Courts Commons^™

Sticky Situations: Understanding The Law And Life, Krystal Banks

National Youth Advocacy & Resilience Conference

Law and life go hand in hand. Understanding the law and how it connects to life can be an effective tool in teaching youth and adults the value of making good decisions when it comes to life and the law. Sticky Situations places real-world situations in the context of learning how to apply the law and effectively respond to life's sticky situations.

Revisiting The Visitor: Maine's New Uniform Probate Code & The Evolving Role Of The Court-Appointed Visitor In Adult Guardianship Reform, Lisa Kay Rosenthal

Maine Law Review

A judge may appoint a guardian for an adult who does not have the capacity to make decisions affecting their own health or welfare. However, the power of the guardian—while intended to serve a protective function—potentially invites financial, physical, and emotional abuse of the most vulnerable members of society. To help a probate judge understand the circumstances of a guardianship and the need for protection, probate courts in Maine appoint a “visitor” to interview both the person allegedly in need of a guardianship and the proposed guardian. The visitor submits a report to the court which contains the visitor’s observations, …

Rebuilding The Federal Circuit Courts, Merritt E. Mcalister

Northwestern University Law Review

The conversation about Supreme Court reform—as important as it is—has obscured another, equally important conversation: the need for lower federal court reform. The U.S. Courts of Appeals have not seen their ranks grow in over three decades. Even then, those additions were stopgap measures built on an appellate triage system that had outsourced much of its work to nonjudicial decision-makers (central judicial staff and law clerks). Those changes born of necessity have now become core features of the federal appellate system, which distributes judicial resources—including oral argument and judicial scrutiny—to a select few. This Article begins to reimagine the courts …

Table Of Contents

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Brief Of Amicus Curiae Notre Dame Law School Religious Liberty Initiative In Support Of Petitioner, Nicole Stelle Garnett, Richard W. Garnett Iv, Francesca Genova Matozzo, Steven A. Engel, Michael H. Mcginley

Court Briefs

No. 21-418
Joseph A. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District

On Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

From the Summary of Argument

This case offers the Court a much-needed opportunity to resolve the longstanding confusion caused by its conflicting and erroneous interpretations of the Establishment Clause. Although recent decisions clarify that the government may not suppress private religious expression, the Court has yet to clear away an undergrowth of older precedents that are often read to suggest the opposite. Rather than permit those outdated decisions to persist and perpetuate confusion, the Court should …

Let Us Not Be Intimidated: Past And Present Applications Of Section 11(B) Of The Voting Rights Act, Carly E. Zipper

Washington Law Review

As John Lewis said, “[the] vote is precious. Almost sacred. It is the most powerful non-violent tool we have to create a more perfect union.” The Voting Rights Act (VRA), likewise, is a powerful tool. This Comment seeks to empower voters and embolden their advocates to better use that tool with an improved understanding of its little-known protection against voter intimidation, section 11(b).

Although the term “voter intimidation” may connote armed confrontations at polling places, some forms of intimidation are much more subtle and insidious—dissuading voters from heading to the polls on election day rather than confronting them outright when …

State Spoliation Claims In Federal District Courts, Jeffrey A. Parness

Catholic University Law Review

The increasing amounts of electronically stored information (ESI) relevant to civil litigation, and the ease of their loss, caused federal lawmakers explicitly to address the possible consequences of certain pre-suit or post-suit ESI losses. These lawmakers acted in both 2006 and 2015 through Federal Civil Procedure (FRCP) 37(e). But they acted only on certain ESI. Their actions have prompted increasing attention to the significant risks of pre-suit and post-suit losses of all ESI, and of non-ESI, otherwise discoverable in civil actions. In addition, their actions have spurred increasing attention to the availability of substantive law claims involving spoliation of information …

Rebuilding The Federal Circuit Courts, Merritt E. Mcalister

UF Law Faculty Publications

The conversation about Supreme Court reform—as important as it is—has obscured another, equally important conversation: the need for lower federal court reform. The U.S. Courts of Appeals have not seen their ranks grow in over three decades. Even then, those additions were stopgap measures built on an appellate triage system that had outsourced much of its work to nonjudicial decision-makers (central judicial staff and law clerks). Those changes born of necessity have now become core features of the federal appellate system, which distributes judicial resources—including oral argument and judicial scrutiny—to a select few. This Article begins to reimagine the courts …

The Unbearable Emptiness Of Formalism: Autonomy, Equality, And The Future Of Affirmative Action, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

Debates over affirmative action in higher education generally focus on equality interests under the Fourteenth Amendment but ignore liberty interests under the First Amendment. That tendency persists, even though the academic freedom to enroll a diverse student body has allowed colleges and universities to defend race-conscious admissions programs against legal challenges for decades. Today, the rise of formalism in judicial interpretation poses new perils for these programs. Justice Powell’s seminal decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke was a pragmatic compromise that used diversity to temper the polarized debate over equality that sharply divided the Court. In …

Endogenous And Dangerous, Brian N. Larson

Nevada Law Journal

Empirical studies show that courts frequently cite cases that the parties did not cite during briefing and oral arguments—endogenous cases. This Article shows the cognitive and rational dangers of endogenous cases and presents an empirical study of their use. I contend that judges should avoid using endogenous cases in their reasoning and opinions. This Article’s first significant contribution is to provide the first exhaustive treatment in the American legal literature of the rational bases upon which defeasible legal deductions and legal analogies may be built and the critical questions or defeaters that can weaken or bring them down. As far …

