Jurisprudence Commons^™

Taxing Combat, Samuel Kan

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

When you are being shot at or dodging landmines you are in a combat zone. Diplomatic niceties aside, these brave warriors are in danger because of the policies of their Government and we must take care of them. Quite frankly, we must act to insure that we do not have a repeat of what happened in Somalia. In Somalia, the families of the soldiers who lost their lives could not receive the benefits that should have gone to them under the Tax Code because the President never declared it a combat zone.

We don’t know exactly where we’re at in …

Predetermined? The Prospect Of Social Determinant-Based Section 1115 Waivers After Stewart V. Azar, Griffin Schoenbaum

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Section 1115 of the Social Security Act allows the Secretary of Health and Human Services (the “Secretary”) to waive some of Medicaid’s requirements so states can enact “demonstration projects.” A demonstration project is an experiment a state can conduct by modifying aspects of its Medicaid program. To waive Medicaid’s requirements for this purpose, the Secretary must determine that the proposed demonstration project will likely assist in promoting Medicaid’s objectives.

Using this standard, President Trump’s Secretary has approved waiver requests to enact demonstration projects that contain “community engagement” requirements. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has heard each …

The Political Party System As A Public Forum: The Incoherence Of Parties As Free Speech Associations And A Proposed Correction, Wayne Batchis

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence addressing the associational rights of political parties is both highly consequential and deeply inconsistent. It dates back at least as far as the Court’s White Primary decisions more than a half-century ago. In recent decades, the Court has imposed an arguably ad hoc formula, striking down regulations on political parties on First Amendment grounds in some cases, while upholding them in others. From a jurisprudential perspective, critics might point to insufficiently principled distinctions between these cases. From a normative perspective, the very expansion of First Amendment rights to political parties, like the parallel extension to corporations …

Aedpa As Forum Allocation: The Textual And Structural Case For Overruling Williams V. Taylor, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Williams v. Taylor, the Supreme Court read a section of the Anti- Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) to change the long-prevailing de novo standard of review of federal habeas petitions by state prisoners. In holding that Congress had denied the lower federal courts the power to grant habeas relief to prisoners in custody pursuant to wrong but reasonable state court decisions, the Court departed from the provision’s text and relied instead on its perception of a generalized congressional purpose to cut back on habeas relief and on the non-redundancy canon of statutory construction. On both scores, …

Contracts, Constitutions, And Getting The Interpretation-Construction Distinction Right, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Interpretation determines the meaning of a legal actor’s words or other significant acts, construction their legal effect. Using contract law and then two nineteenth century theories of constitutional interpretation as examples, this Article advances four claims about interpretation, construction, and the relationship between the two. First, many theorists, following Francis Lieber, assume that rules of construction apply only when interpretation runs out, such as when a text’s meaning is ambiguous or does not address an issue. In fact, a rule of construction is always necessary to determine a legal speech act’s effect, including when its meaning is clear and definite. …

All Balls And No Strikes: The Roberts Court’S Anti-Worker Activism, J. Maria Glover

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For decades, legislatures and courts have created and preserved rights and remedies for vulnerable groups—consumers, employees, victims of mass torts, investors, and the like. Both branches have extolled the virtues of these substantive rights and the private enforcement mechanisms required to effectuate them. However, despite statements like that of Justice Roberts and others that the judiciary is not a lawmaking body—indeed, that the judicial institution should take care to exercise restraint—the Roberts Court has engaged in sweeping reform that tends to extinguish these substantive rights.

In 2012, I traced how the Roberts Court paid scant attention to the integral role …

The Ilc At Its 70th Anniversary: Its Role In International Law And Its Impact On U.S. Jurisprudence, Siegfried Wiessner, Christian Lee González

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Hallows Lecture: Ambition And Aspiration: Living Greatly In The Law, Lee H. Rosenthal

Marquette Law Review

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Supreme Silence And Precedential Pragmatism: King V. Burwell And Statutory Interpretation In The Federal Courts Of Appeals, Michael J. Cedrone

Marquette Law Review

This Article studies statutory interpretation as it is practiced in the federal

courts of appeal. Much of the academic commentary in this field focuses on the

Supreme Court, which skews the debate and unduly polarizes the field. This

Article investigates more broadly by looking at the seventy-two federal

appellate cases that cite King v. Burwell in the two years after the Court issued

its decision. In deciding that the words “established by the State” encompass

a federal program, the Court in King reached a pragmatic and practical result

based on statutory scheme and purpose at a fairly high level of …

The Strings In The Books Ain't Pulled And Persuaded: How The Use Of Improper Statistics And Unverified Data Corrupts The Judicial Process In Sex Offender Cases, Heather Ellis Cucolo, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

An examination of a range of judicial decisions involving sexual offender determinations reveals that, frequently, courts rely improperly on inaccurate and under-developed statistics as well as unverified and outdated information. This reliance, too often, underlies rulings that subject the sex offender to significant sanctions and loss of liberty. Additionally, the continuation of the testimonial script that all sex offenders are high recidivists, dangerous, compulsive and untreatable, contributes to the anti-therapeutic effect of shaming and humiliation. This results in isolation, seclusion, lack of dignity; also, it further trivializes the judicial process, and violates the tenants of therapeutic jurisprudence. Despite the “frightening …

There's Voices In The Night Trying To Be Heard: The Potential Impact Of The Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities On Domestic Mental Disability Law, Michael L. Perlin, Naomi Weinstein

Articles & Chapters

This paper carefully examines, through a therapeutic jurisprudence framework, the likely impact of the ratification of this UN Convention on society’s sanist attitudes towards persons with mental disabilities. We argue that it is impossible to consider the impact of anti-discrimination law on persons with mental disabilities without a full understanding of how sanism -- an irrational prejudice of the same quality and character of other irrational prejudices that cause (and are reflected in) prevailing social attitudes of racism, sexism, homophobia, and ethnic bigotry -- permeates all aspects of the legal system and the entire fabric of American society.

