Judges Commons^™

Mcculloch At 200, David S. Schwartz

Arkansas Law Review

March 6, 2019 marked the 200th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s issuance of its decision in McCulloch v. Maryland, upholding the constitutionality of the Second Bank of the United States, the successor to Alexander Hamilton’s national bank. McCulloch v. Maryland involved a constitutional challenge by the Second Bank of the United States to a Maryland tax on the banknotes issued by the Bank’s Baltimore branch. The tax was probably designed to raise the Second Bank’s cost of issuing loans and thereby disadvantage it relative to Maryland’s own state-chartered banks. Marshall’s opinion famously rejected the Jeffersonian strict-constructionist argument that implied powers …

Why Women: Judging Transnational Courts And Tribunals, Bridget J. Crawford, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Linda L. Berger

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Calls for greater representation of women on the bench are not new. Many people share the intuition that having more female judges would make a difference to the decisions that courts might reach or how courts arrive at those decisions. This hunch has only equivocal empirical support, however. Nevertheless legal scholars, consistent with traditional feminist legal methods, persist in asking how many women judges there are and what changes might bring more women to the bench. This essay argues that achieving diversity in international courts and tribunals – indeed on any bench – will not happen simply by having more …

Judges Versus Jurors: Biased Attributions In The Courtroom, Goran Dominioni, Pieter Desmet, Louis Visscher

Cornell International Law Journal

The fundamental purpose of a tort trial is to allocate responsibility. However, attributing fault is difficult, and decades of research in psychology have shown that human beings are prone to make systematic errors in performing this task. What can be done about this? The United States and countries in continental Europe adopt diametrically opposed strategies to reduce errors in the attribution of responsibility in the courtroom. American law delegates fact-finding to jurors and makes some type of evidence inadmissible in court to protect jurors from potentially biasing information, such as character evidence. European legal systems, instead, employ almost exclusively judges …

Judging During Crises: Can Judges Protect The Facts?, Lissa Griffin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

With the advent of instantaneous information and the trend toward shrinking adherence to the truth, the conversation surrounding the ability of judges to conduct outside research into the matters before them is gaining urgency. In a “post-truth” world, the role that the judiciary plays in our democracy must shift from trier of fact to guardian of factual integrity. And to do this, the professional ethics rules assigned to the judiciary may need re-evaluation.

This Essay argues that the judiciary's ambivalence to its role as fact finder must be overcome, and where appropriate, judges may be empowered to seek out supplemental …

Judging Judges Fifty Years After – Was Judge Julius Hoffman’S Conduct So Different?, Bennett L. Gershman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In Chicago, Illinois--and in courtrooms across the United States--judicial misconduct has affected trial outcomes as long as there have been trials. While Judge Julius Hoffman's conduct in the “Chicago Eight” trial is an egregious example of judicial behavior toward criminal defendants, this piece's examination of at least ten different categories of misconduct in dozens of cases makes the argument that misbehavior by judges is less of an exception to the rule of impartiality than the thinking public might know. In considering these brazen examples, practitioners and academics alike can evaluate how to best confront the extent to which conduct like …

Raising The Bar: Law Clerks Pay Tribute To Judge Adkins, Monica Basche, Michael Collins Jr.

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rediscovering The Issue Class In Mass Tort Mdls, Myriam E. Gilles, Gary Friedman

Articles

For the past twenty-plus years, MDL transferee judges have essentially regarded the class device as unavailable as they struggle to organize masses of tort actions sent their way by the JPML. Even the badges and incidents of class practice, in the form of common-fund-based approaches to attorney compensation and lead-counsel structures for case organization, have come under attack from commentators who insist that mass-tort MDLs should not be treated as “quasi-class actions,” and that Rule 23 does not present a “grab bag” from which MDL judges may pick and choose the most convenient implements. Leading lights of the complex litigation …

Law Library Blog (July 2019): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

State Constitutionalism In The Age Of Party Polarization, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Brief History Of Judicial Appointments From The Last 50 Years Through The Trump Administration, Donald F. Mcgahn Ii

William & Mary Law Review Online

This is the transcript of a lecture Mr. McGahn delivered at William & Mary Law School on November 19, 2018.

