I spend a full month on marriage in Family Law, and I use a fair range of what I’ll call “extrinsic evidence” from the humanities. Because there is so much one could use, I am fairly strict with myself about what I do use. It seems important that when we take the time to…

I am currently in my fifth year as a law professor at Drexel University, where I teach Civil Procedure, Jurisprudence, and a Literature & the Law seminar. While Jurisprudence and Literature & the Law are fields arising directly out of the humanities, Civil Procedure…

The Professional Responsibility course has the potential to have the greatest impact on our students’ futures in the profession. Paradoxically, however, it remains one of the most undervalued courses in most law school curricula. The complexity of teaching…

My assignment for this symposium is to discuss ways of integrating the humanities into the core law school courses on criminal law, criminal procedure, and evidence—what you might call the Dick Wolf courses. In one respect the topic is trivial and almost…

Tort law is frequently taught in terms of economic concepts: efficiency, capture, cost distribution, risk allocation, and so on. Alternatively, or in parallel, a philosophical perspective may wend its way into the first-year tort curriculum through discussions of…

When I teach the dying declarations hearsay exception in my Evidence course, I always show the opening scene from Mel Brooks’s darkly comedic film, The Twelve Chairs. A film clip is a particularly dense piece of storytelling, in that it presents story…

In an effort to curb sexual assault behind bars, the Los Angeles County Jail currently houses inmates deemed homosexual and transgender in a special unit called “K6G.” Professor Russell Robinson’s Article, “Masculinity as Prison: Race, Sexual Identity…

Russell Robinson has done it again. With “Masculinity as Prison: Sexual Identity, Race, and Incarceration,” he has given us another provocative Article, which illuminates a phenomenon in the world and, indirectly, in ourselves.The Article represents much of what…

A short time ago, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued its decision in Ass’n for Molecular Pathology v. USPTO (Myriad Genetics), one of the most important patent cases in recent history. The Myriad case addresses…

Almost no one in the legal academy has written more (or better) about guilty pleas and plea bargains than Stephanos Bibas. It is, therefore, fitting that he should author one of the first articles on Padilla v. Kentucky—a guilty-plea decision that may be the most…

In Fixing Failed States, John Yoo shows why intervening states that seek to massively transform the social, economic, and political framework of failed states aim to do too much and ultimately fail. Yoo proposes that the role of intervening states should be minimal…

Tunisia. Egypt. Jordan. Bahrain. Yemen. Algeria. Syria. Libya. Iran. As the winds of popular protest blow across North Africa and the Middle East, authoritarian autocratic regimes around the region are anxious. They face increasing risk of removal due to political…

5:00 a.m., July 2010: Immigration agents arrive at the home of Farhan Ezad, a thirty-five-year-old Pakistani national who has been living in the United States since the age of five. Agents place Ezad in handcuffs in front of his wife and three children, all U.S. citizens, and…

Since 2005, the Reverend Fred Phelps and other members of the Westboro Baptist Church have outraged almost everyone by protesting near military funerals. In Snyder v. Phelps, the Supreme Court will finally decide whether that outrage is actionable. Few people will lose sleep if the Court finds that the First Amendment allows Albert Snyder to sue the Phelpses for intentional infliction…

The recently passed health care bill1 contains many provisions that deserve celebration. Improving access to care is an important first step. Enhancing patient safety and accountability is an important second step, one that proponents of medical malpractice reform often undermine with attempts to restrict the liability of health care providers through “litigation alternatives.” During the health care…

For the great writ of habeas corpus, these are the best of times and the worst of times. In Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court, in a powerful and eloquent majority opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, vindicated the right of a non-U.S. citizen, held in custody at a military base outside the United States, to use the writ to challenge the legality of his incarceration. Boumediene was a triumph of both…

In recent years, legal scholars and practitioners alike have expressed major misgivings about the advice that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) provided to former President George W. Bush following the attacks of September 11, 2001. On February 19, 2010, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. released internal communications of the Justice…

Approximately 200,000 divorce petitions are filed annually in California. Seventy percent of those cases involve at least one self-represented litigant at the beginning of the case. That figure increases to 80 percent by the time of judgment. This is not simply a California issue. Utah, for example, reports that 49 percent of petitioners and 81 percent of respondents in divorce…

I would like to thank UC Berkeley School of Law for inviting me here today. This is, of course, an opportunity that any person who has appeared before the California Supreme Court dreams about. It may be my only chance to address so many members of the Court without being stopped repeatedly, asked difficult questions, or losing. I can also say things like that without being concerned…

For many years David Cole has been grappling, both in the courtroom and in the pages of the law reviews, with the difficult task of maximizing civil liberties while adequately addressing concerns related to terrorism and other national security threats. By and large, he has played the role of government critic in these debates, highlighting perceived abuses and drawing particular attention…