Digital Commons Network^™

Pub. L. No. 86-272 And The Anti-Commandeering Doctrine: Is This Anachronism Constitutionally Vulnerable After Murphy V. Ncaa?, Matthew A. Melone

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

State taxing authority suffers from little of the structural impediments that the Constitution imposes on the federal government’s taxing power but the states’ power to tax is subject to the restrictions imposed on the exercise of any state action by the Constitution. The most significant obstacles to the states’ assertion of their taxing authority have been the Due Process Clause and the Commerce Clause. The Due Process Clause concerns itself with fairness while the Commerce Clause concerns itself with a functioning national economy. Although the two restrictions have different objectives, for quite some time both restrictions shared one attribute—a taxpayer …

Accusers As Adjudicators In Agency Enforcement Proceedings, Andrew N. Vollmer

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Largely because of the Supreme Court’s 1975 decision in Withrow v. Larkin, the accepted view for decades has been that a federal administrative agency does not violate the Due Process Clause by combining the functions of investigating, charging, and then resolving allegations that a person violated the law. Many federal agencies have this structure, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Trade Commission.

In 2016, the Supreme Court decided Williams v. Pennsylvania, a judicial disqualification case that, without addressing administrative agencies, nonetheless raises a substantial question about one aspect of the combination of functions at agencies. …

Solitary Confinement, Public Safety, And Recdivism, Shira E. Gordon

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

As of 2005, about 80,000 prisoners were housed in solitary confinement in jails and in state and federal prisons in the United States. Prisoners in solitary confinement are generally housed in a cell for twenty-two to twenty-four hours a day with little human contact or interaction. The number of prisoners held in solitary confinement increased 40 percent between 1995 and 2000, in comparison to the growth in the total prison population of 28 percent. Concurrently, the duration of time that prisoners spend in solitary confinement also increased: nationally, most prisoners in solitary confinement spend more than five years there. The …

Penalizing Poverty: Making Criminal Defendants Pay For Their Court-Appointed Counsel Through Recoupment And Contribution, Helen A. Anderson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Over thirty years ago the United States Supreme Court upheld an Oregon statute that allowed sentencing courts, with a number of important procedural safeguards, to impose on indigent criminal defendants the obligation to repay the cost of their court appointed attorneys. The practice of ordering recoupment or contribution (application fees or co-pays) of public defender attorney's fees is widespread, although collection rates are unsurprisingly low. Developments since the Court's decision in Fuller v. Oregon show that not only is recoupment not cost-effective, but it too easily becomes an aspect of punishment, rather than legitimate cost recovery. In a number of …

Evaluating Punishment In Purgatory: The Need To Separate Pretrial Detainees' Conditions-Of-Confinement Claims From Inadequate Eighth Amendment Analysis, David C. Gorlin

Michigan Law Review

The Due Process Clause prohibits all "punishment" of pretrial detainees- individuals that are held by the Government, but not adjudged guilty of any crime. The Eighth Amendment only prohibits the infliction of "cruel and unusual punishments" upon convicted individuals. Despite the Supreme Court's insistence that the Due Process Clause, and not the Eighth Amendment, protects pretrial detainees from deplorable and harmful conditions of confinement, most federal circuits now assess pretrial detainees' claims under Eighth Amendment standards. Under the Eighth Amendment framework, pretrial detainees must establish that conditions subjected them to a substantial risk of serious harm, and that jailers were …

Separate And Unequal: Federal Tough-On-Guns Program Targets Minority Communities For Selective Enforcement, Bonita R. Gardner

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article examines the Project Safe Neighborhoods program and considers whether its disproportionate application in urban, majority- African American cities (large and small) violates the guarantee of equal protection under the law. This Article will start with a description of the program and how it operates-the limited application to street-level criminal activity in predominately African American communities. Based on preliminary data showing that Project Safe Neighborhoods disproportionately impacts African Americans, the Article turns to an analysis of the applicable law. Most courts have analyzed Project Safe Neighborhoods' race-based challenges under selective prosecution case law, which requires a showing by the …

Lochner'S Feminist Legacy, David E. Bernstein

Michigan Law Review

Professor Julie Novkov's Constituting Workers, Protecting Women examines the so-called Lochner era of American constitutional jurisprudence through the lens of the struggle over the constitutionality of "protective" labor legislation, such as maximum hours and minimum wage laws. Many of these laws applied only to women, and Novkov argues that the debate over the constitutionality of protective laws for women - laws that some women's rights advocates saw as discriminatory legislation against women - ultimately had more important implications for the constitutionality of protective labor legislation more generally. Liberally defined, the Lochner era lasted from the Slaughter-House Cases in 1873 - …

