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\u3cem\u3eVerition Partners Master Fund Ltd. v. Aruba Networks, Inc.\u3c/em\u3e: Deal Price as a Ceiling in Statutory Appraisal Actions
Get PDFBeyond Settlement: Reconceptualizing ADR as “Conflict Process Strategy”
Get PDF“Alternative dispute resolution” or “ADR” has reached a paradoxical moment: it is both ubiquitous in practice and at risk of extinction as a distinct concept and field. As the ADR field nears middle age—nearly fifty years after the Pound Conference of 1976—“ADR” has become so popular in name, fractured in practice, and jumbled in theory that it risks a metaphorical genericide, a concept in trademark law when a product name is used to refer to so many things (incorrectly) that it becomes “generic” and confusing. Analogously, the name “ADR” has been applied to so many different processes and concepts that its meaning has become muddled and unifying theoretical principles and governing norms diluted. Over time, ADR has become everything and nothing in particular.
This article reflects on the history and future of ADR in modern legal thought and education. Part I examines what ADR is, and equally important, is not. It seeks to clarify some existing points of confusion about “ADR” that arise, in part, from the three words that comprise our abbreviation. Part II examines where ADR fits within law and legal education, applying lessons from the “Legal Process” movement popular in the 1950s. Situating ADR under the broader unifying frame of “process theory and strategy” may serve to better define the field and guide our collective scholarly and teaching agenda into the future
Constitutional Orphan: Gender Equality and the Nineteenth Amendment
No full textAn account of the ramifications of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the divisions it created in the courts and Congress, and in the women\u27s movement itself.
Constitutional Orphan explores the role of former suffragists in the constitutional development of the Nineteenth Amendment, during the decade following its ratification in 1920. It examines the pivot to new missions, immediately after ratification, by two national suffrage organizations, the National Woman\u27s Party and the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The NWP turned from suffrage to a federal equal rights amendment. NAWSA became the National League of Women Voters, and turned to voter education and social welfare legislation. The book then connects that pivot by both groups, to the emergence of a thin conception of the Nineteenth Amendment, as a matter of constitutional interpretation. It surfaces the history around the Congressional failure to enact enforcement legislation, pursuant to the Nineteenth, and connects that with the NWP\u27s perceived need for southern Congressional votes for the ERA. It also explores the choice to turn away from African American women suffragists asking for help to combat voter suppression efforts, after the November 1920 presidential election; and then evaluates the deep divisions among NWP members, some of whom were social feminists who opposed the ERA, and the NLWV, which supported the social feminists in that opposition. The book also analyzes how state courts, left without federal enforcement legislation to constrain or guide them, used strict construction to cabin the emergence of a more robust interpretation of the Nineteenth. It concludes with an examination of new legal scholarship, which suggests broader ways in which the Nineteenth could be used today to expand gender equality.https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/books/1127/thumbnail.jp
Teaching Professional Responsibility Through Theater
Get PDFThis article is about ethics-focused, law school courses, co-taught with a theater director, in which students wrote, produced and performed in plays. The plays were about four men who, separately, were wrongfully convicted, spent decades in prison, and finally were released and exonerated, formally (two) or informally (two).
The common themes in these miscarriages of justice were that 1) unethical conduct of prosecutors (especially failures to disclose exculpatory evidence) and of defense counsel (especially incompetent representation) undermined the Rule of Law and produced wrongful convictions, and 2) conversely, that the ethical conduct of post-conviction lawyers and law students helped to partially vindicate the rights of those wrongfully convicted, but could not provide any real remedy for decades of wrongfully deprived freedom. In sharp contrast, the worst and best of the legal profession were on display.
We argue that reproducing these extraordinary stories as plays, with students playing the roles of prosecutors, defense counsel, defendants (with not only wrongful convictions but also decades of wrongful incarceration), family members, crime victims, and people in the affected communities, is a powerful way to teach both law students and public audiences about the direct connections between legal ethics rules and the Rule of Law. It teaches as well the ripple effects on many people and communities, not just the parties, of unethical lawyer behavior.
The students learned about legal ethics through in depth analysis of the actual case records, from pretrial motions through trial transcripts and appellate briefs (in the nature of ethics autopsies), and from the personal presentations in class by the exonerated men and their families. As important, the students learned about professional responsibility and irresponsibilities, from their immersion in the roles of the lawyers and “secondary” characters, like the affected families of the four men and the crime victims and their communities.
The students also learned about competence, including how to work collaboratively to develop and to tell stories, to appreciate cultural differences, to examine witnesses, and to deal with performance anxiety.
Because the men, all African Americans, were tried in 1968 (two), 1975, and 1983, the plays served as important points of comparison of criminal justice—criminal law and procedure—then and now. In this respect, the courses also were virtual laboratories in which to explore legal realism and critical legal theory, especially race theory; the true stories were powerful critiques of the romanticized, theoretical model of due process that underlies the formal criminal justice curricula
