Alabama Law Scholarly Commons - The University of Alabama
Not a member yet
1539 research outputs found
Sort by
When Bank Examiners Get It Wrong: Financial Institution Appeals of Material Supervisory Determinations
Get PDFBanks and credit unions sometimes complain that the examination process regulators use to police banking practices is oppressive. These financial institutions complain that regulators reach unduly negative examination conclusions known as material supervisory determinations. Institutions are wary because negative determinations can subject an institution to further regulatory scrutiny or enforcement actions. To guard against erroneous determinations, Congress, in 1994, enacted a statute requiring federal financial institution regulators to provide an appeals process. Each of the four regulators (the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the National Credit Union Administration) adopted a unique material supervisory determination appeals process. Using data (some collected through Freedom of Information Act requests) about material supervisory decision appeals since 1994 and interviews with top regulators, this Article provides the first in-depth analysis of the appeals processes. It shows that the appeals processes are sometimes dysfunctional and seldom used. To improve the appeals processes, the Article recommends three changes. First, once a regulator issues a material supervisory determination, financial institutions should have direct access to a dedicated appellate authority outside of the examination function. Second, the appellate authority should engage in a robust review; it should consider a broad scope of appealable matters and employ a clear and rigorous standard of review. Third, regulators should release detailed information about each decision reached by the appellate authority
The Jury as Democracy
Get PDFAlmost from the moment the law is set to paper, it is shaped and refined through acts of interpretation and discretion. Police and prosecutors choose which cases to investigate, which to charge and how to charge them. Judges make decisions every day that affect the outcome of cases. These acts of interpretation and discretion are driven by the perspectives of those empowered to make them. All too frequently, they reinforce existing power dynamics. But there are other realms of discretion in criminal law. Whether seeking to apply a legal standard as instructed or engaging in an act of nullification, ordinary citizens serving as jurors engage in unique acts of interpretation, redefining the very concept of the law in terms of their own lived experiences and expectations. In this, jurors serve a democratic function that exceeds their minimalist label as “mere fact finders.” But in this account of the jury, the people who occupy the jury box matter. To imagine the jury as serving this democratic function is inevitably to turn to a conversation about the identities of the men and women who actually serve as jurors. While courts and scholars speak wistfully of a “representative” jury-- one that reflects the community from which it is drawn--this conversation remains dissatisfying, as it seeks to compartmentalize discussions of the jury\u27s function and the jury\u27s composition. This Paper rejects the separation, instead examining the question of the jury\u27s composition in the context of its proposed function. In the process, a more nuanced theory of jury selection emerges--one that recognizes that while a representative jury matters, the question of what that representation is and precisely why it matters shifts as notions of function shift. The function this Paper explores is the critical interpretive role the jury plays within the democratic lawmaking body. Viewed through this lens, one must first confront the question of precisely which community the jury seeks to represent and how it achieves that representation. In a world in which different communities may bear the disproportional burden of lawmaking and application, different communities may have a different stake in the jury itself. If so, the use of geographically defined jurisdictions to produce venire panels may cease to make sense. Likewise, the value of proportional representation on individual juries, while promoting some functions, may undermine the jury\u27s democratic viability. Specifically, and perhaps ironically, disproportionate representation on individual juries may actually promote the jury\u27s democratic function. Even more fundamentally the very definitions of “community” and “identity” become fluid in the context of a democratically driven jury that serves as a forum for citizens to constantly realign their own allegiances as they attempt to apply the law to the defendant and so define the law\u27s limits in their own lives. In shifting this conversation about jury composition, the possibility of the jury as a unique democratic space emerges
The secret of magic