Endogenous And Dangerous, Brian N. Larson

Faculty Scholarship

Empirical studies show that courts frequently cite cases that the parties did not cite during briefing and oral arguments—endogenous cases. This Article shows the cognitive and rational dangers of endogenous cases and presents an empirical study of their use. I contend that judges should avoid using endogenous cases in their reasoning and opinions. This Article’s first significant contribution is to provide the first exhaustive treatment in the American legal literature of the rational bases upon which defeasible legal deductions and legal analogies may be built and the critical questions or defeaters that can weaken or bring them down. As far …

Imagining A Better Public Health (Law) Response To Covid-19, Evan Anderson, Scott Burris

University of Richmond Law Review

This Article is not a thorough-going history of the pandemic response. By way of critique and suggesting a way forward for public health, we are going to imagine how public health—both the official agencies and the interconnected nodes in academia and health systems—might have approached COVID-19 differently. This is a story that focuses on good judgment as the lynchpin of optimal pandemic response and allows us to think about where good judgment seems to have been lacking, and how public health culture and institutions might change to improve the chances of better judgment next time.

Trustworthy Digital Contact Tracing, Emily Berman, Leah R. Fowler, Jessica L. Roberts

University of Richmond Law Review

This Article takes a closer look at digital contact tracing in the United States during the coronavirus pandemic and why it failed. It begins by explaining the shortcomings of traditional analog methods and the resulting need for digital contact tracing. It then turns to the norms regarding consent, the scope of the data collected, and the limits on subsequent use necessary for cooperative surveillance. We argue that any successful digital contact-tracing program must incorporate these elements. Yet while necessary, those strategies alone may not be sufficient. People justifiably lack trust in public health authorities, in new technologies, and in the …

The Future Of Wastewater Monitoring For The Public Health, Natalie Ram, Lance Gable, Jeffrey L. Ram

University of Richmond Law Review

This Article thus expands the extant literature by considering the legal and ethical dimensions of wastewater surveillance more thoroughly and more broadly. It arrives at an auspicious time, as the United States moves into a vaccine-mediated phase in which COVID-19 is less likely to give rise to broad stay-at-home orders and more likely to trigger narrower, more targeted interventions. It seeks to offer guidance for the legal and ethical use of wastewater surveillance along two dimensions. The first dimension considers the circumstances under which wastewater monitoring should be deployed for detecting and responding to COVID-19 specifically. The second dimension zooms …

Expanding Medicaid In The Postpartum Period, Madison P. Harrell

University of Richmond Law Review

This Comment will discuss how the current Medicaid law is insufficient to address the issue of disappointing maternal health outcomes in the United States and how the federal government should begin to remedy the problem. First, I will shed light on the maternal health crisis in the United States, before discussing the history of pregnancy and postpartum Medicaid coverage. Then, I will outline the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, the subsequent court battle over its constitutionality, and the effects of that decision on the current landscape of pregnancy and postpartum Medicaid coverage. Finally, I will detail my proposal for …

Acknowledgments, Ren Warden

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Unmet Legal Needs As Health Injustice, Yael Cannon

University of Richmond Law Review

In Part I, this Article examines the health justice framework through which laws are understood as determinants of health equity. In Part II, this Article argues that when unaddressed for low-income individuals, legal needs serve as social determinants of health. Applying the health justice framework, the Article examines the major domains of social determinants of health (“SDOH”) and identifies areas of law for which unmet legal needs contribute to poor health and health inequity. Specifically, it analyzes how the five major domains of SDOH of the Healthy People 2030 paradigm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) …

Reforming Age Cutoffs, Govind Persad

University of Richmond Law Review

This Article examines the use of minimum age cutoffs to define eligibility for social insurance, public benefits, and other governmental programs. These cutoffs are frequently used but rarely examined in detail. In Part I, I examine and catalogue policies that employ minimum age cutoffs. These include not only Medicare and Social Security but also other policies such as access to pensions and retirement benefits, eligibility for favorable tax treatment, and eligibility for discounts on governmentally provided goods and services. In Part II, I examine different rationales underlying eligibility and discuss the imperfect fit between these rationales and the use of …

District Court En Bancs, Maggie Gardner

Fordham Law Review

Despite the image of the solitary federal district judge, there is a long but quiet history of federal district courts deciding cases en banc. District court en bancs predate the development of en banc rehearings by the federal courts of appeals and have been used to address some of the most pressing issues before federal courts over the last one hundred years: Prohibition prosecutions, bankruptcies during the Great Depression, labor unrest in the 1940s, protracted desegregation cases, asbestos litigation, and the constitutionality of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, to name a few. This Article gathers more than 140 examples of voluntary …

Dentistry And The Law: Winning Your Case And Still Being Sanctioned, Dan Schulte Jd

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

This Dentistry and the Law column discusses a perplexing scenario where a dentist, despite winning a licensing case trial, faces sanctions imposed by the Disciplinary Subcommittee (DSC) of the Board of Dentistry. The article unveils the intricate process of disciplinary actions, from administrative complaints to administrative hearings, emphasizing the pivotal role of the DSC in determining sanctions. It clarifies that success in an administrative hearing doesn't guarantee a favorable outcome, as the DSC holds ultimate authority, subject to limited Court of Appeals review.