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Articles 91 - 115 of 115

Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Truth, Deterrence, And The Impeachment Exception , James L. Kainen Jan 2007

Truth, Deterrence, And The Impeachment Exception , James L. Kainen

Faculty Scholarship

James v. Illinois permits illegally-obtained evidence to impeach defendants, but not defense witnesses. Thus far, all courts have construed James to allow impeachment of defendants' hearsay declarations. This article argues against allowing illegally-obtained evidence to impeach defendants' hearsay declarations because doing so unduly diminishes the exclusionary rule's deterrent effect. The distinction between impeaching defendants and defense witnesses disappears when courts allow prosecutors to impeach defendants' hearsay declarations. Because defense witnesses report exculpatory conduct of a defendant who always has a substantial interest in disguising his criminality, their testimony routinely incorporates defendant hearsay. Defense witness testimony thus routinely paves the way …

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Applying The Laws Of Logic To The Logic Of Laws, Hillel Bavli Jan 2006

Applying The Laws Of Logic To The Logic Of Laws, Hillel Bavli

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The article begins by discussing the difficulties of proving consistency within a formal legal system generally. After establishing the importance of a formalized legal model as a prerequisite of rigorous examination of consistency, it proceeds to investigate issues intrinsic to the current system of law that may prevent formalization of a just legal system as currently conceived. The article argues that flexibility inherent in a just legal system may foreclose the possibility of legal formalization or any comprehensive model thereof. The article concludes, however, that a model whose purpose is the examination of consistency within a system need not necessarily …

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Congress's Power To Enforce Fourteenth Amendment Rights: Lessons From Federal Remedies The Framers Enacted , Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 2005

Congress's Power To Enforce Fourteenth Amendment Rights: Lessons From Federal Remedies The Framers Enacted , Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Robert Kaczorowski argues for an expansive originalist interpretation of Congressional power under the Fourteenth Amendment. Before the Civil War Congress actually exercised, and the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld plenary Congressional power to enforce the constitutional rights of slaveholders. After the Civil War, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment copied the antebellum statutes and exercised plenary power to enforce the constitutional rights of all American citizens when they enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and then incorporated the Act into the Fourteenth Amendment. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment thereby exercised the plenary power the Rehnquist Court claims the …

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Supermajoritarianism And The American Criminal Jury, Ethan J. Leib Jan 2005

Supermajoritarianism And The American Criminal Jury, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

I argue in this article that supermajority decision rules would be more appropriate than unanimity or majority rule for criminal jury convictions and that majority decision rules would be more appropriate than either unanimity or supermajoritarian rules for acquittals. I first summarize some of the advantages and disadvantages of various decision rules as a matter of general democratic theory. I next outline the arguments made for various decision rules in the context of the criminal jury. Finally, I offer an argument for supermajoritarian requirements for conviction rooted in our general constitutional commitment to supermajoritarianism. I present a coherentist account for …

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The (Un)Favorable Judgment Of History: Deportation Hearings, The Palmer Raids, And The Meaning Of History, Harlan G. Cohen Jan 2003

The (Un)Favorable Judgment Of History: Deportation Hearings, The Palmer Raids, And The Meaning Of History, Harlan G. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

As Americans respond to the events of September 11, 2001, they are being forced to contemplate their place in American history-past, present, and future. This has become particularly stark in the fight over secret deportation hearings. Following September 11, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that the deportation hearings of "special interest" aliens would be closed to the public. Applying Richmond Newspapers's two-pronged logic-and-experience test, the Third and Sixth Circuits subsequently split over the constitutionality of the blanket closure. At the heart of their disagreement was the scarce history of deportation hearings and whether such hearings had been closed in the …

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The Force Of Ancient Manners: Federalist Politics And The Unitarian Controversy, Marc Arkin Jan 2002

The Force Of Ancient Manners: Federalist Politics And The Unitarian Controversy, Marc Arkin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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Lawyer And Public Service, The Historical Perspectives On Pro Bono Lawyering, Russell G. Pearce Jan 2001

Lawyer And Public Service, The Historical Perspectives On Pro Bono Lawyering, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

Historically, the first way of viewing the lawyer's role was as a member of America's governing class. Second came cause lawyering on behalf of a particular issue. Third, and most recently, arose the idea of pro bono lawyering, a less ambitious incarnation of the governing class lawyer who contributes time to helping cause lawyers. These categories are not rigid: for each individual they may overlap to one degree or another. This framework is preliminary and requires further research and development. Nonetheless, it provides a useful tool for explaining how lawyers-and in particular the heroic lawyers described in this symposium-connect to …

