Courts Commons^™

Panel Assignment In The Federal Courts Of Appeals, Marin K. Levy

Faculty Scholarship

It is common knowledge that the federal courts of appeals typically hear cases in panels of three judges and that the composition of the panel can have significant consequences for case outcomes and for legal doctrine more generally. Yet neither legal scholars nor social scientists have focused on the question of how judges are selected for their panels. Instead, a substantial body of scholarship simply assumes that panel assignment is random. This Article provides what, up until this point, has been a missing account of panel assignment. Drawing on a multiyear qualitative study of five circuit courts, including in-depth interviews …

Trans-Lating The Eighth Amendment Standard: The First Circuit's Denial Of A Transgender Prisoner's Constitutional Right To Medical Treatment, Bethany L. Edmondson

Georgia Law Review

In December of 2014, the First Circuit Court of Appeals
held, en banc, that the Massachusetts Department of
Corrections was not constitutionally obligated to provide
Michelle Kosilek, a transgender prisoner, with sexual
reassignment surgery. Kosilek sued the prison, arguing
that her Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and
unusual punishment were violated. The First Circuit held
that Kosilek did not have a serious medical need, due to
the prison's alternative treatment, and that the prison was
not deliberately indifferent to that need. This Note argues
that the First Circuit erred in applying the "serious
medical need" prong of the cruel and …

Protecting Access To The Great Writ: Equitable Tolling, Attorney Negligence, And Aedpa, Mandi R. Moroz

Georgia Law Review

Since the creation of the Antiterrorism and Effective
Death Penalty Act, attorneys have struggled to understand
and properly apply the Act's statute of limitations. As a
result, many attorneys have mistakenly filed federal
habeas petitions outside the Act's statute of limitations-
effectively barring their clients from federal court forever.
Attorneys who mistakenly misfile habeas petitions are left
with only one option: to request that the court equitably
toll the statute of limitations. While courts will not toll the
statute of limitations for mere negligence, courts are
divided on exactly what circumstances must exist before

allowing equitable tolling. Some courts require …

The Return Of The Unprovided-For Case, Michael S. Green

Georgia Law Review

The unprovided-for case is a puzzle that arises under
governmental interest analysis, the predominant choice-of-

law approach in the United States. As its name suggests,
in the unprovided-for case the law of no jurisdiction seems
to apply. There is a gap in the law. After its discovery by
Brainerd Currie in the 1950s, the unprovided-for case
proved to be an embarrassment for interest analysts and a
focal point for critics.
In 1989, however, Larry Kramer published an argument
that the unprovided-for case is a myth. There is no gap in
the law. Kramer's argument has been well-received, so
much so …

Spoliating The Adverse Inference Instruction: The Impact Of The 2015 Amendment To Federal Rule Of Civil Procedure 37(E), Alexandra M. Reynolds

Georgia Law Review

The discovery process relies heavily on the information
that we store on our electronic devices. The ease with
which we tap into the many capabilities of technology,
however, exposes litigants to a significant risk-spoliation
of evidence. Evidence may be spoliated accidentally or
intentionally, but when spoliation does occur, the party
seeking that evidence often seeks a remedy from the court.
The adverse inference instruction has functioned as one of
those remedies. Courts split on what level of culpability is
required to issue an adverse inference instruction. The
Rule 37(e) amendments attempt to address rising costs of
electronic discovery and resolve …

Privacy And Court Records: Online Access And The Loss Of Practical Obscurity, David S. Ardia

Faculty Publications

Court records present a conundrum for privacy advocates. Public access to the courts has long been a fundamental tenant of American democracy, helping to ensure that our system of justice functions fairly and that citizens can observe the actions of their government. Yet court records contain an astonishing amount of private and sensitive information, ranging from social security numbers to the names of sexual assault victims. Until recently, the privacy harms that attended the public disclosure of court records were generally regarded as insignificant because court files were difficult to search and access. But this “practical obscurity” is rapidly disappearing …

Vote Fluidity On The Hughes Court: The Critical Terms, 1934-1936, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

This article makes four principal claims. The first is that the justices of the Hughes Court often changed their positions in major cases between the time that they cast their votes in conference and their final votes on the merits. The second is that the Court achieved comparatively high rates of unanimity even during its most turbulent Terms because justices who had served on earlier Courts had internalized a norm counseling those who lost at the conference vote to acquiesce in the judgment of the majority. The third is that the justices who most frequently did so in this period’s …

Inside The 'Constitutional Revolution' Of 1937, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

The nature and sources of the New Deal Constitutional Revolution are among the most discussed and debated subjects in constitutional historiography. Scholars have reached significantly divergent conclusions concerning how best to understand the meaning and the causes of constitutional decisions rendered by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Though recent years have witnessed certain refinements in scholarly understandings of various dimensions of the phenomenon, the relevant documentary record seemed to have been rather thoroughly explored. Recently, however, a remarkably instructive set of primary sources has become available. For many years, the docket books kept by a number …

Defining The Scope Of Fiduciary Liability, Paul Miller

Journal Articles

The Supreme Court of Canada has won faint praise and significant criticism for its fiduciary jurisprudence over the past few decades. In prior work, I have come to the partial defence of the Court, commending it for its willingness to confront key questions going to the structure and scope of fiduciary liability, and equally for its interest in ensuring that the law's elasticity is not lost to unreflective adherence to custom and convention. By contrast, peer courts in other jurisdictions have been much less open and creative in addressing questions concerning fiduciary law's general principles and, as a result, the …

Class Actions, Civil Rights, And The National Injunction, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

This essay is a response to Professor Samuel Bray’s article proposing a blanket prohibition against injunctions that enjoin a defendant’s conduct with respect to nonparties. He argues that national injunctions are illegitimate under Article III and traditional equity and result in a number of difficulties.

