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When Fines Don't Go Far Enough: The Failure Of Prison Settlements And Proposals For More Effective Enforcement Methods, Tori Collins

Maine Law Review

The Eighth Amendment’s Punishments Clause provides the basis on which prisoners may bring suit alleging unconstitutional conditions of confinement. Only a small number of these suits are successful. The suits that do survive typically end in a settlement in which prison authorities agree to address the unconstitutional conditions. However, settlements such as these are easily flouted for two primary reasons: prison authorities are not personally held liable when settlements are broken, and prisoners largely lack the political and practical leverage to self-advocate beyond the courtroom. Because of this, unconstitutional prison conditions may linger for years after prison authorities have agreed …

God, Guns, And Hair Salons: Public Perceptions Of Rights And Liberties During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Jessica R. Graham, Kyle J. Morgan

West Virginia Law Review

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, elected officials across the United States took efforts to slow the spread of the virus. Some of these efforts raised constitutional questions about the ability of the government to curtail rights during a crisis. This project makes use of an original dataset—letters to the editor submitted to 33 of the nation’s largest newspapers during the early months of the pandemic—to analyze public attitudes about these restrictions. Like much of the previous work regarding attitudes towards rights and liberties during a crisis, we find that these concerns are not front of mind to the public. …

Answering The Call: A History Of The Emergency Power Doctrine In Texas And The United States, P. Elise Mclaren

St. Mary's Law Journal

During times of emergency, national and local government may be allowed to take otherwise impermissible action in the interest of health, safety, or national security. The prerequisites and limits to this power, however, are altogether unknown. Like the crises they aim to deflect, courts’ modern emergency power doctrines range from outright denial of any power of constitutional circumvention to their flagrant use. Concededly, courts’ approval of emergency powers has provided national and local government opportunities to quickly respond to emergency without pause for constituency approval, but how can one be sure the availability of autocratic power will not be abused? …

Some Objections To Strict Liability For Constitutional Torts, Michael Wells

Scholarly Works

Qualified immunity protects officials from damages for constitutional violations unless they have violated "clearly established" rights. Local governments enjoy no immunity, but they may not be sued on a vicarious liability theory for constitutional violations committed by their employees. Critics of the current regime would overturn these rules in order to vindicate constitutional rights and deter violations.

This Article argues that across-the-board abolition of these limits on liability would be unwise as the costs would outweigh the benefits. In some contexts, however, exceptions may be justified. Much of the recent controversy surrounding qualified immunity involves suits in which police officers …

Youth Suffrage: In Support Of The Second Wave, Mae C. Quinn, Caridad Dominguez, Chelsey Omega, Abrafi Osei-Kofi, Carlye Owens

Akron Law Review

The 19th Amendment is talked about as central to our nation’s suffrage story, with many situating women's suffrage work within feminist theory "wave" discourse. However, with this telling, scholars and others too frequently overlook young voters and efforts relating to their election law rights. This article seeks to remedy this oversight and complicate the voting rights canon, in addition to supporting efforts of today’s youth voting rights advocates. It does so by turning our attention to youth suffrage movements, which we argue also can be examined by way of a framework of "waves." The first to offer such an historical …

Felony Disenfranchisement And The Nineteenth Amendment, Michael Gentithes

Akron Law Review

The Nineteenth Amendment and the history of the women’s suffrage movement can offer a compelling argument against felony disenfranchisement laws. These laws leave approximately six million citizens unable to vote, often for crimes wholly unrelated to the political process. They also increasingly threaten gains in female enfranchisement.

Today’s arguments in support of felony disenfranchisement laws bear striking similarities to the arguments of anti-suffragists more than a century earlier. Both suggest that a traditionally subordinated class of citizens is inherently incapable of bearing the responsibility that the right to vote entails, and that their votes are somehow less worthy than others. …

Suffragist Prisoners And The Importance Of Protecting Prisoner Protests, Nicole B. Godfrey

Akron Law Review

This paper examines the role that public exposure to the conditions experienced by suffragist prisoners played in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Using the experience of the suffragists as an example of how prisoner protest impacted democratic debate, the paper argues that robust protection of prisoners’ First Amendment rights is fundamental to the nation’s democratic values and political discourse and debate.

