Courts Commons^™

Taxes, Administrative Law, And Agency Expertise: Questioning The Orthodoxy, Scott Schumacher

Articles

One of the foundations of administrative law is that federal agencies and their employees are experts in their respective fields. In addition, the many judgments and decisions made by these experts are based on a thorough record after extensive factfinding. As a result, so the theory goes, courts, particularly courts of general jurisdiction like the United States District Courts, should give deference to the determinations made by these experts. But what if the facts underpinning this foundation are not true in all cases? Should courts nevertheless provide deference to decisions by agencies when it is evident that an agency's determinations …

Due Process Deportations, Angelica Chazaro

Articles

Should pro-immigrant advocates pursue federally funded counsel for all immigrants facing deportation? For most pro-immigrant advocates and scholars, the answer is self-evident: More lawyers for immigrants would mean more justice for immigrants, and thus, the federal government should fund such lawyers. Moreover, the argument goes, federally funded counsel for immigrants would improve due process and fairness, as well as make immigration enforcement more efficient. This Article argues the opposite: Federally funded counsel is the wrong goal. The majority of expulsions of immigrants now happen outside immigration courts— and thus are impervious to immigration lawyering. Even for those who make it …

Reviewing Mixed Questions Of Fact And Law In Administrative Adjudications: Why Courts Should Move To “Substantially Established Facts”, Gwendolyn Savitz

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

Courts are inconsistent in how they review mixed questions of fact and law in administrative adjudications. Many courts simply and unquestioningly review the entire mixed issue using only substantial evidence review. This grants extreme and unquestioning deference to any legal interpretation used by the agency, far more than would be available to it under the increasingly besieged Chevron doctrine, despite the fact that the adjudications being reviewed in this manner generally would not even be entitled to Chevron deference if the legal component of the mixed question were analyzed separately. Courts should therefore analyze the different components of a mixed …

American University Law Review Keynote Address, Erwin Chemerinsky

American University Law Review

My talk this morning focuses on the agenda of the current Roberts Court. I think that every Supreme Court can be said to have an agenda. Sometimes it seems conscious and deliberate, apparent from the outset. Sometimes it seems to evolve and only becomes obvious later.

The Purcell Principle And The Antiblackness Of Constitutional Fundamentalism, Brittany Carter

American University Law Review

In Milligan v. Merrill, a district court in Alabama found that the state legislature designed Alabama’s new congressional district map in a way that diminished Black political power, and ordered the legislature to redraw its map to remedy the violation. Two weeks later, the Supreme Court stayed the district court’s order, allowing Alabama’s congressional elections to proceed under the discriminatory maps. The only stated rationale, offered by Justices Kavanaugh and Alito in a concurring opinion, was the so-called Purcell principle – the notion that federal courts should not enjoin a state’s election laws in the period close to an election. …

The Absurd Reach Of A "Colorblind" Constitution, David Hinojosa, Genevieve Bonadies Torres

American University Law Review

Affirmative action has long spurred debates over whether the Equal Protection Clause and subsequent civil rights legislation were intended to permit policies aimed at disrupting racial hierarchies, dismantling systemic discrimination, and ensuring equal opportunity for Black people and other historically marginalized groups. The current lawsuits pending before the Supreme Court challenging affirmative action admissions programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and Harvard College are no exception. Like prior lawsuits, the plaintiff in both cases—Students for Fair Admissions (“SFFA”)—and its amici seek to turn back the clock on racial diversity at selective universities by urging the …

When Amicus Curiae Briefs Are Inimicus Curiae Briefs: Amicus Curiae Briefs And The Bypassing Of Admissibility Standards, David Dematteo, Kellie Wiltsie

