Date of Publication:
Judith A.M. Scully, Book Review, Raised by the Courts: One Judge’s Insight into Juvenile Justice (2010), 35 Champion 61 (2011)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
D. Benjamin Barros, The Complexities of Judicial Takings, 45 U. Rich. L. Rev. 903 (2011)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
In last term’s Stop the Beach Renourishment Inc. v. Florida DEP, the Supreme Court for the first time squarely confronted the question of whether a judicial action could ever be considered an unconstitutional taking of private property. The Court unanimously rejected the judicial takings claim, but the justices issued a highly fragmented set of opinions. No justice was able to command a majority on any of the major conceptual issues presented by the judicial takings question. As a result, the Court dramatically raised the profile of judicial takings question, but left all of the major issues open.
In this article, I argue that the judicial takings issues are even more complicated than the Court’s fractured opinions suggest. In particular, I argue that three factual distinctions among types of cases that largely were ignored in Stop the Beach can lead to dramatically different outcomes in matters of judicial takings standards, procedures, and remedies. I analyze each of the substantive and procedural issues raised by judicial takings in light of these factual distinctions. Along the way, I argue that judicial takings does not require a unique standard different from the Court’s existing takings standards, and that judicial takings (and regulatory takings more broadly) should apply to government actions that mandate transfers of private property to public ownership, but not to government actions that mandate transfers of property between private persons.
Date of Publication:
Lance Long and William F. Christensen, Does the Readability of Your Brief Affect Your Chance of Winning an Appeal? An Analysis of Readability in Appellate Briefs and Its Correlation with Success on Appeal, 12 J. App. Prac. & Process 145 (2011)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The study described in this article suggests that the length of sentences and words, which is “readability” for our purposes, probably does not make much difference in appellate brief writing. First, we found that most briefs are written at about the same level of readability; there simply is not much difference in how lawyers write appellate briefs when it comes to the length of sentences and words. Furthermore, the readability of most appellate briefs is well within the reading ability of the highly educated audience of appellate judges and justices. Second, the relatively small differences in readability are not related to the outcome of an appeal in a statistically significant manner. Our study did show, however, that the opinions of judges and justices are less readable than lawyers’ briefs and that the opinions of dissenting judges or justices are the least readable of all the appellate writing we analyzed. Ultimately, we conclude that readability, as determined by the Flesch Reading Ease scale, is a non-issue for legal writing at the appellate level. Although readability did not appear to be related to outcome, there was a statistically significant relationship between the readability of the courts’ majority and dissenting opinions. Dissenting opinions are decidedly less readable than majority opinions.
Date of Publication:
Roy Balleste, A Primer on Internet Governance: A New Field of Study Emerges in the Internet Age, 15 AALL Spectrum 8 (2011)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
Royal C. Gardner, Stacking Opportunities and Risks in Environmental Credit Markets, 41 Envtl. L. Reporter 10121 (2011)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
Jaclyn Lopez, What We Should Learn from the BP Spill, 20 Envtl. L. Section of the State Bar of California: Envtl. L. News 35 (2011)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
Tim Kaye, Sneering But Adhering: Communication, Kelsen, and Hart’s Habit of Obedience, in Law, Justice, and Miscommunications: Essays in Applied Legal Philosophy (Tim Kaye ed., Vandeplas, 2011)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
Tim Kaye (ed.), Law, Justice, and Miscommunications: Essays in Applied Legal Philosophy (Vandeplas, 2011)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
Tim Kaye, The Confusion of Perspectives, Policies and Practices in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, 26 Westlaw Journal of Employment 14 (2011)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
Date of Publication:
Joseph F. Morrissey, The CISG: A Lex Amicorum, in International Arbitration and International Commercial Law: Synergy, Convergence and Evolution--Liber Amicorum Eric Bergsten (S. Kroll et al. eds., Wolters Kluwer, 2011)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.