The paper begins with an historical overview of the arrests, convictions, and incarceration of the Silent Sentinels, women who began picketing outside the White House in 1917. Over the course of several months, local officials in the District …

State Attorneys General As Agents Of Police Reform, Stephen Rushin, Jason Mazzone

Faculty Publications & Other Works

State attorneys general can and should play an important role in remedying police violations of constitutional rights. In 1994, Congress enacted 42 U.S.C. § 14141 to authorize the U.S. Attorney General to seek equitable relief against state and local police departments engaged in patterns or practices of misconduct. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has used this statute to reform some of the nation’s most troubled police departments. However, the DOJ has lacked the resources to pursue more than a few cases each year and the Trump Administration has recently announced it would no longer enforce § 14141.

In response, a …

Race And Reasonableness In Police Killings, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Alexis D. Campbell

Faculty Scholarship

Police officers in the United States have killed over 1000 civilians each year since 2013. The constitutional landscape that regulates these encounters defaults to the judgments of the reasonable police officer at the time of a civilian encounter based on the officer’s assessment of whether threats to their safety or the safety of others requires deadly force. As many of these killings have begun to occur under similar circumstances, scholars have renewed a contentious debate on whether police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans and other nonwhite civilians and whether such killings reflect racial bias. We analyze data on …

Reproducing Dignity: Race, Disability, And Reproductive Controls, Mary Crossley

Articles

Human rights treaties and American constitutional law recognize decisions about reproduction as central to human dignity. Historically and today, Black women and women with disabilities have endured numerous impairments of their freedom to form and maintain families. Other scholars have examined these barriers to motherhood. Unexplored, however, are parallels among the experiences of women in these two groups or the women for whom Blackness and disability are overlapping identities. This Article fills that void. The disturbing legacy of the Eugenics movement is manifest in many settings. Black and disabled women undergo sterilizations at disproportionately high rates. Public benefit programs discourage …

Detention By Any Other Name, Sandra G. Mayson

Scholarly Works

An unaffordable bail requirement has precisely the same effect as an order of pretrial detention: the accused person is jailed pending trial. It follows as a logical matter that an order requiring an unaffordable bail bond as a condition of release should be subject to the same substantive and procedural protections as an order denying bail altogether. Yet this has not been the practice.

This Article lays out the logical and legal case for the proposition that an order that functionally imposes detention must be treated as an order of detention. It addresses counterarguments and complexities, including both empirical and …

Youth Suffrage: In Support Of The Second Wave, Mae Quinn, Caridad Dominguez, Chelsey Omega, Abrafi Osei-Kofi, Carlye Owens

Journal Articles

The 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution is an appropriate moment to reflect on the history—and consider the future—of the right to vote in the United States. High school and college classes teach the nation’s suffrage story as integral to our identity, focusing on the enfranchisement of women under the 19th Amendment and African Americans pursuant to the 15th Amendment.1 Constitutional law courses also present the 15th Amendment as foundational knowledge for the legal profession.2 Critical legal theory and women’s legal history texts frequently cover the 19th Amendment as central to understanding the first wave …

Dying Constitutionalism And The Fourteenth Amendment, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

The notion of a “living Constitution” often rests on an implicit assumption that important constitutional values will “grow” in such a way as to make the Constitution more attractive over time. But there are no guarantees: What can grow can also wither and die. This essay, presented as the 2018 Robert F. Boden Lecture at Marquette University Law School, marks the sesquicentennial of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification as a powerful charter of liberty and equality for black Americans. But for much of its early history, the Fourteenth Amendment’s meaning moved in reverse, overwhelmed by the end of Reconstruction, the gradual …

Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Foreword, I make the case for an abolition constitutionalism that attends to the theorizing of prison abolitionists. In Part I, I provide a summary of prison abolition theory and highlight its foundational tenets that engage with the institution of slavery and its eradication. I discuss how abolition theorists view the current prison industrial complex as originating in, though distinct from, racialized chattel slavery and the racial capitalist regime that relied on and sustained it, and their movement as completing the “unfinished liberation” sought by slavery abolitionists in the past. Part II considers whether the U.S. Constitution is an …

Explicit Bias, Jessica A. Clarke

Northwestern University Law Review

In recent decades, legal scholars have advanced sophisticated models for understanding prejudice and discrimination, drawing on disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and economics. These models explain how inequality is implicit in cognition and seamlessly woven into social structures. And yet, obvious, explicit, and overt forms of bias have not gone away. The law does not need empirical methods to identify bias when it is marching down the street in Nazi regalia, hurling misogynist invective, or trading in anti-Muslim stereotypes. Official acceptance of such prejudices may be uniquely harmful in normalizing discrimination. But surprisingly, many discrimination cases ignore explicit bias. Courts …