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Market Power Requirement In Antitrust Rule Of Reason Cases: A Rhetorical History, The, Mark R. Patterson Jan 2000

Market Power Requirement In Antitrust Rule Of Reason Cases: A Rhetorical History, The, Mark R. Patterson

Faculty Scholarship

The requirement that an antitrust plaintiff show market power in rule of reason cases has an uninspiring history and unconvincing justifications. Such a requirement has never been adopted by the Supreme Court, and is currently imposed by only the Seventh and Fourth Circuits. Indeed, the requirement was never imposed very widely, despite frequent claims to the contrary. More significantly, the Seventh Circuit cases that initially established the requirement, and that continue to be cited for it, did so with misleading citations to cases from other circuits. Furthermore, the justifications that have been offered for the requirement have generally been either …

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Discontinuous Tradition Of Sentencing Discretion: Koon's Failure To Recognize The Reshaping Of Judicial Discretion Under The Guidelines, The, Ian Weinstein Jan 1999

Discontinuous Tradition Of Sentencing Discretion: Koon's Failure To Recognize The Reshaping Of Judicial Discretion Under The Guidelines, The, Ian Weinstein

Faculty Scholarship

Can a judge exercise discretion and follow the law? Some think it impossible, seeing discretion as the opposite of law. Others have harmonized the two ideas, viewing discretion as the exercise of judgment according to and within the bounds of the law. Those who decry judicial discretion urge legislatures to enact more specific laws and leave less room for the vice of inconsistent results. Those who defend discretion would channel it to achieve the virtue of individualized justice. The tension between individualization and uniformity in the law is often unnecessarily heightened by an inadequate analysis of judicial discretion. The exercise …

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Regionalism And The Religion Clauses: The Contribution Of Fisher Ames, Marc Arkin Jan 1999

Regionalism And The Religion Clauses: The Contribution Of Fisher Ames, Marc Arkin

Faculty Scholarship

On August 20, 1789, Massachusetts Federalist Fisher Ames rose to address the House of Representatives in one of his rare contributions to the debate on the Bill of Rights. 1 The day before, sitting as a Committee of the Whole, the House had concluded its brief discussion of the proposed religion amendment to the federal Constitution by agreeing to New Hampshire Representative Samuel Livermore's formula that "Congress shall make no laws touching religion, or infringing the rights of conscience." 2 Now, on the 20th, before the House could formally adopt Livermore's language, Representative Ames proposed a different wording. He moved …

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Democracy And Feminism , Tracy E. Higgins Jan 1996

Democracy And Feminism , Tracy E. Higgins

Faculty Scholarship

Although feminist legal theory has had an important impact on most areas of legal doctrine and theory over the last two decades, its contribution to the debate over constitutional interpretation has been comparatively small. In this Article, Professor Higgins explores reasons for the limited dialogue between mainstream constitutional theory and feminist theory concerning questions of democracy, constitutionalism, and judicial review. She argues that mainstream constitutional theory tends to take for granted the capacity of the individual to make choices, leaving the social construction of those choices largely unexamined. In contrast, feminist legal theory's emphasis on the importance of constraints on …

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Straying From The Path Of The Law After One Hundred Years, The, Tracy E. Higgins Jan 1996

Straying From The Path Of The Law After One Hundred Years, The, Tracy E. Higgins

Faculty Scholarship

What common ground can be found between modern feminist legal theory and a century-old essay advocating understanding the law from the perspective of the "bad man"? The question admits of no simple answer. Feminists, including myself, might agree with some irony that "[i]f you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man" but would add that this is precisely the problem. Of course, Holmes does not use the concept of the bad man in a feminist sense to suggest that the law empowers the bad man at the expense of women. …

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Tragic Irony Of American Federalism: National Sovereignty Versus State Sovereignty In Slavery And In Freedom, The Federalism In The 21st Century: Historical Perspectives, Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 1996

Tragic Irony Of American Federalism: National Sovereignty Versus State Sovereignty In Slavery And In Freedom, The Federalism In The 21st Century: Historical Perspectives, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

A plurality on the Supreme Court seeks to establish a state-sovereignty based theory of federalism that imposes sharp limitations on Congress's legislative powers. Using history as authority, they admonish a return to the constitutional "first principles" of the Founders. These "first principles," in their view, attribute all governmental authority to "the consent of the people of each individual state, not the consent of the undifferentiated people of the Nation as a whole." Because the people of each state are the source of all governmental power, they maintain, "where the Constitution is silent about the exercise of a particular power-that is, …

