Vining, Navarro, and Zorn: Judicial Tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court, 1790-1868: Frustration, Resignation, and Expiration on the Bench. The Abstract:
Though scholars have found that modern justices are frequently motivated to step down by political circumstances, we believe that their long-departed predecessors rarely had such a luxury. Specifically, we suggest that the focus on political factors often present in this literature is inappropriate in the period prior to the Judiciary Act of 1869 (16 Stat. 44). The absence of pensions and the rigors of circuit duty prevented early justices from reacting to political stimuli in the same manner as recent justices. In support of this proposition, we examine the effects of personal, institutional, and political factors on Supreme Court turnover, positing that departure behavior prior to the advent of judicial pensions was driven primarily by justices' personal and institutional, rather than political, circumstances.
Keith Hylton (BU): When Should a Case be Dismissed? The Economics of Pleading and Summary Judgment Standards. The Abstract:
This paper applies a simple economic framework to the choice between pleading and summary judgment as points at which a claim can be dismissed. It concludes generally that pleading standards should vary with the evidentiary demands of the associated legal standards and the social costs of litigation. The common law's imposition of higher pleading standards for fraud claims is consistent with this proposition. The theory implies that the rigorous summary judgment standards that have been developed by antitrust courts should lead to a correspondingly rigorous assessment at the pleading stage.
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