Robinson Everett: The Citizen Lawyer Ideal Lives On

In this tribute to Professor Robinson O. Everett, Dean David Levi questions the view that the citizen-lawyer or lawyer-statesmen models are in decline. Tracing Professor Everett’s varied career, accomplishments, and commitments to individuals and institutions; Levi contends that Everett combined the lawyer\u27s traditional focus on the individual with an overall dedication to the larger community. Everett was not just a model citizen; he was a lawyer-citizen. Levi contends that the survival of the lawyer-citizen and lawyer-statesmen models is a matter of choice and character. Nothing in the current structure of the legal economy places these models out of reach for those who would follow in Robinson Everett\u27s footsteps

Judging Measures

The question of how to optimally design judicial institutions is one of central importance to the scholarship focused on courts. Basic questions such as whether there should be mandatory retirement for judges, whether judges should be expected to write their own opinions and whether greater racial or gender diversity on the courts improves decision making are optimal design questions. Given the vast variation in the types of judicial system designs used around the world (and even within the United States), it should be possible to conduct a comparative analysis of the relative efficacy of the different designs. These comparisons cannot be evaluated, however, without first tackling the matter of how to measure justice or judicial performance. Although within the legal academy and the judiciary there is considerable skepticism and hostility to the measurement project, we argue that the project is worth attempting for both judges and academics. That said, the simple measures often used today, while necessary, cannot be relied on exclusively. To achieve a more reliable and useful measurement, judges must be involved in the process of arriving at the right characteristics to measure and the right ways to measure them. If judges get involved in improving the quality of data collection and measurement, the inherent dangers in empirical analysis of the judiciary will both be recognized and more effectively navigated. At the same time, empirical analysis with judicial participation is more likely to assist judges and judicial policymakers

Evaluating Judges and Judicial Institutions: Reorienting the Perspective

Empirical scholarship on judges, judging, and judicial institutions, a staple in political science, is becoming increasingly popular in law schools. We propose that this scholarship can be improved and enhanced by greater collaboration between empirical scholars, legal theorists, and the primary subjects of the research, the judges. We recently hosted a workshop that attempted to move away from the conventional mode of involving judges and theorists in empirical research, where they serve as commentators on empirical studies that they often see as reductionist and mis-focused. Instead, we had the judges and theorists set the discussion agenda for the empiricists by describing topics that they thought were worthy of inquiry. In this essay, we explain why we think collaboration of this sort should be encouraged and draw on the workshop experience to offer suggestions for improving the quality and utility of empirical research in this area

In the Absence of Scrutiny: Narratives of Probable Cause

This Article reports on a set of roughly thirty interviews with federal magistrate judges. The focus of the interviews was the impact of the Supreme Court case, United States v. Leon, on the behavior of magistrate judges. Leon, famously, put in place the good faith exception for faulty warrants that were obtained by the officers in good faith. The insertion of this exception diminished significantly the incentive for defendants to challenge problematic warrant grants. That effect, in turn, could have diminished the incentive for magistrate judge scrutiny of the warrants at the front end of the process. We do not find any indication of diminished scrutiny. What we do find, however, is a highly ritualized and formalistic process for the evaluation of warrants where calculations of probabilities are viewed through a legalistic rather than a pragmatic lens

From Judge to Dean: Reflections on the Bench and the Academy

In July of 2007, having served nearly seventeen years as a United States District Judge with chambers in Sacramento, California, I moved to Durham, North Carolina, to become the fourteenth dean of the Duke University Law School. I would concede that in the grand scheme of things such a transition must be deemed unremarkable. Lawyers have become soldiers, presidents, artists, and inn keepers. Judges have left the bench to do much the same. Nonetheless, in the somewhat closed worlds of the federal bench and the legal academy, at a time when the two worlds have seemed to drift apart, such a shift in careers may have seemed surprising. And the surprise was from two points of view: it was surprising that a federal judge would leave a position of such prestige, importance, and security, and it was equally surprising that one of the great law schools in the world would contemplate a judge as its next dean. In this Essay, I take the opportunity to reflect on a few of the everyday aspects of this transition, pointing out some of the differences and similarities in the life of the judge and the life of the legal academic. But my ultimate goal is to take a step back and explore whether there might be some unifying theme within which we might see the roles of the judge and the dean as in harmony with some greater purpose and as part of some greater tradition