Judges Commons^™

Beyond Principal-Agent Theories: Law And The Judicial Hierarchy, Pauline T. Kim

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Chief Justice, The Appointment Of Inferior Officers, And The "Court Of Law" Requirement, James E. Pfander

Northwestern University Law Review

In addition to his judicial duties, the Chief Justice presides over a sprawling judicial bureaucracy. Each year, the Chief fills positions within that bureaucracy, designating Article III judges to various specialty courts and appointing such officers as the director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Although critics worry that the Chief may use his appointment role to shape Third Branch policy unduly, scholars view the role as constitutionally benign. This Article questions the Chief’s role. The Constitution authorizes Congress to vest the appointment of inferior officers in the “courts of law” but not the Chief Justice. History teaches …

A Typology Of Judging Styles, Corey Rayburn Yung

Northwestern University Law Review

This Article calls into question the fundamental premises of models of judicial decisionmaking utilized by legal and political science scholars. In the place of the predominant theories, I offer a new approach to understanding judicial behavior which recognizes judicial heterogeneity, multidimensional behavior, and interconnectedness among judges at different levels within the judiciary. The study utilizes a unique dataset of over 30,000 judicial votes from eleven courts of appeals in 2008, yielding statistically independent measures for judicial activism, ideology, independence, and partisanship. Based upon those four metrics, statistical cluster analysis is used to identify nine statistically distinct judging styles: Trailblazing, Consensus …

Trial By Google: Judicial Notice In The Information Age, Jeffrey Bellin, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Northwestern University Law Review

This Article presents a theory of judicial notice for the information age. It argues that the ease of accessing factual data on the Internet allows judges and litigants to expand the use of judicial notice in ways that raise significant concerns about admissibility, reliability, and fair process. State and federal courts are already applying the surprisingly pliant judicial notice rules to bring websites ranging from Google Maps to Wikipedia into the courtroom, and these decisions will only increase in frequency in coming years. This rapidly emerging judicial phenomenon is notable for its ad hoc and conclusory nature—attributes that have the …

Public Interest Lawyering & Judicial Politics: Four Cases Worth A Second Look In Williams-Yulee V. The Florida Bar, Ruthann Robson

Publications and Research

This "First Look" Essay argues that the Court should consider public interest lawyering when it decides a First Amendment challenge to the Canon prohibiting judicial candidates from soliciting money in Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar. It suggests that four cases are worth a "second look": Republican Party of Minnesota v. White (2002); Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. (2009); Shelley v. Kraemer (1948); and a Florida Supreme Court case involving discipline of a judge, In re Hawkins.

Gossiping About Judges, Jordan M. Singer

Florida State University Law Review

Gossip about judges is an essential source of information to civil litigators. Hearing third party assessments of a judge’s personality, demeanor, intelligence, curiosity, and openness to new interpretations of the law can substantially affect a lawyer’s strategic decisions during the course of litigation, and sometimes whether litigation occurs at all. Yet gossip about judges rarely merits mention and has evaded serious study. This Article brings attorney gossip about judges out into the open, identifying its strategic benefits and drawbacks and explaining how attorneys use gossip (and other secondhand information on judges) to anticipate the likely outcome of judicial decisions. It …

A Conversation With Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice Of The Supreme Court Of The United States, University Of Michigan Law School

Event Materials

Program for the 2015 Tanner Lecture on Human Values on February 6, 2015, sponsored by the University of Michigan Law School and the University of Michigan LSA Department of Philosophy.

The State Of Recusal Reform, Charles G. Geyh, Myles Lynk, Robert S. Peck, Toni Clarke

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Addressing Three Problems In Commentary On Catholics At The Supreme Court By Reference To Three Decades Of Catholic Bishops' Amicus Briefs, Kevin C. Walsh

Scholarly Articles

Much commentary about Catholic Justices serving on the Supreme Court suffers from three related shortcomings: (1) episodic, one-case-at-a-time commentary; (2) asymmetric causal attributions resulting from inattention to cases in which Catholic Justices vote for outcomes opposite those advocated by the Catholic Bishops' Conference; and (3) inattention to broader jurisprudential and ideological factors. This article uses an overlooked resource to identify and counteract these shortcomings. It assesses the votes of the Justices-Catholic and non-Catholic alike-in the full set of cases from the Rehnquist Court and the Roberts Court (through June 2014) in which the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops filed …

Changing The Rules Of The (International) Game: How International Law Is Turning National Courts Into International Political Actors, Osnat Grady Schwartz

