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Articles 61 - 90 of 684
Full-Text Articles in Legal History
The Vitality Of The American Sovereign, Todd E. Pettys
The Vitality Of The American Sovereign, Todd E. Pettys
Michigan Law Review
The proposition that "the people" are the preeminent sovereign in the United States has long been a tenet of American public life. The authors of the Declaration of Independence characterized the American people's sovereignty as a "self-evident" truth when announcing the colonies' decision to sever their ties with Great Britain, the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 invoked the people's sovereignty when framing the nation's Constitution, and Americans today exercise their sovereignty each time they cast their ballots on Election Day. Yet what prerogatives, precisely, does the people's sovereignty entail? In modern America, where neither a bloody revolution nor …
Examining Presidential Power Through The Rubric Of Equity, Eric A. White
Examining Presidential Power Through The Rubric Of Equity, Eric A. White
Michigan Law Review
In this Note I propose a method to examine presidents' actions taken outside the normal bounds of executive power by employing the general rubric of equity, in an attempt to find when the president acts with what I term "practical legitimacy." This would be a new category for executive actions that, while perhaps arguably illegal, are so valuable that we want to treat them as legitimate exercises of executive power. To do so, I first examine the history of equity, noting the many relevant parallels to our modern conception of executive power In light of these parallels, I argue that …
Fault At The Contract-Tort Interface, Roy Kreitner
Fault At The Contract-Tort Interface, Roy Kreitner
Michigan Law Review
The formative period in the history of contract and tort (in the second half of the nineteenth century) may be characterized by the cleavage of contract and tort around the concept of fault: tort modernized by moving from strict liability to a regime of "no liability without fault," while contract moved toward strict liability. The opposing attitudes toward fault are puzzling at first glance. Nineteenth-century scholars of private law offered explanations for the opposition, reasoning that alternative ideas about fault account for the different character of state involvement in enforcing private law rights: tort law governs liabilities imposed by law …
The Appropriations Power And Sovereign Immunity, Paul F. Figley, Jay Tidmarsh
The Appropriations Power And Sovereign Immunity, Paul F. Figley, Jay Tidmarsh
Michigan Law Review
Discussions of sovereign immunity assume that the Constitution contains no explicit text regarding sovereign immunity. As a result, arguments about the existence-or nonexistence-of sovereign immunity begin with the English and American common-law doctrines. Exploring political, fiscal, and legal developments in England and the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this Article shows that focusing on common-law developments is misguided. The common-law approach to sovereign immunity ended in the early 1700s. The Bankers' Case (1690- 1700), which is often regarded as the first modern common-law treatment of sovereign immunity, is in fact the last in the line of English …
Supreme Neglect Of Text And History, William Michael Treanor
Supreme Neglect Of Text And History, William Michael Treanor
Michigan Law Review
Since his classic book Takings appeared in 1985, Richard Epstein's ideas have profoundly shaped debate about the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause to a degree that no other scholar can even begin to approach. His broad, original, and stunningly ambitious reading of the clause has powerfully influenced thinking in academia, in the judiciary, and in the political arena. The firestorm of controvery that followed the Supreme Court's recent decision in Kelo - in which the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a municipal urban renewal plan that displaced long-time homeowners and conveyed their land to developers - is in critical part …
"Airbrushed Out Of The Constitutional Canon": The Evolving Understanding Of Giles V. Harris, 1903-1925, Samuel Brenner
"Airbrushed Out Of The Constitutional Canon": The Evolving Understanding Of Giles V. Harris, 1903-1925, Samuel Brenner
Michigan Law Review