The Pathological Politics Of Criminal Law, William J. Stuntz

Michigan Law Review

Substantive criminal law defines the conduct that the state punishes. Or does it? If the answer is yes, it should be possible, by reading criminal codes (perhaps with a few case annotations thrown in), to tell what conduct will land you in prison. Most discussions of criminal law, whether in law reviews, law school classrooms, or the popular press, proceed on the premise that the answer is yes. Law reform movements regularly seek to broaden or narrow the scope of some set of criminal liability rules, always on the assumption that by doing so they will broaden or narrow the …

When Constitutional Worlds Colide: Resurrecting The Framers' Bill Of Rights And Criminal Procedure, George C. Thomas Iii

Michigan Law Review

For two hundred years, the Supreme Court has been interpreting the Bill of Rights. Imagine Chief Justice John Marshall sitting in the dim, narrow Supreme Court chambers, pondering the interpretation of the Sixth Amendment right to compulsory process in United States v. Burr. Aaron Burr was charged with treason for planning to invade the Louisiana Territory and create a separate government there. To help prepare his defense, Burr wanted to see a letter written by General James Wilkinson to President Jefferson. In ruling on Burr's motion to compel disclosure, Marshall departed from the literal language of the Sixth Amendment - …

Finding Gold In The Rainbow Rights Movement, Shayna S. Cook

Michigan Law Review

In her history of the past fifty years of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement, Patricia Cain recounts the litigation successes and failures that contributed to the legal status of gays and lesbians in the Untied States today. Clearly an insider who has marched with the movement every step of the way, Cain provides a comprehensive account of all fronts of the battle in state and federal courts since 1950. But while Rainbow Rights serves as a good primer on the legal challenges and the key themes uniting them, the book reads like an account of a struggle ending …

Deceptive Police Interrogation Practices: How Far Is Too Far?, Laurie Magid

Michigan Law Review

Virtually all interrogations - or at least virtually all successful interrogations - involve some deception. As the United States Supreme Court has placed few limits on the use of deception, the variety of deceptive techniques is limited chiefly by the ingenuity of the interrogator. Interrogators still rely on the classic "Mutt and Jeff," or "good cop, bad cop," routine. Interrogators tell suspects that nonexistent eyewitnesses have identified them, or that still at-large accomplices have given statements against them. Interrogators have been known to put an unsophisticated suspect's hand on a fancy, new photocopy machine and tell him that the "Truth …

Identifying And (Re)Formulating Prophylactic Rules, Safe Harbors, And Incidental Rights In Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Susan R. Klein

Michigan Law Review

The Miranda conundrum runs something like this. If the Miranda decision represents true constitutional interpretation, and all unwarned statements taken during custodial interrogation are "compelled" within the meaning of the Self-Incrimination Clause, the impeachment and "fruits" exceptions to Miranda should fall. If it is not true constitutional interpretation, than the Court has no business reversing state criminal convictions for its violation. I offer here what I hope is a satisfying answer to this conundrum, on both descriptive and normative levels, that justifies not only Miranda but a host of similar Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Court decisions as well. In Part …

Miranda, Dickerson, And The Puzzling Persistence Of Fifth Amendment Exceptionalism, Stephen J. Schulhofer

Michigan Law Review

Dickerson v. United States preserves the status quo regime for judicial oversight of police interrogation. That result could be seen, in the present climate, as a victory for due process values, but there remain many reasons for concern that existing safeguards are flawed - that they are either too restrictive or not restrictive enough. Such concerns are partly empirical, of course. They depend on factual assessments of how much the Miranda rules do restrict the police. But such concerns also reflect a crucial, though often unstated, normative premise; they presuppose a certain view of how much the police should be …

Separated At Birth But Siblings Nonetheless: Miranda And The Due Process Notice Cases, George C. Thomas Iii

Michigan Law Review

Paraphrasing Justice Holmes, law is less about logic than experience. Courts and scholars have now had thirty-four years of experience with Miranda v. Arizona, including the Court's recent endorsement in Dickerson v. United States last Term. Looking back over this experience, it is plain that the Court has created a Miranda doctrine quite different from what it has said it was creating. I think the analytic structure in Dickerson supports this rethinking of Miranda. To connect the dots, I offer a new explanation for Miranda that permits us to reconcile Dickerson and the rest of the post-Miranda doctrine with the …

