Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

What Will We Lose If The Trial Vanishes?, Robert P. Burns

Faculty Working Papers

The number of trials continues to decline andfederal civil trials have almost completely disappeared. This essay attempts to address the significance of this loss, to answer the obvious question, "So what?" It argues against taking a resigned or complacent attitude toward an important problem for our public culture. It presents a short description of the trial's internal structure, recounts different sorts of explanations, and offers an inventory of the kinds of wounds this development would inflict.

The First Principles Of Standing: Privilege, System Justification, And The Predictable Incoherence Of Article Iii, Christian Sundquist

Articles

This Article examines the indeterminacy of standing doctrine by deconstructing recent desegregation, affirmative action, and racial profiling cases. This examination is an attempt to uncover the often unstated meta-principles that guide standing jurisprudence. The Article contends that the inherent indeterminacy of standing law can be understood as reflecting an unstated desire to protect racial and class privilege, which is accomplished through the dogma of individualism, equal opportunity (liberty), and “white innocence.” Relying on insights from System Justification Theory, a burgeoning field of social psychology, the Article argues that the seemingly incoherent results in racial standing cases can be understood as …

Advocacy Revalued, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr., Dana A. Remus

All Faculty Scholarship

A central and ongoing debate among legal ethics scholars addresses the moral positioning of adversarial advocacy. Most participants in this debate focus on the structure of our legal system and the constituent role of the lawyer-advocate. Many are highly critical, arguing that the core structure of adversarial advocacy is the root cause of many instances of lawyer misconduct. In this Article, we argue that these scholars’ focuses are misguided. Through reflection on Aristotle’s treatise, Rhetoric, we defend advocacy in our legal system’s litigation process as ethically positive and as pivotal to fair and effective dispute resolution. We recognize that advocacy …

Litigation And Democracy: Restoring A Realistic Prospect Of Trial, Stephen B. Burbank, Stephen N. Subrin

All Faculty Scholarship

In this essay we review some of the evidence confirming, and some of the reasons underlying, the phenomenon of the vanishing trial in federal civil cases and examine some of the costs of that phenomenon for democratic values, including in particular democratic values represented by the right to a jury trial under the Seventh Amendment. We discuss the Supreme Court’s recent pleading decisions in Twombly and Iqbal as examples of procedural attacks on democracy in four dimensions: (1) they put the right to jury trial in jeopardy; (2) they undercut the effectiveness of congressional statutes designed to compensate citizens for …

Arbitral And Judicial Proceedings: Indistinguishable Justice Or Justice Denied?, Pat K. Chew

Articles

This is an exploratory study comparing the processes and outcomes in the arbitration and the litigation of workplace racial harassment cases. Drawing from an emerging large database of arbitral opinions, this article indicates that arbitration outcomes yield a lower percentage of employee successes than in litigation of these types of cases. At the same time, while arbitration proceedings have some of the same legal formalities (legal representation, legal briefs), they do not have other protective procedural safeguards.

The Thirteenth Amendment And Interest Convergence, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

The Thirteenth Amendment was intended to eliminate the institution of slavery and to eliminate the legacy of slavery. Having accomplished the former, the Amendment has only rarely been extended to the latter. The Thirteenth Amendment’s great promise therefore remains unrealized.

This Article explores the gap between the Thirteenth Amendment’s promise and its implementation. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, this Article argues that the relative underdevelopment of Thirteenth Amendment doctrine is due in part to a lack of perceived interest convergence in eliminating what the Amendment’s Framers called the “badges and incidents of slavery.” The theory of interest convergence, in its …