Richard H. Pildes argued in an influential 2000 article that the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion in Giles v. Harris, which was written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, was the "one decisive turning point" in the history of "American (anti)-democracy." In Giles, Holmes rejected on questionable grounds Jackson W. Giles's challenge to the new Alabama Constitution of 1901-a document which was designed to disfranchise and had the effect of disfranchising African Americans. The decision thus contributed significantly to the development of the all-white electorate in the South, and the concomitant marginalization of southern African Americans. According to Pildes, however, the …
The Many Faces Of Fault In Contract Law: Or How To Do Economics Right, Without Really Trying, Richard A. Epstein
The Many Faces Of Fault In Contract Law: Or How To Do Economics Right, Without Really Trying, Richard A. Epstein
Michigan Law Review
Modern law often rests on the assumption that a uniform cost-benefit formula is the proper way to determine fault in ordinary contract disputes. This Article disputes that vision by defending the view that different standards of fault are appropriate in different contexts. The central distinction is one that holds parties in gratuitous transactions only to the standard of care that they bring to their own affairs, while insisting on the higher objective standard of ordinary care in commercial transactions. That bifurcation leads to efficient searches. Persons who hold themselves out in particular lines of business in effect warrant their ability …
An "Unintended Consequence": Dred Scott Reinterpreted, Sam Erman
An "Unintended Consequence": Dred Scott Reinterpreted, Sam Erman
Michigan Law Review
Austin Allen's monograph marks the 150th anniversary of the decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford with a revisionist interpretation of that oft-examined case. Many scholars have portrayed the case as a proslavery decision that fanned sectional fires. After all, the Court held that blacks were not U.S. citizens and that Congress was impotent to bar slavery in U.S. territories. Allen, by contrast, understands the case primarily as a judicial attempt to rationalize federal commerce and slavery jurisprudences. Part I argues that this ambitious reinterpretation enriches, but does not topple, existing Dred Scott historiography. In the case of the Court's citizenship …
"Now For A Clean Sweep!": Smiley V. Holm, Partisan Gerrymandering, And At-Large Congressional Elections, Benedict J. Schweigert
"Now For A Clean Sweep!": Smiley V. Holm, Partisan Gerrymandering, And At-Large Congressional Elections, Benedict J. Schweigert
Michigan Law Review
The 1930 Census reduced Minnesota's apportionment in the U.S. House of Representatives from ten to nine, requiring the state to draw new congressional districts. The Republican-led state legislature passed a gerrymandered redistricting bill in an attempt to insulate its nine incumbents in the state's delegation from the party's expected loss of the statewide popular vote to the insurgent Farmer-Labor Party. When the Farmer-Labor Governor, Floyd B. Olson, vetoed the redistricting bill, the legislature claimed the bill could take effect without the governor's signature. In Smiley v. Holm, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the veto was effective and that …
Scrutiny Land, Randy E. Barnett
Scrutiny Land, Randy E. Barnett
Michigan Law Review
Scrutiny Land is the place where government needs to justify to a court its restrictions on the liberties of the people. In the 1930s, the Supreme Court began limiting access to Scrutiny Land. While the New Deal Court merely shifted the burden to those challenging a law to show that a restriction of liberty is irrational, the Warren Court made the presumption of constitutionality effectively irrebuttable. After this, only one road to Scrutiny Land remained: showing that the liberty being restricted was a fundamental right. The Glucksberg Two-Step, however, limited the doctrine of fundamental rights to those (1) narrowly defined …
Judicial Compensation And The Definition Of Judicial Power In The Early Republic, James E. Pfander
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 …
The Era Of Deference: Courts, Expertise, And The Emergence Of New Deal Administrative Law, Reuel E. Schiller
The Era Of Deference: Courts, Expertise, And The Emergence Of New Deal Administrative Law, Reuel E. Schiller
Michigan Law Review
The first two terms of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency (1933-1941) were periods of great administrative innovation. Responding to the Great Depression, Congress created scores of new administrative agencies charged with overseeing economic policy and implementing novel social welfare programs. The story of the constitutional difficulties that some of these policy innovations encountered is a staple of both New Deal historiography and the constitutional history of twentieth-century America. There has been very little writing, however, about how courts and the New Deal-era administrative state interacted after these constitutional battles ended. Having overcome constitutional hurdles, these administrative agencies still had to interact with …
