Courts Commons^™

Climate Change Litigation In The Federal Courts: Jurisdictional Lessons From California V. Bp, Gil Seinfeld

Michigan Law Review Online

On March 21 of this year, something unusual took place at a U.S. courthouse in San Francisco: a group of scientists and attorneys provided Federal District Judge William H. Alsup with a crash course in climate science. The five-hour tutorial was ordered by Judge Alsup in connection with a lawsuit that had been filed by the cities of Oakland and San Francisco (“the Cities”) against the world’s five largest producers of fossil fuels. The central issue in the case is whether the energy companies can be held liable for continuing to market fossil fuels long after they learned that such …

Practitioners' Perception Of Court-Connected Mediation In Five Regions: An Empirical Study, Shahla F. Ali

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Courts throughout the world face the challenge of designing court mediation programs to provide opportunities for party-directed reconciliation on the one hand, while ensuring access to formal legal channels on the other. In some jurisdictions, mandated programs require initial attempts at mediation, while in others, voluntary programs encourage party-selected participation. This Article explores the attitudes and perceptions of eighty-three practitioners implementing court mediation programs in five regions in order to understand the dynamics, challenges, and lessons learned from the perspectives of those directly engaged in the work of administering, representing, and mediating civil claims. Given the highly contextual nature of …

Court Capture, Jonas Anderson

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Capture — the notion that a federal agency can become controlled by the industry the agency is supposed to be regulating — is a fundamental concern for administrative law scholars. Surprisingly, however, no thorough treatment of how capture theory applies to the federal judiciary has been done. The few scholars who have attempted to apply the insights of capture theory to federal courts have generally concluded that the federal courts are insulated from capture concerns.

This Article challenges the notion that the federal courts cannot be captured. It makes two primary arguments. As an initial matter, this Article makes the …

Hearing The States, Anthony Johnstone

Faculty Law Review Articles

The 2016 Presidential and Senate elections raise the possibility that a conservative, life-tenured Supreme Court will preside for years over a politically dynamic majority. This threatens to weaken the public's already fragile confidence in the Court. By lowering the political stakes of both national elections and its own decisions, federalism may enable the Court to defuse some of the most explosive controversies it hears. Federalism offers a second- best solution, even if neither conservatives nor liberals can impose a national political agenda. However, principled federalism arguments are tricky. They are structural, more prudential than legal or empirical. Regardless of ideology, …

Court Capture, Jonas Anderson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Capture — the notion that a federal agency can become controlled by the industry the agency is supposed to be regulating — is a fundamental concern for administrative law scholars. Surprisingly, however, no thorough treatment of how capture theory applies to the federal judiciary has been done. The few scholars who have attempted to apply the insights of capture theory to federal courts have generally concluded that the federal courts are insulated from capture concerns.

This Article challenges the notion that the federal courts cannot be captured. It makes two primary arguments. As an initial matter, this Article makes the …

Who Will Judge The Many When The Game Is Through: Considering The Profound Differences Between Mental Health Courts And Traditional Involuntary Civil Commitment Courts, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

This paper is an expansion of a presentation given by the author at the annual Therapeutic Jurisprudence Workshop at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 15, 2016. There is a developing robust literature about mental health courts (MHCrts) in the United States, and researchers have begun to focus on a broad range of empirical issues, such as the extent to which defendants are competent to waive their trial rights in such settings, the significance of diversion, etc. Also, advocates and other scholars have engaged in vigorous debates about the value of these courts, and the extent …

Trouble Counting To Three: Circuit Splits And Confusion In Interpreting The Prison Litigation Reform Act's Three Strikes Rule, 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1915(G), Molly Guptill Manning

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Studying The "New" Civil Judges, Anna Carpenter, Jessica Steinberg, Colleen Shanahan, Alyx Mark

Faculty Articles

We know very little about the people and institutions that make up the bulk of the United States civil justice system: state judges and state courts. Our understanding of civil justice is based primarily on federal litigation and the decisions of appellate judges. Staggeringly little legal scholarship focuses on state courts and judges. We simply do not know what most judges are doing in their day-to-day courtroom roles or in their roles as institutional actors and managers of civil justice infrastructure. We know little about the factors that shape and influence judicial practices, let alone the consequences of those practices …

