Notes

This Note reinterprets and recontextualizes the pronouncement in Employment Division v. Smith (Smith II) that exemptions from generally applicable laws will not be granted unless claims of free exercise are accompanied by the assertion of another constitutional right. It argues that when Arab American Muslims, and others who are of minority race and religion, bring claims for exemption from generally applicable laws on the basis of free exercise and equal protection principles, they ought to be able to invoke Smith II‘s hybridity exception, thus meriting heightened judicial scrutiny and increased solicitude from courts.

The jurisdiction of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is governed by the well-pleaded complaint rule. In Holmes Group, Inc. v. Vornado Air Circulation Systems, Inc., the Supreme Court held that counterclaims-permissive or compulsory-cannot operate to create jurisdiction under the rule. The Holmes decision has been the target of numerous commentators because of its effect on patent law. The crux of the criticism is that the policies supporting the decision only make sense with respect to the well-pleaded complaint rule as applied to federal question jurisdiction. Further, the decision is alleged to promote forum shopping in patent law and threaten the very goals behind the creation of the Federal Circuit. In this Note, Ravi Sitwala rejects the criticism of the Holmes decision. He begins by examining the decision and the policies supposedly contravened by it and then shows that the harm to these policies is overstated greatly. Holmes increases only slightly the ability of litigants to engage in forum shopping,and would allow only a minimal number of patent cases to reach regional circuit courts or state courts. Sitwala goes on to demonstratet he importance of the policies behind the decision, as it protects plaintiffs’ mastery over their cases. Although concluding that the decision should not be overruled-legislatively or otherwise-he recognizes that some issues of patent law may come before regional circuit or state courts. Accordingly, he proposes a model for these courts to adjudicate patent law issues. This model analogizes the problem to the one faced by federal courts when deciding state law issues, and recommends that courts follow Federal Circuit law. Thus, when available, precedent should be followed, and when unavailable, courts should either predict the law or certify the questions to the Federal Circuit, much like in the Erie context.

Ensuring Minimal Deliberation Through Judicial Review of Congressional Processes

Federal statutes are enacted that, in whole or in part, have failed to receive even minimal attention from Congress. Because the most obvious solution to this problem-procedura lreform of Congress’s internal legislative rules-has not been forthcoming, Victor Goldfeld attempts to put forth the strongest possible case for a judicial approach to addressing this problem. Drawing on recent Supreme Court decisions, Goldfeld outlines “legislative due process”-a form of judicial review in which courts would examine the legislative process by which federal statutory provisions are enacted to ensure that such provisions received at least a minimal level of congressional deliberation. This would improve the quality of congressional policymaking, and help minimize the ability of special interest groups to game the legislative process. He eschews coming to a firm conclusion on whether legislative due process is a viable model of judicial review, instead providing the reader with a framework for approaching that question.

Minority and City Schools in Education Finance Reform Litigation

This Note’s primary purpose is to test Professor James Ryan’s assertion that at least two extra legal factors-the predominant race and setting of plaintiff school disricts-have an influence on the outcome of education finance reform litigation. Although the subject matter of this Note is education finance reform litigation, its findings may be significant to readers who have an interest in judicial decisionmaking as well. Yohance C. Edwards and Jennifer Ahern conduct a quantitative study that surveys the education finance reform litigation that has reached the respective state supreme courts of forty-one states. After analyzing the various factors that have been evaluated in previous quantitative studies of education finance reform litigation, the authors conclude that none of these factors explains why minority and city school districts fare poorly in this litigation. This Note is the first quantitative study of education finance reform litigation to include the number of plaintiff school districts as a variable. The authors find that along with race and school district setting, this variable does have an association with outcome. The authors conclude by discussing how the results of their study suggest that multiracial coalition building may be beneficial for all potential education finance litigation plaintiffs.

Since 1976, the California Coastal Commission has been charged with protecting California’s 1100-mile shoreline. The Commission has been both celebrated for protecting California’s coastal resources and denounced for exerting totalitarian control over private property rights and commercial development. Recently, a California appellate court found the Commission in violation of the state constitution’s separation-of-powers doctrine because of the California legislature’s ability to appoint and remove at will two-thirds of the Commission’s twelve members. In a special assembly, the legislature rushed to amend the Commission’s composition and provide the legislative appointees with fixed terms. The California Supreme Court must now determine whether the ad hoc response alleviates the constitutional concerns.

In this Note, David R. Carpenter argues that the California Supreme Court still should find the Commission unconstitutional because of the legislature’s continued ability to appoint two-thirds of the commissioners. Examining two recent California Supreme Court decisions, the Note identifies two approaches to the separation-of-powers inquiry. One approach asks whether the legislature’s appointment power defeats or materially impairs the governor’s inherent authority to supervise the Commission’s executive powers. The second approach, and that taken by this Note, frames the issue primarily in terms of limitations on legislative power and the problems created when legislators operate beyond their statutory role. This Note argues that appointment power enables and encourages legislators to impose arbitrary influence while abdicating their responsibility to make good law. Utilizing principles from public choice theory, this Note argues that separation of powers should guard against “the twin problems” of faction and governmental self-interest. Those concerns are heightened in this case by the scope of the Commission’s authority and jurisdiction,along with the powerful interests it regulates. Instead of minimizing political influence over Commission actions, the appointment structure has had the opposite effect. By enforcing the separation-of- powers doctrine,the California Supreme Court would take an important and principled action that would not destroy the Commission, but rather potentially would improve its integrity and independence.

