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[T]he judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power; that it can never attack with success either of the other two; and that all possible care […]

Ms. Lannette Nickens contributed suggestions in the final sections of this article. She is a former Assistant Attorney General of the State of Alaska (USA) and is an experienced attorney [...]

Between 2017 and 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court examined three cases that involved states that tried to limit the use of public money to support religious-affiliated schools. The Supreme Court found a violation of the Free Exercise Clause in all three cases. Although not the focus of the Court's opinions, these cases may have created avenues for discriminatory practices in publicly funded state school voucher programs. In elevating free-exercise rights above Establishment Clause concerns, the Court's decisions may have serious implications for students' civil rights in schools. This article specifically examines whether the growth of school voucher programs in the context of these recent Supreme Court decisions creates a pathway for racial discrimination in participating voucher schools. We first explore the impact of the three Supreme Court decisions. Specifically, we argue that when the Court eliminated distinctions between policies denying funding because of religious status and policies denying funding for religious uses and when it elevated free-exercise arguments, it may have opened additional avenues for discrimination. Thus, we next address whether participating voucher schools can refuse admission to Black students. To set the context for this discussion, we provide a brief historical analysis of case law that has previously supported race-based discrimination on religious grounds. We show that although past court cases and federal tax policy have created a bulwark against such discrimination, the recent rulings favoring free exercise rights raise concerns. If free-exercise rights trump civil rights, some voucher statutes may create an alternative funding stream for modern-day "segregation academies." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Regional Court of Amberg has sentenced a defendant to a suspended sentence of one year and three months for theft. However, the court is of the opinion that the positive criminal prognosis has not been fulfilled, as the defendant started sociotherapy shortly before the trial. The Higher Regional Court has found a defendant guilty of genocide and imposed a life sentence. The article describes the background of the "Church Massacre of Kiziguro" in Rwanda in 1994. The convicted person was sentenced in Germany for attempted murder and aggravated arson and placed in a detoxification facility due to their paranoid schizophrenia and drug use. The Federal Court of Justice has criticized the decision of the Regional Court. The text refers to a decision of the Federal Court of Justice regarding placement according to § 64 of the Criminal Code. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the role of the judge in 'prosecutor-centred', 'law-centred' and 'judge-centred' models of plea bargaining in the European context. A comprehensive study regarding the judicial role in plea bargaining is necessary, since the principle of double control has frequently been neglected in negotiated case dispositions, and in the literature it has often been suggested that more robust judicial control of plea bargaining should be in place. Instead of a pan-European overview, our article focuses on the different models of plea bargaining, particularly in the example of the Swiss abbreviated proceedings, the German confession bargaining and the English sentence discount. In order to put the judge's role into context, the article first introduces the contours of each model before analysing the role of the judge in these proceedings. In conclusion, the article compares the models discussed, which would provide a baseline for assessing the judicial role in plea bargaining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the importance of courts helping parties prepare for mediation sessions. It highlights the benefits of careful preparation, such as increased fairness, party involvement, and satisfaction with the process. However, many parties are not well prepared before mediation sessions, and some are not even aware of their eligibility for mediation programs. The article suggests that courts should provide clear information about mediation, require attorneys to discuss dispute resolution options with their clients, and develop best practice guidelines for mediation preparation. [Extracted from the article]

It has been established that the participation of the people in the administration of justice on Ukrainian lands during their time within the Russian and Austrian Empires is a complex topic for research. To date, questions related to the mechanisms of public participation in the judiciary, particularly the functioning of the jury system, the election of justices of the peace, and the influence of public opinion on judicial processes, remain insufficiently studied. The lack of detailed analysis of these aspects in doctrinal sources complicates the understanding of the overall picture of the legal culture of that time. It is noted that Ukrainian lands were part of the Russian and Austrian Empires from the late 18th to the early 20th century, and the judiciary during this period differed from the judicial system of previous eras. In many respects, this was an era of centralized and imperial governance. It has been observed that public participation in the administration of justice during this period is seen through the activities of justices of the peace, approved by the governor, who were the lowest tier of the judicial system. The appointment of justices of the peace ensured a certain level of control and compliance with the requirements of the state administration. On Ukrainian lands, justices of the peace handled criminal and civil cases in rural and