Academic Round-Up

Christopher Schatz and Noah Horst recently published an article entitled “Will Justice Delay be Justice Denied? Crisis Jurisprudence, The Guantanamo Detainees, and the Imperiled Role of Habeas Corpus in Curbing Abusive Government Detention” in the Lewis & Clark Law Review, see here. The title of the article probably tells you what position the authors take but the piece does contain an extensive analysis of the issues that the Court will be confronting in Boumadiene and Al-Odah. This article chiefly tackles the timely question of whether it is constitutional for Congress to eliminate habeas corpus jurisdiction for aliens held in military detention facilities outside the United States. It dedicates less attention to whether the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) are an adequate substitute for the writ of habeas corpus.

Unfortunately, I cannot find a publicly available link to this article, but the newest issue of the Political Research Quarterly contains a fascinating article about what factors impact the Supreme Court’s attention to legal issues. The article is by C. Scott Peters (University of Northern Iowa) and it is entitled, “Getting Attention: The Effect of Legal Mobilizations on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Attention to Issues.” The abstract of the article can be found here. According to Peters, the Court’s attention to issues–or its agenda–is set by some combination of prior decisions of the Court as well as the debates taking place actively in law reviews. I do find it hard to believe that the Court’s docket is influenced by the number of law review articles on a particular topic, which makes me skeptical of Peters’s results, though it is true that several members of the Court are former academics.

Last but certainly not least, Richard Lazarus (Georgetown University Law Center) has posted on SSRN a new article entitled, “Advocacy Matters Before and Within the Supreme Court: Transforming the Court by Transferring the Bar” on SSRN, see here. In just about a week, Richard’s piece has been downloaded over 300 times from SSRN and has been the subject of an article by Tony Mauro in the Legal Times, see here. Lazarus examines the influence that the elite Supreme Court bar is having on the size and shape of the docket as well as its influence on the direction of Supreme Court doctrine. It is a really excellent paper. Realizing that a single reference to it during the academic round-up does not do the paper justice, we will have Richard on SCOTUSblog very soon for an “ask the author” series. Please feel free to send me questions for Richard in advance of the series.