Equal Protection Under The Carceral State, Aya Gruber

Northwestern University Law Review

McCleskey v. Kemp, the case that upheld the death penalty despite undeniable evidence of its racially disparate impact, is indelibly marked by Justice William Brennan’s phrase, “a fear of too much justice.” The popular interpretation of this phrase is that the Supreme Court harbored what I call a “disparity-claim fear,” dreading a future docket of racial discrimination claims and erecting an impossibly high bar for proving an equal protection violation. A related interpretation is that the majority had a “color-consciousness fear” of remedying discrimination through race-remedial policies. In contrast to these conventional views, I argue that the primary anxiety …

Diversity Entitlement: Does Diversity-Benefits Ideology Undermine Inclusion?, Kyneshawau Hurd, Victoria C. Plaut

Northwestern University Law Review

Ideologies are most successful (or most dangerous) when they become common-sense—when they become widely accepted, taken-for-granted truths—because these truths subsequently provide implicit guidelines and expectations about what is moral, legitimate, and necessary in our society. In Regents of University of California v. Bakke, the Court, without a majority opinion, considered and dismissed all but one of several “common-sense” rationales for affirmative action in admissions. While eschewing rationales that focused on addressing discrimination and underrepresentation, the Court found that allowing all students to obtain the educational benefits that flow from diversity was a compelling rationale—essential, even, for a quality education. …

Seizing Family Homes From The Innocent: Can The Eighth Amendment Protect Minorities And The Poor From Excessive Punishment In Civil Forfeiture?, Louis S. Rulli

All Faculty Scholarship

Civil forfeiture laws permit the government to seize and forfeit private property that has allegedly facilitated a crime without ever charging the owner with any criminal offense. The government extracts payment in kind—property—and gives nothing to the owner in return, based upon a legal fiction that the property has done wrong. As such, the government’s taking of property through civil forfeiture is punitive in nature and constrained by the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause, which is intended to curb abusive punishments.

The Supreme Court’s failure to announce a definitive test for determining the constitutional excessiveness of civil forfeiture takings under …

The History, Means, And Effects Of Structural Surveillance, Jeffrey L. Vagle

All Faculty Scholarship

The focus on the technology of surveillance, while important, has had the unfortunate side effect of obscuring the study of surveillance generally, and tends to minimize the exploration of other, less technical means of surveillance that are both ubiquitous and self-reinforcing—what I refer to as structural surveillance— and their effects on marginalized and disenfranchised populations. This Article proposes a theoretical framework for the study of structural surveillance which will act as a foundation for follow-on research in its effects on political participation.

What Gideon Did, Sara Mayeux

All Faculty Scholarship

Many accounts of Gideon v. Wainwright’s legacy focus on what Gideon did not do—its doctrinal and practical limits. For constitutional theorists, Gideon imposed a preexisting national consensus upon a few “outlier” states, and therefore did not represent a dramatic doctrinal shift. For criminal procedure scholars, advocates, and journalists, Gideon has failed, in practice, to guarantee meaningful legal help for poor people charged with crimes.

Drawing on original historical research, this Article instead chronicles what Gideon did—the doctrinal and institutional changes it inspired between 1963 and the early 1970s. Gideon shifted the legal profession’s policy consensus on indigent defense away from …

Policing In The Era Of Permissiveness: Mitigating Misconduct Through Third-Party Standing, Julian A. Cook

Scholarly Works

On April 4, 2015, Walter L. Scott was driving his vehicle when he was stopped by Officer Michael T. Slager of the North Charleston, South Carolina, police department for a broken taillight. A dash cam video from the officer’s vehicle showed the two men engaged in what appeared to be a rather routine verbal exchange. Sometime after Slager returned to his vehicle, Scott exited his car and ran away from Slager, prompting the officer to pursue him on foot. After he caught up with Scott in a grassy field near a muffler establishment, a scuffle between the men ensued, purportedly …