urban communities from the late 19th to the early 20th century. It has been emphasized that later, an important form of public participation in the administration of justice became the jury system (in district courts), which began functioning in 1864 according to the Judicial Statutes. It has been highlighted that the Austrian Empire introduced its own specifics into the legal system of Western Ukraine, establishing the structure of courts, the competence of judges, judicial procedures, and other aspects of judicial activity. This legal framework reflected the imperial norms and standards of justice that existed in the territories under its control. Therefore, judges in Western Ukrainian lands performed their duties according to Austrian legislation, which included norms regarding their status, powers, procedures for conducting court sessions, and the resolution of cases. Within the Austrian Empire, the jury system was introduced in 1867. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Scholars have recently criticized Fourth Amendment pretext doctrine for leading to more police contact with Black and Brown people and thus to racially disproportionate uses of excessive force. This Essay reveals the intersection of the Court’s pretext and excessive force doctrines by unearthing their shared roots in the 1973 United States v. Robinson search-incident-to-arrest opinion. This Essay’s new insight is that Robinson contains what it calls a “dicta mine.” A dicta mine is (1) an unnecessary statement that (2) a Court silently recharacterizes as having already resolved an issue, (3) exploding it into a significant doctrine. The Robinson dicta mine claims, without support, that “it is of no moment that [officer] Jenks did not indicate any subjective fear of the Respondent or that he did not himself suspect that the Respondent was armed.” Citing Robinson’s dicta mine, the 1978 Scott v. United States opinion takes Robinson’s aside and explodes it into a general principle that courts may not review officers’ subjective motivations. The 1989 Graham opinion then cites Scott, at the place where it cites Robinson’s dicta mine, for the proposition the anti-subjectivity principle is required in excessive force doctrine. Finally, the 1996 Whren opinion argues that Robinson and Scott had already “foreclose[d]” the possibility that the Fourth Amendment could consider police racial bias to be unreasonable. This Essay’s principal contribution to criminal procedure literature is being the first publication to demonstrate how excessive force and pretext doctrines are illegitimate because they rest upon the shaky foundation of Robinson’s dicta mine. This Essay’s second contribution is its proposal that we should respond to the criminal procedure redemption—the systematic undoing of civil liberties, especially for racial minorities, that began in the early 1970s—by adopting a criminal procedure futurism perspective. The goals of this approach are to delegitimate antiegalitarian doctrines in the present and create doctrinal principles for a second criminal procedure revolution in the future. To prepare for the future, law professors should discontinue teaching Robinson as a stand-alone search incident to arrest case. Instead, we should connect it to the excessive force and pretext doctrines as part of showing students how to read opinions with a critical eye. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Necmettin Erbakan University School of Law Review is the property of Necmettin Erbakan University School of Law Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study assesses the effect of the #MeToo movement on the language used in judicial opinions on sexual violence related cases from 51 U.S. state and federal appellate courts. The study introduces various indicators to quantify the extent to which actors in courtrooms employ language that implicitly shifts responsibility away from the perpetrator and onto the victim. One indicator measures how frequently the victim is mentioned as the grammatical subject, as research in the field of psychology suggests that victims are assigned more blame the more often they are referred to as the grammatical subject. The other two indices designed to gauge the level of victim-blaming capture the sentiment of and the context in sentences referencing the perpetrator. Additionally, judicial opinions are transformed into bag-of-words and tf-idf vectors to facilitate the examination of the evolution of language over time. The causal effect of the #MeToo movement is estimated by means of a Difference-in-Differences approach comparing the development of the language in opinions on sexual offenses and other crimes against persons as well as a Panel Event Study approach. The results do not clearly identify a #MeToo-movement-induced change in the language in court but suggest that the movement may have accelerated the evolution of court language slightly, causing the effect to materialize with a significant time lag. Additionally, the study considers potential effect heterogeneity with respect to the judge's gender and political affiliation. The study combines causal inference with text quantification methods that are commonly used for classification as well as with indicators that rely on sentiment analysis, word embedding models and grammatical tagging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The glaring gap in tort theory is its failure to take adequate account of liability insurance. Much of tort theory fails to recognize the active and central role that liability insurance plays in tort law and litigation, or mentions liability insurance only briefly. Liability insurance is treated as exogenous to tort law itself--as if it were merely a contingent source of outside financing, like a bank that passively guarantees a loan. It is no exaggeration to say that liability insurance played a defining and (in our view) salutary role in creating modern tort liability. Modern tort liability would not look at all as it does today if liability insurance had not existed and influenced tort law's development