Courts Commons^™

A Social Psychology Model Of The Perceived Legitimacy Of International Criminal Courts, Stuart Ford

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

There is a large body of literature arguing that positive perceived legitimacy is a critical factor in the success of international criminal courts, and that courts can be engineered in such a way that they will be positively perceived by adjusting factors such as their institutional structure and outreach efforts. But in many situations the perceived legitimacy of international criminal courts has almost nothing to do with these factors. This Article takes the latest research in social psychology and applies it to survey data about perceptions of international criminal courts in order to understand how affected populations form attitudes about …

Cost As A Sentencing Factor: Missouri's Experiment, Chad W. Flanders

All Faculty Scholarship

In sentencing offenders, should judges take into account the different costs of possible punishments? In 2010, Missouri gave sentencing judges, in addition to information about the nature and severity of the offense and the criminal history of the offender, the price tag of various punishments: prison cost about $17,000 a year, compared to probation, which is much cheaper (about $7000 per year). Judges were allowed, even encouraged, to base their sentences on how much it each sentence would cost the state. The move was a subject of considerable national and local controversy.

This essay represents the first sustained look at …

Reverse Abstention, Samuel P. Jordan

All Faculty Scholarship

State courts decide claims based on federal or sister-state law every day. Although the applicable constitutional provisions are different, there are significant similarities in the way the Supreme Court conceptualizes the constraints on how those claims must be treated. One project of this Article is to chart those similarities, providing a unified account of the Court’s approach to judicial federalism. The larger project, however, is not to describe the Court’s approach, but to replace it. The current emphasis on discrimination and interference imposes burdensome and unwarranted obligations on state courts. A more flexible approach to judicial federalism is needed, and …

Lifting The Veil Of Secrecy: Judicial Review Of Administrative Detentions In The Israeli Supreme Court, Shiri Krebs

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

All around the world, hundreds of individuals are constantly subjected to administrative detentions designed to prevent them from committing future atrocities. Generally, the main protection against arbitrary and unjustified administrative detentions is judicial review. Nonetheless, judicial review of administrative detention proceedings suffers from inherent difficulties and is typically based on ex parte proceedings and secret evidence. In spite of these difficulties and based on a few renowned cases, it is widely accepted in the scholarly debates that the Israeli judicial review model is robust and effective. Therefore, prominent international law scholars often recommend the adoption of this model in various …

A Trilogy Of "Difficult And Complex" Arbitration Issues In 2012, Darius Chan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

At the end of 2011, the Singapore High Court in Re David Joseph QC [2011] SGHC 262 (per VK Rajah JA) permitted the admission of an English Queen’s Counsel, David Joseph QC, to represent eight entities of the Astro Group, a Malaysian broadcasting and media entity, in proceedings arising from an arbitration with three subsidiaries of Indonesia’s Lippo Group. Under Singapore’s current statutory scheme, the court may admit QCs on an ad hoc basis if a matter contains issues of fact or law of “sufficient difficulty and complexity”, and if the circumstances of the case warrant it. The High Court …

Pluralism On Appeal, Paul Gugliuzza

Faculty Scholarship

In a thoughtful response to my article, Rethinking Federal Circuit Jurisdiction, Ori Aronson notes that judges “work in context, be it social, cultural, or...institutional,” and that “context matters” to their decisions. Indeed, the primary aim of my article was to spur a conversation about the context in which the judges of the Federal Circuit — who have near plenary control over U.S. patent law — decide cases. That context includes many matters in narrow areas of law that bear little relation to the innovation and economic concerns that should animate patent law. To inject those concerns into the court’s province, …

The New Federal Circuit Mandamus, Paul Gugliuzza

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores an ongoing revolution in the mandamus jurisprudence of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the court of appeals with nearly exclusive jurisdiction over patent cases. Before December 2008, the Federal Circuit had never used the interlocutory writ of mandamus to order a district court to transfer a case to a more convenient forum, denying each one of the twenty-two petitions it had decided on that issue. Since that time, however, the court has overturned eleven different venue decisions on mandamus. Remarkably, ten of those eleven cases have come from the same district court, the …

The Emerging Enforcement Practice Of The International Criminal Court, Hirad Abtahi, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

The dual enforcement regime of the International Criminal Court constitutes a fundamental pillar of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and represents a novel system within the history of international criminal law. This article is the first to focus on the emerging practice of the Court as it begins developing and implementing this unique enforcement regime. Drawing directly from the recent history within the Presidency and focusing on the current activities of the Trust Fund for Victims, this Article explains how, why, and in what direction the Court’s enforcement practice is evolving.

Aedpa Mea Culpa, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, the author contends that the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 [AEDPA] has frustrated both the enforcement of federal rights and legitimate state interests. He lays most of the blame on the Supreme Court's methodology for construing AEDPA's provisions. The Court insists that poorly conceived and drafted provisions must be taken literally, whatever the consequences, and that every provision must be read to change habeas corpus law in some way. This approach has produced unfair, wasteful, and even bizarre results that might have been avoided if the Court had assessed AEDPA more realistically.

