SLR Online

Book and glass loupe

Essay

The Faulty Frequency Hypothesis

Difficulties in Operationalizing Ordinary Meaning Through Corpus Linguistics
by  Ethan J. Herenstein  

Introduction Promising to inject empirical rigor into the enterprise of statutory interpretation, corpus linguistics has, over the past couple years, taken the legal academy by storm. A product of linguistics departments, corpus linguistics is an empirical approach to the study of language through the use of large, electronic, and searchable databases of text called corpora.…

Volume 70 (2017-2018)

Block chain network concept on technology background

Essay

Blockchain’s Big Hurdle

by  Riley T. Svikhart  

Blockchain technology can maintain accurate chains of title to securities and other legal instruments in a reliable electronic form. As private industries begin to recognize the cost-saving and risk-reducing potential of this technology, state legislatures are responding. Arizona’s H.B. 2417 is a prototypical state solution. In essence, the law requires parties to treat blockchain-secured records,…

Volume 70 (2017-2018)

Investment and Stock Market watchdog

Essay

Leidos and the Roberts Court’s Improvident Securities Law Docket

by  Matthew C. Turk & Karen E. Woody  

For its October 2017 term, the U.S. Supreme Court took up a noteworthy securities law case, Leidos, Inc. v. Indiana Public Retirement System. The legal question presented in Leidos was whether a failure to comply with a regulation issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Item 303 of Regulation S-K (Item 303), can be grounds for a…

Volume 70 (2017-2018)

Statue of Confederate Soldier Looking at Copy Space

Essay

Confederate Statute Removal

by  Aneil Kovvali  

Certain state governments have adopted statutes that are designed to prevent city governments from eliminating memorials to Confederate forces and leaders. Critics of these controversial statutes generally focus on the moral issue of preserving statues honoring white supremacy. This Essay highlights a different set of concerns: These statutes suppress the speech of cities while compelling…

Volume 70 (2017-2018)

Scrabble Letters

Essay

The Words Under the Words

by  Patrick Barry  

The words lawyers choose can change the decisions people make. Psychologists call the mechanics of this change “framing.” They’ve found, for example, that more people will decide to have a surgery if they are told that the “survival rate is 90%” than if they are told that the “mortality rate is 10%”—even though a survival…

Volume 70 (2017-2018)

Faceless hooded anonymous computer hacker

Essay

Government Hacking to Light the Dark Web

Risks to International Relations and International Law?
by  Orin S. Kerr & Sean D. Murphy  

Introduction Government hacking is everywhere. Hackers working for the Russian government broke into computers run by the Democratic National Committee and stole e-mails relating to the 2016 Presidential election. Hackers traced to the Chinese government broke into U.S. government computers and copied personnel files of over 22 million employees. North Korean hackers intruded into Sony…

Volume 70 (2017-2018)

Law and justice

Response

Continuities, Ruptures, and Causation in the History of American Legal Culture

by  Amalia D. Kessler  

Henry Vanderlyn, an antebellum lawyer from the small town of Oxford, New York, whom I discuss in Inventing American Exceptionalism, kept a daily diary for a thirty-year period and was in the habit of regaling visitors with selected readings from his collected thoughts. Confident that his visitors eagerly attended to his every word, Vanderlyn never…

Volume 70 (2017-2018)

Courthouse facade.

Book Review

Exploring the Origins of America’s ‘Adversarial’ Legal Culture

by  Edward A. Purcell, Jr.  

Introduction Amalia D. Kessler’s Inventing American Exceptionalism is a tour de force of historical imagination, analysis, and synthesis. Asking fresh questions that open new vistas of understanding, her book illustrates some of the complex ways that social factors shape legal thinking on matters ranging from arcane procedural technicalities to fundamental institutional assumptions. Changing social and…

Volume 70 (2017-2018)

paper wisdom

Book Review

The Lawyer/Judge as Republican Hero

by  Mark Tushnet  

Introduction Inventing American Exceptionalism tells a two-sided story. On one side is the replacement of the distinctive inquisitorial processes of equity courts with the adversarial ones of common-law courts. The equity courts relied heavily on taking testimony in writing and in secret, freezing the record so that parties could not shape their evidence in light…

Volume 70 (2017-2018)

Interior View of the Ornate Supreme Court in Lansing, Michigan.