in the ways that it did. This Article calls upon tort scholars of all theoretical and methodological stripes to address the significance of liability insurance by incorporating consideration of liability insurance into their work. We first lay the groundwork for understanding liability insurance's significance by describing the role that liability insurance plays in the life cycle of a tort claim, sketching the contemporary incidence of liability insurance and commercial self-insurance. We then provide a novel contribution to the tort law literature by identifying a collection of important judicial opinions that have made express reference to the availability (or unavailability) of liability insurance in precedentsetting, liability-expanding, and liability-limiting tort cases. We further identify the ways that liability insurance historically has influenced, and continues to influence, the shape and scope of tort law. We specifically identify a number of significant tort law doctrines and practices, such as the thin-skull rule, that we argue would never have persisted in the absence of liability insurance. Given this evidence, we argue that it is liability insurers who--paradoxically--have fueled the continuing expansion of American tort liability that began more than a century ago. We then examine modern tort theory, much of which fails to take adequate account of liability insurance. We explain how to begin filling the gap in tort theory that results from omitting consideration of or inadequately considering liability insurance, showing how liability insurance can appropriately figure in both deontic and consequentialist theories of tort liability. Only by greater recognition and candid acknowledgment of the role that liability insurance plays in tort cases can tort theory provide an accurate picture of the field that it seeks to describe. Finally, we offer lessons for the courts, calling not only for more open acknowledgment of the significance of liability insurance in judicial opinions but also for a radical change in trial practice by proposing that judges explicitly consider record evidence (including the availability of liability insurance) on the insurability of the risk at issue in tort cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does increased use of the shadow docket influence public opinion of the Supreme Court? In recent years, the shadow docket of the Supreme Court has been used with increased frequency to make important decisions. The little research done previously on this docket has led to speculation that the shadow docket creates potential problems with perceptions of legitimacy for the Court. I theorize that procedures matter in changing public opinion of an institution when the procedures are nontransparent, stray from expected norms, and are thus perceived as politically unfair. I administered a survey experiment and find evidence to suggest that use of the shadow docket procedure does lead to less support for decisions as well as an increased support for measures of broad court curbing. The results have important implications for approval of the Court as well as the role of the Court in a transparent democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article investigates the decay of precedents in state supreme courts—the speed at which judicial opinions lose precedential force as measured by the rates of subsequent citation. Prior literature has documented the existence of this effect, but to date researchers have not systematically investigated the phenomenon. This Article performs that analysis by examining three unique databases, each consisting of more than a hundred thousand relevant citations. We fnd that the frequency of citation drops off by a roughly constant ratio with each passing year—a pattern that fts an exponential curve with remarkable precision. The large scale and extended time period of our study suggest that this pattern must result from underlying forces unrelated to circumstances of time or place. The main takeaway is the extraordinary persistence of exponential decay across all of the data. Citations age at different rates across different cuts of the data, but in every case the deterioration of precedents displays an exponential pattern. In addition to documenting the exponential pattern of precedential decay, we explore the determinants of that process across case types. We fnd that opinions with dissents tend to cite older opinions and longer decisions tend to be cited more often and faster. As compared to constitutional law cases, criminal law opinions tend to cite more recent precedents, while trust and estate opinions tend to cite older precedents. We offer some conjectures about possible reasons for the observed differences in decay rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides tips for winning insurance coverage appeals at the appellate level. It emphasizes that briefing for an appellate court should not simply be a repetition of the trial court memoranda, as what may have been a winning argument at the trial court level may not be successful at the appellate level. The article also discusses the importance of understanding how appellate judges approach cases and the need to educate them about unfamiliar areas of the law. It cautions against overreliance on nonbinding opinions and emphasizes the importance of using in-state precedents to build a persuasive case. Additionally, the article mentions the value of certification of questions of law and discusses the appealability of certain orders and the use of supersedeas bonds. [Extracted from the article]

The article presents the text of the inaugural Spencer Abraham Address given by Honorable Judge Patrick J. Bumatay during the Harvard Federalist Society Alumni Banquet on April 1, 2023 at the Sheraton Commander Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bumatay discussed the role that judicial dissent plays in the constitutional system, how that role has developed since the founding of the journal, and the various functions it serves and what it reflects about the society.

