Alabama Law Scholarly Commons - The University of Alabama
Not a member yet
1539 research outputs found
Sort by
The trapped girl
No full textIn this #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller, Tracy Crosswhite must first identify the victim to catch the killer. When a woman\u27s body is discovered submerged in a crab pot in the chilly waters of Puget Sound, Detective Tracy Crosswhite finds herself with a tough case to untangle. Before they can identify the killer, Tracy and her colleagues on the Seattle PD\u27s Violent Crimes Section must figure out who the victim is. Her autopsy, however, reveals she may have gone to great lengths to conceal her identity. So who was she running from? After evidence surfaces that their Jane Doe may be a woman who suspiciously disappeared months earlier, Tracy is once again haunted by the memory of her sister\u27s unsolved murder. Dredging up details from the woman\u27s past leads to conflicting clues that only seem to muddy the investigation. As Tracy begins to uncover a twisted tale of brutal betrayal and desperate greed, she\u27ll find herself risking everything to confront a killer who won\u27t go down without a deadly fight. Once again, New York Times bestselling author Robert Dugoni delivers a taut, riveting thriller in the fourth installment of his acclaimed Tracy Crosswhite series.https://scholarship.law.ua.edu/harper_lee_prize_books_2018/1007/thumbnail.jp
Before we were yours : a novel
No full textMemphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and uncertainty. Aiken, South Carolina, present day. Born into wealth and privilege, Avery Stafford seems to have it all: a successful career as a federal prosecutor, a handsome fiancé, and a lavish wedding on the horizon. But when Avery returns home to help her father weather a health crisis, a chance encounter leaves her with uncomfortable questions and compels her to take a journey through her family’s long-hidden history, on a path that will ultimately lead either to devastation or to redemption. Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country—Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong.https://scholarship.law.ua.edu/harper_lee_prize_books_2018/1027/thumbnail.jp
Law Without Absolutes: Toward a Pragmatic Science of Law
Get PDFAlthough today the very idea of a science of law-the thought that law could be made a science like any other taught and studied at a modern university-has the ring of an oxymoron, this piece argues that the rejection of legal science was not only overhasty but unnecessary. There is a sense in which we can see law as a science, it argues, but only once we come to see more clearly and accurately just why the tradition of legal science begun in the earliest days of the Western legal tradition and brought to America by Christopher Columbus Langdell was destined to
fail. The article accordingly lays out a reconstruction of both the basic idea of legal science and the specific conception that Langdell was effectively working out in the context of the American common law: the rationalist tradition of legal science. It contends that what was distinctive of the tradition was the absolutist way it had understood and framed the intellectual core of the law: its absolutism as to the law \u27s content, method, and viewpoint. After tracing that tradition from its twelfth-century origins through Langdell \u27s modern reinterpretation, the article goes on to examine the twofold critique of that science conceptualized by Holmes and later carried out in detail by the American Legal Realists, showing that, contrary to the claims of a rationalist legal science, the law is indeterminate not just in practice but in principle. Understanding this principled indeterminacy thus sets the stage for reconsideration of the failure of rationalist legal science, pioneered by the early fellow-traveler of the Realists, John Dewey-a pragmatic science of law, freed of absolutes
Causation Actually
Get PDFThe article debunks the consensus that in concerted action concurrent causes and alternative liability situations the actual causation requirement is missing While courts and scholars insist that in these cases tort law holds liable parties who clearly did not cause the victim\u27s harm this article offers a novel approach Using a simple model and applying it to leading decisions it shows that a party who did not and could not even potentially injure the victim could nevertheless be a butfor reason for the harm The article also challenges claims that causation theories like concerted action substantial factor and alternative liability are fair to the victim or that they are designed to deter actors from engaging in antisocial activities In deviation from the prior literature this article reveals that these causation theories reduce the parties\u27 incentives to take care and result in more rather than fewer accidents This article further shows that despite lip service to the contrary tort law promotes harmful activities that judges declare immoral antisocial and illegal The article argues however that in many cases this result can be justified on efficiency grounds The article concludes that the butfor test should have a larger role in causation analysis and it provides a number of policy recommendations to courts and lawmaker
Compensation\u27s Role in Deterrence
Get PDFThere are plenty of noneconomic reasons to care whether victims are compensated in class actions. The traditional law-and-economics view, however, is that when individual claim values are small, there is no reason to care whether victims are compensated. Rather than compensation deterring wrongdoing is tort law\u27s primary economic objective. And on this score, law-and-economics scholars contend that only the aggregate amount of money that a defendant expects to pay affects deterrence. They say that it does not matter for deterrence purposes how that money is split between victims, lawyers, and charities. This Article challenges that claim about achieving tort law\u27s primary objective and argues that there is an economic reason to care whether victims are compensated in class actions. It offers reason to think that compensating victims deters more wrongdoing than the same amount of relief in other forms, at least in damages class actions.