American University Law Review

Amicus curiae briefs are being submitted at historically high levels by a range of individuals and entities, and there is compelling evidence that these briefs are highly influential in judicial decision-making, including in the Supreme Court of the United States. Although amicus curiae briefs have been an ingrained aspect of the U.S. legal system for hundred-plus years, various legal scholars, researchers, commentators, and judges, including Supreme Court Justices, have raised concerns about their use, including that amicus curiae briefs contain redundant information and often function as advocacy tools. This Article addresses an aspect of amicus curiae briefs that has received …

The Application Of Law As A Key To Understanding Judicial Independence, Tahirih V. Lee

FIU Law Review

Judges across China recently declined to apply a law that the National People’s Congress had newly brought into effect. In this article, I describe this startling finding and explore the significance of it. I conclude that it represents an exercise of judicial independence. Using a thickly descriptive approach that focuses on textual analysis and institutional context, I demonstrate that judges in China have no legal duty to apply law and that it is professionally risky for them to apply law; that judges there operate within a professional culture that encourages restraint; and that the court system has developed a strong …

Save Your Rights: How Florida And Other States Have Targeted Voting Access Following The 2020 Election, Francisco Varona

FIU Law Review

Following the 2020 general election, Florida’s Republican led legislature introduced Senate Bill 90 (“S.B. 90”), which seeks to put many restrictions on various aspects of the voting process. S.B. 90 limits ballot drop-off boxes, restricts mail-in voting, proscribes “line-warming,” increases registration difficulty, and expands identification requirements. Despite lauding Florida’s election as a gold standard for the rest of the country, Governor Ron DeSantis approved this bill in May of 2021, explaining that Florida should not become complacent despite its success. The Republican Governor approved this law against the backdrop of record voter turnout for Black and Latino voters and record …

How Florida’S Courts Should Evaluate The Admissibility Of Field Sobriety Testing And Blood Thc Levels Evidence In Marijuana Impaired Driving Prosecutions, Christopher Bomhoff

FIU Law Review

Field sobriety and blood alcohol concentration tests are proven reliable techniques to determine whether a person us under the influence of alcohol. No such technique has been developed to reliably determine whether a person is under the influence of marijuana. However, despite a lack of scientific consensus regarding the reliability of field sobriety and blood toxicology tests to determine marijuana impairment, these methods are routinely used as evidence of guilt in marijuana impaired driving prosecutions. Twenty-four states have legalized the recreational use of marijuana, and Florida appears to be set to join them in the near future. As a result …

The Paradoxes Of A Unified Judicial Philosophy: An Empirical Study Of The New Supreme Court, 2020-2022, Victoria Frances Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The 2021 Supreme Court Term ended with a bang, yielding blockbuster cases making headlines. But what of the rest of the cases? This is the first major paper to examine the “Trump effect,” meaning the influence of three Justices appointed by President Trump who all share a “unified” judicial philosophy. In a two-year project, starting from 2020, when Justice Barrett ascended to the Court, to the end of June 2022, this article reviews 124 cases and over 300 opinions. There is both good and bad news for the court’s new “unified” judicial philosophy. History and text are both upwardly mobile …

Brief Amici Curiae Legal Scholars Of Sex And Gender In Support Of Plaintiff-Appellant, Kyle Velte, Ezra Young, Jeremiah A. Ho, M. Dru Levasseur, Nancy C. Marcus, Dara E. Purvis, Eliot Tracz, Ann E. Tweedy

All Faculty Scholarship

This amicus brief was filed in Griffith v. El Paso County, Colorado, case no. 23-1135 (10th Circuit) in support of appellant Darlene Griffith. Amici curiae are legal scholars of sex and gender. They offer expertise in their personal capacities to assist the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in assessing whether the El Paso County Sheriff officials violated Ms. Griffith’s Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection when they refused to house Ms. Griffith, a transgender woman, in the women's unit of the El Paso County Jail as a pretrial detainee.