This research paper examines the role of mens rea and actus reus in determination of terrorism charges in a case. In spite of substantial worldwide comprehensive efforts to curb the menace of terrorism, on the legal side there is still a gap. There is no universally accepted definition of this term. In Pakistan, the broad and ambiguous definition of terrorism in the ATA has led legal jurisprudence to overlaps with regular penal laws. There have been two approaches developed under ATLs: one, the mens rea-based approach; and second, the actus reus-based approach. This study discovers the use of these two approaches in execution and prosecution of ATLs. This research uses a comprehensive analysis of existing legal scholarship, judicial opinions, and landmark case-laws. It concludes that mens rea-based approach can significantly enhance the precision and fairness in determination whether a case falls under terrorism laws or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is little linguistic research on the structure of judicial opinions from a discourse analysis perspective. There are, however, many professional resources about writing judicial opinions. This paper contributes to genre theory and linguistics of languages for specific purposes by proposing a role for professional writing advice. We also construct a typology of macrostructures proposed by professionals and compare them to the move structure of authentic judicial opinions. Our results show that, in terms of large discourse units, professional resources and move analysis seem to converge. Professional resources, however, do not describe the variation that may be observed in authentic documents. In this way, corpora of professional advice may contribute to a deeper understanding of how a discourse community represents its own genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the prosecutorial tactic, often called "Rap on Trial"--in which rap lyrics and videos associated with a defendant are used as evidence of criminal activity--has exploded into national prominence. The widely-followed prosecution of Young Thug and his labelmates, along with other high-profile rappers, has generated intense interest in the issue, but even before the Young Thug indictment, legislators in California, Washington D.C., and other states had introduced legislation to curb the practice. The Rap on Trial tactic has been around since at least 1991; hundreds of courts have issued judicial opinions permitting the use of rap evidence, despite a steady stream of peer-reviewed empirical studies demonstrating that the tactic introduces a substantial risk of unfair prejudice. In this Article, the author reflects on his work on this issue, identifies important moments in the history of the tactic, explores why it has become more well-known in recent years, and what this new prominence suggests about the state of the Rap on Trial tactic. The author concludes by offering suggestions for policymakers and courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Umsatzsteuer-Rundschau is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Umsatzsteuer-Rundschau is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of FinanzRundschau is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

ABSTRACT--Recent developments at the U.S. Supreme Court have rekindled debates over textualism. Missing from the conversation is a discussion of the courts that decide the vast majority of statutory interpretation cases in the United States--state courts. This Article uses supervised machine learning to conduct the first-ever empirical study of the statutory interpretation methods used by state supreme courts. In total, this study analyzes over 44,000 opinions from all fifty states from 1980 to 2019. This Article establishes several key descriptive findings. First, since the 1980s, textualism has risen rapidly in state supreme court opinions. Second, this rise is primarily attributable to increased reliance on the statute's plain meaning. Third, state supreme courts use tools of statutory interpretation often associated with textualism--plain meaning, dictionaries, and linguistic canons--much more often than legislative history or consequences. And fourth, there is dramatic variation in textualism use across states. This Article also conducts several exploratory analyses investigating whether ideology and judicial selection are associated with the use of textualist tools. I find that conservative justices invoke textualist reasoning slightly more often. And, while the estimates are noisy, the findings also indicate this ideological gap is primarily explained by conservatives' heightened tendency to invoke the