers’ era many if not most judges believed they could issue search warrants without independently assessing the adequacy of probable cause, and that this view persisted even after the Fourth Amendment became effective. This argument challenges the leading originalist account of the Fourth Amendment, which Professor Thomas Davies published in the Michigan Law Review in 1999.

The focus in this first article is upon an analysis of the common law and how it reflected the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions. Learned treatises in particular, and to a lesser extent a …

But What Will They Do Without Unpublished Opinions?: Some Alternatives For Dealing With The Ninth Circuit's Massive Caseload Post F.R.A.P. 32.1, Bryan Wright

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Our Sovereign Body: Narrating The Fiction Of Sovereign Immunity In The Supreme Court: Part I-A English Stories, Marc L. Roark

ExpressO

This is part I-A of a Book I am working towards on the narratives and fictions of sovereign immunity. The goal in this part is to look before the American republic and towards the background in which American Sovereignty came to be shaped by -- the feudal notion of the sovereign; the Lockean response, and the Blackstonean doctrine. The first part looks at the legal fictions surrounding the kingship, their sources and their effects. The Second part looks to the specific ways of treating the sovereign in law, namely viewing King as Property owner or patriarch, Trustee, and Constitution.

Our Sovereign Body: Narrating The Fiction Of Sovereign Immunity In The Supreme Court, Marc L. Roark

ExpressO

This is the introduction to a book I am preparing on the Normative and Narrative aspects of the U.S. Sovereign Immunity Doctrine. The introduction sets up the problem of a doctrine that is not exactly coherent with the national narrative.

Bond Repudiation, Tax Codes, The Appropriations Process And Restitution Post-Eminent Domain Reform, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

This brief comment suggests where the anti-eminent domain movement might be heading next.

The “Csi Effect”: Better Jurors Through Television And Science?, Michael D. Mann

ExpressO

This Comment discusses how television shows such as CSI and Law & Order create heightened juror expectations. This will be published in the Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal's 2005-2006 issue.

Review Essay: Using All Available Information, Max Huffman

ExpressO

This is a review essay entitled “Using All Available Information,” in which I review and comment on Justice Stephen Breyer’s new book, Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution, published in September 2005. Justice Breyer’s book, adapted from the Tanner Lectures given in 2005 at Harvard Law School, serves partly as a response to Justice Scalia’s 1997 volume A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law. I review Justice Breyer’s book in part by comparison to and contrast with Justice Scalia’s. I propose that much about Justice Breyer’s interpretive philosophy, which centers on determining the “purposes” of texts and interpreting …