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The sentencing literature is replete with studies that have examined the influence of extralegal offender characteristics on two key sentence outcomes: the imprisonment and sentence length decisions. Yet the study of other outcomes, such as the application of intermediate sanctions, is rarely addressed. To date, no studies have been conducted in the federal courts to examine the potential influence of race/ethnicity, age, gender, and educational attainment on the decision to apply intermediate sanctions. Consequently, the present analysis employs U.S. Sentencing Commission data to examine direct and interactive effects of these extralegal characteristics on this understudied outcome. Findings indicate that extralegal effects may play an important role in the use of intermediate sanctions. The implications of this research are discussed in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a novel sample of 83,260 lawsuits filed in US Federal District courts, we extend the results of prior studies investigating market value and reputational losses due to corporate misconduct. We examine alternative explanations for the loss in market value, such as media coverage, the expectation of subsequent litigation, and the defendant's willingness to settle, in addition to previously documented factors. Our results suggest that with the exception of securities litigation, this loss in market value can be attributed to these alternative explanations rather than to reputational consequences. This finding is confirmed by several indirect measures of reputation loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines represent a uniform set of formal rules that are implemented across a broad range of diverse social contexts. Drawing from neo-institutional theory and kindred perspectives on criminal courts, we argue that the federal courts represent an organizational field in which local influences play a key role in conformity to institutional rules. We use unique survey data from federal judges, aggregated to the district court level and combined with individual-level federal sentencing data, to examine hierarchical models of judicial departures from the Guidelines. Our analysis includes more proximate measures of court community culture than prior research. We find that the collective views of federal judges, including their perceptions of the degree of regulative constraint posed by the Guidelines, as well as the extent to which the Guidelines are normatively and morally legitimate, are intimately related to variation in judicial Guidelines departures across district courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1970, several tribes in the Pacific Northwest, along with their federal trustee, sued the state of Washington claiming that numerous state actions violated their treaty rights, which assured them "the right of taking fish in common with" white settlers. The tribes and their federal trustee maintained that the treaties of the 1850s guaranteed the tribes: (1) a share of fish harvests for subsistence, cultural, and commercial purposes; (2) inclusion of hatchery fish in that harvest share; and (3) protection of the habitat necessary for the salmon that were the basis of the treaty bargain and the peaceful white settlement of the Pacific Northwest. By 1985, the tribes and the trustee persuaded the courts of the merits of the first two propositions, but the Ninth Circuit deferred on the third issue, declining to declare that the treaties supplied habitat protection in the absence of a specific factual dispute. Some two decades later, in 2007, the tribes and the federal government convinced United States District Court Judge Ricardo Martinez that the state's construction and maintenance of road culverts blocking salmon access to their spawning grounds violated the 1850s treaties. In 2013, after settlement talks failed, the district court issued an injunction that required most of the offending barrier culverts to be remedied within seventeen years, or by 2030. Claiming exaggerated costs of compliance, the state appealed, and in 2016 a unanimous panel of the Ninth Circuit affirmed, rejecting the state's allegations wholesale. This Article examines the reasoning of both the district court and the Ninth Circuit and the path ahead, which may implicate road culverts owned by other governments and other habitat-damaging activities like dams, water diversions, and land management actions affecting water quality and quantity. Moreover, the Ninth Circuit's reliance on foundational rules of treaty construction to interpret the scope of the treaty right of taking fish could influence other Indian treaty cases beyond the issue of off-reservation fishing rights. Even if confined to treaties with off-reservation rights, the case represents the most significant interpretation of treaty fishing rights in nearly four decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses America's spoliation of evidence doctrine in relation to electronically stored information (ESI), pre-trial discovery processes, and a December 2015 amendment to Rule 37(E) of the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. American electronic discovery (e-discovery) is addressed, along with the nation's district courts and the case Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC which deals with a duty to preserve evidence. Intentional spoliation is assessed.