Taking Judicial Legitimacy Seriously, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Increasing Transparency In The Us Tax Court, Leandra Lederman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Transparency is a widely accepted judicial norm because it increases accountability. Access to U.S. Tax Court documents has long differed from access to the documents of other courts. For example, the Tax Court does not participate in PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records). This essay discusses some of the ways in which access to Tax Court documents has been restricted; areas in which the Tax Court has increased transparency over the years; upcoming changes; and where increased transparency is still needed, such as with respect to case statistics.

Politics, Power Dynamics, And The Limits Of Existing Self-Regulation And Oversight In Icc Preliminary Examinations, Asaf Lubin

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

Professor Lubin's contribution to volume 2 is titled, "Politics, Power Dynamics, and the Limits of Existing Self-Regulation and Oversight in ICC Preliminary Examinations," pp. 77-150.

Should the normative framework that governs the International Criminal Court’s (‘ICC’) oversight concerning preliminary examinations undergo a reform? The following chapter answers this question in the affirmative, making the claim that both self-regulation by the Office of the Prosecutor (‘OTP’) and quality control by the Pre-Trial Chamber (‘PTC’) currently suffer from significant deficiencies, thus failing to reach the optimum point on the scale between absolute prosecutorial discretion and absolute control. The chapter demonstrates some of …

Expanding The Search For America's Missing Jury, Richard Lorren Jolly

Michigan Law Review

A review of Suja A. Thomas, The Missing American Jury: Restoring the Fundamental Constitutional Role of the Criminal, Civil, and Grand Juries.

Adaptation Nation: Three Pivotal Transitions In American Law & Society Since 1886, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Waiver, Work Product, And Worry: A Case For Clarifying The Waiver Doctrine In Oklahoma, Mitchell B. Bryant

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Combating Prosecutorial Misconduct In Closing Arguments, Michael D. Cicchini

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

President Donald Trump And Federal Bench Diversity, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

President Donald Trump constantly reminds United States citizens about the myriad circuit and district court appointments that his White House is making to the federal judiciary. Last September, Trump proposed the seventh “wave,” which included three people of color among sixteen judicial nominees. This wave permitted the administration to triple the number of ethnic minority picks whom it had selected, which means that the Executive Branch has proffered ten persons of color in appeals court and district court submissions, yet none is a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) individual. Nevertheless, a problematic pattern, which implicates a stunning lack of …

Delaware's Retreat: Exploring Developing Fissures And Tectonic Shifts In Delaware Corporate Law, James D. Cox, Randall S. Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Erie As A Way Of Life, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Brief Of Professors William Baude And Stephen E. Sachs As Amici Curiae In Support Of Neither Party, William Baude, Stephen E. Sachs

Faculty Scholarship

This case presents the question whether to overrule Nevada v. Hall, 440 U.S. 410 (1979). That question requires careful attention to the legal status of sovereign immunity and to the Constitution’s effect on it, which neither Hall nor either party has quite right. The Founders did not silently constitutionalize a common-law immunity, but neither did they leave each State wholly free to hale other States before its courts. While Hall’s holding was mostly right, other statements in Hall are likely quite wrong—yet this case is a poor vehicle for reconsidering them.

Hall correctly held that States lack a constitutional immunity …

Will Delaware Be Different? An Empirical Study Of Tc Heartland And The Shift To Defendant Choice Of Venue, Ofer Eldar, Neel U. Sukhatme

Faculty Scholarship

Why do some venues evolve into litigation havens while others do not? Venues might compete for litigation for various reasons, such as enhancing their judges’ prestige and increasing revenues for the local bar. This competition is framed by the party that chooses the venue. Whether plaintiffs or defendants primarily choose venue is crucial because, we argue, the two scenarios are not symmetrical.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods illustrates this dynamic. There, the Court effectively shifted venue choice in many patent infringement cases from plaintiffs to corporate defendants. We use TC Heartland to empirically measure …