Judges & Judicial Process – Page 26 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Reflections on Judicial Contract Interpretation and the Boden Lecture

Post author:Nadelle E. Grossman
Post published:October 8, 2014
Post category:Business Regulation Judges & Judicial Process Public Speakers at Marquette

agreement-signing This week in my Contracts class we are discussing how to interpret a contract — that is, how to give contractual language meaning. This discussion inevitably focuses on how courts interpret contracts, because Contracts casebooks primarily examine principles of contract through case law. Cases do, in fact, provide a useful lens through which to study contract interpretation, for they allow an examination of courts’ goals and tools in approaching conflicting arguments about how to interpret an ambiguous term. Yet we also considered judicial interpretation of contracts from a policy perspective.

Specifically, in light of Professor Robert Scott’s Boden lecture “Contracts Design and the Goldilocks Problem,” I asked my Contracts students to reflect on the wisdom of judicial determination of the meaning of ambiguous contractual language.

US Supreme Court Review: Constitutional Criminal Cases

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:July 3, 2014
Post category:Constitutional Law Criminal Law & Process Judges & Judicial Process Public U.S. Supreme Court

(This is another post in our series, Looking Back at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Term.)

In my previous post, I discussed the Court’s recent Fourth Amendment decisions. Here are this term’s other criminal cases that also center on constitutional issues (excluding habeas decisions):

Kansas v. Cheever, 571 U.S. __ (2013) (prosecutors could use testimony based on court-ordered mental examination of defendant in order to rebut defendant’s intoxication defense).
Hall v. Florida, 572 U.S. __ (2014) (in capital case, state may not categorically limit intellectual disability defense to individuals with an IQ score of 70 or lower — see my earlier post here).
Kaley v. United States, 571 U.S. __ (2014) (when trying to overturn pretrial asset freeze affecting funds to be used for legal representation, defendant may not challenge grand jury’s probable cause determination).
Martinez v. Illinois, 572 U.S. __ (2014) (after jury empaneled and sworn, judge’s grant of defendant’s motion for “directed findings of not guilty” counted as acquittal for double jeopardy purposes and precluded appeal by state).

A notable recurring theme across this set of decisions is the Court’s desire to maintain a particular competitive balance at criminal trials.

US Supreme Court Review: Statutory Interpretation in Criminal Cases

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:June 30, 2014
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Federal Criminal Law & Process Federal Sentencing Judges & Judicial Process Public U.S. Supreme Court

(This is another post in our series, Looking Back at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Term.)

In the first post in this series, I discussed two causation cases in some detail. In this post, I will more briefly summarize the full set of the Court’s criminal statutory interpretation cases from the past term and then offer a few overarching observations.

Here are the cases (excluding habeas corpus decisions):