The Racial Origins Of Modern Criminal Procedure, Michael J. Klarman

Michigan Law Review

The constitutional law of state criminal procedure was born between the First and Second World Wars. Prior to 1920, the Supreme Court had upset the results of the state criminal justice system in just a handful of cases, all involving race discrimination in jury selection. By 1940, however, the Court had interpreted the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to invalidate state criminal convictions in a wide variety of settings: mob-dominated trials, violation of the right to counsel, coerced confessions, financially-biased judges, and knowingly perjured testimony by prosecution witnesses. In addition, the Court had broadened its earlier decisions forbidding …

Reconceiving The Right To Present Witnesses, Richard A. Nagareda

Michigan Law Review

Modem American law is, in a sense, a system of compartments. For understandable curricular reasons, legal education sharply distinguishes the law of evidence from both constitutional law and criminal procedure. In fact, the lines of demarcation between these three subjects extend well beyond law school to the organization of the leading treatises and case headnotes to which practicing lawyers routinely refer in their trade. Many of the most interesting questions in the law, however, do not rest squarely within a single compartment; instead, they concern the content and legitimacy of the lines of demarcation themselves. This article explores a significant, …

Ultra Vires Takings, Matthew D. Zinn

Michigan Law Review

When does legislative or administrative regulatory action "go[] too far" and effectively amount to an .appropriation of private property for which the Fifth Amendment requires just compensation? This question has turned out to be one of the thorniest in American constitutional law. The Supreme Court has identified several circumstances in which one can expect to find a regulatory taking, but its numerous pronouncements on the subject give no clear rule to distinguish compensable takings from noncompensable interference with property rights. Notwithstanding its volume, the commentary on the Takings Clause by and large addresses only proper governmental action that rises to …

Rights Against Rules: The Moral Structure Of American Constitutional Law, Matthew D. Adler

Michigan Law Review

The Bill of Rights, by means of open-ended terms such as "freedom of speech," "equal protection," or "due process," refers to moral criteria, which take on constitutional status by virtue of being thus referenced. We can disagree about whether the proper methodology for judicial application of these criteria is originalist or nonoriginalist. The originalist looks, not to the true content of the moral criteria named by the Constitution, but to the framers' beliefs about that content; the nonoriginalist tries to determine what the criteria truly require, and ignores or gives less weight to the framers' views. Bracketing this disagreement, however, …

Process, The Constitution, And Substantive Criminal Law, Louis D. Bilionis

Michigan Law Review

Criminal law scholars have pined for a substantive constitutional criminal law ever since Henry Hart and Herbert Packer first embraced the notion in the late 1950s and early 1960s. To this day, scholars continue to search for a theory fhat giv:es content to, in Hart's words, "the unmistakable indications that the Constitution means something definite and spμiething serious when it speaks of 'crime.'" To their dismay, the Supreme Court has - with two exceptions - seemingly resisted the notion. The two exceptions are familiar. First came the 1957 case of Lambert v. California, in which the Court came as close …

The First Amendment Comes Of Age: The Emergence Of Free Speech In Twentieth-Century America, G. Edward White

Michigan Law Review

As the number of issues perceived as having First Amendment implications continues to grow, and the coterie of potential beneficiaries of First Amendment protection continues to widen - including not only the traditional oppressed mavericks and despised dissenters but some rich and powerful members from the circles of political and economic orthodoxy - alarms have been sounded. Another period of stocktaking for free speech theory appears to be dawning, and some recent commentators have proposed a retrenchment from the long twentieth- century progression of increasingly speech-protective interpretations of the First Amendment. At the heart of the retrenchment literature lies the …

Determining Ripeness Of Substantive Due Process Claims Brought By Landowners Against Local Governments, David S. Mendel

Michigan Law Review

Landowners who sustain economic harm from arbitrary and capricious applications of land use regulations may sue the local government entities responsible for applying those regulations under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging that the local government entities deprived them of substantive due process in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. A landowner who brings this claim - an "as-applied arbitrary and capricious substantive due process" claim - may in appropriate cases seek declaratory and injunctive relief, damages, and attorney's fees. Despite controversy among courts and commentators over both the definition of property interests protected by the Due Process Clause and the standard …

The Negative Constitution: A Critique, Susan Bandes

Michigan Law Review

Part I describes the current approach, which demands adherence to the notion of a negative constitution. Part II critiques the assumptions underlying the current approach and demonstrates its undesirable consequences in decisional law. Part III explores the tenacious barriers to recognition of affirmative governmental duties: the constitutional, philosophical, and common law roots of the notion of a negative constitution, as well as the belief that recognizing affirmative duties would be an invitation to chaos. Finally, Part IV proposes discarding the rhetoric of negative rights and suggests an approach for constructing a theory better designed to effectuate constitutional goals.

