Courts Commons^™

"Grossly Negligent Utilities," "Unimaginable Property Damage" And The Scope Of Liability Insurers' Duty To Indemnify Subrogated Property Insurers - Probative And Empirical Inferences From Courts' Divided Subrogation And Indemnification Decision, Willy E. Rice

Faculty Articles

Each year, extreme weather, natural disasters and allegedly "grossly negligent" investor-owned utilities concurrently destroy property, persons and lives. In the wake, billions of dollars are lost. Given utilities' general immunity under the judicially created filed-rate or filed-tariff doctrine, residential and commercial owners are precluded from filing ordinary negligence actions against utilities. Thus, many injured consumers try to settle their property-loss claims with their insurers. Some property insurers satisfy the "make-whole" doctrine and cover all losses. Most insurers, however, refuse to settle any claim. Or, they partially compensate the insureds. Yet, an overwhelming majority of property insurers are increasingly filing subrogation …

Situating Structural Challenges To Agency Authority Within The Framework Of The Finality Principle, Harold J. Krent

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Road To Recovery: Why Rhode Island Drivers Should Be Made Whole From Potholes, Jordan Z. Sasa

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dream Big And Lay The Groundwork: How Rhode Island Can Improve Access To Civil Justice For Self- Represented Litigants, Amanda Rotimi

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The History Of Pennsylvania Rules Of Juvenile Court Procedure (2005-2022), Joel Fishman, Righteous Caldwell

Law Faculty Publications

Under the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1968, Article V, § 5 established a single Courts of Common Pleas in each judicial district. Previously, there had been a variety of separate trial courts in Pennsylvania, e.g., common pleas, county courts, orphans, juvenile, oyer and terminer, etc. Under the new Constitution, all courts were merged into a single court of common pleas. In larger counties, like Philadelphia and Allegheny County, a separate family division consists of an Adult and Juvenile divisions.

No Balancing For Anticonstitutional Government Conduct, Bruce Ledewitz

Law Faculty Publications

Noted Supreme Court critic Eric Segall has been criticizing the majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n v. Bruen for its failure to engage in any kind of means-end balancing in striking down a New York gun control measure--balancing that he argues the Court has engaged in since the Reconstruction era. Segall is hardly the only American law professor to level this charge. But the lack of balancing in Bruen is neither unprecedented nor methodologically innovative. It certainly does not reflect a victory of originalism. Instead, the Bruen decision stands firmly in the tradition that courts do …

White-Collar Courts, Merritt E. Mcalister

UF Law Faculty Publications

Article III courts are white-collar courts. They are, scholars have said, “special.” They sit atop the judicial hierarchy, and they are the courts of the one percent. We inculcate that sense of specialness in a variety of ways: federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction; they are the subject of a (perhaps overrated) class in law school; we privilege clerkships with federal judges more than with state-court judges; and we focus more scholarly attention on federal courts than state courts. They are, in short, the courts of the elite—jurisdictionally, doctrinally, and socially. Perhaps the singular importance of federal courts was …

Managing Out The Federal Appellate Judge, Merritt E. Mcalister

UF Law Faculty Publications

Federal judges have managed themselves out of the federal appellate process for ordinary appeals. Managing out refers to a management style where the boss makes the employee's work so intolerable as to induce her to quit; the employee's managed out instead of terminated. Something similar has been happening at the federal appellate courts over the last half century. A flood of ordinary, routine matters brought by (mostly) pro se litigants has spurred a managerial transformation at the federal appellate courts. And that transformation has mostly involved removing the federal judge from the ordinary work of the federal appellate courts.

Witness Hide-And-Seek: Why Federal Prosecutors Should Record Pretrial Interviews, Christina Frohock, Jeffrey E. Marcus

Articles

This Article pays long-overdue attention to a federal appellate court's warning against "playing hide-and-seek" with witnesses. Specifically, prosecutors should record interviews. While courtroom cameras dominate the topic of judicial transparency, cameras can play a critical role in a sleepier corner of criminal proceedings: pretrial witness interviews. The Article first tracks the history of open judicial proceedings as a tradition of our Anglo- American jurisprudence. Next, the Article identifies the normative thread running through that history. Fairness may suffer when cameras transform public proceedings into publicized proceedings. Finally, the Article argues that this same issue of fairness applies to pretrial witness …

State V. Joseph Segrain, 252 A.3d 1255 (R.I. 2021), Jaclyn A. Martin

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Lawyerless Law Development, Colleen Shanahan, Jessica Steinberg, Alyx Mark, Anna Carpenter

Faculty Articles

State civil courts are the object of growing scholarly attention converging from two directions: rapidly expanding research regarding lawyerless state civil trial courts, and an increasing volume of voices calling for state supreme courts to serve as a balm for American democracy’s wounds. The challenges of lawyerless trial courts and the potential of state supreme courts converge when considering how law develops in state civil courts. We and others have asserted that law development is not happening in lawyerless courts, at least not in the way that American legal scholars conventionally understand law development. This Essay explores the core theoretical …

The Judicial Nondelegation Doctrine, Jason Iuliano

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

“Nondelegation doctrine.” Lawyers know it as the rule barring Congress from delegating power to other branches of government. The doctrine, however, has another side—one that applies to the judiciary. This aspect of the doctrine holds that courts may not delegate judicial power to other branches of government. Nonetheless, courts do precisely that. And they do it thousands of times each and every day. Judges empower non-judicial actors to do everything from making legal findings and rendering sentences to resolving custody disputes and setting probation conditions.

