When Judges Lie (and When They Should)
By Paul Butler. Full text here. What should a judge do when she must apply law that she believes is fundamentally unjust? The problem is as old as slavery. It is as contemporary as the debates about capital punishment and abortion rights. In a famous essay, Robert Cover described four choices that a judge has in…
Continue ReadingThe Scientific Study of Judicial Activism
By Frank B. Cross & Stefanie A. Lindquist. Full text here. Claims of judicial activism are common from both the right and the left, but they are seldom scrutinized systematically. Prior tests of judicial activism published in law reviews have typically involved analysis of frequency distributions reflecting the number of cases in which Justices voted…
Continue ReadingWhy Supreme Court Justices Should Ride Circuit Again
By David R. Stras. Full text here. The practice of Supreme Court Justices circuit riding is as old as the federal judiciary itself and has a storied history that spans the first 120 years of this nation’s history. Yet the practice is also one of the least explored aspects of the Judiciary Act of 1789 and…
Continue ReadingImmigration Law and the Regulation of Marriage
By Kerry Abrams. Full text here. This Article argues that much of federal immigration law functions as a form of family law. Although conventional wisdom holds that family law is state law, federal immigration law actually regulates marriages that involve immigrants much more extensively than state family law does, and often unintentionally. This Article maps the…
Continue ReadingNote: From Deference to Restraint: Using the Chevron Framework to Evaluate Presidential Signing Statements
By David C. Jenson. Full text here. Presidential signing statements are creeping into judicial opinions with increasing frequency, leading to a resurgence of interest in the issue and several attempts, by Congress and others, to limit the use of signing statements or to challenge their constitutionality. This Note contends that the paramount separation of powers concern…
Continue ReadingConcordance and Conflict in Intuitions of Justice
By Paul H. Robinson & Robert Kurzban. Full text here. The common wisdom among criminal law theorists and policy makers is that the notion of desert is vague and subject to wide disagreement. Yet the empirical evidence in available studies, including new studies reported here, paints a dramatically different picture. While moral philosophers may disagree on…
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