plain meaning rule. As for judicial selection, cross-state evidence suggests that justices appointed by governors and legislatures use textualism more frequently than those selected via election or merit commission. These findings add empirical discipline to ongoing debates about ideology and textualism. They also reframe priorities for future research on the plain meaning rule, textualism in general, and judicial selection's relationship to statutory interpretation. More broadly, they illustrate how natural language processing methods can help statutory interpretation scholarship expand its focus and study state courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the causes of transjudicial conversation phenomenon on human rights norms in the context of the Philippine Supreme Court. Transjudicial conversation refers to a judicial occurrence where a domestic court cross-cites foreign judicial opinions. Analysis of the decisions delivered by the Philippine High Court from 1987 to 2019 on issues involving free speech, religious freedom, and environmental rights revealed that the court is an interlocutor in the transjudicial conversation phenomenon. The examination of these cases alongside relevant literature showed that the motivations behind this engagement might be attributed to the genealogical linkages between the domestic rights guarantees and their foreign counterparts, the historical-political alliances between the interlocutor courts, the constitutional system of the borrowing courts, and the foreign academic trainings of the judge who pens the decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a stunning legal opinion that challenged the Supreme Court's ruling in Utah v. Strieff and marked a watershed moment for her voice of dissent. In this essay, I argue that Justice Sotomayor's Strieff dissent was animated by a praxis of rebellious knowledge production – disruptive moves of legal opinion writing that rework interpretive traditions of context, authority, and lived experience to center an episteme of race-consciousness in the law. This study points to the possibilities of outsider jurisprudence as a rhetorical praxis of legal opinion writing and illuminates the democratic promise of Sotomayor's judicial voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When we hear about a transgression, we may consider whether the perpetrator's individual circumstances make their transgression more understandable or excusable. Mitigating circumstances may reduce the severity of punishment that is deemed appropriate, both intuitively and legally. But importantly, in courts of public opinion and of law, mitigating information is typically presented only after information about a perpetrator's transgression. We explore whether this sequence influences the force of mitigating evidence. Specifically, in two studies, we examined whether presenting evidence about a perpetrator's background before or after evidence of their violation influenced how severely U.S. participants punished perpetrators. In Study 1 (N = 132), evidence about the perpetrator's mitigating circumstances reduced punishment only when it was presented before evidence about the perpetrator's violation. Study 2 (N = 316) additionally revealed this moderating effect of presentation order across a variety of premeditated and impulsive violations. These findings are consistent with person-centered theories of punishment and with the Story Model of adjudication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interaction of divine decree among His creation gives rise to states, and groups emerge, defining the cultural features of each nation. The knights of the word, the creators of innovative thought shape these features. The cultural characteristics persist through them as the ages unfold, generation after generation. You see them in every field, affirming their cultural legitimacy and stability across the ages. This necessitates researchers to examine the works of these knights, highlighting their importance and profound impact. The significance of the study lies in focusing on a renewing personality that traversed various fields. Its owner is firm in his opinion, and clear in his presentation. Some consider him the foremost in his field for the last century, while others oppose him and challenge his ideas. The crux of the issue lies in the conflicting opinions and varying acceptance. The Sheikh follows a middle path between two extremes. The first is the submissive model of Muslims without regard for their dignity, and the second is the extremist approach that disregards the suffering of Muslims, pays no attention to consequences, and is only concerned with