Judges Commons^™

Crafting Precedent, Richard C. Chen

Faculty Publications

(with the Hon. Paul J. Watford & Marco Basile)

How does the law of judicial precedent work in practice? That is the question at the heart of The Law of Judicial Precedent, a recent treatise by Bryan Garner and twelve distinguished appellate judges. The treatise sets aside more theoretical and familiar questions about whether and why earlier decisions (especially wrong ones) should bind courts in new cases. Instead, it offers an exhaustive how-to guide for practicing lawyers and judges: how to identify relevant precedents, how to weigh them, and how to interpret them. This Review takes up the treatise on …

Seen And Heard: A Defense Of Judicial Speech, Dmitry Bam

Faculty Publications

Judicial ethics largely prohibits judges from engaging in political activities, including endorsing or opposing candidates for public office. These restrictions on judicial politicking, intended to preserve both the reality and the appearance of judicial integrity, independence, and impartiality, have been in place for decades. Although the Code of Conduct for United States Judges does not apply to the Supreme Court, Supreme Court Justices have long followed the norm that they do not take sides, at least publicly, in partisan political elections. And while elected state judges have some leeway to engage in limited political activities associated with their own candidacy," …

Tailored Judicial Selection, Dmitry Bam

Faculty Publications

American states have experimented with different methods of judicial selection for two centuries, creating uniquely American models of selection, like judicial elections, rarely used throughout the rest of the world. But despite the wide range of selection methods in existence throughout the nation, neither the American people nor legal scholars have given much thought to tailoring the selection method to particular levels of the judiciary. To the contrary, the most common approach to judicial selection in the United States is what I call a unilocular, “a judge is a judge,” approach. For most of our nation’s history, all judges within …

Judge Gorsuch And Johnson Resentencing (This Is Not A Joke), Leah M. Litman

Michigan Law Review Online

Jan Crawford has reported that President Donald Trump is strongly considering appointing Judge Neil Gorsuch of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit to the U.S. Supreme Court. I do not know Judge Gorsuch, but I do know his opinion in Prost v. Anderson, which is a rather wonky case on a somewhat technical area of federal habeas law. Prost provides an interesting insight into Judge Gorsuch’s jurisprudence. The case concerns an issue on which the courts of appeals disagree, so it provides a nice glimpse into how Judge Gorsuch might address matters that are reasonably …

The Life And Legacy Of Chief Judge Lawrence H. Cooke: "Truly An Exemplary Life. A Life Well Lived", Jay C. Carlisle

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

It is an appropriate tribute to the late Chief Judge of New York, Lawrence H. Cooke, that this article be devoted to a man who many leaders of the bench, bar, and academia consider to be the greatest jurist to ever serve on New York State's highest court. Chief Judge Cooke, better known as Larry, served with honor and distinction as an associate judge of the Court of Appeals, and later as Chief Judge.

Justice Scalia's Labor Jurisprudence- Justice Denied, Anne M. Lofaso

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Confirm Myra Selby For The Seventh Circuit, Carl W. Tobias

Indiana Law Journal

This Article canvasses Myra Selby’s dynamic professional record, the federal judicial selection process under President Obama, and the Seventh Circuit. It ascertains that Selby is an exceptionally competent, mainstream prospect and that the appellate court requires all of its members to deliver justice. However, Republican senators did not collaborate, particularly after they had captured a Senate majority—a circumstance that this presidential election year aggravates. The last section, therefore, proffers recommendations for Selby’s prompt Senate consideration and confirmation.

How Conservative Justices Are Undertermining Our Democracy (Or What's At Stake In Choosing Justice Scalia, Alan E. Garfield

Indiana Law Journal

In this essay, Professor Garfield contends that the conservative justices on the Supreme Court have allowed elected officials to manipulate laws to entrench themselves in office and to disenfranchise voters who threaten their power. The justices’ unwillingness to curb these abuses has largely redounded to the benefit of the Republican Party because Republicans control the majority of state legislatures and have used this power to gerrymander legislative districts and to enact voter‑suppressive laws such as voter ID laws. With Justice Antonin Scalia’s unexpected passing during the administration of a Democratic president, the conservatives’ control of the Court has been put …

Intangible Fish And The Gulf Of Understanding: Yates V. United States And The Court's Approach To Statutory Interpretation, John M. Garvin

Indiana Law Journal

Is a fish a tangible object? The answer in most cases is obviously “yes.” But in Yates v. United States, the Supreme Court held that fish are outside the meaning of the phrase “tangible object” as it is used in the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002. This Note argues that the Yates decision provides a lens with which to examine the Court’s contemporary methods of statutory interpretation. In adopting the textualist vocabulary most famously associated with the late Justice Scalia, the Justices have committed to speaking the same language. Still, fundamental differences between the Justices remain. These differences expose the …

Dirty Laundry: Judicial Appointments In Canada, Richard Devlin

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The issue of the appointment of judges is not a freestanding problem. Rather, as Adam Dodek and I have argued, it is part of a larger public policy puzzle, the challenge of designing an appropriate regulatory regime for judges. Any description, analysis, assessment or critique of judicial appointments processes necessarily requires the development and deployment of some conceptual framework. Sometimes such a framework is implicit or taken for granted. However, in our opinion, it is better if we can make that framework—that paradigm—explicit because we can then more clearly understand the nature of the evaluative process in which we are …