The Duty Of Responsible Administration And The Problem Of Police Accountability, Charles F. Sabel, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Many contemporary civil rights claims arise from institutional activity that, while troubling, is neither malicious nor egregiously reckless. When law-makers find themselves unable to produce substantive rules for such activity, they often turn to regulating the actors’ exercise of discretion. The consequence is an emerging duty of responsible administration that requires managers to actively assess the effects of their conduct on civil rights values and to make reasonable efforts to mitigate harm to protected groups. This doctrinal evolution partially but imperfectly converges with an increasing emphasis in public administration on the need to reassess routines in the light of changing …

Teaching Slavery In American Constitutional Law, Paul Finkelman

Akron Law Review

From 1787 until the Civil War, slavery was probably the single most important economic institution in the United States. On the eve of the Civil War, slave property was worth at least two billion dollars. In the aggregate, the value of all the slaves in the United States exceeded the total value of all the nations railroads or all its factories. Slavery led to two major political compromises of the antebellum period, as well as to the most politically divisive Supreme Court decision in our history. Vast amounts of political and legal energy went into dealing with the institution. It …

An Analysis Of The Legal And Practical Implications Of The Potential Increased Participation In Jury Service By Racial Minorities In The U.S. Criminal Justice System, Brian Keith Leonard

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Conservative-Libertarian Turn In First Amendment Jurisprudence, Steven J. Heyman

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

It's The Constitution, Stupid: Two Liberals Pay Tribute To Antonin Scalia's Legacy, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean

Adam Lamparello

Living constitutionalism may achieve “good” results, but with each Roe v. Wade, and Bush v. Gore, the Constitution’s vision takes more shallow breaths, and democracy fades into elitism’s shadow. The debate over constitutional interpretation is, in many ways, reducible to this question: if a particular outcome is desirable, and the Constitution’s text is silent or ambiguous, should the United States Supreme Court (or any court) disregard constitutional constraints to achieve that outcome? If the answer is yes, nine unelected judges have the power to choose outcomes that are desirable. If the answer is no, then the focus must be on …

It's The Constitution, Stupid: Two Liberals Pay Tribute To Antonin Scalia's Legacy, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean

Adam Lamparello

Living constitutionalism may achieve “good” results, but with each Roe v. Wade, and Bush v. Gore, the Constitution’s vision takes more shallow breaths, and democracy fades into elitism’s shadow. The debate over constitutional interpretation is, in many ways, reducible to this question: if a particular outcome is desirable, and the Constitution’s text is silent or ambiguous, should the United States Supreme Court (or any court) disregard constitutional constraints to achieve that outcome? If the answer is yes, nine unelected judges have the power to choose outcomes that are desirable. If the answer is no, then the focus must be on …

Justice Sotomayor's Undemocratic Dissent In Schuette V. Coalition To Defend Affirmative Action, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

There are compelling reasons to support affirmative action programs. The effects of racial discrimination, and racism itself, remain prevalent throughout the country. Pretending otherwise would be to ignore reality. Arguing that the equal protection clause compels a state to implement race-based affirmative action programs, however, would make a mockery of the Constitution. Former Supreme Court Justice Hughes famously stated, “at the constitutional level where we work, 90 percent of any decision is emotional.” The remaining 10 percent is “[t]he rational part … [that] supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.” It is time for this type of judging to end. …

The Separate But Unequal Constitution, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean

Adam Lamparello

The Constitution should not be a political chess match, and outcomes should not depend on the composition of the Supreme Court. The text’s written and unwritten mandates speak to a single value that should unite jurists of all interpretive persuasions: the people — not legislatures or courts — own the Constitution’s enumerated rights, and have a corresponding right to define those that are not enumerated. But those rights have not been fully realized because the Constitution has been applied in a separate — and unequal — manner.

The wealthy have increased access to the political process, the poor are disproportionately …

"Continually Reminded Of Their Inferior Position": Social Dominance, Implicit Bias, Criminality, And Race, Darren Lenard Hutchinson

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article contends that implicit bias theory has improved contemporary understanding of the dynamics of individual bias. Implicit bias research has also helped to explain the persistent racial disparities in many areas of public policy, including criminal law and enforcement. Implicit bias theory, however, does not provide the foundation for a comprehensive analysis of racial inequality. Even if implicit racial biases exist pervasively, these biases alone do not explain broad societal tolerance of vast racial inequality. Instead, as social dominance theorists have found, a strong desire among powerful classes to preserve the benefits they receive from stratification leads to collective …