This Article is the first to explore the constitutionality of these kinds of delegations. To …

Universal Forms Of Influence: Support For Women On Boards, Cindy A. Schipani, Paula J. Caproni

Seattle University Law Review

There are various efforts underway to increase gender diversity on corporate boards, including legislation in California, a recent SEC approved comply or explain rule for companies listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, and efforts by institutional investors such as State Street and BlackRock to recognize the value diversity brings to corporate decisionmaking. Although some of these efforts are being contested in the courts, many companies have begun to comply with these initiatives.

This Article is organized as follows. Part I provides an overview of several efforts to increase gender diversity on boards along with numerous research studies showcasing the benefits …

“Statistics Are Human Beings With The Tears Wiped Away”: Utilizing Data To Develop Strategies To Reduce The Number Of Native Americans Who Go Missing, Lori Mcpherson, Sarah Blazucki

Seattle University Law Review

On New Year’s Eve night, 2019, sixteen-year-old Selena Shelley Faye Not Afraid attended a party in Billings, Montana, about fifty miles west of her home in Hardin, Montana, near the Crow Reservation. A junior at the local high school, she was active in her community. The party carried over until the next day, and she caught a ride back toward home with friends in a van the following afternoon. When the van stopped at an interstate rest stop, Selena got out but never made it back to the van. The friends reported her missing to the police and indicated they …

Three-Judge District Courts, Direct Appeals, And Reforming The Supreme Court’S Shadow Docket, Michael E. Solimine

Indiana Law Journal

The “shadow docket” is the term recently given to a long-standing practice of the U.S. Supreme Court, in granting or denying requests for stays of lower court decisions, often on a hurried basis with rudimentary briefing and no oral argument, and with little if any explanation by the Court or individual Justices. Recently, the practice has received unusual attention inside and outside the legal community, because of its seemingly increased use by the Court in high-profile cases, with the emergency orders often sought by the federal government or state officials. Scholars have advanced various reforms to ameliorate the perceived problems …

On Warrants & Waiting: Electronic Warrants & The Fourth Amendment, Tracy Hresko Pearl

Indiana Law Journal

Police use of electronic warrant (“e-warrant”) technology has increased significantly in recent years. E-warrant technology allows law enforcement to submit, and magistrate judges to review and approve, warrant applications on computers, smartphones, and tablets, often without any direct communication. Police officers report that they favor e-warrants over their traditional, paper counterparts because they save officers a significant amount of time in applying for warrants by eliminating the need to appear in-person before a magistrate. Legal scholars have almost uniformly praised e-warrant technology as well, arguing that use of these systems will increase the number of warrants issued throughout the United …

The Active Vices, Benjamin Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Alexander Bickel's pathbreaking idea of the "passive virtues" attempted to explain and justify the Supreme Court's power to control its docket. He proposed that the Court's extensive discretion allows it to remain passive and avoid politically perilous cases, preserving its institutional legitimacy until such time as durable principles are at stake. This theory remains one of the most influential ideas in legal scholarship, but is dangerously incomplete. Discretion is a double-edged sword, empowering the Court not only to avoid politics, but also to engage in it. In other words, a policy-motivated Court can use its agenda-setting power to target highly …

From Cryptocurrencies To Cryptocourts: Blockchain And The Financialization Of Dispute Resolution Platforms, Matthew Dylag

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This paper contributes to emerging discussions of blockchain governance through an analysis of dispute resolution platforms that reimagine justice. We focus specifically on Kleros, a blockchain-enabled dispute resolution platform, that promises to secure, authenticate, and democratize access to justice for the twenty-first century. We advance the concept of cryptocourts whereby jurors, incentivized by accumulating cryptocurrency, rapidly mobilize using principles of on-demand crowdsourcing to resolve disputes. We critique the broader social imaginaries that cryptocourts such as Kleros will result in a more open, trustworthy, transparent, and democratic systems of justice. These platforms instead pose important questions concerning their potential impact …

How Biden Can Continue Making The Federal Courts Better, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

From 2017 until 2020, former President Donald Trump and the Republican Senate majority nominated and confirmed record-breaking numbers of appellate court judges. This emphasis undermined ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, and experiential diversity as well as ideological balance on these courts and neglected to address persistent district court and emergency vacancies. Moreover, to achieve these historic confirmation levels, the GOP Senate majority eviscerated or altered certain rules and customs of regular order, which included the creation of a circuit-level exception to the blue slip process. President Joe Biden, in turn, has pledged to rectify the damage to the courts and the …

Faux Advocacy In Amicus Practice, James G. Dwyer

Faculty Publications

Amicus brief filing has reached “avalanche” volume. Supreme Court Justices and lower court judges look to these briefs particularly for non-case-specific factual information––“legislative facts”—relevant to a case. This Article calls attention to a recurrent yet unrecognized problem with amicus filings offering up legislative facts in the many cases centrally involving the most vulnerable members of society—namely, non-autonomous persons, including both adults incapacitated by mental illness, intellectual disability, or other condition, and children. Some amici present themselves as advocates for such persons but use the amicus platform to serve other constituencies and causes, making false or misleading factual presentations about the …