Explore the vast range of titles available.

In Judgment and Mercy , Martin J. Siegel offers an insightful and compelling biography of Irving Robert Kaufman, the judge infamous for condemning Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death for atomic espionage. In 1951, world attention fixed on Kaufman's courtroom as its ambitious young occupant stridently blamed the Rosenbergs for the Korean War. To many, the harsh sentences and their preening author left an enduring stain on American justice. But then the judge from Cold War central casting became something unexpected: one of the most illustrious progressive jurists of his day. Upending the simplistic portrait of Judge Kaufman as a McCarthyite villain, Siegel shows how his pathbreaking decisions desegregated a Northern school for the first time, liberalized the insanity defense, reformed Attica-era prisons, spared John Lennon from politically motivated deportation, expanded free speech, brought foreign torturers to justice, and more. Still, the Rosenberg controversy lingered. Decades later, changing times and revelations of judicial misconduct put Kaufman back under siege. Picketers dogged his footsteps as critics demanded impeachment. And tragedy stalked his family, attributed in part to the long ordeal. Instead of propelling him to the Supreme Court, as Kaufman once hoped, the case haunted him to the end. Absorbingly told, Judgment and Mercy brings to life a complex man by turns tyrannical and warm, paranoid and altruistic, while revealing intramural Jewish battles over assimilation, class, and patriotism. Siegel, who served as Kaufman's last law clerk, traces the evolution of American law and politics in the twentieth century and shows how a judge unable to summon mercy for the Rosenbergs nonetheless helped expand freedom for all.

This Article offers the first close study of statutory interpretation in several state courts of last resort. While academics have spent the past decade speculating about the \"death of textualism,\" the utility of legislated rules of interpretation, and the capacity of judges to agree on a single set of interpretive rules, state courts, as it turns out, have been engaging in real-world experiments in precisely these areas. Several state courts have articulated governing interpretive regimes for all statutory questions. Methodological stare decisis—the practice of giving precedential effect to judicial statements about methodology—is generally absent from federal statutory interpretation, but appears to be a common feature of some states' statutory case law. Every state legislature in the nation has enacted certain rules of interpretation, which some state courts are, in an unexpected twist, flouting. And, far from textualism being \"dead,\" what emerges from these state cases is a surprisingly strong consensus methodology—what this Article terms \"modified textualism\"—a theory that shares textualism's core components but has broader potential appeal. These state developments offer a powerful counter-paradigm to that of the U.S. Supreme Court, where persistent interpretive divides and a refusal to treat methodological statements as precedential have made interpretive consensus seem impossible. They also highlight that, for all the energy that the statutory interpretation wars have consumed, the legal status of methodology itself—whether it is \"law\" or something \"less\"—remains entirely unresolved.

The author develops the concept of legal framing to expand theoretical knowledge on the cultural & symbolic processes that enable, constrain, & transform social movements. Merging insights from social movement theory, the sociology of law, & law & society scholarship, the author argues that law is a type of \"master frame,\" & that mobilizing law's \"constitutive\" symbols & categories is a central, yet routinely overlooked, way in which challengers frame their grievances, identity, & objectives. This study systematically explores legal framing processes through historical-narrative analysis of the women's movement & the debate over protective labor laws in the 1960s. Historical evidence suggests that reciprocal transformations in the women's movement & equal employment law were largely attributable to a symbolic framing contest between competing cultural representations of gender (\"protective\" vs. \"equal\" treatment) & that this contest was waged in explicitly legal terms. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document.

Studies of how social movements impact policy outcomes typically treat policy change as a dichotomous phenomenon; a governmental unit either adopts or does not adopt a particular policy in a particular time frame. This simplistic view of the policy process runs the risk of masking how movements & other factors matter at various stages of the policy process. Each stage is characterized by different rules & different consequences; thus, movements & other factors ought to matter differently at each stage. The authors examine three stages of policy development with regard to state ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Results show that movements mattered more to legislative decisions in the earlier stages of the policy process, but that their effects were eclipsed in later stages by public opinion. Tables, Appendixes, References. Adapted from the source document.

The optimal stringency of the burden of proof is characterized in a model in which relaxing the proof burden enhances deterrence but also chills desirable behavior. The result are strikingly different from those in prior work that uses a simpler model in which individuals only choose whether to commit a harmful act (so only deterrence is at stake). Moreover, the qualitative differences between the optimal rule and the familiar preponderance of the evidence rule—and related rules that look to Bayesian posteriors—are great, much more so than revealed by prior work.