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Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 1995

Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

The thesis of Professor Donald Nieman's paper, "From Slaves to Citizens: African-Americans, Rights Consciousness, and Reconstruction," is that the nation experienced a revolution in the United States Constitution and in the consciousness of African Americans. According to Professor Nieman, the Reconstruction Amendments represented "a dramatic departure from antebellum constitutional principles,"' because the Thirteenth Amendment reversed the pre-Civil War constitutional guarantee of slavery and "abolish[ed] slavery by federal authority." The Fourteenth Amendment rejected the Supreme Court's "racially-based definition of citizenship [in Dred Scott v. Sandford4], clearly establishing a color-blind citizenship” and the Fifteenth Amendment "wrote the principle of equality into the …

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By Reason Of Their Sex: Feminist Theory Postmodernism And Justice , Tracy E. Higgins Jan 1994

By Reason Of Their Sex: Feminist Theory Postmodernism And Justice , Tracy E. Higgins

Faculty Scholarship

Both the Supreme Court's jurisprudence of gender and feminist legal theory have generally assumed that some identifiable and describable category of woman exists prior to the construction of legal categories. For the Court, this woman-whose characteristics admittedly have changed over time-serves as the standard against which gendered legal classifications are measured. For feminism, her existence has served a different but equally important purpose as the subject for whom political goals are pursued. To the extent that the definitions of the category diverge, the differences among definitions are played out in feminist critiques of the Court's gender jurisprudence, and, occasionally, in …

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Using Comparative Fault To Replace The All-Or-Nothing Lottery Imposed In Intentional Torts Suits In Which Both Plaintiff And Defendant Are At Fault , Gail D. Hollister Jan 1993

Using Comparative Fault To Replace The All-Or-Nothing Lottery Imposed In Intentional Torts Suits In Which Both Plaintiff And Defendant Are At Fault , Gail D. Hollister

Faculty Scholarship

All or nothing. For years this idea of absolutes has been a hallmark of tort law despite the inequities it has caused. Plaintiffs must either win a total victory or suffer total defeat. In recent years courts and legislatures have begun to recognize the injustice of the all-or-nothing approach and to replace it with rules that permit partial recoveries that are more equitably tailored to the particular facts of each case. The most dramatic example of this more equitable approach is the nearly universal rejection of contributory negligence in favor of comparative fault in negligence cases. Almost all jurisdictions, however, …

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Historical Framework For Reviving Constitutional Protection For Property And Contract Rights , James L. Kainen Jan 1993

Historical Framework For Reviving Constitutional Protection For Property And Contract Rights , James L. Kainen

Faculty Scholarship

Post-New Deal constitutionalism is in search of a theory that justifies judicial intervention on behalf of individual rights while simultaneously avoiding the charge of "Lochnerism."' The dominant historical view dismisses post-bellum substantive due process as an anomalous development in the American constitutional tradition. Under this approach, Lochner represents unbounded protection for economic rights that permitted the judiciary to read laissez faire, pro-business policy preferences into the constitutional text. Today's revisionists have mounted a substantial challenge to the dismissive views of traditionalists. Indeed, some claim Lochner reached the right result, but for the wrong reason. The revisionists characterize substantive due process …

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Rediscovering The Republican Origins Of The Legal Ethics Codes, Russell G. Pearce Jan 1992

Rediscovering The Republican Origins Of The Legal Ethics Codes, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

Many commentators wrongly assume that the hired gun ideal is the foundation of our legal ethics codes. This article explains that this assumption is based on an historical mistake that has consequences for interpreting the modern codes. Judge George Sharswood, the nineteenth century scholar whose work provided the basis for the 1908 A.B.A. Canons of Ethics, had a republican conception that rejected the adversarial ethic in favor of a more nuanced conception that combined loyalty to clients with a thick obligation to the public good that both bounded client representation and required lawyers to provide political leadership. Although the emphasis …

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Beyond The Second Amendment: An Individual Right To Arms Viewed Through The Ninth Amendment , Nicholas J. Johnson Jan 1992

