Runaway Jury: An Analysis of State Laws Concerning Juror Impeachment

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-421
Author(s):  
Brenda I. Rowe ◽  
Wesley S. McCann

The no impeachment rule bars the admission into evidence of juror testimony regarding jury deliberations in proceedings questioning the validity of a verdict. In Pena-Rodriguez v. Colorado, the U.S. Supreme Court created a constitutional exception to the no impeachment rule to allow impeachment of a verdict by a juror’s testimony regarding a fellow juror’s clear statement during jury deliberations indicating reliance on racial bias as a substantial motivating factor for that juror’s vote. This study traces the history of the no impeachment rule, analyzes the Court’s decision in Pena-Rodriguez v. Colorado, examines variation in exceptions provided by states’ statutory no impeachment rules, and discusses the likely impact of Pena-Rodriguez as well as policy implications of the current state of no impeachment statutes.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John F. Preis

Time and again, the U.S. Supreme Court has declared that the federal cause of action is "analytically distinct" from rights, remedies, and jurisdiction. Yet, just pages away in the U.S. Reports are other cases in which rights, remedies, and jurisdiction all hinge on the existence of a cause of action. What, then, is the proper relationship between these concepts?The goal of this Article is to articulate that relationship. This Article traces the history of the cause of action from eighteenth-century England to its modem usage in the federal courts. This history demonstrates that the federal cause of action is largely distinct from rights, closely related to (and sometimes synonymous with) remedies, and distinct from jurisdiction except where Congress instructs otherwise or the case implicates sovereign immunity. Sorting out these relationships provides several benefits, including refining the doctrine of prudential standing, clarifying the grounds for federal jurisdiction, and dispelling claims that Congress lacks power over certain causes of action.


Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers

This introduction reframes the history of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Hague v. CIO (1939) that guaranteed speech and assembly rights in public municipal forums under federal law for the first time. It lifts the story out of standard treatment as a product of police repression of labor organizers by city boss Frank Hague, exploring instead the case’s broader roots in multiple changes in city governance, policing, the labor movement, civil liberties law, and anticommunism and antifascism politics of the late New Deal era. It urges examination of all sides of the controversy, winners and losers, scrutinizing evidence beyond antiboss sources, including varied newspapers, municipal reports, trial transcripts, labor archives, and federal court records. It views the case as part of a constitutional watershed.


2021 ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Michael J. Rosenfeld

Chapter 9 tells the story of Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court decision that finally struck down the remaining state laws that criminalized sodomy. In 2004 Massachusetts became the first state in the U.S. to have marriage equality, following the state supreme court decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health. Opponents of gay rights fought furiously to overturn marriage equality in Massachusetts, but once straight people saw that marriage equality cost them nothing, the opposition faded away. Gay rights groups in Massachusetts prevailed despite having many institutional disadvantages. In California in 2008, Proposition 8 was passed by voters to reintroduce a same-sex marriage ban.


Hypatia ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Wagner Decew

I first discuss reasons for feminists to attend to the role of women in the military, despite past emphasis on antimilitarism. I then focus on the exclusion of women from combat duty, reviewing its sanction by the U.S. Supreme Court and the history of its adoption. I present arguments favoring the exclusion, defending strong replies to each, and demonstrate that reasoning from related cases and feminist analyses of equality explain why exclusion remains entrenched.


Author(s):  
Robert M. Lichtman

This book provides a comprehensive history of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in “Communist” cases during the McCarthy era. The book shows the Court’s vulnerability to public criticism and attacks by the elected branches during periods of political repression. The book describes every Communist-related decision of the era (none is omitted), placing them in the context of political events and revealing the range and intrusiveness of McCarthy-era repression. Demonstrating keen insight into the Supreme Court’s inner workings and making extensive use of the justices’ papers, the book examines the dynamics of the Court’s changes in direction and the relationships and rivalries among its justices, including such towering figures as Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Earl Warren, William O. Douglas, and William J. Brennan, Jr.


2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Novak

James Henretta's “Charles Evans Hughes and the Strange Death of Liberal America” takes up one of the most interesting and important interpretive questions in the history of American political economy. What explains the dramatic transformation in liberal ideology and governance between 1877 and 1937 that carried the United States from laissez-faire constitutionalism to New Deal statism, from classical liberalism to democratic social-welfarism? That question has preoccupied legions of historians, political-economists, and legal scholars (as well as politicians and ideologues) at least since Hughes himself opened the October 1935 Term of the U.S. Supreme Court in a brand new building and amid a rising chorus of constitutional criticism. Henretta, wisely in my opinion, looks to law, particularly public law, for new insights into that great transformation. But, of course, the challenge in using legal history to answer such a question is the enormous increase in the actual policy output of courts, legislatures, and administrative agencies in this period. Trying to synthesize the complex changes in “law-in-action” in the fiercely contested forums of turn-of-the-century America sometimes seems the historical-sociological equivalent of attempting to empty the sea with a slotted spoon. Like any good social scientist, Henretta responds to the impossibility of surveying the whole by taking a sample. Through a case-study of the ideas, political reforms, and legal opinions of Charles Evans Hughes, particularly as governor of New York and associate and chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Henretta offers us in microcosm the story of the revolution (or rather several revolutions) in modern American governance.


2000 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
James W. Ely Jr. ◽  
John E. Semonche

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