Courts Commons^™

Justice On The Fly: The Danger Of Errant Deportations, Fatma Marouf, Michael Kagan, Rebecca Gill

Scholarly Works

The government may deport an immigrant appealing a deportation order in federal court even before the court rules on the case, unless the court issues a stay of removal. In its 2009 decision in Nken v. Holder, the Supreme Court clarified that the legal standard for stays of removal is the same test courts use for preliminary injunctions. Yet Justice Kennedy expressed frustration that the Court had little data to inform its decision. The Court will likely need to revisit this issue, as doubts cloud the meaning of Nken’s main holdings, in part because the government misled the …

The Ninth Circuit’S Treatment Of Sexual Orientation: Defining “Rational Basis Review With Bite”, Ian C. Bartrum

Scholarly Works

When the Ninth Circuit handed down Witt v. Department of the Air Force, President Obama and then-Solicitor General Kagan declined to take an appeal to the Supreme Court. At the time, it seemed that most advocates of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” believed that the administration made that decision because it was afraid the Supreme Court would reverse the Ninth Circuit. If that fear was perhaps well-founded in 2009, it is certainly less so now. In the wake of SmithKline Beecham Corp. v. Abbott Laboratories, as well as recent District Court decisions, opponents of federal constitutional protection for gay people …

Around The Nation, Calen Weiss

Criminal Law Practitioner

No abstract provided.

From Commonwealth To Constitutional Limitations: Thomas Cooley's Michigan, 1805-1886, Robert Allan Olender

SJD Dissertations

In response to what he perceived as the challenges associated with republican governance in the later portions of the nineteenth century, Michigan’s Thomas McIntyre Cooley penned his treatise concerning constitutional limitations on legislative power. In it, Cooley offered a vision of government where courts would check government power and would raise constitutional barriers against the impact of improper influences on legislators. As a student of history, Cooley grounded his beliefs and doctrines in experience, not philosophical reflections. Believing that “the fruits of speculative genius in government are of little value,” Cooley submitted that governing structures and law “must be the …

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission And Structural Reform Of The American Workplace, Margo Schlanger, Pauline T. Kim

Articles

In one of its most-watched recent cases, the United States Supreme Court struck down a class action alleging that Wal-Mart stores discriminated against female employees in pay and promotion decisions. The plaintiffs alleged that Wal-Mart’s corporate culture and highly discretionary decision-making practices led to sex discrimination on a company-wide basis, and they sought injunctive relief as well as backpay for individual employees. Reversing the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the Supreme Court held in Wal-Mart v. Dukes that the proposed class failed to meet the requirements for class action certification under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of …

Formalism And Employer Liability Under Title Vii, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

Most lawyers, law professors, and judges are familiar with two standard critiques of formalism in legal reasoning. One is the unacknowledged-policymaking critique. This critique argues that formalist reasoning purports to be above judicial policymaking but instead simply hides the policy decisions offstage. The other is the false-determinacy critique. This critique observes that formalist reasoning purports to reduce decision costs in the run of cases by sorting cases into defined categories, but argues that instead of going away the difficult questions of application migrate to the choice of the category in which to place a particular case.

Rate Of False Conviction Of Criminal Defendants Who Are Sentenced To Death, Samuel R. Gross, Barbara O'Brien, Chen Hu, Edward H. Kennedy

Articles

The rate of erroneous conviction of innocent criminal defendants is often described as not merely unknown but unknowable. There is no systematic method to determine the accuracy of a criminal conviction; if there were, these errors would not occur in the first place. As a result, very few false convictions are ever discovered, and those that are discovered are not representative of the group as a whole. In the United States, however, a high proportion of false convictions that do come to light and produce exonerations are concentrated among the tiny minority of cases in which defendants are sentenced to …

The Danger Of Nonrandom Case Assignment: How The Southern District Of New York's "Related Cases" Rule Shaped Stop-And-Frisk Rulings, Katherine A. Macfarlane

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The Southern District of New York’s local rules are clear: “[A]ll active judges . . . shall be assigned substantially an equal share of the categories of cases of the court over a period of time.” Yet for the past fourteen years, Southern District Judge Shira Scheindlin has been granted near-exclusive jurisdiction over one category of case: those involving wide-sweeping constitutional challenges to the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) stop-and-frisk policies. In 1999, Judge Scheindlin was randomly assigned Daniels v. City of New York, the first in a series of high-profile and high-impact stop-and-frisk cases. Since then, she has overseen …

The War On Drugs Is Over (If You Want It): State Drug Courts As An Alternative To Criminal Courts For Low-Level Nonviolent Drug Offenders, Blake Courlang

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

Part I of this Note describes the social, political, and legal reasons behind the rise of mandatory minimum sentencing in the 1980s and their path towards becoming advisory in the 2000s, as held by the Supreme Court in United States v. Booker. Part II provides a description of drug courts and argues for the use of drug courts as an alternative to the criminal sanctions for all nonviolent, low-level drug offenders. As part of this discussion, this Note examines the use of mandatory minimum sentencing post-Booker and the procedural method of divesting federal jurisdiction of nonviolent, low-level drug offenses …

Citizen Participation In Criminal Trials In Japan: The Saiban-In System And Victim Participation In Japan In International Perspectives, Setsuo Miyazawa

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Recognition And Enforcement Of Foreign Judgments In U.S. Courts: Problems And Possibilities, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

The United States is currently facing a period of intense interest in transnational litigation. Not only has the U.S. Supreme Court become increasingly active in this field, but the American Law Institute (ALI) is also in the process of revising and drafting a number of Restatements concerning international law. The United States also recently signed The Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements (COCA), although the instrument has not yet been ratified.