In November 2001, after delaying the release of President Reagan’s presidential papers, President Bush issued Executive Order 13,233, which limits the ability of the public to access presidential documents by giving the sitting president and former presidents an effective veto over the release of their records. In this Note, Stephen H. Yuhan argues that Executive Order 13,233 is an impermissible aggrandizement of presidential power at the expense of Congress, the National Archives, and the public. In an effort to find the outer limits of the President’s power to issue executive orders, Yuhan looks first to the watershed case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer. Finding that Youngstown fails to yield any definitive answers, Yuhan then draws on case law and legal scholarship on the President’s appointment and removal powers. Yuhan contends that preventing arbitrary decisionmakinginterested considerations rather than the public good, Yuhan concludes, the executive order violates separation of powers.

A recent decision of the Federal Circuit, Madey v. Duke University, highlights the extremely limited protection granted to universities conducting noncommercial research from claims of patent infringement. The proper scope of the experimental use exception has been hotly debated among legal scholars, with many asserting that a broad defense is necessary to allow universities to freely conduct valuable experimental science and basic research. This Note examines the structure of university research in an effort to explain why, despite any significant legal protection, it is often in the interest of patent holders to allow infringing noncommercial research to continue unchallenged. Specifically, the commercial ties that exist between universities and for-profit entities serve to protect academic noncommercial research. While providing universities with less protection than a strengthened common law or statutory defense, this nonlegal “informal” research exception performs much the same function as a recognized experimental use exception.

In this Note, Valerie Roddy studies the continuing hesitancy of U.S. courts to include foreign relevant conduct in federal sentences, despite the expansive inclusion of domestic relevant conduct. Roddy analyzes the courts’ principal concerns and concludes that the distinctions that courts are drawing between foreign and domestic relevant conduct are illusory. She argues that to achieve consistency in sentencing and proportional sentencing for international defendants, foreign and domestic conduct must be treated identically. Finally, she contends that distinguishing foreign relevant conduct and subjecting it to a special analysis is best viewed as a means of retaining a measure of discretion in a federal sentencing system struggling with both the potent effect of relevant conduct on sentences and the shrinking judicial discretion over sentences.

Eyewitness testimony is an important, persuasive, and often pivotal element in American trials. Jurors are strongly inclined to believe eyewitnesses, even in the face of other contradictory evidence, such as fingerprints. However, thirty years of psychological research into the workings of human memory have revealed that eyewitness accounts are frequently flawed, either because the witness’s original perception of the event was flawed, or because the memory was subconsciously altered prior to testifying at trial. This, combined with jurors’ inclination to trust eyewitnesses, leads juries to overcredit eyewitness testimony, resulting in false convictions. To help avoid such erroneous outcomes, the legal system must find a way to close the gap between eyewitness accuracy and juror belief in eyewitness accuracy. One controversial option is the use of expert psychological testimony to educate the jury about eyewitness fallibility. In this Note, Jennifer L. Overbeck draws on recent psychological research indicating that while expert testimony may be the best way of educating the jury, it is not successful in all circumstances. The Note argues that lawyers must harness psychological research to determine the circumstances that contribute to effective eyewitness expert testimony and incorporate this into their trial strategies. The Note concludes by suggesting some concrete ways of doing so.

Although it is widely accepted that the Eighth Amendment operates as a broad prohibition against excessive criminal sanctions, neither the courts nor the academic community have presented a unified account of what excessiveness means in the Eighth Amendment context. This absence of any larger theory of the Amendment has produced an increasingly disjointed body of case law, and left the legal community without a method of analyzing excessiveness claims as they arise. The purpose of this Note is to lay the initial groundwork for such a theory. This Note argues that the reason why no comprehensive theory of the Eighth Amendment has been developed is because courts and scholars have not framed their discussion in terms of the two theoretical questions raised by the Amendment’s sweeping prohibition of “excessive” criminal sanctions: (1) what substantive standard of decision should determine the outcomes of specific cases, and (2) what standard of review should courts apply when examining sentencing schemes enacted by the legislative branches? In examining these questions, this Note makes two important insights about the nature of the Eighth Amendment: first, that the substantive standard of decision governing the excessiveness prohibition is necessarily tied to an underlying theory of punishment that provides the normative baseline needed for the excessiveness inquiry; and second, that the appropriate standard of review for a criminal sanction adopted by the legislative branches ultimately must be derived from a theory of judicial review that defines the appropriate role of the courts in a democratic society. By structuring the inquiry in this way, this Note contends that it becomes possible to see the competing policy preferences that are implicated by the selection of one standard over another, and thereby forces us to undertake the difficult task of deciding which of these social values should inform interpretation of the Eighth Amendment.