Remaking the United States Supreme Court in the Courts’ of Appeals Image

We argue that Congress should remake the United States Supreme Court in the U.S. courts\u27 of appeals image by increasing the size of the Court\u27s membership, authorizing panel decisionmaking, and retaining an en banc procedure for select cases. In so doing, Congress would expand the Court\u27s capacity to decide cases, facilitating enhanced clarity and consistency in the law as well as heightened monitoring of lower courts and the other branches. Remaking the Court in this way would not only expand the Court\u27s decisionmaking capacity but also improve the Court\u27s composition, competence, and functioning

Theory of the Thermal Diffusion of Electrolytes in a Clusius Column

A theory is presented which accounts approximately for the apparently anomalous difference between the thermal diffusion coefficients of an ion in the presence and in the absence of other electrolytes; the theory is based on the existence of an electric field parallel to the thermal gradient in the electrolyte as a consequence of the variation in mobility among the various ions present. It is pointed out also that some data on the behavior of electrolytes in a Clusius column are at variance with the Debye exponential law concerning the steady‐state distribution of solute

The Old Bailey proceedings and the representation of crime and criminal justice in eighteenth-century London

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, published accounts of felony trials held at London’s central criminal court, were a remarkable publishing phenomenon. First published in 1674, they quickly became a regular periodical, with editions published eight times a year following each session of the court. Despite the huge number of trial reports (some 50,000 in the eighteenth century), the Proceedings, also known as the “Sessions Papers”, have formed the basis of several important studies in social history, dating back to Dorothy George’s seminal London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1925). Their recent publication online, however, has not only made them more widely available, but also changed the way historians consult them, leading to greater use of both quantitative analysis, using the statistics function, and qualitative examination of their language, through keyword searching. In the context of recent renewed interest in the history of crime and criminal justice, for which this is the most important source available in this period, the growing use of the Proceedings raises questions about their reliability, and, by extension, the motivations for their original publication. Historians generally consider the Proceedings to present accurate, if often incomplete, accounts of courtroom proceedings. From this source, along with manuscript judicial records, criminal biographies (including the Ordinary’s Accounts), polemical pamphlets such as Henry Fielding’s Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), and of course the satirical prints of William Hogarth, they have constructed a picture of eighteenth-century London as a city overwhelmed by periodic crime waves and of a policing and judicial system which was forced into wide-ranging reforms in order to meet this challenge

The Futility of Appeal: Disciplinary Insights into the Affirmance Effect on the Unitest States Courts of Appeals

In contrast to the Supreme Court, which typically reverses the cases it hears, the United States Courts of Appeals almost always affirm the cases that they hear. We set out to explore this affirmance effect on the U.S. Courts of Appeal by using insights drawn from law and economics (i.e., selection theory), political science (i.e., attitudinal theory and new institutionalism), and cognitive psychology (i.e., heuristics and biases, including the status quo and omission biases)

The Threes : Re-Imagining Supreme Court Decisionmaking

Article III is odd. In contrast to Articles 12 and II, which specify in some detail how the legislative and executive branches are to be assembled, Article III says virtually nothing about the institutional design of the Supreme Court. Consistent with this Constitutional silence, the Court\u27s look, shape, and behavior have adapted to changed circumstances. For example, the Court\u27s membership has changed substantially. Initially, six Justices sat on the Court; in time, the Court grew to ten and shrank to seven. Only in 1869 did it settle at nine. Likewise, the Court\u27s jurisdiction has changed, first expanding, then contracting, and then shifting. The Court\u27s caseload, which is now almost entirely discretionary, was once almost entirely mandatory. And the Court has altered its courtroom practices in a variety of ways; for instance, the Court once allowed advocates, who rarely submitted briefs, to present oral arguments that lasted for days! These examples tell us something important about the past, present, and future of the Supreme Court. The current Court may consist of nine members who decide a small number of discretionary appeals en banc, but this was not always so, nor need it be so in the future. So, in light of the many important roles the Court plays in our constitutional democracy, how should it conduct its affairs? In this Essay-the first in a series of essays designed to reimagine the Supreme Court-we argue that Congress should authorize the Court to adopt, in whole or part, panel decisionmaking. We recognize, of course, that this proposal is likely to elicit a visceral reaction. If your politics skew left, you might tremble at the thought of Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas deciding Grutter, or Justices White and Rehnquist deciding for a divided panel that a woman does not have the right to choose. If your politics skew right, you might fear a world in which the inconvenient truth is not an Academy Award-winning documentary, but rather a decision by Justices Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg to send Al Gore to the White House. Whatever counterfactual you find troubling, your visceral reaction probably reflects two presumed costs associated with a move to a panel system: the prospect of different outcomes and the prospect of lower-quality decisions