Numerous studies have examined the influence of offender characteristics on sentencing outcomes, yet little attention has been afforded to offenders’ educational attainment. The focal concerns theory provides reason to suspect that greater educational attainment may insulate offenders from the effects of criminal stereotypes linked to extralegal factors, including race/ethnicity, age, and sex. The current analysis employs a sample of 115,674 federal offenders to test this assumption on the in/out and sentence length decisions. Results of the in/out models demonstrate a general pattern where the effects of several extralegal factors (i.e., race, ethnicity, age, sex, and detention) are reduced, and in some cases fully moderated, by offenders’ educational attainment. This pattern, however, is not apparent during the sentence length decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The common law style of judging appears to be on its way out. Trial courts rarely shape legal policymaking by asserting decisional autonomy through distinguishing, limiting, or criticizing higher court precedent. In an earlier study, we demonstrated the reluctance of lower court judges to assert decisional autonomy by invoking the holding-dicta dichotomy. In this Article, we make use of original empirical research to study the level of deference U.S. district court judges exhibit toward higher courts and whether the level of deference has changed over time. Our analysis of citation behavior over an eighty-year period reveals a dramatic shift in judges' practices. In the first fifty years included in our study, district court judges were not notably deferential to either their federal court of appeals or the U.S. Supreme Court. District court judges regularly assessed the relevance and scope of precedents from those higher courts and asserted their prerogative to disregard many of them. Since then, judges have become far more likely to treat a given higher court precedent as dispositive. In so doing, lower courts have embraced a hierarchical view of judicial authority at odds with the common law style of judging. The causes of this shift are multifold and likely permanent; we discuss several of them, including dramatic changes in legal research, the proliferation of law clerks throughout the legal system, the growing docket of lower court judges, the growth of the administrative state, and the Supreme Court's increasing embrace of judicial hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview is presented with Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court Anne McKeig. Topics discussed include her experience as the first Native American woman appointed to any state's highest court; works ethics followed by her; and her experience of serving as a Supreme Court judge along with the things she misses about being a judge on the district court.

The article discusses various developments involving American criminal sentencing law and the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the 2005 case United States v. Booker which deals with the Sixth Amendment to the nation's Constitution and an enhanced sentence based on a judge's determination of a fact that was not found by the jury or admitted by the defendant. District courts in Florida and U.S. Probation Office investigation reports are examined.

Drawing from data obtained in a comparative study of US district courts' criminal justice practices, this paper examines adjudication processing responses at the intersection of immigration and drug offences in a Southwestern federal district court, where the logic of immigration enforcement subsumes more traditional federal drug law enforcement. I demonstrate how characteristics of 'drug cases' are constructed at this intersection in such a manner that they stand apart from the prototypical federal drug case, and more closely resemble criminal immigration cases. I argue that in this border jurisdiction, the prevailing adjudicatory logic is concerned with defendants' status as unauthorized outsiders such that these defendants are barely distinguishable from immigration defendants in how their sentences are calculated and rhetorically justified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address the exorbitant costs of air ambulance services, North Dakota passed House Bill 1255, codified as North Dakota Century Code § 23-27-04.10. Under this law, for an air ambulance service provider to be on the primary caller list, it must be a participating provider of health insurance carriers which collectively hold at least seventy-five percent of the health insurance coverage in North Dakota. In response to this bill, Valley Med Flight, Inc. moved to prevent enforcement of the law. The District Court of North Dakota granted relief based on preemption under the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. This Note discusses relevant case and statutory law, and addresses the need for air ambulance regulation for not only North Dakota, but the entire United States. In so doing, this Note examines arguments for and against state regulation of air ambulance service providers, the regulation of insurance providers, and the regulation of health care providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author talks about the recollections of how the circuit and district court functioned in courthouse at Seventh and Mission Streets in San Francisco. Topics discussed include his experience as U.S. Ninth Circuit judge; mention of Thiel v. Southern Pacific Co. court case; and functioning of the courthouse.

