Dorf on Law

Mostly law-related musings by Cornell Professor Michael Dorf and some of his lawyer/professor friends

Monday, March 19, 2007

Dorf on Dorf

Adam Liptak has a piece in today's New York Times that refers to my reaction to the DC Circuit opinion in Parker. Liptak doesn't expressly mention the blog but he does quote my conversation with him -- on the declining citation of law review articles by courts. Here are the relevant three paragraphs:

Michael C. Dorf, a law professor at Columbia, had a similar reaction to being cited dismissively in this month’s decision striking down parts of the District of Columbia’s gun control law. On the one hand, Professor Dorf said, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.” On the other, he said it was vexing to see his article caricatured rather than engaged.

The District of Columbia Circuit had, he said, at least tried to engage the legal scholarship on a difficult and important question. He had less sympathy for judges who have given up on the academy.

“The claim by judges that they have no use for law review articles seems to me an anti-intellectual know-nothingism that is understandable but regrettable,” Professor Dorf said.

That ought to win me friends in the federal judiciary!

Meanwhile, I'll be on NPR's All Things Considered this afternoon talking about executive privilege -- unless I get bumped. I'll report back on the conversation tomorrow.

2 Comments:

  • At 4:26 PM, Blogger Thomas Healy said…

    Doesn't it depend on the level of court we're talking about? District judges, and probably even most circuit judges, don't have a lot of time to spend reading 80-page law review articles with 500+ footnotes. If they cite law reviews articles at all, it's probably because their clerks read them.

    Supreme Court justices, on the other hand, would seem to have plenty of time, what with their declining caseload. But if they're not citing law review articles, perhaps it's because legal scholarship has become less relevant to what they do. And if that's the case, you can't blame them for the lack of citations.

     
  • At 4:05 AM, Blogger Marty Lederman said…

    Assuming the U.S. Att'y would refuse to submit to the grand jury a contempt citation against an Executive branch official who refuses to abide by a subpoena on Executive privilege grounds, a House of Congress would have the inherent constitutional authority to imprison specified individuals for (civil) contempt of Congress. The Sergeant-at-Arms would simply arrest the Executive Branch official and detain her. See Jurney v. MacCracken, 294 U.S. 125 (1935); Anderson v. Dunn, 19 U.S. 204 (1821). This power has not been used for many decades.

    Alternatively, and more likely, a House could bring a civil action seeking to have the subpoena enforced. The courts are unlikely to entertain such a suit until the two branches are entirely at loggerheads, with no further possibility of negotiations or accommodation -- see, e.g., 556 F. Supp. at 152-153 -- but it remains a possible avenue to resolve the impasse, if it ever comes to that.

     

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