Courts Commons^™

Contract Creep, Tal Kastner, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars and judges think they can address the multiple purposes and values of contract law by developing different doctrinal regimes for different transaction types. They think if we develop one track of contract doctrine for sophisticated parties and another for consumers, we can build a better world of contract: protecting private ordering for sophisticated parties and protecting consumers’ needs all at once. Given the growing enthusiasm for laying down these separate tracks and developing their infrastructures, this Article brings a necessary reality check to this endeavor by highlighting for scholars and judges how doctrine in contract law functions in fact: …

Indiana Civil Legal Needs Study And Legal Aid System Scan, Victor D. Quintanilla, Rachel Thelin

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

In 2017, the Indiana Coalition for Court Access entered into a partnership with Indiana University to conduct a statewide legal needs study. The IU Center for Law, Society & Culture and the IU Public Policy Institute submit this final report to the CCA. We designed this comprehensive study of legal needs to provide a relevant, reliable source of information with which the CCA, policymakers, and legal aid providers can make strategic decisions about where, when, and how to allocate resources for the effective, efficient delivery of civil legal services. We also designed this project to generate data and information that …

Conversion Therapy: A Brief Reflection On The History Of The Practice And Contemporary Regulatory Efforts, Tiffany C. Graham

Scholarly Works

This brief symposium essay offers a broad-stroke sketch of the history of conversion therapy, its current status as a locus of regulation, and some preliminary questions about the direction the law might take to protect individuals who elect or are forcibly subjected to the practice.

How Courts In Criminal Cases Respond To Childhood Trauma, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

Neurobiological and epidemiological research suggests that abuse and adverse events experienced as a child can increase an adult’s risk of brain dysfunction associated with disorders related to criminality and violence. Much of this research is predictive, based on psychological evaluations of children; few studies have focused on whether or how criminal proceedings against adult defendants consider indicators of childhood trauma. This Article analyzes a subset of criminal cases pulled from an 800-case database created as part of an original, large-scale, empirical research project known as the Neuroscience Study. The 266 relevant cases are assessed to determine the extent to which, …

National Injunctions And Preclusion, Zachary D. Clopton

Michigan Law Review

Critics of national injunctions are lining up. Attorney General Jeff Sessions labeled these injunctions “absurd” and “simply unsustainable.” Justice Clarence Thomas called them “legally and historically dubious,” while Justice Neil Gorsuch mockingly referred to them as “cosmic injunctions.” Scholars in leading law reviews have called for their demise. Critics argue that national injunctions encourage forum shopping, unfairly burden the federal government, and depart from the history of equity. They also claim that national injunctions contradict the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Mendoza to exempt the federal government from offensive nonmutual issue preclusion—a doctrine that permits nonparties to benefit …

Promises Unfulfilled: How Investment Arbitration Tribunals Mishandle Corruption Claims And Undermine International Development, Andrew T. Bulovsky

Michigan Law Review

In recent years, the investment-arbitration and anti-corruption regimes have been in tension. Investment tribunals have jurisdiction to arbitrate disputes between investors and host states under international treaties that provide substantive protections for private investments. But these tribunals will typically decline to exercise jurisdiction over a dispute if the host state asserts that corruption tainted the investment. When tribunals close their doors to ag-grieved investors, tribunals increase the risks for investors and thus raise the cost of international investment. At the same time, the decision to decline jurisdiction creates a perverse incentive for host states to turn a blind eye to …

A Network Analysis Of The Singapore Court Of Appeal’S Citations To Precedent, Jerrold Tsin Howe Soh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This article presents findings from an empirical network analysis of citation practices in Singapore's highest court.A network of all 987 reported Court of Appeal judgments handed down from 2000 to 2017 is constructed. Networkcentrality algorithms are used to rank judgments by centrality. Judgments on contract law, particularly on contractual interpretation and terms, emerge as the most central. Based on this, this article argues that more attention can be paid to interpretation per se as a legal skill. More generally, this article establishes a framework for applying network analysis to Singapore jurisprudence on a larger scale.

