Courts Commons^™

Problem-Solving Courts And Pragmatism, Richard C. Boldt

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Revisiting The Influence Of Law Clerks On The U.S. Supreme Court's Agenda-Setting Process, Christina L. Boyd, Ryan C. Black, Amanda C. Bryan

Scholarship@WashULaw

Do law clerks influence U.S. Supreme Court Justices’ decisions in the Court’s agenda-setting stage? For those Justices responding to their own law clerks’ cert recommendations, we expect a high degree of agreement between Justice and clerk. For non-employing Justices, however, we anticipate that the likelihood of agreement between clerk and Justice will vary greatly based on the interplay among the ideological compatibility between a Justice and the clerk, the underlying certworthiness of the petition for review, and the clerk’s final recommendation. Relying on a newly collected dataset of petitions making the Court’s discuss list over the 1986 through 1993 Terms, …

Prosecutor V. Taylor, Charles Chernor Jalloh, David P. Stewart

Articles

No abstract provided.

Cyborgs In The Courtroom: The Use Of Google Glass Recordings In Litigation, Kristin Bergman

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

The future is now. Wearable computers such as Google Glass (Glass) have begun entering society—we see people wearing these devices on the streets, in classrooms, at parties, and elsewhere. Though most of these devices are not yet available to the public at large, there has been much hype over the impact Glass will have on our interactions, privacy, safety, and more. Although this Article will briefly address such controversial aspects, it will focus more narrowly on the potential utility of Glass in litigation.

The Return Of Constitutional Federalism, Logan E. Sawyer Iii

Scholarly Works

This article comments on National League of Cities v. Usery, 426 U.S. 833 (1976) and the role played by Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. It argues that the decision did not constitute any “return” to “constitutional federalism” and that, despite claims to the contrary, its inspiration came from the political goals of the Court’s conservative Justices. More specifically it argues that Justice Powell’s role was not influenced simply by contemporary critiques that undermined the “political safeguards of federalism” theory but, rather, that Justice Powell’s political views likely shaped both his understanding of the “political safeguards” thesis and his rejection of …

Neuroscientists In Court, Owen D. Jones, Anthony D. Wagner, David L. Faigman, Marcus E. Raichle

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Neuroscientific evidence is increasingly being offered in court cases. Consequently, the legal system needs neuroscientists to act as expert witnesses who can explain the limitations and interpretations of neuroscientific findings so that judges and jurors can make informed and appropriate inferences. The growing role of neuroscientists in court means that neuroscientists should be aware of important differences between the scientific and legal fields, and, especially, how scientific facts can be easily misunderstood by non-scientists,including judges and jurors.

This article describes similarities, as well as key differences, of legal and scientific cultures. And it explains six key principles about neuroscience that …

Development And Initial Findings Of An Implementation Process Measure For Child Welfare System Change, Mary I. Armstrong, Julie S. Mccrae, Michelle Graef, Tammy Richards, David Lambert, Charlotte Lyn Bright, Cathy Sowell

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

This article describes a new measure designed to examine the process of implementation of child welfare systems change. The measure was developed to document the status of the interventions and strategies that are being implemented and the drivers that are being installed to achieve sustainable changes in systems. The measure was used in a Children’s Bureau-supported national effort to assess the ongoing implementation of 24 systems-change projects in child welfare jurisdictions across the country. The article describes the process for measure development, method of administration and data collection, and quantitative and qualitative findings.

Trans-Substantivity Beyond Procedure, Suzette M. Malveaux

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Administrative State's Passive Virtues, Sharon B. Jacobs

Publications

Fifty years ago, Alexander Bickel famousy suggested that courts use tools like standing, ripeness, and the political question doctrine to avoid reaching the merits of difficult cases. Yet despite the increasingly central role of administrative agencies in government, there have been no efforts to date to apply Bickel's insights to the bureaucracy. This Article remedies that deficit. The Article provides a three-part taxonomy of administrative restraint and offers case studies from federal agencies such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. It argues that agencies sometimes use restraint strategically for reasons …

Bridging The Justice Gap: Exploring Approaches For Improving Indigent Access To Civil Counsel, Kelsey Atkinson

Pomona Senior Theses

The United States is among one of the only democratic industrialized nations in the world that does not provide guaranteed access to civil representation in cases involving basic human need. This leaves indigent litigants who are at risk of losing their homes or their children left to seek counsel through insufficient pro-bono programs or limited scope legal self-help centers. This thesis provides a history of the struggle for the right to civil counsel, known as Civil Gideon, and explores a variety of proposed solutions to bridge the justice gap for indigent litigants. Despite considerable support for Civil Gideon among scholars …

