Academic Round-Up

I apologize for my brief hiatus from the blog. Things have been busy on the academic front and I have a few articles in the queue for the next couple of academic round-ups.

Continuing his trend of timely writing on recent Supreme Court decisions, Scott Dodson (University of Arkansas School of Law) has written a short piece for the Northwestern University Colloquy entitled “Jurisdictionality and Bowles v. Russell,” see here. You will probably recall that the Court held last Term in Bowles that the statutory time limitation for filing a notice of appeal is jurisdictional. Professor Dodson provides a brief summary of Bowles and then critiques the Court’s decision. Dodson argues that the Court should have held that the time limitation was mandatory, not jurisdictional, which would have led to the same result in the case without further confusing the nature of jurisdictional rules and the Court’s precedents in the area.

James Fowler (University of California-San Diego) and Sangick Jeon (University of California-Davis) have posted “The Authority of Supreme Court Precedent” on SSRN, see here. The authors use network analysis, which has become increasingly prominent in the work of political scientists and among other social scientists who write about courts and other social phenomena, to study the use of stare decisis by the Supreme Court. Analyzing the complete network of 30,288 majority opinions by the Court , the authors demonstrate that stare decisis emerged as a strong norm during the 19th century (as evidenced by the citation of a greater number of cases in each majority opinion) with the Court fully adopting the norm by around 1900. Of particular interest, the authors also show that the Warren Court deviated from the norm of stare decisis by citing fewer cases in its majority opinions, a conclusion about which many of you will no doubt have an opinion. The second part of the paper is a bit more difficult, and quantitative, and attempts to use network analysis to show the importance of many of the Court’s most well-know opinions.

The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy has posted its newest issue, which contains a student note examining Justice Alito’s approach to statutory interpretation, see here. The article is entitled “The Newer Textualism: Justice Alito’s Statutory Interpretation,” and it discusses, among other things, Justice Alito’s willingness to look at legislative history in interpreting statutes. As most of you no doubt know, Justice Alito’s approach is in sharp contrast to the textualist approaches of Justices Scalia and Thomas. Using Zedner v. United States as a backdrop, the note thoroughly explores whether Justice Alito’s “new textualism” is likely to take hold with other members of the Court. Because it is a student note, the piece also benefits from its relative brevity: it is only 22 pages long. (H/T Volokh Conspiracy)