Owning Heller, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

Recent historical research using big-data techniques casts doubt on whether District of Columbia v. Heller was rightly decided according to originalist methods. These new discoveries put originalists in a bind. Do they embrace “faint hearted” originalism: the idea that as between the need for stability in prior decision making, settled expectations, and the coherence of the law, some adulterated decisions must remain enforced for the greater good? Or do they follow Justice Thomas’s reasoning in Gamble v. United States, remain stout-hearted, and reject any prior decision that cannot be supported by the common linguistic usage of the founding era – …

Brief Of Public Law Scholars As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioners, Chris Dove, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dying Constitutionalism And The Fourteenth Amendment, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

The notion of a “living Constitution” often rests on an implicit assumption that important constitutional values will “grow” in such a way as to make the Constitution more attractive over time. But there are no guarantees: What can grow can also wither and die. This essay, presented as the 2018 Robert F. Boden Lecture at Marquette University Law School, marks the sesquicentennial of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification as a powerful charter of liberty and equality for black Americans. But for much of its early history, the Fourteenth Amendment’s meaning moved in reverse, overwhelmed by the end of Reconstruction, the gradual …

Visiting Judges, Marin K. Levy

Faculty Scholarship

Despite the fact that Article III judges hold particular seats on particular courts, the federal system rests on judicial interchangeability. Hundreds of judges “visit” other courts each year and collectively help decide thousands of appeals. Anyone from a retired Supreme Court Justice to a judge from the U.S. Court of International Trade to a district judge from out of circuit may come and hear cases on a given court of appeals. Although much has been written about the structure of the federal courts and the nature of Article III judgeships, little attention has been paid to the phenomenon of “sitting …

Has Shoe Run Its Course?, David W. Ichel

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Defining Law, Tal Kastner

Scholarly Works

Commenting on Chaim Saiman’s book, Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law, this essay views the difficulty of defining halakha as indicative of the universal challenge of defining the bounds of what constitutes “law.” Considering the dynamic of contingent norms, social context, history, and narrative that shapes the meaning of law, it focuses on a series of decisions by a federal district court judge in connection with the case of Bayless v. United States (1996) involving the sufficiency of reasonable suspicion to justify a police stop. Tracing the slippage in this case between holding and dicta, among other sources of authority …

The Justice System Is Criminal, Raven Delfina Otero-Symphony

2020 Award Winners

No abstract provided.

An Erie Approach To Privilege Doctrine., Megan M. La Belle

Scholarly Articles

This short essay considers the HannStar and Silver cases and begins a discussion of the impact that the Erie doctrine has—and, more importantly, ought to have—on privilege law. While Erie is considered by many as “one of the modern cornerstones of our federalism,” the doctrine is important too for the change it can effect through the cross pollination of ideas among tribunals. Because privilege laws reflect deliberate policy choices by legislatures and courts, the Erie doctrine arguably plays a particularly vital role in developing this area of the law.

The States Have Spoken: Allow Expanded Media Coverage Of The Federal Courts, Mitchell T. Galloway

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Since the advent of film and video recording, society has enjoyed the ability to capture the lights and sounds of moments in history. This innovation left courts to determine what place, if any, such technology should have inside the courtroom. Refusing to constrain the future capacity of this technology, the Supreme Court "punted" on this issue until a time when this technology evolved past its initial disruptive nature. Throughout the past forty-five years, the vast majority of state courts have embraced the potential of cameras in the courtroom and have created policies governing such use. In contrast, the federal judiciary …

The Disappointing History Of Science In The Courtroom: Frye, Daubert, And The Ongoing Crisis Of “Junk Science” In Criminal Trials, Jim Hilbert

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Inefficient Litigation Over Forum: The Unintended Consequence Of The Jvca’S “Bad Faith” Exception To The Bar On Removal Of Diversity Cases After One Year, E. Farish Percy

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Filling The California Ninth Circuit Vacancies, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

At President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit faced ample vacancies that the United States Courts’ Administrative Officelabeled “judicial emergencies” because of their protracted length and its huge caseload. Recent departures by Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt and former Chief Judge AlexKozinski, who occupied California posts, and other jurists’ decision to change their active status mean that the circuit has five emergencies, three in California, because Trump has appointed only three nominees. The court also resolves the most filings least expeditiously.

Limited clarity about whether more judges will leave active service over Trump’s presidency …

Opposition To Abortion, Then And Now: How Amicus Briefs Use Policy Frames In Abortion Litigation, Laura Moyer, Alyson Hendricks-Benton, Megan Balcom

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Early in the debate over abortion, opposition to the procedure was primarily described in terms that reflected moral concerns about the protection of “the unborn.” Indeed, much of the media coverage and public discourse describing opposition to abortion since the time of Roe characterizes the movement as focused on securing rights for all human beings from the moment of conception (Huff 2014, 39). However, interviews with activists and movement leaders suggest that antiabortion groups have employed an array of public outreach strategies over time. As seen above, the former director of the antiabortion group National Right to Life …