Judges Commons^™

Judicial Retirement And Return To Practice, Mary Clark

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This Article engages recent scholarly debates about U.S. Supreme Court tenure and retirement practices, specifically those concerning the merits of adopting eighteen-year term limits or mandatory retirement for Supreme Court Justices. It broadens the discussion by including all Article III judges and by addressing former Article III judges’ return to practice following resignation or retirement, which has been largely ignored in the literature to date despite what I have found to be the return-to-practice rate of over forty percent in the last two decades.

This Article advocates retaining life tenure because it promotes institutional and individual judicial independence better than …

Roberts’ Rules: The Assertiveness Of Rules-Based Jurisprudence, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Conflicted Assumptions Of Modern Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

Contribution to Symposium - The Nature of Judicial Authority: A Reflection on Philip Hamburger's Law and Judicial Duty

Public Funding Of Judicial Campaigns: The North Carolina Experience And The Activism Of The Supreme Court, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the problem of selecting judges to sit on the highest state courts has become a national crisis. North Carolina remains among the states whose constitutions require competitive elections of all its judges. Presently, all candidates for its judicial offices must first compete for election in a non-partisan primary, a system motivated by the desire to maximize the power of the state’s citizen-voters to choose their judges and hold them accountable for their fidelity to the law. Some observers have continued to celebrate such judicial elections as an honorable democratic empowerment, while others have not. The disagreement has …

Judging Women, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Mirya Holman, Eric A. Posner

Faculty Scholarship

Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s assertion that female judges might be “better” than male judges has generated accusations of sexism and potential bias. An equally controversial claim is that male judges are better than female judges because the latter have benefited from affirmative action. These claims are susceptible to empirical analysis. Primarily using a dataset of all the state high court judges in 1998-2000, we estimate three measures of judicial output: opinion production, outside state citations, and co-partisan disagreements. We find that the male and female judges perform at about the same level. Roughly similar findings show up in data from the …

Targeted Killing: The Case Of Anwar Al-Aulaqi, John C. Dehn, Kevin Jon Heller

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Courts' Increasing Consideration Of Behavioral Genetics Evidence In Criminal Cases: Results Of A Longitudinal Study, Deborah W. Denno

Faculty Scholarship

This article, which is part of a symposium honoring David Baldus, presents a unique study of all criminal cases (totaling thirty-three) that addressed behavioral genetics evidence from June 1, 2007, to July 1, 2011. The study builds upon this author’s prior research on all criminal cases (totaling forty-eight) that used such evidence during the preceding thirteen years (1994-2007). This combined collection of eighty-one criminal cases employing behavioral genetics evidence offers a rich context for determining how the criminal justice system has been handling genetics factors for nearly two decades, but also why the last four years reveal particularly important discoveries. …

In Praise Of Procedurally Centered Judicial Disqualification - And A Stronger Conception Of The Appearance Standard: Better Acknowledging And Adjusting To Cognitive Bias, Spoliation And Perceptual Realities, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Remarks By Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, Neal K. Katyal

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Few have served the public with greater distinction than Justice John Paul Stevens. That service began with Justice Stevens's work as a naval intelligence officer during World War II, continued through his five years of service as a judge on the Seventh Circuit, and culminated with thirty-four and a half years on the United States Supreme Court. It also included a twenty-six-day stint in September 2005, during which Justice Stevens served as the Acting Chief Justice of the United States.

Remarks By Dean William M. Treanor, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Attorney General Levy produced a list of candidates for President Ford and it seems clear he particularly highlighted then-Judge Stevens. President Ford took the list, he read some of then-Judge Stevens’s opinions which he pronounced concise, persuasive, and legally sound. He slept on his decision and the following day he nominated Justice Stevens, who was confirmed within three weeks ninety-eight to nothing. So it was a very different world, but it’s also a testament to Justice Stevens and the respect that he held in the bench and the bar at that time.

Justice Stevens’s legacy on the Court accords with …

The Political Economy Of Jus Cogens, Paul B. Stephan

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Article examines the basis of an asserted jus cogens exception to sovereign immunity. It demonstrates that the vision of jus cogens one embraces depends on background assumptions about the present and future of the international system. A robust conception of jus cogens assumes: (1) that independent judges and tribunals, informed by the views of non-state actors, can identify core international obligations and manage their tradeoffs with other values pursued by the international legal system, and (2) that the actions of independent judges and tribunals, informed by non-state actors, will influence state behavior. Doubts about the abilities of judges and …

An Expectation Of Empathy, Steve Leben

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Law, Politics, And The Erosion Of Legitimacy In The Delaware Courts, Kent Greenfield

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

American Academy Of Religion V. Napolitano, Margaret Laufman

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Appellate Judges And Philosophical Theories: Judicial Philosophy Or Mere Coincidence, Gerald R. Ferrer, Mystica Alexander

Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest

This paper suggests that judicial opinions often reflect ajudge's position on what is ethical and useful in the real world of constitutional values. It further suggests that an appreciation of legal philosophical theory assists one in understanding the ethical and public policy dimensions of a court's opinion. Do judges' opinions parallel philosophical theories constructed by philosophers or is any apparent relationship mere coincidence? This paper suggests the former-that a judge's belief system, education, and experiences 2 include the adoption of judicial philosophies, the expression of which can be found in his or her written opinions.

Iowa’S 2010 Judicial Election: Appropriate Accountability Or Rampant Passion?, Roy A. Schotland

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Although 89% of state judges (appellate and general-jurisdiction trial judges) face some type of election, judicial elections are rarely thought of even by academics interested in elections. Iowa’s 2010 election, in which three Justices were defeated, is one of the most significant judicial elections ever. The Justices lost their seats because they participated in a unanimous 2009 decision upholding gay marriage. That decision stirred intense opposition among “social conservatives”, in Iowa a substantial proportion of the population and actively led by more than 100 ministers.

That active opposition was one of eight elements that created a perfect storm against the …

Passive-Voice References In Statutory Interpretation, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court regularly references grammar rules when interpreting statutory language. And yet grammar references play a peculiar role in the Court's statutory cases—often lurking in the background and performing corroborative work to support a construction arrived at primarily through other interpretive tools. The inevitable legisprudential question triggered by such references is, why does the Court bother? If grammar rules provide merely a second, third, or fourth justification for an interpretation reached through other interpretive canons, then what does the Court gain—or think it gains—by including such rules in its statutory analysis?

This essay examines these questions through the lens …

Preface, Stanley W. Hammer

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Failed Constitutional Metaphors: The Wall Of Separation And The Penumbra, Louis J. Sirico Jr.

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Electing Our Judges And Judicial Independence: The Supreme Court's "Triple Whammy", Martin Belsky

Akron Law Faculty Publications

In this article, Martin Belsky makes the case for judicial selection based on merit, as opposed to popular elections. Belsky cites Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Company and the recent defeat of three Iowa supreme court justices because of their opinion in a controversial gay marriage case for the proposition that judicial elections can, and do, yield unjust results. Belsky asserts the need for judicial independence, but concludes that this goal is not achievable through elections because of the "triple whammy" of constitutional limitations: (1) the First Amendment protection of the right of judges and judicial candidates to give specific, …