Some Initial Thoughts On Wilson V. Atomic Energy Of Canada Ltd And Edmonton (City) V. Edmonton East (Capilano) Shopping Centres Ltd, Diana Ginn

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Administrative law focusses on the way in which, and the extent to which, courts should oversee the exercise of administrative authority. The law on substantive review of administrative decision-making has changed drastically over the last several decades, particularly around choice of standard of review. In the words of the Honorable John M Evans, courts have returned to this issue “with almost monotonous regularity over the last 30 years”. Two Supreme Court of Canada decisions from 2016, Wilson v Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd and Edmonton (City) v Edmonton East (Capilano) Shopping Centres Ltd, have regenerated discussion about standard of …

The Supreme Court Of Canada And Federalism: Does / Should Anyone Care Anymore?, A. Wayne Mackay

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Federalism is still a relevant and vital aspect of Canadian Constitutional Law. Although a lower profile aspect than the Charter of Rights and Aboriginal rights (and in common parlance less "sexy"), the division of powers continues to an important part of the work of the Supreme Court of Canada and part of what defines us as a nation. The author argues that the Supreme Court has pursued an increasingly contextualized approach to division of powers issues - one that abandons the arid legalism of earlier days, in favour of a broad social analysis of issues based on extensive use of …

Justice, Interrupted: The Effect Of Gender, Ideology, And Seniority At Supreme Court Oral Arguments, Tonja Jacobi, Dylan Schweers

Faculty Articles

Oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court are important—they affect case outcomes and constitute the only opportunity for outsiders to directly witness the behavior of the Justices of the highest court. This Article studies how the Justices compete to have influence at oral argument, by examining the extent to which the Justices interrupt each other; it also scrutinizes how advocates interrupt the Justices, contrary to the rules of the Court. We find that judicial interactions at oral argument are highly gendered, with women being interrupted at disproportionate rates by their male colleagues, as well as by male advocates. Oral argument …

Judging Law In Election Cases, Michael S. Kang, Joanna Shepherd

Faculty Articles

In Part I, we introduce our earlier work on election cases and judicial partisanship before setting forth our new approach to studying the influence of law on judicial decisionmaking. We describe the special nature of the election cases in our database that allow more persuasive inferences of judicial partisanship than typically derived in empirical work on judicial behavior. We then explain our new approach for measuring case strength based on counterpartisan decisionmaking by judges. In Part II, we apply our approach to case strength to our dataset and present our results. In a nutshell, partisanship appears to matter as expected …

Combating The Ninth Circuit Judicial Vacancy Crisis, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

When Donald Trump became President, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had four judicial vacancies that the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AO) identified as “judicial emergencies.” The court also faces a larger caseload than all the other regional circuits, and has frequently decided appeals the least swiftly. The 2016 election returns indicate that more confirmations will be necessary due to additional court members’ probable retirement or assumption of senior status during President Trump’s administration. Striking politicization could frustrate this effort, however. Soon after the inauguration, President Trump signed a novel executive order proscribing U.S. …

I Dissent: The Federal Circuit's "Great Dissenter," Her Influence On The Patent Dialogue, And Why It Matters, Daryl Lim

Faculty Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Reforming Military Justice: An Analysis Of The Military Justice Act Of 2016, David A. Schlueter

St. Mary's Law Journal

The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), 10 USC §§ 801-946, is the statutory template for the United States' military justice system. The UCMJ addresses topics such as court-martial jurisdiction, and pretrial, trial, and appellate procedures. It also includes punitive articles which proscribe, not only common law offenses, but also offenses unique to the military. Congress made significant changes to the UCMJ in the Military Justice Act of 2016. The legislation not only amended a significant number of existing articles, but also added many new articles. In addition, Congress completely reorganized the punitive articles. In this article, Professor Schlueter addresses …

Exemplary Legal Writing 2016: Books Selected By Our Respectable Authorities: Five Recommendations, Femi Cadmus

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Sixteenth Annual Albert A. Destefano Lecture On Corporate, Securities & Financial Law At The Fordham Corporate Law Center, Sean J. Griffith, The Honorable Andre G. Bouchard

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

No abstract provided.

Judge Lawrence W. Kaplan And His Court Cases In Family Division, Court Of Common Pleas Of Allegheny County (1980-1990), Joel Fishman

Law Faculty Publications

In the last issue of the Pennsylvania Family Lawyer, I compiled a list of family law cases decided by Judge R. Stanton Wettick, Jr. for the decade of the 1980s when the Divorce Code was first introduced into the Commonwealth. The local court was a leader in deciding cases that set forth many of the principles that the appellate courts adopted as new law developed. In this article, I present the cases of Judge Lawrence Kaplan who served his entire judicial career in the Allegheny Court of Common Pleas from June 30, 1978 until his retirement on Augst 12, 1998 …