No full textWorking for a prominent member of the NAACP in 1946 when a request comes from her favorite childhood author to investigate the murder of a black war hero, Regina Robichard travels to Mississippi, where she navigates the muddy waters of racism, relationships, and her own tragic pasthttps://scholarship.law.ua.edu/harper_lee_prize_books_2015/1010/thumbnail.jp
The Chairman
No full textBaxter “Boxer” Tate is preparing to graduate with poor grades from an unaccredited law school when he first encounters Miller Johnson, a partner at Malloy, a third-rate insurance defense firm. Boxer is being sued in a personal-injury case, but after meeting with Miller, he knows he will get Miller’s firm to give him a job―his first step on the road to judicial superstardom. After passing the bar exam, Boxer joins the Malloy law firm and finds himself entering the legal profession through a variety of judicial hellholes. There he thrives, learning to be an articulate, effective advocate―a courtroom magician of sorts. His star begins to rise, and he’s finally going in the direction he wants. But then he loses some big ones and spends time in jail. He falls in love with two women at once and is soon hated by judges and adversaries alike. As his fate becomes more uncertain, he wonders whether the judicial system actually renders justice in a world where the bench and the bar are both corrupt. This legal thriller follows the changing fates of a talented but controversial lawyer through the ins and outs of the legal profession.https://scholarship.law.ua.edu/harper_lee_prize_books_2015/1006/thumbnail.jp
The insanity plea
No full textA young nurse is savagely killed during a pre-dawn run on Galveston’s seawall. The murderer slices her running shorts from her body as his trophy and tosses the body over the wall to the rocks below. As dawn breaks, a bedraggled street person, wearing four layers of old, tattered clothes, emerges from the end of the jetty, waving his arms and talking to people only he hears. He trips over the body, checks for a pulse and, instead, finds a diamond bracelet which he puts in his pocket. He hurries across the street, heading for breakfast at the Salvation Army two blocks away, leaving his footprints in blood as he goes. Wayne Little, former Galveston prosecutor and now Houston trial lawyer, learns that his older brother has been charged with capital murder for the killing. At first he refuses to be dragged back into his brother’s life. Once a brilliant lawyer, Dan’s paranoid schizophrenia had captured his mind, estranging everyone including Wayne. Finally giving in to pleas from his mother, Wayne enlists the help of his best friend, Duke Romack, former NBA star turned criminal lawyer. When Wayne and Duke review the evidence, they conclude that Dan’s chances are slim. They either find the killer or win a plea of insanity since the prosecution’s case is air tight. The former may be a mission impossible since the killer is the most brilliant, devious and cruel fictional murderer since Hannibal Lecter. The chances of winning an insanity plea are equally grim. It will take the combined skills of the two lawyers along with those of Duke’s girlfriend, Claudia, a brilliant appellate lawyer, and Rita Contreras, Wayne’s next door neighbor and computer hacker extraordinaire, to attempt to unravel the mystery of the serial killer before the clock clicks down to a guilty verdict for Dan. The Insanity Plea is a spell-binding tale of four amateur sleuths who must find, track and trap a serial killer as they prepare for and defend Wayne\u27s brother, who is trapped in a mind like that of John Nash, Russell Crowe’s character in A Beautiful Mind. Combining legal thriller with tracking a serial killer, Thompson once again takes the reader on a helluva ride, right up to the last page and sentence. The Insanity Plea, a new legal thriller by Larry D. Thompson, Best Selling author of Dead Peasants, The Trial and So Help Me God. “…fierce courtroom drama…” “…intoxicating…and nail-biting…” “…the courtroom scenes often soar” --Kirkus Reviewshttps://scholarship.law.ua.edu/harper_lee_prize_books_2015/1015/thumbnail.jp
Commentary: Taming Suffering
No full textIn Knowing the Suffering of Others, legal scholar Austin Sarat brings together essays that address suffering as it relates to the law, highlighting the ways law imagines suffering and how pain and suffering become jurisprudential facts.From fetal imaging to end-of-life decisions, torts to international human rights, domestic violence to torture, and the law of war to victim impact statements, the law is awash in epistemological and ethical problems associated with knowing and imagining suffering. In each of these domains we might ask: How well do legal actors perceive and understand suffering in such varied domains of legal life? What problems of representation and interpretation bedevil efforts to grasp the suffering of others? What historical, political, literary, cultural, and/or theological resources can legal actors and citizens draw on to understand the suffering of others?In Knowing the Suffering of Others, Austin Sarat presents legal scholarship that explores these questions and puts the problem