Property, Contracts, And Politics, Mark Tushnet
Property, Contracts, And Politics, Mark Tushnet
Michigan Law Review
Rebecca Scott is a historian, not an economist. Describing how a dispute over a mule's ownership was resolved, Professor Scott reproduces a receipt two claimants left when they took the mule from the plantation whose manager claimed it as well (p. 185). By contrast, analyzing property relations in the pre-Civil War American South, economic historian Jenny Wahl observes, "[E]conomic historians tend to [use] ... frequency tables, graphs, and charts." The differences in visual aids to understanding indicate the various ways historians and economists approach a single topic-the relation between markets and politics, the latter defined to include the deployment of …
Keeping The State Out: The Separation Of Law And State In Classical Islamic Law, Lubna A. Alam
Keeping The State Out: The Separation Of Law And State In Classical Islamic Law, Lubna A. Alam
Michigan Law Review
The implementation and enforcement of Islamic law, especially Islamic criminal law, by modem-day Muslim nation-states is fraught with controversy and challenges. In Pakistan, the documented problems and failures of the country's attempt to codify Islamic law on extramarital sexual relations have led to efforts to remove rape cases from Islamic law courts to civil law courts. In striking contrast to Pakistan's experience, the Republic of the Maldives recently commissioned a draft of a penal law and sentencing guidelines based on Islamic law that abides by international norms. The incorporation of Islamic law into the legal systems of various countries around …
Looking Backward: Richard Epstein Ponders The "Progressive" Peril, Michael Allan Wolf
Looking Backward: Richard Epstein Ponders The "Progressive" Peril, Michael Allan Wolf
Michigan Law Review
In the 1888 novel Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy dreamed up a twentieth century America that was a socialist utopia, a vision invoked four years later by the conservative Justice David J. Brewer as a warning against government regulation. In How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution, Richard Epstein, looking back at the twentieth century through an interpretive lens much more similar to Brewer's than Bellamy's, sees and bemoans the growth of a dominant big government of which the novelist could only dream. Epstein pulls no punches in his attack on those he deems responsible for the shift in the American …
Legal Fictions In Pierson V. Post, Andrea Mcdowell
Legal Fictions In Pierson V. Post, Andrea Mcdowell
Michigan Law Review
American courts and citizens generally take the importance of private property for granted. Scholars have sought to explain its primacy using numerous legal doctrines, including natural law, the Lockean principle of a right to the product of one's labor, Law & Economics theories about the incentives created by property ownership, and the importance of bright line rules. The leading case on the necessity of private property, Pierson v. Post, makes all four of these points. This Article argues that Pierson has been misunderstood. Pierson was in fact a defective torts case that the judges shoe-horned into a property mold …
The Folklore Of Legal Biography, Mark Fenster
The Folklore Of Legal Biography, Mark Fenster
Michigan Law Review
Spencer Weber Waller's Thurman Arnold: A Biography faces the problem of making this life stand out, and this Review seeks both to evaluate his rendering-which it does in Part II, after providing more details of the raw materials of Arnold's life in Part I-and to use Arnold's ideas to reflect on the endeavor of the legal biography. Although other works bearing on Arnold's life have been available,' Waller's competent, readable chronicle will provide an authoritative source of information and satisfy the desires of general readers interested in accomplished legal lives and seeking a straightforward account of Arnold's career. But Waller's …
Facing Evil, Joseph E. Kennedy
Facing Evil, Joseph E. Kennedy
Michigan Law Review
It is no earthshaking news that the American public has become fascinated- some would say obsessed-with crime over the last few decades. Moreover, this fascination has translated into a potent political force that has remade the world of criminal justice. Up through the middle of the 1960s crime was not something about which politicians had much to say. What was there to say? "Crime is bad." "We do what we can about crime." "Crime will always be with us at one level or another." Only a hermit could have missed the transformation of crime over the last couple of decades …