Constitutional Constraints On The Admissibility Of Grand Jury Testimony: The Unavailable Witness, Confrontation, And Due Process, Barbara L. Strack

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Defendants, however, have raised serious constitutional objections to the introduction of grand jury testimony when the witness is unavailable to testify at trial. These claims have focused on the confrontation clause of the sixth amendment and the due process clauses of the fifth and fourteenth amendments. Defendants have contended that the introduction of testimony from a grand jury proceeding which cannot be subjected to cross-examination fatally compromises the defendant's right to a fair trial. Lower courts are split over admitting grand jury testimony in these circumstances, and the Supreme Court has yet to rule on the issue. As a result, …

Newman: Conviction: The Determination Of Guilt Or Innocence Without Trial, B. J. George Jr.

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Conviction: The Determination of Guilt or Innocence Without Trial by Donald J. Newman

Foster Parents Versus Agencies: A Case Study In The Judicial Application Of "The Best Interests Of The Child" Doctrine, Sanford N. Katz

Michigan Law Review

A recurring problem which courts face is the need to resolve the conflict which arises when foster parents challenge the decision of agencies that have disqualified these persons from continuing their relationship with or adopting their foster child. This article will explore the role of courts in resolving these disputes and will suggest some criteria by which the courts may be guided in deciding such questions.

The Line Between Federal And State Court Jurisdiction, Leslie A. Anderson

Michigan Law Review

From the beginning of this nation, there have been controversies involving the division of jurisdiction between federal and state courts. Often, these controversies have centered on the diversity of citizenship provision of the federal constitution. Today, however, the more poignant question is whether any division of jurisdiction between the federal and state systems retains logical bases.

Although myriad developments have relevancy with respect to this question, I have here focused upon two of the more important ones: the increasing overlap of subject matter being litigated in federal and state courts and the growing uniformity of standards to be applied in …

Unconstitutional Racial Classification And De Facto Segregation, Joseph A. Milchen

Michigan Law Review

Classification along racial lines, when involving state action, is unconstitutional. Such classification may violate the due process or equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment or the fifteenth amendment, and it has been held invalid in the fields of education, transportation, voting, recreational facilities, ownership and use of real property, and jury selection.

Grand Jury Secrecy, Richard M. Calkins

Michigan Law Review

When a leading state such as Illinois enacts "reform" legislation, an impact on the legislatures of other jurisdictions may be anticipated. Accordingly, a need exists for an examination of this legislation in the light of the common-law background of grand jury secrecy and for a further analysis of it in the face of the growing trend toward more liberalized discovery of grand jury minutes in other jurisdictions. It is the contention of the author that such an empirical study will demonstrate that this legislation adopted by Illinois is contrary to all modern judicial thinking and is, in fact, a retrogressive …

Child Custody In A Federal System, Leonard G. Ratner

Michigan Law Review

Among the most difficult of judicial functions is the determination of a child's custody after its parents have separated. The difficulties are acute enough when all the parties remain in the same place; when the parties are in different states, an additional perplexing problem arises as to which state should have authority to make the custody decision. This broad question can be resolved into three distinct though interrelated issues: (1) what state may initially determine custody; (2) what state may later modify that determination; (3) to what extent is such a determination binding on other states.

The Constitution And Preclusion/Res Judicata, Allan D. Vestal

Michigan Law Review

The interrelation of lawsuits is one of the most troublesome, yet least commented upon, areas of the law. The ramifications are great; related lawsuits may be pending concurrently, either brought by the same individual-repetitive litigation--or brought by different parties-reactive litigation. Such lawsuits may occur serially over a period of time. The courts are then faced with problems which have traditionally been discussed in terms of res judicata, bar, merger, or estoppel. It is impossible to cover the whole area or even a sizable part of it in a single article, but it is feasible to examine one facet which certainly …