Washington International Law Journal

Courts are known to be political actors. National courts play the political game in the national domain. International courts play it in the international sphere. This article studies the transformation of national courts into international political actors (IPAs), and the part international law plays in so making them. The article identifies, categorizes, and demonstrates the influence of national courts and judges on international relations (IR), separating the influence into two main categories: direct and indirect. Direct influence, is the effect of a national court taking a position on international issues in concrete situations with immediate IR implications. Indirect influence is …

The Rise And Fall Of Bad Judge: Lady Justice Is No Tramp, Taylor Simpson-Wood

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Of Judges, Law, And The River: Tacit Knowledge And The Judicial Role, Chad M. Oldfather

Journal of Dispute Resolution

“What does it mean to be a judge?” That’s a tall order, and one is tempted to begin—and perhaps to end—by formulating taxonomy of characteristics that judges ought to have. Indeed, that is a tactic that others have used. The resulting lists differ in their particulars, but are broadly similar. The enumerated traits include attributes like intelligence, legal knowledge, judgment, decisiveness, and so on.

Believable Victims: Asylum Credibility And The Struggle For Objectivity, Michael Kagan

Scholarly Works

Asylum adjudication is often the invisible frontline in the struggle by oppressed groups to gain recognition for their plights. Through this process, individual people must tell their stories and try to show that they are genuine victims of persecution rather than simply illegal immigrants attempting to slip through the system. In 2002, because the world had not yet acknowledged the nature of the calamity from which they were escaping, many Darfurian asylum cases would have relied on the ability of each individual to convince government offices to believe their stories. They would have had to be deemed “credible,” or they …

A Rhetorician’S Practical Wisdom, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

For three years, I had the great good fortune to work in the office next to Jack Sammons. My good fortune extended to a coincidence of timing that allowed me to work with Jack on a co-authored article, The Law's Mystery. During the time I worked next door, I felt cursed by an inability to grasp concepts that to Jack appeared inevitable and essential, whether those inevitabilities and essences were to be found within the law, good lawyering, or good legal education. The curse persisted throughout the writing of The Law's Mystery.

For Jack, the essence of a …

Assumed Sane, Fatma Marouf

Scholarly Works

In 2014, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) held in Matter of G-G-S- that a noncitizen’s mental health status at the time of an offense is irrelevant to determining whether the offense is a “particularly serious crime” for immigration purposes. Since a “particularly serious crime” is a bar to asylum and withholding of removal, it can result in a noncitizen’s deportation to a country where he or she faces a serious risk of persecution. In deciding that immigration judges “are constrained by how mental health issues were addressed as part of the criminal proceedings,” the BIA failed to recognize the …

Marriage Equality Comes To Wisconsin, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Marriage equality has swept America. Numerous federal judges, including Western District of Wisconsin Judge Barbara Crabb, have invalidated state proscriptions on same-sex marriage. This paper scrutinizes U.S. litigation, Crabb’s opinion, Seventh Circuit affirmance, and Supreme Court resolution. Finding that Wisconsin shows how to efficaciously institute full marriage equality, even as other states have not, the piece affords future suggestions.

Unspringing The Witness Memory And Demeanor Trap: What Every Judge And Juror Needs To Know About Cognitive Psychology And Witness Credibility, Mark W. Bennett

American University Law Review

The soul of America's civil and criminal justice systems is the ability of jurors and judges to accurately determine the facts of a dispute. This invariably implicates the credibility of witnesses. In making credibility determinations, jurors and judges necessarily decide the accuracy of witnesses' memories and the effect of the witnesses' demeanor on their credibility. Almost all jurisdictions' pattern jury instructions about witness credibility explain nothing about how a witness's memories for events and conversations work-and how startlingly fallible memories actually are. They simply instruct the jurors to consider the witness's "memory" with no additional guidance. Similarly, the same pattern …

Get Out From Under Your Overcoat, Jeanne J. Graham

William Mitchell Law Review

No abstract provided.

Judicial Selection In Congress’ Lame Duck Session, Carl W. Tobias

Indiana Law Journal

This Article first scrutinizes the Obama Administration confirmation and nomination processes. It then critically explores selection and concludes that Republican obstruction instigated the most open positions the longest time. Because this deficiency undermines swift, economical, and fair case resolution, the Article suggests ideas to promptly decrease the remaining unoccupied judgeships after the session commences.

Choosing A Court To Review The Executive, Joseph Mead, Nicholas Fromherz

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

For more than one hundred years, Congress has experimented with review of agency action by single-judge district courts, multiple-judge district courts, and direct review by circuit courts. This tinkering has not given way to a stable design. Rather than settling on a uniform scheme—or at least a scheme with a discernible organizing principle— Congress has left litigants with a jurisdictional maze that varies unpredictably across and within statutes and agencies.

In this Article, we offer a fresh look at the theoretical and empirical factors that ought to inform the allocation of the judicial power between district and circuit courts in …