Same Old, Same Old: Scientific Evidence Past And Present, Edward K. Cheng
Same Old, Same Old: Scientific Evidence Past And Present, Edward K. Cheng
Michigan Law Review
For over twenty years, and particularly since the Supreme Court's Daubert decision in 1993, much ink has been spilled debating the problem of scientific evidence in the courts. Are jurors or, in the alternative, judges qualified to assess scientific reliability? Do courts really need to be concerned about "junk science"? What mechanisms can promote better decision making in scientific cases? Even a cursory scan of the literature shows the recent explosion of interest in these issues, precipitating new treatises, hundreds of articles, and countless conferences for judges, practitioners, and academics. To this literature, Professor Tal Golan adds Laws of Men …
Race Nuisance: The Politics Of Law In The Jim Crow Era, Rachel D. Godsil
Race Nuisance: The Politics Of Law In The Jim Crow Era, Rachel D. Godsil
Michigan Law Review
This Article explores a startling and previously unnoticed line of cases in which state courts in the Jim Crow era ruled against white plaintiffs trying to use common law nuisance doctrine to achieve residential segregation. These "race-nuisance" cases complicate the view of most legal scholarship that state courts during the Jim Crow era openly eschewed the rule of law in service of white supremacy. Instead, the cases provide rich social historical detail showing southern judges wrestling with their competing allegiances to both precedent and the pursuit of racial exclusivity. Surprisingly, the allegiance to precedent generally prevailed. The cases confound prevailing …
Police And Democracy, David Alan Sklansky
Police And Democracy, David Alan Sklansky
Michigan Law Review
Part I of the Article describes the emergence in postwar America of a particular understanding of a democracy, an understanding generally referred to as "democratic pluralism," "analytic pluralism," "pluralist theory," or simply "pluralism." We will spend a fair bit of time unpacking pluralism, because its fine points will prove important when we turn to the task of tracing its reflections in criminal procedure. That task is taken up in Part II, which examines the ways in which the central tenets of democratic pluralism found echoes in criminal procedure - construed broadly to include not only jurisprudence and legal scholarship but …
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens And Alien Citizens, Leti Volpp
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens And Alien Citizens, Leti Volpp
Michigan Law Review
America is a nation of immigrants, according to our national narrative. This is the America with its gates open to the world, as well as the America of the melting pot. Underpinning this national narrative is a very particular story of immigration that foregrounds the inclusion of immigrants, rather than their exclusion. Highlighted in this story is the period before 1924, of relatively unfettered European immigration, and the period after 1965, post the lifting of national origins quotas. Also underlying this national narrative is a particular story about what happens once immigrants enter. In this story the immigrant traverses smoothly …
Theory Wars In The Conflict Of Laws, Louise Weinberg
Theory Wars In The Conflict Of Laws, Louise Weinberg
Michigan Law Review
Fifty years ago, at the height of modernism in all things, there was a great revolution in American choice-of-law theory. You cannot understand what is going on in the field of conflict of laws today without coming to grips with this central fact. With this revolution, the old formalistic way of choosing law was dethroned, and has occupied a humble position on the sidelines ever since. Yet there has been no lasting peace. The American conflicts revolution is still happening, and poor results are still frustrating good intentions. Now comes Dean Symeon Symeonides, the author of the choice of- law …
The Ghost Of Telecommunications Past, Philip J. Weiser
The Ghost Of Telecommunications Past, Philip J. Weiser
Michigan Law Review
When the canon for the field of information law and policy is developed, Paul Starr's The Creation of the Media will enjoy a hallowed place in it. Like Lawrence Lessig's masterful Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Starr's tour de force explains how policymakers have made a series of "constitutive choices" about how to regulate different information technologies that helped to shape the basic architecture of the information age. In so doing, Starr displays the same literary and analytical skill he used in writing the Pulitzer Prizewinning The Social Transformation of American Medicine, the firsthand experience he gained …