Digital Realty, Legislative History, And Textualism After Scalia, Michael Francus

Pepperdine Law Review

There is a shift afoot in textualism. The New Textualism of Justice Scalia is evolving in response to a new wave of criticism. That criticism presses on the tension between Justice Scalia’s commitment to faithful agency (effecting the legislature’s will) and his rejection of legislative history in the name of ordinary meaning (which ignores legislative will). And it has caused some textualists to shift away from faithful agency, even to the point of abandoning it as textualism’s grounding principle. But this shift has gone unnoticed. It has yet to be identified or described, let alone defended, even as academic and …

Supreme Court Institute Annual Report, 2018-2019, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute

SCI Papers & Reports

During the U.S. Supreme Court’s October Term (OT) 2018 – corresponding to the 2018-2019 academic year –the Supreme Court Institute (SCI) provided moot courts for advocates in 99% of the cases heard by the Supreme Court, offered a variety of programs related to the Supreme Court, and continued to integrate the moot court program into the education of Georgetown Law students. The varied affiliations of advocates mooted this Term reflect SCI’s firm commitment to provide assistance to advocates without regard to the party represented or the position advanced.

A list of all SCI moot courts held in OT 2018 – …

Table Of Contents And Editorial Board, Yoori Chung

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

Slip Slidin' Away: The Erosion Of Apa Adjudication, William Funk

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

Although the enactment of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) was intended to establish a uniform set of procedures applicable to adjudications "required by statute to be determined on the record after opportunity for an agency hearing," agencies have long sought to avoid those procedures, and, in particular, Administrative Law Judges, by substituting informal, non-APA adjudications. Over time, the courts have accelerated this substitution through a misapplication of three Supreme Court opinions. This article describes the original understanding of the APA and how that original understanding has been eroded over the years. The article then asks whether this is a problem …

Keynote Address: Staying Afloat And Engaged In Today's Flooded Marketplace Of Speech, Michael Y. Scudder

Notre Dame Law Review

The contributions to this Symposium cover substantial ground, address important issues, and offer much to react to. This Symposium, I submit, also occurs at a time of significance for the First Amendment in the Supreme Court. Perhaps the Court’s most fervent and consequential defender of free speech, Justice Anthony Kennedy, has retired. His impact on American constitutional law was enormous, including, in my view, in the area of free speech. I had the privilege of clerking for Justice Kennedy, admire him deeply as judge and person, and want to offer some reflections on what I see as a few of …

The Case Against Absolute Judicial Immunity For Immigration Judges, Jacqueline Stevens

Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality

A federal regulation states that immigration hearings shall be open to the public. Courts and scholars also have located a right to observe these proceedings in the First Amendment. And yet immigration judges (IJ) have excluded members of the press and other observers from hearings for no stated legal reasons, thus effectively eliminating public scrutiny of proceedings that affect millions of citizens and non-citizens in the United States. In response to a lawsuit pursuing monetary, injunctive, and declaratory relief after an IJ ordered guards to remove a reporter from a federal building, an Eleventh Circuit panel held IJs have absolute …

Social Media, Venue And The Right To A Fair Trial, Leslie Y. Garfield Tenzer

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Judicial failure to recognize social media's influence on juror decision making has identifiable constitutional implications. The Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial demands that courts grant a defendant's change of venue motion when media-generated pretrial publicity invades the unbiased sensibility of those who are asked to sit in judgment. Courts limit publicity suitable for granting a defendant's motion to information culled from newspapers, radio, and television reports. Since about 2014, however, a handful of defendants have introduced social media posts to support their claims of unconstitutional bias in the community. Despite defendants' introduction of negative social media in support …

Do Justices Time Their Retirements Politically? An Empirical Analysis Of The Timing And Outcomes Of Supreme Court Retirements In The Modern Era, Christine Kexel Chabot

Utah Law Review

As the rampant speculation preceding Justice Kennedy’s retirement made clear, it is difficult to predict when Justices will retire. Justices often defy the conventional wisdom that a Justice is more likely to retire when the president and Senate share the Justice’s ideology. For example, Justice Ginsburg chose to remain on the Court rather than retire during President Obama’s terms. Her choice is not unusual. Since 1954, a majority of similarly situated Justices refused to retire. In light of this behavior, it is no surprise that existing studies struggle to explain Justices’ retirement decisions and disagree on whether political factors predict …

Simplified Courts Can't Solve Inequality, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

State civil courts struggle to handle the volume of cases before them. Litigants in these courts, most of whom are unrepresented, struggle to navigate the courts to solve their problems. This access-to-justice crisis has led to a range of reform efforts and solutions. One type of reform, court simplification, strives to reduce the complexity of procedures and information used by courts to help unrepresented litigants navigate the judicial system. These reforms mitigate but do not solve the symptoms of the larger underlying problem: state civil courts are struggling because they have been stuck with legal cases that arise from the …

Your Honor, On Social Media: The Judicial Ethics Of Bots And Bubbles, Katrina Lee

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.