opposing everyone and waging war against all. This approach has caught the researcher's attention, prompting her to delve into it. She tackles it from various angles, one of which will be discussed in the following paragraphs. The researcher seeks to address the research topic (Civilization and its Components in the Thought of Al-Qaradawi) from two perspectives. The first is to identify and analyze the theory of renewal and civilization in Al-Qaradawi's jurisprudence, and the second is to clarify the renewal aspects and components in Al-Qaradawi's jurisprudence, using the descriptiveanalytical method based on describing the research problem, segmenting and analyzing it. The researcher arrives at several results, including the categorization of the guidelines adopted by Al-Qaradawi to preserve Islamic civilization and its stability in the face of changing circumstances while embracing the world, based on the solid religious principles brought by the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the discourse functions of BE expected to and BE supposed to in the genre of judicial opinion, providing insights into discipline-specific practices of epistemological positioning. Drawing on the 130 million words Corpus of US Supreme Court Opinions, it looks at how the two mindsay constructions were deployed in judicial writing over a period of more than 200 years, and identifies divergent frequency patterns associated with their use. As the findings reveal, in the opinions, on the one hand, BE expected to tends to co-occur with reasonably (can/could (not) reasonably be expected to) and is used to create a semblance of objectivity. BE supposed to, on the other hand, favors the present tense and third-person reference (which/it is supposed to) and serves as a distancing device. The paper also compares the frequency patterns involving BE expected to and BE supposed to found in the opinions with those attested in the Corpus of Historical American English, and it demonstrates that judicial writing exhibits trends which clearly differ from trends noted in non-judicial registers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In ncent decades, judges have increasingly incorporated juvenile brain science into legal rulings. Courts have acknowledged scientific facts, such as the typical human brain not fully developing until approximately twenty-six years old. Meanwhile, scientists have made significant strides in learning how early childhood trauma affects the physical structure and development of the brain. Should courts begin to take into account the impact of early childhood trauma upon the juvenile brain as well?. In this Article, I draw from a line of ground-breaking cases in the United States Supreme Court. The cases began to follow a pattern where the Cow·t was increasingly recognizing brain science as significant to its legal rulings. Lower federal courts and state courts are following suit as well. I posit that the nextfrontier should be trauma-informed and brain-informedjudicial decision making. With the scientific knowledge that trauma rewires the brain physiologically, courts and the legal system need to take juvenile trai¢ma into account when assessing cases. To support the development and incorporation of trauma science into the law, I provide research, such as a comprehensive longitudinal stu* from Swedens Karolinska Institute, the Center for Disease Control k articulationofadversechildhood experiences (ACEs), and the trauma brain science work of Dr. Bruce Perry and Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. Ultimately, I urge that childhood family trauma and its resultant brain development and rewiring be more fully incorporated into legal rulings, judicial opinions, and legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the increasing use of visual elements, such as memes and emojis, in judicial opinions and their impact on legal proceedings. It highlights cases where memes and emojis have been used as evidence, emphasizing their importance in conveying nuanced meanings and emotions in digital communication. It suggests that judges must interpret these visual elements carefully, considering their context and potential implications in legal contexts.

The article explores the increasing usage of non-English terms in U.S. court opinions since World War II, reflecting the nation's linguistic diversity. It discusses how courts handle these terms, often relying on external sources like dictionaries or translators. It highlights the growing importance of understanding and accurately translating non-English terms in legal contexts, given the significant impact they can have on legal interpretations and decisions.