Copyright's Communications Policy, Timothy Wu
Copyright's Communications Policy, Timothy Wu
Michigan Law Review
There is something for everyone to dislike about early twenty-first century copyright. Owners of content say that newer and better technologies have made it too easy to be a pirate. Easy copying, they say, threatens the basic incentive to create new works; new rights and remedies are needed to restore the balance. Academic critics instead complain that a growing copyright gives content owners dangerous levels of control over expressive works. In one version of this argument, this growth threatens the creativity and progress that copyright is supposed to foster; in another, it represents an "enclosure movement" that threatens basic freedoms …
Sexual Orientation And The Paradox Of Heightened Scrutiny, Nan D. Hunter
Sexual Orientation And The Paradox Of Heightened Scrutiny, Nan D. Hunter
Michigan Law Review
In Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court performed a double move, creating a dramatic discursive moment: it both decriminalized consensual homosexual relations between adults, and, simultaneously, authorized a new regime of heightened regulation of homosexuality. How that happened and what we can expect next are the subjects of this essay. The obvious point of departure for an analysis of Lawrence is its decriminalization of much sexual conduct. Justice Scalia began this project with his dire warning that "[s]tate laws against bigamy, samesex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are . . . sustainable only in …
Lawrence V. Texas And Judicial Hubris, Nelson Lund, John O. Mcginnis
Lawrence V. Texas And Judicial Hubris, Nelson Lund, John O. Mcginnis
Michigan Law Review
The republic will no doubt survive the Supreme Court's decision, in Lawrence v. Texas, to invalidate laws against private, consensual sodomy, including those limited to homosexual behavior. Such laws are almost never enforced, and the rare prosecutions for such acts are necessarily capricious. So the principal direct effect of the Court's decision is likely to be extremely limited, and largely salutary: a few individuals will be spared the bad luck of getting a criminal conviction for violating laws that are manifestly out of step with prevailing sexual mores. Nor are we likely to see anything like the intense political …
Surviving Lawrence V. Texas, Marc Spindelman
Surviving Lawrence V. Texas, Marc Spindelman
Michigan Law Review
The lesbian and gay communities have reacted to the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas - striking down state sodomy laws on Due Process grounds - with unbridled enthusiasm. Lawrence has variously been praised as an unmitigated victory for lesbian and gay rights, a turning point in our community's history, and the moment when we have gone from second-class political outcasts to constitutional persons with first-class rights. Obviously, something remarkable happened in Lawrence. In an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court declared that John Geddes Lawrence and Tyrone Gamer, who had been convicted under Texas's sodomy …
The Unknown Past Of Lawrence V. Texas, Dale Carpenter
The Unknown Past Of Lawrence V. Texas, Dale Carpenter
Michigan Law Review
On the night of September 17, 1998, someone called the police to report that a man was going crazy with a gun inside a Houston apartment. When Harris County sheriff's deputies entered the apartment they found no person with a gun but did witness John Lawrence and Tyron Gamer having anal sex. This violated the Texas Homosexual Conduct law, and the deputies hauled them off to jail for the night. Lawyers took the men's case to the Supreme Court and won a huge victory for gay rights. So goes the legend of Lawrence v. Texas. Do not believe it. …
What's A Judge To Do? Remedying The Remedy In Institutional Reform Litigation, Susan Poser
What's A Judge To Do? Remedying The Remedy In Institutional Reform Litigation, Susan Poser
Michigan Law Review
Democracy by Decree is the latest contribution to a scholarly literature, now nearly thirty-years old, which questions whether judges have the legitimacy and the capacity to oversee the remedial phase of institutional reform litigation. Previous contributors to this literature have come out on one side or the other of the legitimacy and capacity debate. Abram Chayes, Owen Fiss, and more recently, Malcolm Feeley and Edward Rubin, have all argued that the proper role of judges is to remedy rights violations and that judges possess the legitimate institutional authority to order structural injunctions. Lon Fuller, Donald Horowitz, William Fletcher, and Gerald …