This Response argues, from a normative lens, that Bray’s proposed ban on national injunctions should be rejected. Such a bright-line rule against national injunctions is too blunt an instrument to address the complexity of our tripartite system of government, our pluralistic society and our democracy. Although national injunctions may be imperfect and crude forms of …

Envisioning 100% Access To Justice In Colorado, Daniel M. Taubman, Melissa Hart

Publications

No abstract provided.

"Make Him An Offer He Can't Refuse"-- Mezzanatto Waivers As Lynchpin Of Prosecutorial Overreach, Christopher B. Mueller

Publications

Plea bargaining is the dominant means of disposing of criminal charges in the United States, in both state and federal courts. This administrative mechanism has become a system that is grossly abusive of individual rights, leading to many well-known maladies of the criminal justice system, which include overcharging, overincarceration, convictions on charges that would likely fail at trial, and even conviction of “factually innocent” persons. Instrumental in the abuses of plea bargaining is the so-called Mezzanatto waiver, which takes its name from a 1995 Supreme Court decision that approved the practice of getting defendants to agree that anything they say …

Triangulating Public Meaning: Corpus Linguistics, Immersion, And The Constitutional Record, Lawrence B. Solum

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay contributes to the development of an originalist methodology by making the case for an approach that employs three distinct methods, each of which serves as a basis for confirming or questioning the results reached by the other two. This approach will be called the Method of Triangulation. The three component techniques are as follows:

(1) The Method of Corpus Linguistics: The method of corpus linguistics employs large-scale data sets (corpora) that provide evidence of linguistic practice.

(2) The Originalist Method of Immersion: The method of immersion requires researchers to immerse themselves in the linguistic and conceptual world of …

Historical Gloss, Constitutional Conventions, And The Judicial Separation Of Powers, Curtis A. Bradley, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars have increasingly focused on the relevance of post-Founding historical practice to discern the separation of powers between Congress and the executive branch, and the Supreme Court has recently endorsed the relevance of such practice. Much less attention has been paid, however, to the relevance of historical practice to discerning the separation of powers between the political branches and the federal judiciary—what this Article calls the “judicial separation of powers.” As the Article explains, there are two ways that historical practice might be relevant to the judicial separation of powers. First, such practice might be invoked as an appeal to …

Grave Crimes And Weak Evidence: Fact-Finding Evolution In International Criminal Law, Nancy Amoury Combs

Faculty Publications

International criminal courts carry out some of the most important work that a legal system can conduct: prosecuting those who have visited death and destruction on millions. Despite the significance of their work--or perhaps because of it--international courts face tremendous challenges. Chief among them is accurate fact-finding. With alarming regularity, international criminal trials feature inconsistent, vague, and sometimes false testimony that renders judges unable to assess with any measure of certainty who did what to whom in the context of a mass atrocity. This Article provides the first-ever empirical study quantifying fact-finding in an international criminal court. The study shines …

Separating Amicus Wheat From Chaff, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl, Adam Feldman

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Informed Misdemeanor Sentencing, Jenny M. Roberts

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

There is no such thing as a low-stakes misdemeanor. The misdemeanor sentence itself, which can range from time served to up to twelve years in some jurisdictions, is often significant. But the collateral consequences of such a conviction can be far worse, affecting a person’s work and home lives for decades, and sometimes for the rest of their lives. As a result of misdemeanor convictions, defendants can be fired from their jobs, barred from future employment in many fields, deported, evicted from public housing together with their entire family, and refused housing by private landlords.

Under most theories of punishment, …

The Supreme Court, Madhav Khosla, Ananth Padmanabhan

Faculty Scholarship

Over time, the Supreme Court of India has evolved from being a court of law to a major institutional actor in the political arena. The present chapter analyses this transition by directing external and internal lenses on the court’s functioning. The external lens reveals engagement by the Court with legislative and executive domains of governance, and the current concerns of transparency and accountability that it faces. The internal lens scrutinizes the Court’s success as a court of law and its capability to streamline the judicial process such that the judicial system lives up to the legitimate expectations of the litigant …

How Much Has The Supreme Court Changed Patent Law?, Paul Gugliuzza

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided a remarkable number of patent cases in the past decade, particularly as compared to the first twenty years of the Federal Circuit’s existence. No longer is the Federal Circuit “the de facto Supreme Court of patents,” as Mark Janis wrote in 2001. Rather, it seems the Supreme Court is the Supreme Court of patents. In the article at the center of this symposium, Judge Timothy Dyk of the Federal Circuit writes that the Supreme Court’s decisions “have had a major impact on patent law,” citing, among other evidence, the Court’s seventy percent reversal rate …

Confronting Crawford: Justice Scalia, The Judicial Method, And The Adjudicative Limits Of Originalism, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

If you conduct an online search for something like “Justice Scalia’s most important opinions” or “Justice Scalia’s most influential opinions,” you will (or at least I did) almost always end up with a list that is top-heavy with dissents. That is not surprising. Dissenting opinions gave Justice Antonin Scalia the most freedom to exercise his considerable skills as a writer and were therefore more likely to produce memorable one-liners. They were also the best occasions for him to express his views can­didly and forcefully and thus served as the best vehicles for elaboration of his jurisprudential and doctrinal positions. Majority …