of suffering at the center of thinking about law. The contributors to this volume do not regard pain and suffering as objective facts of a universe remote from law; rather they examine how both are discursively constructed in and by law. They examine how pain and suffering help construct and give meaning to the law as we know it. The authors attend to the various ways suffering appears in law as well as the different forms of suffering that require the law’s attention.Throughout this book law is regarded as a domain in which the meanings of pain and suffering are contested, and constituted, as well as an instrument for inflicting suffering or for providing or refusing its relief. It challenges scholars, lawyers, students, and policymakers to ask how various legal actors and audiences understand the suffering of others.https://scholarship.law.ua.edu/fac_bookchapter/1048/thumbnail.jp
Comment on Chapter 5: Questioning the Value of Dissent and Free Speech More Generally: American Skepticism of Government and the Protection of Low-Value Speech
No full textDissenting Voices in American Society: The Role of Judges, Lawyers, and Citizens explores the status of dissent in the work and lives of judges, lawyers, and citizens, and in our institutions and culture. It brings together under the lens of critical examination dissenting voices that are usually treated separately: the protester, the academic critic, the intellectual, and the dissenting judge. It examines the forms of dissent that institutions make possible and those that are discouraged or domesticated. This book also describes the kinds of stories that dissenting voices try to tell and the narrative tropes on which those stories depend. In what voices and tones do dissenting voices speak? What worlds does dissent try to imagine and what in the end is the value of dissent? Where does dissent speak without actually speaking? Where do dissenting voices most often go unheard or unrecognized? Do we find dissent wherever we find discontent? Wherever we find expression? This book is the product of an integrated series of symposia at the University of Alabama School of Law. These symposia bring leading scholars into colloquy with faculty at the law school on subjects at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary inquiry in law.https://scholarship.law.ua.edu/fac_bookchapter/1037/thumbnail.jp
Comment on Chapter 4: Why Dissent Isn\u27t Free: A Commentary on Pildes\u27s The Legal Academy and the Temptations of Power
No full textDissenting Voices in American Society: The Role of Judges, Lawyers, and Citizens explores the status of dissent in the work and lives of judges, lawyers, and citizens, and in our institutions and culture. It brings together under the lens of critical examination dissenting voices that are usually treated separately: the protester, the academic critic, the intellectual, and the dissenting judge. It examines the forms of dissent that institutions make possible and those that are discouraged or domesticated. This book also describes the kinds of stories that dissenting voices try to tell and the narrative tropes on which those stories depend. In what voices and tones do dissenting voices speak? What worlds does dissent try to imagine and what in the end is the value of dissent? Where does dissent speak without actually speaking? Where do dissenting voices most often go unheard or unrecognized? Do we find dissent wherever we find discontent? Wherever we find expression? This book is the product of an integrated series of symposia at the University of Alabama School of Law. These symposia bring leading scholars into colloquy with faculty at the law school on subjects at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary inquiry in law.https://scholarship.law.ua.edu/fac_bookchapter/1036/thumbnail.jp
Company Law and the Law of Succession Droit Commercial/Commercial Law Section III.A: Commercial Law
Get PDFShifting the Fat-Tailed Distribution of Blockbuster Punitive Damages Awards
Get PDFThe distribution of blockbuster punitive damages awards has fat tails similar to the distributions of losses from natural disasters Extremely large awards occur more often and are more difficult to predict than if blockbuster awards were distributed normally The size and predictability of awards are important factors in the US Supreme Court\u27s decisions on punitive damages This article examines the effect of the Court\u27s decision in iState Farm v Campbelli on blockbuster punitive damages awards iState Farmi shifts the fat tail of the distribution of blockbuster awards down or thins the tail which is consistent with a restraining effect on award size iState Farmi reduces the size of blockbuster awards in general but this reduction is most salient in the upper half of the distribution of awards iState Farmi also has a negative influence on the probability of exceeding a single digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages This article also examines the largest awards and considers why defendants may not pay large punitive damages award