This paper examines the rich and unique history of Dartmouth's Board of Trustees, beginning with the College's founding in 1769, through the landmark case Dartmouth v. Woodward, to the current controversy regarding the expansion of the Board of Trustees. The paper evaluates the legal arguments of both sides in the current case, and argues that the Trustees have the stronger legal position.
In a recent ruling that retroactively punished moneylenders, the Supreme Court of Japan forever changed the Japanese consumer finance industry. In the wake of this decision, formerly profitable lenders in Japan are struggling to survive a wave of refund requests from customers claiming excessive payments made in prior years. Central to this case is the evolution of the Japanese Supreme Court's definition of the term “voluntary” as it relates to interest payments made by consumer debtors. This Note assesses the implications of the Japanese Supreme Court's decision on that nation's consumer finance industry as it moves forward.
The federal judiciary today faces a crisis of authority. The independence of the judiciary that the Founders held so dear seems to have been compromised or threatened in many ways in recent years. The judicial nominations process has become politicized to an extent that has stymied the confirmation of judges needed to do the important work of the judiciary, judicial pay has languished at unreasonably low levels, the judiciary has been starved of the capital and human resources it truly needs to fulfill its Constitutional role, and Congress has increasingly sought to exert oversight and control over judicial decisionmaking. This Article chronicles these various challenges to the independence of the federal judiciary and offers some thoughts about how the independence of the Judicial Branch might be restored.
The capital punishment laws of the United States, despite their seeming impartiality, nevertheless permit room for gender bias. This article traces the foundational conceptions of aversion to punishing women by explaining the existing mechanisms of the “Chivalry Theory” and the “Evil Woman Theory.” It then moves to an overview of the case law that has defined the constraints of the death penalty's application. Both statutory aggravating factors, which enable a person to be charged guilty in a capital crime, and statutory mitigating factors, which differentiate sentencing decisions, are flawed because they do not ensure gender neutrality. Rather, because of both extralegal attitudes and institutional qualifications used in capital crime trials, capital punishment laws do discriminate against men. The article then discusses ways for states to employ more legislative scrutiny in determining the fairness of these laws.
This paper seeks to examine the effectiveness of briefs of amicus curiae on the opinion of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. Research indicates that the briefs had very little direct impact on the specific language used in Justice O'Connor's opinion, but that the reference to Bradwell v. Illinois seems to have been taken directly from two amici. The lack of amici influence on the opinion of the Court in this case instead speaks to a sense of duty to the rules and norms of the Supreme Court and the idea of institutional maintenance on behalf of the Justices, and in particular Justice O'Connor, rather than an ability or possibility of being swayed by briefs.br>
The phenomenon of suicide has profound emotional, moral, and legal implications. When put in the context of incarcerated prisoners on death row, it becomes an even more complicated issue by testing the boundaries of our understanding of the nature of justice, autonomy, and mercy. This paper will attempt to accomplish three things: 1) to examine the causes of suicide in prison, and relate these to the experience of death row inmates; 2) to consider the status of suicide within a moral and legal framework and relate this status to the treatment of prisoner suicide on death row; and 3) to examine the nature of individual liberty and self-determination for those under a death sentence, taking on the issues of mental illness, “suicide by execution,” and martyrdom. All of these issues will be analyzed with the goal of promoting personal autonomy in the face of profound moral ambiguity.