Protecting A Real Or Imagined Past: Justice Samuel Alito And The First Amendment, Derigan Silver, Dan V. Kozlowski

All Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the First Amendment jurisprudence of Justice Samuel Alito. In this article, we argue that the principles behind his decision-making are not always necessarily traditional methods of constitutional analysis, and litigants should understand the frames and lenses Alito uses to make decisions when making their arguments to him. The article concludes with a discussion of Alito’s overall approach to the law and some thoughts on how he is attempting to reshape the First Amendment. We write that, above all, it is clear he is seeking to protect a real or imagined past that, in his mind, is under …

Lawyerless Law Development, Colleen F. Shanahan, Jessica K. Steinberg, Alyx Mark, Anna E. Carpenter

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The typical American civil trial court is lawyerless. In response, access to justice reformers have embraced a key intervention: changing the judge’s traditional role. The prevailing vision for judicial role reform calls on trial judges to offer accommodation, information, and process simplification to people without legal representation.

Until now, scholars have known little about judicial behavior in lawyerless courts, including whether and how judges are implementing role reform recommendations. Our lack of knowledge stands in stark contrast to the responsibility civil trial judges bear—and the discretionary power they wield—in dispensing justice for millions of unrepresented people each year. While today’s …

Rolling Back Transparency In China's Courts, Benjamin L. Liebman, Rachel E. Stern, Xiaohan Wu, Margaret Roberts

Faculty Scholarship

Despite a burgeoning conversation about the centrality of information management to governments, scholars are only just beginning to address the role of legal information in sustaining authoritarian rule. This Essay presents a case study showing how legal information can be manipulated: through the deletion of previously published cases from China’s online public database of court decisions. Using our own dataset of all 42 million cases made public in China between January 1, 2014, and September 2, 2018, we examine the recent deletion of criminal cases from the China Judgements Online website. We find that the deletion of cases likely results …

The Failure Of Market Efficiency, William Magnuson

Faculty Scholarship

Recent years have witnessed the near total triumph of market efficiency as a regulatory goal. Policymakers regularly proclaim their devotion to ensuring efficient capital markets. Courts use market efficiency as a guiding light for crafting legal doctrine. And scholars have explored in great depth the mechanisms of market efficiency and the role of law in promoting it. There is strong evidence that, at least on some metrics, our capital markets are indeed more efficient than they have ever been. But the pursuit of efficiency has come at a cost. By focusing our attention narrowly on economic efficiency concerns—such as competition, …

Problems With Authority, Amy J. Griffin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Judicial decisionmaking rests on a foundation of unwritten rules—those that govern the weight of authority. Such rules, including the cornerstone principle of stare decisis, are created informally through the internal social practices of the judiciary. Despite the central role of such rules in judicial decisionmaking, we lack a good account of how they are created, revised, and enforced. There is something paradoxical and troubling about the notion that the rules of the game are determined by the players as they play the game according to those rules. Because weight-of-authority rules are largely informal and almost entirely unwritten, we don’t even …

The Major Questions Doctrine: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Remedy, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s “major questions” doctrine has been attacked as an attempt to revive the nondelegation doctrine. The better view is that this statutory interpretation responds to perceived failings of the Chevron doctrine, which has governed court-agency relations since 1984. This article criticizes the major question doctrine and proposes modifications to the Chevron doctrine that would partially correct its failings while preserving the traditional interpretive role of courts.

Necessary Necessity: Courts’ Historical Assessment Of The Condition Precedent For Martial Law, Eric Merriam

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Liability Beyond Law: Conceptions Of Fairness In Chinese Tort Cases, Rachel E. Stern, Benjamin L. Liebman, Wenwa Gao, Xiaohan Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Empirical work consistently finds that Chinese courts resolve civil cases by finding a compromise solution. But beyond this split-it-down-the-middle tendency, when and how do Chinese courts arrive at decisions that feel “fair and just” in cases in which they invoke those ideas? Drawing on a data set of 9,485 tort cases, we find that Chinese courts impose liability on two types of parties with ethical, but not legal, obligation to victims: (1) participants in a shared activity and (2) those who control a physical space. In these cases, Chinese courts stretch the law to spread losses through communities and to …