Put a different way, this Article contends that the primary objectives of class actions -- compensation and deterrence -- are intertwined in ways that scholars have not previously recognized. Compensation affects the amount of reputational harm that class actions inflict on defendants, and anticipating that reputational harm provides a source of deterrence. Because the public cares whether victims are compensated in civil litigation, if class actions were frequently to slight compensation that would undermine public perception of the class device; class actions would come to seem more like plaintiffs\u27 lawyers\u27 extortion mechanisms than legitimate means of redressing harm. Diminished procedural legitimacy makes the class action a less powerful signal about the validity of the underlying claims, which undermines reputational deterrence
Courting death: a novel
No full textCourting Death finds Melanie Wilkerson (from Cotton, book two of the Clarkeston Chronicles) and Arthur Hughes working uncomfortably together in the chambers of a famous federal judge. While Melanie neglects her duties as a law clerk to investigate the mysterious death of a young woman in the courthouse five years earlier, Arthur wades through the horrific habeas corpus appeals of two prisoners: an infamous serial killer and a pathetic child murder. Melanie, a Georgia native who returns from law school in the Northeast, hoped to establish a legal reputation that will eclipse her beauty pageant queen past, which she is now desperate to disown. Arthur is a bright but naive Midwesterner who is rapidly seduced by the small Georgia college town of Clarkeston which, to his surprise, comes with an exotic and attractive landlady. The cohort of federal court clerks is completed by Phil Jenkins, a Stanford graduate from San Francisco who tries his best to balance the personalities of his volatile colleagues. Living and working in bucolic Clarkeston comes with a price. In Courting Death, Arthur, Melanie, and Phil are confronted with the extremes of human mortality, both in and outside the legal system, in ways that they could never have expected or prepared for -- Provided by publisherhttps://scholarship.law.ua.edu/harper_lee_prize_books_2017/1012/thumbnail.jp
The four-night run
No full textJ.D. Scrbacek has just won the biggest trial of his career, but even as he crows to the press, his entire life blows sky-high. Was the bomb meant for him, or for his mobster client? In this seaside casino town where the tables run hot and the tensions run high, the odds say the attorney is a marked man. Alone and on the run, Scrbacek flees into the city\u27s forgotten underbelly, a ruined corridor called Crapstown, where he is forced to confront the ghosts of his past, his present, and his future. Somewhere in the sordid stream of his own existence lie the answers he needs. But in order to emerge from the depths of Crapstown, Scrbacek must argue for his life before a jury of the forgotten and the damned. Is he lawyer enough to save his own skin?https://scholarship.law.ua.edu/harper_lee_prize_books_2017/1016/thumbnail.jp
Small great things: a novel
No full textThis stunning new novel is Jodi Picoult at her finest--complete with unflinching insights, richly layered characters, and a page-turning plot with a gripping moral dilemma at its heart. Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than twenty years\u27 experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she\u27s been reassigned to another patient. The parents are white supremacists and don\u27t want Ruth, who is African American, to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day, the baby goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is alone in the nursery. Does she obey orders or does she intervene? Ruth hesitates before performing CPR and, as a result, is charged with a serious crime. Kennedy McQuarrie, a white public defender, takes her case but gives unexpected advice: Kennedy insists that mentioning race in the courtroom is not a winning strategy. Conflicted by Kennedy\u27s counsel, Ruth tries to keep life as normal as possible for her family--especially her teenage son--as the case becomes a media sensation. As the trial moves forward, Ruth and Kennedy must gain each other\u27s trust, and come to see that what they\u27ve been taught their whole lives about others--and themselves--might be wrong. With incredible empathy, intelligence, and candor, Jodi Picoult tackles race, privilege, prejudice, justice, and compassion--and doesn\u27t offer easy answers. Small Great Things is a remarkable achievement from a writer at the top of her game. Praise for Jodi Picoult\u27s Leaving Time A riveting drama. --Us Weekly [A] moving tale. --People A fast-paced, surprise-ending mystery. --USA Today Poignant. an entertaining story about parental love, friendship, loss. --The Washington Post -- Provided by publisher; A woman and her husband admitted to a hospital to have a baby requests that their nurse be reassigned - they are white supremacists and don\u27t want Ruth, who is black, to touch their baby. The hospital complies, but the baby later goes into cardiac distress when Ruth is on duty. She hesitates before rushing in to perform CPR. When her indecision ends in tragedy, Ruth finds herself on trial, represented by a white public defender who warns against bringing race into a courtroom. As the two come to develop a truer understanding of each other\u27s lives, they begin to doubt the beliefs they each hold most dear -- Provided by publisher ; Includes bibliographical references (pages 469-470) ; New York Times Best Seller Listhttps://scholarship.law.ua.edu/harper_lee_prize_books_2017/1020/thumbnail.jp
Credit Reporting\u27s Vicious Cycles
Get PDFThis article argues that, despite being the least discriminatory form of underwriting in history, consumer credit reporting can reinforce and deepen systemic inequalities. Credit reports can create two sorts of vicious cycles, which can contribute to cycles of poverty and deepen race-based disenfranchisement. The first takes place in credit markets themselves. Even on a neoclassical model of credit reporting, and especially on a model that accounts for cognitive imperfections, credit reports can amplify past problems with debt, most of which can be traced to broader forces that shape economic inequality. The second cycle arises when credit reports are used in extra-lending contexts. In non-lending contexts such as employment credit checks, credit reports do not seem to provide any useful information to employers, but they do reinforce the first vicious cycle and the disadvantage it amplifies. In quasi-lending contexts like insurance pricing, credit reports may provide predictive information, but the information they reveal seems only to be information about economic instability. By forcing economically unstable individuals to pay more for insurance (or making it harder to rent an apartment), the use of credit reporting deepens this instability. The fact that even a cheap and generally accurate system of underwriting can reinforce and deepen racial and economic inequities should provide reason to rethink the notion that equal access to consumer credit markets can truly serve egalitarian goals when the credit market is embedded in such a fundamentally unequal system