Structuring Jurisdictional Rules And Standards, Scott Dodson, Elizabeth Mccuskey

Faculty Scholarship

Jonathan Remy Nash's article, On the Efficient Deployment of Rules and Standards to Define Federal Jurisdiction, bravely tackles and creatively merges-the dual debates over rules versus standards and the ideal contours of federal jurisdiction.' He proposes a revised regime in which rules define jurisdictional boundaries at the front end, while standards "migrate" into a discretionary abstention phase at the back end.² This realignment, Nash argues, optimizes efficiency and predictability by placing a bright-line rule at the jurisdictional threshold, while promoting federalism by establishing a safety net that applies standards to claims that cross the threshold. ³ In this …

Clarity And Clarification: Grable Federal Questions In The Eyes Of Their Beholders, Elizabeth Mccuskey

Faculty Scholarship

Jurists and commentators have repeated for centuries the refrain that jurisdictional rules should be clear.' Behind this mantra is the idea that clearly designed jurisdictional rules should enable trial courts to apply the law more easily and therefore allow litigants to predict more accurately how trial courts will rule^.2 The mantra's ultimate goal is efficiency-that trial courts not labor too long on jurisdiction and, most important, that litigants can accurately predict the correct forum and choose to spend their money litigating the merits of their claim, rather than where it will be heard. Jurisdictional clarity largely is devoted …

No History, No Certainty, No Legitimacy . . . No Problem: Originalism And The Limits Of Legal Theory, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Martin H. Redish is on the warpath. Like General Sherman marching toward Atlanta (or Justin Tuck marching toward Tom Brady), Professor Redish, together with Matthew Arnould,1 lays waste to every constitutional theory that he encounters. Originalism, with its “belief that constitutional interpretation should be characterized exclusively by an effort to determine the Constitution’s meaning by means of some form of historical inquiry,”2 generates “an often contrived and opaque veil of historical inquiry”3 that provides “an ideal smokescreen behind which judges may pursue their personal[,] moral, political[,] or economic goals with relative impunity.”4 Nontextual theories, for their part, “permit[] selective …

Custody Rights Of Lesbian And Gay Parents Redux: The Irrelevance Of Constitutional Principles, Nancy Polikoff

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Disputes over custody and visitation can arise when a marriage ends and one parent comes out as gay or lesbian. the heterosexual parent may seek custody or may seek to restrict the activities of the gay or lesbian parent, or the presence of the parent's same-sex partner, during visitation. A gay or lesbian parent's assertion of constitutional rights has not been an effective response to such efforts. that is not likely to change. Advocates for gay and lesbian parents have argued forcefully for a nexus text, permitting consideration of a parent's sexual orientation only when there is evidence of an …

Film Review: Mississippi Innocence And The Prosecutor’S Guilt, Angela J. Davis

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Film review of Mississippi Innocence. A documentary film by Joe York. Media and Documentary Projects at the University of Mississippi (2011)

Do Boumediene Rights Expire?, Andrew Kent

Faculty Scholarship

In 2008, Guantanamo detainees won a landmark victory in Boumediene v. Bush, which held that the Congress and the President could not prevent the detainees from accessing the courts to seek release via habeas corpus. The Court decided that persons claiming to be innocent civilians deserved a day in court, even though they were noncitizens held by the U.S. military as enemy combatants on foreign territory. The Court applied a fact-specific test that granted habeas rights to noncitizens outside the United States only when a balance of factors — including citizenship, enemy status, the nature of status review procedures, the …

Undermining Congressional Overrides: The Hydra Problem In Statutory Interpretation, Deborah Widiss

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Statutory overrides — that is, amendments to supersede a judicial interpretation of a statute — are the primary mechanism by which Congress signals disagreement with court interpretations; they are essential to protect the separation of powers and the promise of legislative supremacy. But in Gross v. FBL Financial Services, the Supreme Court held that Congress’s override of a judicial interpretation of Title VII did not control the interpretation of identical language in the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, and further that Congress’s “neglecting” to amend the ADEA when it amended Title VII was a clear signal that Congress intended the …

Africa And The International Criminal Court, Charles C. Jalloh

Articles

No abstract provided.

Elected Judges And Statutory Interpretation, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

This Article considers whether differences in methods of judicial selection should influence how judges approach statutory interpretation. Courts and scholars have not given this question much sustained attention, but most would probably embrace the “unified model,” according to which appointed judges (such as federal judges) and elected judges (such as many state judges) are supposed to approach statutory text in identical ways. There is much to be said for the unified model—and we offer the first systematic defense of it. But the Article also attempts to make the best case for the more controversial but also plausible contrary view: that …

Significant Entanglements: A Framework For The Civil Consequences Of Criminal Convictions, Colleen F. Shanahan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A significant and growing portion of the United States population is or has recently been in prison. Nearly all of these individuals will face significant obstacles as they struggle to reintegrate into society. A key source of these obstacles is the complex, sometimes unknown, and often harmful collection of civil consequences that flow from a criminal conviction. As the number and severity of these consequences have grown, courts, policymakers, and scholars have struggled with how to identify and understand them, how to communicate them to defendants and the public, and how to treat them in the criminal and civil processes. …

New Paths For The Court: Protections Afforded Juveniles Under Miranda; Effective Assistance Of Counsel; And Habeas Corpus Decisions Of The Supreme Court’S 2010/2011 Term, Richard Klein

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.