Book Review

Contextualizing Inventing American Exceptionalism

by  Richard White  

Amalia Kessler’s Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877 is a stunning legal history that is even richer than the author may have intended. I would not have thought that an analysis of the oral adversarial tradition in American law could provide the larger insights that her book does. This is…

Volume 70 (2017-2018)

Beige US supreme court columns

Book Review

Introduction

Book Review Symposium on Inventing American Exceptionalism
by  Bernadette Meyler  

How, when, and why did Americans become convinced both that our system of civil justice is adversarial through and through and that adversarialism is normatively desirable? Professor Amalia Kessler’s highly engaging and dauntingly erudite new book, Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877, locates the answer to these questions in a…

Volume 70 (2017-2018)

Programming code abstract technology background of software deve

Essay

Transformative Use in Software

by  Clark D. Asay  

Introduction Fair use is copyright law’s most important defense against claims of copyright infringement. Major corporations depend on it to pursue a variety of technological innovations; universities rely on it for a number of educational purposes; and innovative parties frequently resort to it in creating works that build upon the creativity of others. In short,…

Volume 70 (2017-2018)

manhattan office building

Essay

A Better Way to Revive Glass-Steagall

by  John Crawford  

Introduction The financial crisis of 2007-2008 repeatedly forced regulators to face terrible choices between risking catastrophic contagion by letting particular firms or markets fail, and intervening to bail them out. One explanation of why these dilemmas arose was that financial firms were “too big to fail.” Nearly a decade after the onset of the crisis,…

Volume 70 (2017-2018)

Old Cadillac Eldorado

Essay

‘Cadillac Compliance’ Breakdown

by  Todd Haugh  

Introduction The recent defeat device scandal at Volkswagen, in which VW engineers created and installed a computer algorithm to cheat emissions testing on over eleven million automobiles, brings together two things I spend time thinking about: white collar crime and cars. While that may seem like an odd combination, VW’s troubles happen to marry my…

Volume 69 (2016-2017)

Neil Gorsuch

Symposium - 2017 - Gorsuch

Before the Robe

Judge Neil M. Gorsuch
by  Mark C. Hansen  

The Honorable Neil M. Gorsuch was not the distinguished silver-haired jurist we see now when he walked through the doors of our start-up law firm in the fall of 1995. He was, like the other supremely talented young lawyers we hired to help us build a practice in the attorney-infested (or should I say shark-infested?)…

Volume 69 (2016-2017)

Byron White United States Courthouse in Denver

Symposium - 2017 - Gorsuch

A Personal Reflection on Judge Neil M. Gorsuch from a Former Colleague

by  Michael W. McConnell  

I served with Judge Neil Gorsuch on the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit for over three years, before I left the bench to teach constitutional law at Stanford. I sat with him in about fifty cases. Sometimes we disagreed, strongly. More often, we agreed. I want to share my impressions of Judge Gorsuch…

Volume 69 (2016-2017)

Closeup of First Amendment to the United States Constitution

Symposium - 2017 - Gorsuch

Mainstream Jurisprudence and Some First Amendment Problems

Judge Neil M. Gorsuch on Free Expression
by  Brian C. Baran & Nathaniel Rubin  

Introduction On the 2016 campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump promised he would pick a Supreme Court nominee in the mold of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. To this end, President Trump narrowed his candidate shortlist to three federal appellate judges who had the approval of the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society, and whom the press…

Volume 69 (2016-2017)

Praying people sajdah

Symposium - 2017 - Gorsuch

Judge Gorsuch and Free Exercise

by  Sean R. Janda  

Introduction This Essay examines how Judge Gorsuch, if confirmed, would approach religious freedom cases. It first looks at two free exercise cases Judge Gorsuch has participated in. Then it extracts principles from those cases and from his other writings that help explain how a Justice Gorsuch might contextualize religious freedom claims. Finally, it applies those…

Volume 69 (2016-2017)

Woman with Bible

Symposium - 2017 - Gorsuch

Judge Gorsuch and the Establishment Clause

by  James Y. Xi  

Introduction The proper meaning of the Establishment Clause has sharply divided the Court for decades. Nowhere is this more obvious than in cases dealing with the constitutionality of religious displays. The Court has held that it is unconstitutional, for example, for a city to display a holiday crèche (a Nativity scene) if it stands alone.…

Volume 69 (2016-2017)

Police dog. Policeman with a German shepherd on duty.

Symposium - 2017 - Gorsuch

Judge Gorsuch and the Fourth Amendment

by  Sophie J. Hart & Dennis M. Martin  

Introduction Before Justice Scalia, pragmatic balancing tests dominated the Court’s Fourth Amendment doctrine. But by 2008, Justice Scalia had succeeded in reframing the Court’s analysis. In an opinion joined by seven other Justices, he wrote: “In determining whether a search or seizure is unreasonable, we begin with history. We look to the statutes and common…

Volume 69 (2016-2017)