The article offers information on property and liability insurance of legal marijuana business. Topics discussed include criminalization of marijuana's possession, distribution and sale by federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA); Colorado district court decision on void of insurance contract, and illegal marijuana growing operations.

The history o f court reporting o f the federal lower judiciary dates from the early days of the Republic. Mr. Fishman helps to document that history by reviewing the publication o f the reports for the Third Circuit (circuit and district courts) covering the nominative reports from the late-eighteenth to the late-nineteenth century, before their republication in Federal Cases by West Publishing Company. A bibliography is appended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many standards development organizations ask participants who hold patents that may be essential to practice a standard to agree to license those patents under "reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND)" terms. But what exactly are RAND terms? This article discusses the policy of RAND obligations, explains how disputes can arise about whether a proposed license to a standard-essential patent includes RAND terms, and explains how a particular dispute over RAND terms was resolved in a United States district court. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We use structural break analysis to estimate rates of patent validity and infringement in decisions on the merits in U.S. courts over 1929-2006. We separately estimate these rates for district court and appeals court decisions. We find multiple structural breaks in both validity and infringement, and the breaks do not coincide. The rate of validity falls around 1939 and rises around 1983, while the rate of infringement rises around 1950 and falls around 1991. We argue that these breaks, and the variation across the implied five 'eras' of decision standards, reflect political and legal innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore how government officials' behavior varies with their ethnicity, gender, and political orientation. Specifically, we analyze criminal sentencing decisions in Texas state district courts using data on approximately half a million criminal cases from 2004 to 2013.We exploit randomized case assignments within counties and obtain precisely estimated effects of judges' ethnicity, gender, and political orientation that are near zero, conditional on geographic factors. However, we find substantial cross-judge heterogeneity in sentencing. Exploiting a unique overlapping structure of Texas state district courts, we find no evidence that this heterogeneity is driven by judges pandering to voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates cases in which harms are statistically correlated. When parties are risk averse, correlation plays an important role in the choice between liability rules. Specifically, positively correlated harms favor a liability rule that spreads the risk over a multitude of parties, as in the negligence rule. Negatively correlated harms favor a liability rule that pools risks together, as in strict liability. The same applies when parties can purchase costly insurance (first party or third party). This policy recommendation is in line with current products liability law, which places design defects and warning failures under a de facto negligence regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of United States v. Booker and Gall/Kimbrough v. United States, sentencing researchers and legal scholars conducted research designed to identify their impact on the federal sentencing process, with a focus on determining whether the decisions increased unwarranted disparity. In this article, we extend this body of research. Using 10 years of data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission and data from other sources, we assess whether and how these decisions influence sentence severity. Results indicate that sentence severity declined following Booker and, especially, Gall/Kimbrough, but that the decisions’ effects on sentence severity varied significantly across U.S. District Courts. Most importantly, the impact of Gall/Kimbrough sentence severity was conditioned by districts’ percent Black population, level of socioeconomic disadvantage, and degree of political conservatism; each of these factors moderated the decisions’ effects on the harshness of the sentences imposed by the districts’ judges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents Idaho State Bar association news briefs on topics including the admission of 36 new bar association members on April 26, 2019 in Boise, Idaho. According to the article, lawyer Steven W. Boyce has been appointed as an Idaho Seventh District Court judge. The graduates of the Idaho Academy of Leadership for Lawyers class of 2018-2019 are addressed, along with elections involving Idaho District Bar Association officers such as Stephen A. Stokes and James A. Cook.