Beyond The Second Amendment: An Individual Right To Arms Viewed Through The Ninth Amendment , Nicholas J. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Traditionally, the debate over the individual right to possess firearms has focused on the origins and meaning of the Second Amendment. Some constitutional scholars have dismissed the idea that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to arms. They argue that it only prevents the federal government from disarming states. Other scholars, focusing on the language of the amendment and its historical context, conclude that it does indeed establish an individual right to firearms. This article examines whether, even absent the Second Amendment, the Constitution restrains government from taking away what may be individuals' best tools of self-defense. The foothold …

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Impeachment Exception To The Exclusionary Rules: Policies, Principles, And Politics, The , James L. Kainen Jan 1991

Impeachment Exception To The Exclusionary Rules: Policies, Principles, And Politics, The , James L. Kainen

Faculty Scholarship

The exclusionary evidence rules derived from the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments continue to play an important role in constitutional criminal procedure, despite the intense controversy that surrounds them. The primary justification for these rules has shifted from an "imperative of judicial integrity" to the "deterrence of police conduct that violates... [constitutional] rights." Regardless of the justification it uses for the rules' existence, the Supreme Court continues to limit their breadth "at the margin," when "the acknowledged costs to other values vital to a rational system of criminal justice" outweigh the deterrent effects of exclusion. The most notable limitation on …

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Common-Law Background Of Nineteenth-Century Tort Law, The , Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 1990

Common-Law Background Of Nineteenth-Century Tort Law, The , Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

A century ago Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., examined the history of negligence in search of a general theory of tort. He concluded that from the earliest times in England, the basis of tort liability was fault, or the failure to exercise due care. Liability for an injury to another arose whenever the defendant failed "to use such care as a prudent man would use under the circumstances.” A decade ago Morton J. Horwitz reexamined the history of negligence for the same purpose and concluded that negligence was not originally understood as carelessness or fault. Rather, negligence meant "neglect or failure …

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Enforcement Provisions Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1866: A Legislative History In Light Of Runyon V. Mccrary, The Review Essay And Comments: Reconstructing Reconstruction, Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 1988

Enforcement Provisions Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1866: A Legislative History In Light Of Runyon V. Mccrary, The Review Essay And Comments: Reconstructing Reconstruction, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this Comment is to examine the history of the enactment and early enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 from the perspective of the remedies Congress sought to provide to meet the problems that necessitated the legislation. Its main foci are the statute's enforcement provisions and their early implementation, an aspect of the history of the statute that has not been fully considered in relation to section one, the provision that has received the most scholarly attention. The occasion of this study is the Supreme Court's reconsideration of Runyon v. McCrary' in Patterson v. McLean Credit …

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Revolutionary Constitutionalism In The Era Of The Civil War And Reconstruction , Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 1986

Revolutionary Constitutionalism In The Era Of The Civil War And Reconstruction , Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

The meaning and scope of the fourteenth amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 remain among the most controversial issues in American constitutional law. Professor Kaczorowski contends that the issues have generated more controversy than they warrant, in part because scholars analyzing the legislative history of the amendment and statute have approached their task with preconceptions reflecting twentieth century legal concerns. He argues that the most important question for the framers was whether national or state governments possessed primary authority to determine and secure the status and rights of American citizens. Relying on records of the congressional debates as …

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Nineteenth Century Interpretations Of The Federal Contract Clause: The Transformation From Vested To Substantive Rights Against The State , James L. Kainen Jan 1982

Nineteenth Century Interpretations Of The Federal Contract Clause: The Transformation From Vested To Substantive Rights Against The State , James L. Kainen

Faculty Scholarship

During the early nineteenth century, the contract clause served as the fundamental source of federally protected rights against the state. Yet the Supreme Court gradually eased many of the restrictions on state power enforced in the contract clause cases while developing the doctrine of substantive due process after the Civil War. By the end of the nineteenth century, the due process clause had usurped the place of the contract clause as the centerpiece in litigation about individual rights. Most analyses of the history of federally protected rights against the state have emphasized the rise of substantive due process to the …

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Searching For The Intent Of The Framers Of Fourteenth Amendment , Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 1972

Searching For The Intent Of The Framers Of Fourteenth Amendment , Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

IN 1946 JUSTICE HUGO BLACK DECLARED that one of the objects of the fourteenth amendment was to apply the Bill of Rights to the States. He was confident that an analysis of the intent of the framers of the amendment would support his assertion. A few years later the Supreme Court requested such an investigation, but when the analysis was made and the results presented to it, the Supreme Court concluded that the framers' intent could not be determined. The uncertainty surrounding the intent of the framers of the fourteenth amendment has had profound implications on the application of that …

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