The United States can and should reconsider U.S. law concerning the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments immediately and unilaterally. Although this may appear to be a daunting …

The U.S. Supreme Court Fellows Program; The Opportunity Of A Lifetime, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

One reason why the Supreme Court Fellowship is one of the best-kept secrets in Washington, D.C., is its size. Unlike the White House Fellows program, which invites 12 people to join its ranks each year, and the Congressional Fellows program, which has over 30 participants annually, the Supreme Court accepts only four extremely talented individuals into its Fellows program each year. Every fall, these fortunate few begin a 12-month journey that offers them an unparalleled opportunity to observe and participate in the work of the federal judiciary at the highest levels.

Technology, Ethics, And Access To Justice: Should An Alogrithm Be Deciding Your Case?, Anjanette H. Raymond, Scott J. Shackelford

Michigan Journal of International Law

At a time of U.S. budget cuts, popularly known as the “sequester,” court systems across the nation are facing financial shortfalls. Small claims courts are no exception. Among the worst hit states is California, which is suffering staffing cutbacks that result in long delays prompting consideration of the old maxim, “justice delayed is justice denied.” Similar problems, albeit on a larger scale, are evident in other nations including India where the Law Commission has argued that the millions of pending cases combined with the lagging uptake of technological best practices has impeded judicial productivity, leading to “disappointment and dissatisfaction among …

Functional Elements In Patent Claims, As Construed By The Patent Trial And Appeal Board (Ptab), 13 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 251 (2014), Tom Brody

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

Claims in patents include both structural elements and functional elements. Functional elements occur in various categories: (1) Functional elements that mandate a particular range of structures that are able to perform the required function; (2) Functional elements that mandate a particular cooperation between structures; (3) Compound noun/function functional elements, (4) Active-type functional elements; (5) “Capable of”-type functional elements, (6) Single-word structural elements that are typical nouns, but that are also functional elements, e.g., “plasticizer,” and (7) Quasi-functional elements that lack any patentable weight. This article discloses which of these types of functional elements confers the broadest claim scope, and which …

What Reversals And Close Cases Reveal About Claim Construction: The Sequel, 13 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 525 (2014), Thomas Krause, Heather Auyang

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

This article updates and elaborates on last year’s What Close Cases and Reversals Reveal About Claim Construction at the Federal Circuit. Like the previous article, this article provides empirical insight into claim construction at the Federal Circuit, by approaching the question with two unique and distinct subsets of data: (1) “reversals” of all district court claim construction decisions since Phillips v. AWH, and (2) “close cases,” or post-Markman claim construction cases that had dissents in which a currently-active judge participated. The past year’s reversals data once again confirms that district courts persistently favor narrow claim interpretations in cases in which …

The Rapid Rise Of Delayed Notice Searches, And The Fourth Amendment "Rule Requiring Notice", Jonathan Witmer-Rich

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article documents the rapid rise of covert searching, through delayed notice search warrants, and argues that covert searching in its current form presumptively violates the Fourth Amendment's "rule requiring notice."

Congress authorized these "sneak and peek" warrants in the USA Patriot Act of 2001, and soon after added a reporting requirement to monitor this invasive search technique. Since 2001, the use of delayed notice search warrants has risen dramatically, from around 25 in 2002 to 5601 in 2012, suggesting that "sneak and peek" searches are becoming alarmingly common. In fact, it is not at all clear whether true "sneak …

The Constitution According To Justices Scalia And Thomas: Alive And Kickin', Eric J. Segall

Faculty Publications By Year

No abstract provided.

Doctrinal Conversation: Justice Kagan's Supreme Court Opinions, Laura K. Ray

Indiana Law Journal

In her first two terms on the Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan has crafted a distinctive judicial voice that speaks to her readers in a remarkably conversational tone. She employs a variety of rhetorical devices: invocations to “remember” or “pretend”; informal and even colloquial diction; a diverse assortment of similes and metaphors; and parenthetical interjections that guide the reader’s response. These strategies engage the reader in much the same way that Kagan as law professor may well have worked to engage her students, and in the context of judicial opinions they serve several purposes. They make Kagan’s opinions accessible to …

Justice Scalia's Truthiness And The Virtues Of Judicial Center, Allen K. Rostron

Indiana Law Journal

Antonin Scalia is by far the Supreme Court’s greatest wit and most colorful personality. When I choose audio clips from the Court’s oral arguments to play in my constitutional law classes, I would like to offer a balanced sample of views from the left and right sides of the Court. But I cannot resist loading up on Scalia sound bites, because in almost every major case he serves up the sharpest questioning and most imaginative hypotheticals. His judicial opinions are also remarkably passionate and frank. If he thinks a lawyer’s or even a fellow Justice’s argument is nonsense, he will …

Introduction: Invited Essays On The Implications Of Windsor And Perry

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.