Category: current scholarship

Ravid on Tweeting #Justice

Itay Ravid (JSD candidate, Stanford) has posted his new article, Tweeting #Justice: Audio-Visual Coverage of Court Proceedings in a World of Shifting Technology, on SSRN. It should be of significant interest to readers of this blog who follow issues of comparative law and court transparency.  From the abstract:

The debate over whether to allow cameras into courtrooms refuses to fade away. In 2015 alone, U.S. federal courts completed a five-year experiment with cameras in courts, New Zealand published new guidelines for audio-visual coverage, and Scotland completely revised its former broadcast policy. These jurisdictions, and others around the globe, constantly struggle to design model practices that successfully balance freedom of the press, transparency, and public access to information, with rights to a fair trial and privacy. The constant need to rethink coverage policies can be attributed in large part to the advancement of technology, providing the media innovative tools to report from within courtrooms even when formal legal norms bar direct reports. These advancements often result in an unsettling disparity between formal norms and the reality of court coverage.

Drawing on the Israeli example, this Article seeks to address this timely issue, illustrating how social media and technological advancements can push regulators to re-evaluate legal regimes that seem to lag behind the law in action. The Article provides a systematic analysis of both doctrinal arguments and empirical data on the policies adopted by different common law jurisdictions, aiming to devise a policy framework for audio-visual coverage of courts in the age of hyper-technology. By synthesizing lessons from these jurisdictions, the Article first traces the evolution of the doctrine on audio-visual coverage across various jurisdictions, and its constitutional framing. Moreover, the Article exposes the politicization of constitutional law: how courts adopt flexible frameworks with regard to policies on constitutional issues that affect them. Second, the Article suggests that existing empirical data are generally supportive of coverage, showing almost no adverse effects resulting from the presence of cameras in courtrooms. Third, the Article provides practical tools for reaching balanced coverage policies, offering the first analytical framework for the design of coverage policies. The Article utilizes the Israeli case study—a country with currently no audio-visual coverage policy—in order to implement the suggested framework and offers a comprehensive coverage policy within Israeli courts.

Should you correct a judge’s mispronunciation?

Professor James Duane has a very short and interesting article up on SSRN about the potential perils of correcting a judge’s mispronunciation during oral argument. He focuses on one recent case where an excellent young lawyer twice corrected a Supreme Court Justice’s mangled pronunciation of “antecedent” simply by later pronouncing it correctly. Duane thinks this was the wrong approach, and counsels lawyers to either mispronounce the word in the same way going forward, or avoid using the mispronounced word altogether for the remainder of the argument.

That seems like odd advice to me. Judges are human beings, and they are not immune from basic mistakes any more than the rest of us.* Were I in the situation of that young advocate, I would be inclined just to use the word correctly the next time. Mimicking the error would seem to call even greater attention to it.

What do readers think?  Feel free to weigh in.

* Some judges are more comfortable admitting mild linguistic ignorance (Chief Justice Roberts’ interruption a few years back to ask about the meaning of “orthogonal” comes to mind).  But accepting that you mispronounced a word, and that it’s no big deal, seems to me a basic example of judicial humility.

Stern on Judicial Candidates’ Right to Lie

Nat Stern (Florida State) has posted his new article, Judicial Candidates’ Right to Lie, on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

A large majority of state judges are chosen through some form of popular election. In Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, the Supreme Court struck down a law forbidding certain judicial campaign speech. A decade later, the Court in United States v. Alvarez ruled that factually false statements do not constitute categorically unprotected expression under the First Amendment. Together these two holdings, along with the Court’s wider protection of political expression and disapproval of content-based restrictions, cast serious doubt on states’ ability to ban false and misleading speech by judicial candidates. Commonly known as the misrepresent clause, this prohibition has intuitive appeal in light of judges’ responsibilities and still exists in many states. Given the provision’s vulnerability to challenge, however, states may be able to avert chronic fabrication by judicial candidates only by removing its ultimate source — judicial elections themselves.

Leib and Brudney on legislative underwriting of judicial decisions

Over at Prawfsblawg, Ethan Leib has called attention to his new article (coauthored with James Brudney) on legislative underwrites: As the first part of the abstract explains:

This article introduces a widespread but virtually unacknowledged practice in Congress and state legislatures. Not only do legislatures override judicial decisions as part of an interbranch dialogue when they disagree with judicial rulings and doctrine; they also underwrite judicial decisions when they agree with those rulings. For all the literature on the adversarial communication evidenced through legislative overriding, there is not a single paper devoted to legislative underwrites that reflect more collaborative dimensions of the interbranch dialogue. This article begins to fill that void, and in so doing it frames practical and theoretical lessons for legislative, judicial, and scholarly audiences.

This is a very interesting piece, and I encourage you to read the whole thing.  Lieb and Brudney identify an important area of communication and cooperation between the legislative and judicial branches.  Interbranch communication as a general matter is understudied, and (as the authors note) when it is examined, it it usually in the context of collisions between the branches.

I do wish Leib and Brudney had given more substantial credit (beyond a brief mention) to a little-known but important “statutory housekeeping” program initiated nearly thirty years ago by Robert Katzmann when he was still heading the Governance Institute (an arm of the Brookings Institution). Through that program, the federal appellate courts transmitted to Congress selected judicial opinions identifying problems in the text of a statute — for example, statutory provisions containing ambiguous language, or statutes whose text required the court to fill a gap to determine their appropriate scope. The transmissions were purely informational: the courts did not comment on the enclosed opinions other than to say they might be of interest, and Congress was under no obligation to make any modifications to the statute.  A 2007 review of the program concluded that Congress was making sufficient use of the opinions to justify the program’s continuation.

The program itself was the product of close collaboration between the federal courts, key members of Congress, the administrative staffs of both the judicial and legislative branches, and the Governance Institute. As importantly, it set the stage for open communications between the Congress and the judiciary that was reasonably benign and suspicion-free.  Given the judiciary’s reluctance to engage Congress directly on most matters unless expressly invited to do so, the housekeeping protocols allowed courts to flag important statutory glitches for legislators without concern that they would be viewed as overstepping their bounds.  It was, in a sense, the equivalent of pointing out that someone’s shoe is untied — a small gesture, typically meant to gently assist, but which could be viewed as suspicious or even mocking if a relationship is strained or unfamiliar.

The legislative underwriting that Leib and Brudney identify is broader in scope and much more ambitious than mere “housekeeping” measures.  Among other things, they imagine transmissions that travel not just from the courts to Congress, but back the other way.  This is fair enough, but the eventual success of any more expansive underwriting program will owe a significant debt to the groundwork laid by the “statutory housekeeping” program. By exchanging information and communications frequently when the stakes are small, both entities have begun to build the trust to communicate and collaborate when the stakes are larger.