Do federal magistrate judges make different decisions and produce distinct judicial outputs from district judges? To provide initial empirical evidence on this question, this study utilizes federal district court data covering issue areas including employment discrimination, broader civil rights, intellectual-property rights, and personal-injury torts. The data indicate that magistrate judges are actively involved in civil cases, with as many as sixty-seven percent of cases having one or more magistrate judges serving in some role. These magistrate judges commonly preside over settlement conferences, decide discovery motions, issue reports and recommendations on dispositive motions, preside over status, management, and scheduling conferences, and serve as the assigned judge in the case by the consent of the parties. While there are numerous areas where there is no statistical difference in the outputs of magistrate judges and district judges, notable differences include grant rates of discovery motions, the likelihood of cases settling, appeal rates, the number of days to case resolution, the number of docket entries before case resolution, and the likelihood of opinion publication. The results may be due to differences in behavior between district judges and magistrate judges or, instead, may be driven by non-random opinion assignment practices. This project also provides empirical insight into two additional, closely related questions. For the first question of whether prior experience as a magistrate judge affects district judge behavior, the data reveal that differences in settlement probabilities again emerge. The data also show a lower rate of report and recommendation non-adoption, and a higher number of words and citations per opinion among district judges with magistrate judge experience than those without that same background. For the second question of whether magistrate judges who receive future Article III district court appointments behave differently from their magistrate colleagues who do not, the data indicate that future district judges have higher grant rates on discovery motions and lower rates of appeal than other magistrate judges. There are also no instances in the data of these future appointees having their reports and recommendations not adopted. The article ends with an encouragement of additional data collection efforts on magistrate judges’ decisions and activities to further the systematic inquiry into this important subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between United States district judges and United States magistrate judges is unique within the American judiciary. United States magistrate judges are the first judges encountered in most federal civil or criminal cases and play an increasingly important role in the adjudication of virtually every case in United States district court. Yet, while the behavior of Article III judges has been the subject of active academic scrutiny, the behavior of magistrate judges, who are appointed to renewable eight-year terms by their Article III district judge colleagues, has largely been ignored.1 This paper reports the results of interviews of thirty-four magistrate judges and district judges, and through their experiences, explores whether their judicial decision-making relationship, a motivation for reappointment, or elevation to Article III status influences their judicial behavior and that of their district judge colleagues. The answers to these questions are nuanced and dependent on variables not previously considered, and are best understood in the context of the remarkable evolution of the Magistrate Judges System, which has existed for less than fifty years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relative ease with which corporate fraud went unnoticed during the Enron scandal created tension between Congress and the public. In hindsight, the public questioned the difference whistleblowers could have made if they were adequately protected. Since 2002, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act ("SOX") has provided anti-retaliation protection to employees of publicly traded companies. However, the language used in the whistleblower statute raises the question: Does SOX extend coverage to employees discharging their duties? The district courts have thus far correctly interpreted SOX as extending coverage to employees discharging their duties. Although this issue has only manifested itself in the district courts, it is crucial that Congress remain vigilant--foreseeing the consequences that would arise if courts start to deny whistleblower protection to those best suited to blow the corporate whistle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article seeks to seeks to clarify existing Kansas law concerning when a state district court should reconsider a motion to suppress, as of June 2016. It offers a offers a three-part test, based on existing Kansas case law that district court judges can apply when evaluating whether to reconsider a motion to suppress.

The article focuses on redefining "other property" under the economic loss doctrine with reference to the court case CHMM, LLC v. Freeman Marine Equipment, Inc. (Freeman). Topics include buyer company CHMM LLC stated to have brought several products liability claims against Freeman seeking to recover the loss sustained from the failure of the door, and the U.S. district court stated to have decided that the CHMM could not bring such an action in tort and dismissed the claims.

The article discusses the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the 1938 diversity jurisdiction case Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins (Erie) in relation to a debate about whether a U.S. federal district court that is hearing a case under its diversity jurisdiction is required to use the preliminary injunction standard that would be applied by a court of general civil jurisdiction where the federal court is located. American civil procedure, forum shopping, and legal presumptions are assessed.

The article discusses the court case Sissel v. United States Department of Health & Human Services. Particular focus is given to how this case relates to constitutional law, the Origination Clause and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Details relating to how the court case took place in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia are also offered.

The article discusses rise in pretrial adjudication that resulted in an emphasis on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Topics discussed include ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal amending the standard for complaint pleading, application of plausibility standard to affirmative defenses by district courts and change to notice pleading introduced by the Federal Rules.