Do the Ene Doctrine and its \"reverse-Erie\" mirror require state and federal courts to apply one another's statutory interpretation methodologies when they interpret one another's statutes? Surprisingly, the courts have no consistent answer to this question — even though state and federal courts constantly interpret one another's laws. What's more, exploring this application oí Erie reveals that one of the most important jurisprudential questions about statutory interpretation also remains entirely unresolved: namely, are the rules of statutory interpretation \"law,\" individual judicial philosophy, or something in between? This Article argues that many federal courts are getting the Ene question wrong—or at least that they are unaware that the question exists in the first place. The Erie inquiry also makes clear that federal courts treat both state and federal statutory interpretation methodology as much less \"lawlike\" than they treat analogous interpretive principles, without acknowledging or justifying the distinction. Federal courts routinely bypass state interpretive principles when they interpret state statutes, but almost always look to other state methodological principles, including state rules of contract interpretation, choice of law, and constitutional interpretation. Further, unlike in those other areas, the U.S. Supreme Court does not treat even its own statements about federal statutory interpretation principles as \"law\" and does not give them precedential effect. This practice has licensed an interpretive freedom for state and lower federal courts when those courts interpret federal statutes — a freedom that facilitates federal-law disuniformity that the Court generally does not tolerate in other contexts. This Article challenges the notion that statutory interpretation is sufficiently different from other decisionmaking regimes to justify these distinctions.

Organizational law empowers firms to hold assets and enter contracts as entities that are legally distinct from their owners and managers. Legal scholars and economists have commented extensively on one form of this partitioning between firms and owners: namely, the rule of limited liability that insulates firm owners from business debts. But a less-noticed form of legal partitioning, which we call \"entity shielding,\" is both economically and historically more significant than limited liability. While limited liability shields owners' personal assets from a firm's creditors, entity shielding protects firm assets from the owners' personal creditors (and from creditors of other business ventures), thus reserving those assets for the firm's creditors. Entity shielding creates important economic benefits, including a lower cost of credit for firm owners, reduced bankruptcy administration costs, enhanced stability, and the possibility of a market in shares. But entity shielding also imposes costs by requiring specialized legal and business institutions and inviting opportunism vis-à-vis both personal and business creditors. The changing balance of these benefits and costs illuminates the evolution of legal entities across time and societies. To both illustrate and test this proposition, we describe the development of entity shielding in four historical epochs: ancient Rome, the Italian Middle Ages, England of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and the United States from the nineteenth century to the present.

Whether a right to payment is a 'claim' is one of the most important determinations in bankruptcy because only 'claims' are subject to the bankruptcy process, including the all-important automatic stay and discharge provisions. The Bankruptcy Code ('Code') provides a definition of claim in § 101(5), but courts have differed greatly in what 'rights to payment' are covered by that definition. For twenty-six years, the Third Circuit was subject to one of 'the most criticized and least followed precedents decided under the current Bankruptcy Code,' In re M. Frenville Co., which created the overly narrow state law accrual test. The Third Circuit finally heeded the criticism in 2010 and overruled Frenville in In re Grossman's, in which it adopted the prepetition relationship test. In Wright v. Owens Corning, decided in May 2012, the Third Circuit set out to clarify the scope of its new test. Instead of clarifying, however, the court in Wright expanded the realm of 'claims' in the Third Circuit to include those established by a preconfirmation, rather than a prepetition, relationship. It did so without adequately considering the language of the Code or the policy implications of its decision. This Note argues that a 'claims' test should focus on the date of petition, not confirmation, to be consistent with the language and policy of the Code, and that Wright was therefore wrongly decided.

U.S. and E. U. environmental policy employ criminal sanctions to enforce compliance. Recent moves toward revising their use are based on little empirical evidence as to their effectiveness. This paper exploits a unique dataset to study the deterrent effect of criminal enforcement. The dynamic panel data analysis leads to three findings. First, criminal sanctions do provide the intended deterrent effects. Second, standing trial provides one of the most significant deterrents, rather than the probability of conviction or the magnitude of fines. Third, public preferences regarding environmental quality and political economy variables affect reported environmental crime.

In 1990, shotguns and M-16s were adopted into Enga warfare, setting off some 15 years of devastation as youths (~17 to 28) took charge of interclan warfare. In response, people called on elder leaders to adapt customary institutions to restore peace; subsequently, war deaths and the frequency of war declined radically. Data from precolonial warfare, 501 recent wars, and 129 customary court sessions allow us to consider (i) the principles and values behind customary institutions for peace, (ii) their effectiveness, (iii) how they interact with and compare to state institutions of today, and (iv) how such institutions might have shaped our human behavioral repertoire to make life in state societies possible.