The Stanford Law Review dedicates this Issue to one of the most distinguished graduates of Stanford Law School, Shirley Mount Hufstedler: U.S. Secretary of Education, federal judge, attorney, and advocate. Her pioneering life shines as an inspiring example of the power of persistence, brilliance, and adventurousness. Secretary Hufstedler passed away on March 30, 2016. The…
When I became President, one of my top priorities was to establish the Department of Education. Prior to that time, the crucial need for an independent and viable department was obvious, as it was buried under the Department of Health and Welfare. There were long and intense debates in the U.S. Congress, and finally the…
I appreciate this opportunity to recall the most Honorable Shirley Mount Hufstedler, a woman whose bright mind was well matched by her caring heart. Shirley Hufstedler had several careers in or involving the law—skilled practitioner, sage judge at trial and on appeal, fine teacher, perceptive scholar, and innovative member of the President’s cabinet at the…
Shirley Hufstedler and I were friends in the vineyards of law reform, judicial administration, and legal education for over fifty years. Therefore, it was a thrill for me to inherit her judicial chambers when I was appointed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals by President Carter and she went on to become his Secretary…
Both the federal judiciary and Harvard Law School were male-dominated institutions when, as a second-year law student, I first encountered Shirley Hufstedler in the fall of 1971. Judge Hufstedler was the only woman sitting on a United States Court of Appeals anywhere in the country and only the second woman ever to do so: Florence…
Shirley Hufstedler was a tiny woman, but in every other way she was a giant—intellectually, legally, morally. She was a feminist legal pioneer. One of only two female graduates of the Stanford Law School class of 1949, she became in 1961 the only woman among 120 California state trial judges and in 1966 became one of two…
Shirley and Seth Hufstedler loved to climb mountains. The week before the U.S. Department of Education opened its doors in 1980, a profile of them reported that their “favorite hobby is mountain climbing” and noted they had made five trips to the Nepalese Himalayas. When interviewed decades later, Shirley Hufstedler fondly recalled how she and Seth…
In response to the failure of U.S. copyright law to protect foreign authors, nineteenth-century American publishers evolved an informal practice called the “courtesy of the trade” as a way to mitigate the public goods problem posed by a large and ever-growing commons of foreign works. Trade courtesy was a shared strategy for regulating potentially destructive…
In misdemeanor cases, pretrial detention poses a particular problem because it may induce innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to exit jail, potentially creating widespread error in case adjudication. While practitioners have long recognized this possibility, empirical evidence on the downstream impacts of pretrial detention on misdemeanor defendants and their cases remains limited. This…
Understanding the precedential significance of Supreme Court plurality decisions is a task that has long confounded lower court judges. Surprisingly, the Supreme Court has offered little direct guidance on this question apart from a single sentence in Marks v. United States, which instructed that where the Justices fail to converge on a single majority rationale,…
In the digital age, users store vast amounts of data—often data considered to be private—in the cloud. The privacy of this data is increasingly determined by the policies of the companies storing it. But how does the law currently protect that data from law enforcement? Do users maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy in the…
The introduction of extraneous information into the jury room has been recognized by courts as posing a potential threat to the due process rights of litigants and the Sixth Amendment rights of criminal defendants. At the same time, however, courts encourage jurors to use their prior experience and common sense as a means of analyzing…