Impeachment By Unreliable Conviction, Anna Roberts

Faculty Articles

This article offers a new critique of Federal Rule of Evidence 609, which permits impeachment of criminal defendants by means of their prior criminal convictions. The article draws on three aspects of the contemporary criminal justice system to show that in admitting convictions for impeachment courts are wrongly assuming that they are necessarily reliable indicators of relative culpability. First, courts assume that convictions are the product of a fair fight, despite the adversarial collapse revealed by the nature of plea-bargaining, the crisis in public defense, and the data on wrongful convictions; second, courts assume that convictions demonstrate relative culpability, despite …

The Siren Is Calling: Economic And Ideological Trends Toward Privatization Of Public Police Forces, Karena Rahall

Faculty Articles

The landmark Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United has opened the floodgates to allow unlimited corporate campaign donations, and Supreme Court doctrine is shifting back to the Lochner-era's focus on economic rights. At the same time, there are efforts underway across the United States to privatize public services in order to alleviate what proponents claim is a shortfall in revenue due to the recession. Within those privatization efforts, public policing has become a new front, with outsourcing and wholesale privatization of the police underway. This article adds to the existing scholarship a political analysis of privatization efforts, including how lobbying …

Fictions Of Omniscience, Karen Petroski

Kentucky Law Journal

Recent studies of the legislative process have questioned the rationales for many principles of statutory interpretation. One of those traditional rationales is the so-called fiction of legislative omniscience, thought to underlie many judicial approaches to statutory decisions. This Article presents the first comprehensive analysis of judicial assertions about legislative awareness and proposes a different way of understanding them. The proposed perspective compares fictions of legislative omniscience with similar but more widely accepted imputations of knowledge in other areas of law; it also draws on recent findings from other disciplines on the use and comprehension of statements about fictional situations. The …

To The Victor Goes The Toil -- Remedies For Regulated Parties In Separation-Of-Powers Litigation, Kent H. Barnett

Scholarly Works

The U.S. Constitution imposes three key limits on the design of federal agencies. It constrains how agency officers are appointed, the extent of their independence from the President, and the range of issues that they can decide. Scholars have trumpeted the importance of these safeguards with soaring rhetoric. And the Supreme Court has permitted regulated parties to vindicate these safeguards through implied private rights of action under the Constitution. Regulated parties, for their part, have been successfully challenging agency structure with increased frequency. At the same time, regulated parties, courts, and scholars have largely ignored the practical question of “structural …

Disparity In Judicial Misconduct Cases: Color-Blind Diversity?, Athena D. Mutua

Journal Articles

This article presents and analyzes preliminary data on racial and gender disparities in state judicial disciplinary actions. Studies of demographic disparities in the context of judicial discipline do not exist. This paper presents a first past and preliminary look at the data collected on the issue and assembled into a database. The article is also motivated by the resistance encountered to inquiries into the demographic profile of the state bench and its judges. As such, it also tells the story of the journey undertaken to secure this information and critiques what the author terms a practice of colorblind diversity. Initially …

The Story Of Prudential Standing, S. Todd Brown

Journal Articles

Prudential standing, it seems, is the latest target in the Roberts Court’s effort to “bring some discipline” to jurisdictional and pseudo-jurisdictional concepts. During the Court’s last two terms, it issued a unanimous opinion that excised the zone of interests test from prudential standing doctrine (Lexmark), two unanimous opinions that questioned federal courts’ prudential discretion to decline jurisdiction (Lexmark and Driehaus), and a bitterly divided opinion in which the classification of a standing principle as prudential or constitutional was decisive (Windsor). Moreover, in Lexmark, the Court suggested that the third party standing principle may not be properly classified as prudential standing …

Religious Law (Especially Islamic Law) In American Courts, Eugene Volokh

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Surprising Acquittals In The Gotovina And Perisic Cases: Is The Icty Appeals Chamber A Trial Chamber In Sheep's Clothing?, Mark A. Summers

Richmond Journal of Global Law & Business

No abstract provided.

The Punishment Agenda In The Courts, Debra Parkes

All Faculty Publications

This paper critically examines the potential of prisoner litigation in Canada to shed light on what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has called “the hidden world of punishment.” It considers whether prisoner’s rights litigation can act as a meaningful legal check on the growing punishment agenda in Canada. The paper begins with a brief description of some aspects of the punishment agenda before moving on to consider case law under the section of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which speaks directly to punishment and its limits, the section 12 right to be free from “cruel and unusual …

The Aftermath Of Hobby Lobby: Hsas And Hras As The Least Restrictive Means, Edward A. Zelinsky

Articles

In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., the United States Supreme Court held that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) does not require closely-held corporations’ employer-sponsored medical plans to provide forms of contraception that shareholders of such corporations object to on religious grounds. The question now raised is how the President, Congress, and the departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Treasury and Labor, ought to respond to the Hobby Lobby decision.