Notwithstanding nearly …

Punishment Without Process: Victim Impact Proceedings For Dead Defendants, Bruce Green, Rebecca Roiphe

Articles & Chapters

After Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in jail, two judges allowed his accusers to speak in court. This article argues that the proceedings were inappropriate because the criminal case ends when the defendant dies. If the conviction and appeal are not final, there is no finding of guilt, and the defendant is still presumed innocent. Allowing accusers to speak at this time violates the principle of due process and threatens to undermine faith in judges and the criminal justice system in general. While courts are at times legally required to hear from victims of crimes, they were not allowed to do …

To Promote Innovation, Congress Should Abolish The Supreme Court Created Exceptions To 35 U.S. Code Sec. 101, Shahrokh Falati

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Legislating Morality: Moral Theory And Turpitudinous Crimes In Immigration Jurisprudence, Abel Rodríguez, Jennifer A. Bulcock

Faculty Publications

Congress could have framed the country’s immigration policies in any number of ways. In significant part, it opted to frame them in moral terms. The crime involving moral turpitude is among the most pervasive and pernicious classifications in immigration law. In the Immigration and Nationality Act, it is virtually ubiquitous, appearing everywhere from the deportability and mandatory detention grounds to the inadmissibility and naturalization grounds. In effect, it acts as a gatekeeper for those who wish to enter and remain in the country, obtain lawful permanent residence, travel abroad after admission, or become United States citizens. With limited exceptions, noncitizens …

Legal Sets, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

In this Article, I propose that the practices of legal reasoning and analysis are helpfully understood as being primarily concerned not with rules or propositions, but with sets. This Article develops a formal model of the role of sets in the practices of legal actors in a common-law system defined by a recursive relationship between cases and rules. In doing so, it demonstrates how conceiving of legal doctrines as a universe of discourse comprising (sometimes nested or overlapping) sets of cases can clarify the logical structure that governs marginal cases and help organize the available options for resolving such cases …

A Tj Approach To Mental Disability Rights Research: On Sexual Autonomy And Sexual Offending, Michael L. Perlin, Heather Ellis Cucolo, Alison Lynch

Articles & Chapters

We believe it is impossible to understand the development and the power of therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) without acknowledging that its roots in mental disability law have continued to expand and flourish over the decades, and that there is no other substantive area of the law in which every aspect – substantive and procedural, civil and criminal, statutory and constitutional. domestic and international – has been weighed and evaluated using a TJ lens. In this chapter, we consider how those roots have shaped the last three decades of research and the implications of what has developed. We look carefully at two …

Of Hats And Robes: Judicial Review Of Nonadjudicative Article Iii Functions, Jeffrey L. Rensberger

University of Richmond Law Review

We are accustomed to thinking of Article III courts and judges deciding cases and controversies. But, federal judges and courts have historically also engaged in official but nonadjudicative activities. In addition to a history of federal judges serving on nonjudicial commissions, federal judges and the Supreme Court participate in the rulemaking process for the federal procedural and evidentiary rules. Although some argue to the contrary, the Supreme Court has approved such arrangements in the face of separation of powers objections. Since Article III officers and courts perform nonadjudicative duties, the question arises of how federal courts who address a challenge …

Law As A Means To Human Flourishing: Law, Morality, And Natural Law In Policy-Oriented Perspective, Christian L. Gonzalez-Rivera

Faculty Articles

Friendships can be uneasy without ceasing to be friendships. Because the "pie" of law and morality's relationship can be sliced in many ways and to different yields, in what follows, I consider the simultaneously unexplored, uneasy, and yet promising relationship between the Natural Law tradition and Policy-Oriented Jurisprudence (or "New Haven"), hoping that doing so will partially illuminate aspects of the relationship between morality and the law more generally. My aim is to describe what and how New Haven School founders Myres McDougal and Harold Lasswell thought about Natural Law. As it will become clearer below, despite their critical appraisal …

Exhaustion In The Service Of Progress, Ofer Tur-Sinai

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

Under the doctrine of patent exhaustion, an authorized sale of a patented item exhausts the patentee's rights with respect to that item, leaving the purchaser and subsequent owners free to use or resell it without fear of an infringement lawsuit. In 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Impression Products v. Lexmark International, which strengthened the exhaustion doctrine in various significant ways. The Court held that an authorized sale of a patented item exhausts all patent rights with respect to that item, regardless of any restrictions on use or resale the patentee purports to impose. The Court …

The Well-Intentioned Purpose But Weak Epistemological Foundation Of Originalism, George C. Christie

Faculty Scholarship

The attraction of an originalist approach to constitutional interpretation is understandable. It is maintained that only that method can provide the judicial objectivity and certainty that constitutional adjudication requires. They claim that the traditional common-law evolutionary approach leads Supreme Court Justices to succumb to the temptation to fill in gaps in constitutional law and thereby ignore that major expansions in constitutional meaning and should be made in the way the Founders envisioned, namely by amendment of the Constitution. However difficult or impractical that process may be, it is the only way to avoid the politicization of the Court. Whether that …