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Susan D. Rozelle, Daubert, Schmaubert: Criminal Defendants and the Short End of the Science Stick, 43 Tulsa L. Rev. 597 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Susan D. Rozelle, Fear and Loathing in Insanity Law: Explaining the Otherwise Inexplicable Clark v. Arizona, 58 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 39 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Eric Clark believed he was battling space aliens when he shot and killed Officer Jeffrey Moritz. Charged under a first-degree murder statute that requires knowledge the victim is a police officer, Clark should have been not guilty two ways: first, by reason of insanity, and second, because he did not satisfy the mens rea requirement. Instead, he was found guilty, and the United States Supreme Court's decision upholding this result tortured insanity law jurisprudence. The only plausible explanation for the Court's decision lies in society's emotional reaction to mental illness. Fear and loathing have displaced not only care and compassion, but even logic.
This article first describes and then unpacks the irrationality of the Court's reasoning in Clark. The Court's inexplicable decisions - finding no semiotic truncation of Arizona's insanity statute, and upholding its refusal to admit evidence of mental illness on the question of mens rea - can be explained only by reference to our unconscious selves. The mentally ill frighten us, and when we are frightened, we do not think clearly. But the decisions in Clark serve only to stigmatize and marginalize even further a group that needs our help as well as our compassion. We must reexamine the criminal law's insanity jurisprudence. Our unconscious animus toward the mentally ill ill-serves them, and ill-becomes us.
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Mark D. Bauer, Give the Lady What She Wants-As Long as It’s Macy’s, 80 Temp. L. Rev. 949 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
In 2005, Federated Department Stores, which does business as Macy's and Bloomingdales, acquired May Company Department Stores for $17 billion. Federal antitrust regulators took no action against this merger and in fact released an unprecedented statement explaining the decision to permit the merger.
State antitrust regulators demanded that Federated sell approximately 20% of the former May stores, including branches of L.S. Ayres, Marshall Field, Lord & Taylor, Filenes, Hecht and Strawbridge & Clothier. In the fall of 2006, Federated sold the remaining Lord & Taylor stores to a private investment group. Substantially all of the stores remaining with Federated were converted to the Macy's nameplate; a few were converted to Bloomingdales.
The Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) decision that this merger did not substantially lessen competition under the Clayton Act raises important questions.
First, the FTC suggested there was no antitrust product market comprised of conventional department stores, or middle-market department stores. Numerous retail studies, the department stores' own market studies and the common sense experience of most consumers suggest otherwise.
Second, FTC's unusual public statement listed reasons that the merger would not substantially lessen competition. Many of these reasons do not stand up to closer scrutiny.
Third, through an empirical study created for this article that compares prices before and after the merger, Federated appears to have significantly raised prices throughout the United States.
For these reasons, it is likely that the Federated/May merger did in fact substantially lessen competition in the conventional department store market.
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Roy Balleste, Hypothetical Case Study: Creating AI Assistants in the Law Library, 26 Legal Ref. Serv. Q. 47 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Mark D. Bauer, Whither Dr. Miles?, 20 Loy. Consumer L. Rev. 1 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This essay analyzes the June 2007 Supreme Court decision of Leegin v. PSKS. That case overruled a 96 year old Supreme Court case, Dr. Miles v. Park & Sons. The Leegin case eliminated Dr. Miles' per se rule in antitrust for minimum resale price maintenance between manufacturers and retailers. The essay examines the history and controversy of Dr. Miles, acts of Congress to circumvent and then restore Dr. Miles, the controversy over the Leegin case, and likely outcomes in the future.
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James W. Fox, The Law of Many Faces: Antebellum Contract Law Background of Reconstruction-Era Freedom of Contract, 49 Am. J. Legal Hist. 61 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This article, published in late-2008, has two goals. First, it seeks to connect doctrinal histories of contract law with the political and social histories of contract ideology. In doing so I hope to show how the tales about the development of contract doctrine can be told more richly by considering the political and ideological developments of the period. Second, and more significantly, this article highlights the ambiguous strands of contract law that were part of the culture of contract surrounding Reconstruction, and shows how contract law was far more contextualized than historians of either free labor ideology or contract doctrine typically acknowledge. This failure to explore the rich context and ambiguity of mid-nineteenth century contract law produces, on the one hand, an inappropriately narrow view of Reconstruction-era conceptions of the potential role of contract, and, on the other hand, a general inattentiveness to the potential uses of contract law and ideas to challenge the otherwise dominant ideologies. The article proceeds through four topics: antebellum equity jurisprudence, antebellum labor law, inn and carrier law, and antebellum feminist uses and critiques of contract. By connecting contract-as-doctrine to contract-as-political-ideology through these four areas, I hope to show that during Reconstruction there was more possibility for both than often seems apparent to those looking back after the Lochner era.
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Theresa J. Pulley Radwan, Keeping the Faith: The Rights of Parishioners in Church Reorganizations, 82 Wash. L. Rev. 75 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Ellen S. Podgor, The Challenge of White Collar Sentencing, 97 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 731 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Sentencing white collar offenders is difficult in that the economic crimes committed clearly injured individuals, but the offenders do not present a physical threat to society. This Article questions the necessity of giving Draconian sentences, in some cases in excess of twenty-five years, to non-violent first offenders who commit white collar crimes. The attempts by the U.S. Sentencing Commission to achieve a neutral sentencing methodology, one that is class-blind, fails to respect the real differences presented by these offenders. As the term white-collar crime has sociological roots, it is advocated here that sociology needs to be a component in the sentencing of white collar offenders.
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Royal C. Gardner, Reconsidering In-Lieu Fees: A Modest Proposal, Ecosystem Marketplace (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
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Ellen S. Podgor, Essay, A New Corporate World Mandates a “Good Faith” Affirmative Defense, 44 Am. Crim. L. Rev. 1537 (2007)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
In the aftermath of corporate scandals and the establishment of the President's Corporate Fraud Task Force, the Department of Justice has moved with a new emphasis to curb corporate criminality. Congress has also imposed new legislation with stricter compliance and more stringent oversight to curtail corporate criminality. Corporations for the most part have met these new demands and instituted effective compliance programs to prevent and detect criminal conduct. Yet despite these efforts, corporations with the best of motives, with the best of efforts, and with the utmost in due diligence, can still find themselves the subject of a criminal prosecution. This Essay advocates that this new landscape should allow corporations to argue a good faith affirmative defense.