Federal Courts. Pendent Jurisdiction. Whether Federal Statute Affords Private Remedies Raises Substantial Federal Question for Purposes of Pendent Jurisdiction

1963 ◽  
Vol 49 (6) ◽  
pp. 1224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc I. Steinberg

This chapter analyzes and recommends federal corporate governance enhancements that should be implemented. These enhancements, which should be adopted in a measured and directed manner, are necessary to remediate certain deficiencies that currently exist. Consistent therewith, this chapter focuses on several important matters that merit attention, including the undue deference by federal courts to state law, the appropriate application of federal law to tactics undertaken in tender offers, the need for a federal statute encompassing insider trading, and the propriety of more vigorous oversight by the Securities and Exchange Commission (such as with respect to the “current” disclosure regime, the SEC’s Standards of Professional Conduct for Attorneys, and the Commission’s neglecting at times to invoke its statutory resources). Thus, the analysis set forth in this chapter identifies significant deficiencies that currently exist and recommends measures that should be implemented on the federal level to enhance corporate governance standards.


2015 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradford C. Mank

In rare cases, a president refuses to defend a statute based upon a belief that the statute is unconstitutional. The law is unclear whether either House of Congress has Article III standing to defend a statute that the president refuses to defend. In United States v. Windsor, the Supreme Court in 2013 addressed the onstitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The Obama Administration took the middle position of declining to defend DOMA, but still enforcing it, despite its view that the statute was unconstitutional to assist federal courts in reviewing the constitutionality of the statute. It was unclear whether an appeal was proper in the case once a district court held the statute was unconstitutional, and the Executive Branch essentially agreed with that decision. Applying both prudential standing principles and mandatory Article III standing rules, Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, recognized that the Executive Branch was an appropriate party on appeal because it continued to enforce the statute. Additionally, the majority acknowledged that briefs filed by House of Representatives leadership supporting the constitutionality of DOMA supplied the necessary adverseness in the case given the Executive's view that DOMA was unconstitutional. The majority did not fully resolve the thorny issue of Congressional standing in cases where a president refuses to enforce a federal statute. Justice Scalia, in his dissent, emphasized the almost exclusive role of the Executive Branch in defending federal laws under Article II, squarely rejected Congressional standing, and argued that no party had standing to appeal in Windsor because the Executive agreed with the district court's judgment holding Section 3 unconstitutional. By contrast, Justice Alito, in his dissent, would have expressly recognized the authority and standing of the leaders of either House to defend any federal statute that the president does not defend. Yet by acknowledging that Congressional participation could supply the necessary adverseness to litigate a case when the Executive Branch agrees with the challenger that a statute is unconstitutional, the Court's opinion in Windsor likely will pave the way for increased Congressional participation in unusual cases where the Executive Branch believes a statute is unconstitutional, but at least one House of Congress wishes to defend the statute's constitutionality.


Author(s):  
Peter Manus

This article discusses the status of federal common law in the wake of the Supreme Court's May, 2013 denial of petitioners' writ of certiorari in Native Village of Kivalina v. Exxonmobil.  A close reading of Supreme Court and recent appellate decisions on federal common law as applied to transboundary pollution reveals three views on the availability and function of federal common law where a federal statute addresses a category of environmental harms: presumptive displacement of federal common law when a federal statute creates a regulatory approach, presumptive coexistence of federal statutory and common law where a federal statute does not provide relief for injuries alleged under common law, and case-by-case balancing of the interfering effect of federal common law against the injuries left unaddressed by federal statutory law.  The Court’s current approach resides somewhere between presumptive displacement and case-by-case balancing, and although the Court offers various rationales for this approach in its latest federal common law opinion, the most convincing of these is that cases involving transboundary pollution, particularly those alleging global warming-induced injury, are cumbersome for federal courts to handle as common law matters.  Allocation of judicial resources is within the Supreme Court's discretion to consider in rejecting a case, but it is a far more pragmatic than principled rationale, and thus less than satisfying as a court’s primary reason for denying relief.  A more principled approach, advocated by Justices Stevens and Blackmun in dissents to two key federal common law cases, is that the displacement analysis should begin with the premise that the judicial system aims, first and foremost, to compensate the injured, and that a federal common law claim should be displaced only where the legislative-regulatory regime covering the subject of a common law claim directly addresses the injury alleged under common law.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy J. King ◽  
Michael Heise

Scholarly and public debates about criminal appeals have largely taken place in an empirical vacuum. This study builds on our prior empirical work exploring defense-initiated criminal appeals and focuses on criminal appeals by state and federal prosecutors. Exploiting data drawn from a recently released national sample of appeals by state prosecutors decided in 2010, as well as data from all appeals by federal prosecutors to the United States Court of Appeals terminated in the years 2011 through 2016, we provide a detailed snapshot of non-capital, direct appeals by prosecutors, including extensive information on crime type, claims raised, type of defense representation, oral argument and opinion type, as well judicial selection, merits review, and relief. Findings include a rate of success for state prosecutor appeals about four times greater than that for defense appeals (roughly 40% of appeals filed compared to 10%). The likelihood of success for state prosecutor-appellants appeared unrelated to the type of crime, claim, or defense counsel, whether review was mandatory or discretionary, or whether the appellate bench was selected by election rather than appointment. State high courts, unlike intermediate courts, did not decide these appeals under conditions of drastic asymmetry. Of discretionary criminal appeals reviewed on the merits by state high courts, 41% were prosecutor appeals. In federal courts, prosecutors voluntarily dismissed more than half the appeals they filed, but were significantly less likely to withdraw appeals from judgments of acquittal and new trial orders after the verdict than to withdraw appeals challenging other orders. Among appeals decided on the merits, federal prosecutors were significantly more likely to lose when facing a federal defender as an adversary compared to a CJA panel attorney.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 26-34
Author(s):  
E. V. Gerasenko ◽  

Employees of the federal courts' apparatus, in accordance with the current regulations, are public civil servants. In practice and in existing scientific research there is an approach to determining the legal status of this category of public servants through their duties, without specifying the specific requirements for candidates for the position to be filled. The purpose of this study is to define additional qualification requirements to be imposed on the applicant for the position of State Civil Service «Court Secretary» in court, in addition to those contained in the Federal Law «On State Civil Service of the Russian Federation» and orders of the Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. The tasks of this work are to study the theoretical foundations of the concept of «status of a State civil servant », to compare federal legislation, decrees of the President of the Russian Federation, decisions and other acts of ministries and departments in the field of the State civil service in the apparatus of federal courts; Justification for the need to include in the status of a public servant serving in the court apparatus additional requirements for the level of education. The methodological basis of the present study was the general scientific methods such as analogy, derivation, system analysis, as well as the private scientific methods: formal-logical, technical-legal and comparativelegal in their various combinations. The study concluded that it was necessary to distinguish the status of federal court staff according to the level of education required to replace a public civil service post, in particular the «Registrar of the Court».


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