When the Pinball Wizard asked his well-timed question, he not only lit up the 1L classroom with a cacophony of opinions but also illuminated deep confusion about the meaning of, and distinctions between, "rules" and "holdings." The practice of both oversimplifying and conflating the parts of a judicial opinion, particularly rules and holdings, is common among law professors, law school success materials, and, to an extent, even legal writing texts. Coupled with the novice law student's search for right answers and found meaning, 1Ls often find themselves understandably frustrated and confused. This Article argues that the resulting confusion about rules and holdings is an opportunity ripe for introducing contextual understanding and for modeling this metacognitive approach to reading legal texts. Further, it demonstrates how to persuade 1Ls, even the doubters, that contextual understanding will enable their early fluency in the logic of judicial opinions. With buy-in for contextual understanding achieved, this Article next proposes teaching holdings as hypotheses and offers two detailed examples for doing so. Finally, it explains how teaching holdings as hypotheses--itself an example of contextual understanding--will achieve at least three classroom objectives: (1) focusing 1L attention on constructed meaning and the malleability of law; (2) emphasizing the evolution of law, including how holdings themselves can be fundamentally altered without being overruled or criticized; and (3) enhancing classroom engagement, particularly among Gen-Z students who may otherwise be reticent to participate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the inter-American human rights system, inter-State disputes seem largely irrelevant. Such irrelevance contrasts with the European human rights system, where the amount of inter-State disputes is significant (and growing), and is similar to the African human rights regime, where there is a very low number of inter-State disputes. In more than four decades since the entry into force of the American Convention on Human Rights, there are only two inter-State disputes brought before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights—one of the two bodies that, along with the Inter-American Court, make up the regional human rights system. The virtual inexistence of inter-State complaints, however, does not mean an absence of human rights disputes among members of the Organization of American States (OAS). In fact, States resort to other mechanisms to process their disputes. Therefore, to explore how inter-States disputes actually operate under inter-American human rights law, it is necessary to broaden the view and look beyond the specific mechanism of inter-State communications established in the American Convention. This article discusses the two inter-State communications that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has so far examined, and analyses other mechanisms—typically, advisory opinions by the Inter-American Court—that serve as a substitute for inter-State communications. The article shows how OAS States use advisory opinions as a covert inter-State dispute mechanism and argues that the Inter-American Court should articulate a clear set of admissibility standards to address this practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explore the approaches taken by U.S. federal courts in handling disputes over extraterritorial evidence gathering in civil and commercial matters. In the mid-to-late 20th century, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two judicial opinions discussing how to regulate extraterritorial evidence-gathering activities that might cause conflicts of laws among different nations. A significant feature of its litigation system, U.S. courts encourage parties to actively disclose evidence before trial, a practice unwelcomed by many (though not necessarily out of sound justifications given the recent changes in practice) as overly broad "fishing expeditions." The two Supreme Court precedents discussed how courts should exercise their power to compel the disclosure of information when the requested information is located within another nation, and when forcing the disclosure of such information may lead to a violation of that nation's laws. It is worth noting that the core issues involved in these two cases are not of the exact same nature. One case, indeed, concerned the extent to which U.S. courts should require parties to comply with the procedures set forth in the Hague Evidence Convention, as opposed to whether the information may be discovered at all. By far the most influential multilateral treaty in the field of cross-border civil and commercial evidence gathering, the application of the Evidence Convention in individual cases is undoubtedly crucial in reconciling the conflicts between U.S. discovery orders and foreign laws. Upon analyzing the two Supreme Court cases and a series of subsequent lower court opinions, this article finds that U.S. courts have applied rather similar analytical rules and reasoning to resolve discovery disputes both involving and not involving the Hague Evidence Convention. Given that the factual backgrounds out of which these disputes arise are often quite similar, it is possible that courts have failed to fully appreciate the changes in the underlying inquiries. Consequently, the Hague Evidence Convention is used much less frequently in real life than the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to conduct extraterritorial discovery. In order to improve the status quo, this article aims to build a clearer and more sensible analytical framework to help courts better navigate the issues concerning the applicability of the Hague Evidence Convention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Chief Justice Max Baer's judicial opinions during his tenure on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania from 2004 to 2022. It categorizes his opinions into five main types, majority opinions, dissenting opinions, concurring opinions, concurring and dissenting opinions, and plurality opinions. It outlines Baer's background and career achievements, highlighting his contributions to family law and judicial innovation.