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Cherry-Picking History: Witchcraft, The Common Law, And The Weaponization Of Substantive Due Process, Sarah E. Bradley
Cherry-Picking History: Witchcraft, The Common Law, And The Weaponization Of Substantive Due Process, Sarah E. Bradley
William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice
In 2021, the Supreme Court sharply altered its substantive due process analysis in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, reversing the 49-year-old decision in Roe v. Wade to establish abortion access as a constitutional right. The Court reframed its substantive due process analysis as a two-step test, requiring a right to be narrowly framed and “deeply rooted in history and tradition” before it could be analyzed as “implicit in the concept of liberty,” instead of its previous balancing test that involved a broad description of the right. In the Dobbs majority opinion, the Court cherry-picked elements of common law …
What We Pretend To Be: Codifying A Right To A Religious Advisor In The Execution Chamber, Claire R. Jenkins
What We Pretend To Be: Codifying A Right To A Religious Advisor In The Execution Chamber, Claire R. Jenkins
William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice
Over the last fifty years, the Supreme Court has moved the pendulum both toward religious accommodation and away from it. After a decade of oscillating Court decisions, multiple attempts at corrective action by Congress, and widespread social activism, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Person’s Act, or RLUIPA, was passed in 2000. RLUIPA was designed to fortify the rights of incarcerated persons and provide clarification to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. As of 2024, the Supreme Court has granted certiorari in only a few RLUIPA cases—and has decided even less about the application of the law to death row inmates. …
Death After Dobbs: Addressing The Viability Of Capital Punishment For Abortion, Melanie Kalmanson
Death After Dobbs: Addressing The Viability Of Capital Punishment For Abortion, Melanie Kalmanson
William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice
Pre-Dobbs legislative efforts and states’ reactions in the immediate aftermath of Dobbs indicate the post-Dobbs reality that deeply conservative states will seek to criminalize abortion and impose extremely harsh sentences for such crimes, up to and including death. This Article addresses that reality. Initially, this Article illustrates that abortion and capital punishment are like opposite sides of the same coin, and it is a handful of states leading the counter majoritarian efforts on both topics. After outlining the position of each state in the nation that retains capital punishment on capital sentencing and abortion, the Article identifies the …
Kids, Cognition, And Confinement: Evaluating Claims Of Inadequate Access To Mental Health Care In Juvenile Detention Facilities, Lydia G. Mrowiec
Kids, Cognition, And Confinement: Evaluating Claims Of Inadequate Access To Mental Health Care In Juvenile Detention Facilities, Lydia G. Mrowiec
William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice
In the United States, almost 60,000 juveniles are incarcerated in juvenile jails and prisons every day, and, as of March 2021, at least seventy percent of juveniles in the juvenile justice system have a mental health condition. For many young adults, prison and detention centers have “become the avenue of last resort” for treatment of those mental health conditions. However, juvenile detention facilities lack the support and resources to provide adequate care, which has led to high recidivism in the juvenile population. Juveniles, and individuals on their behalf, can challenge inadequate access to mental health resources by bringing claims under …
Beating Justice: Corporal Punishment In American Schools And The Evolving Moral Constitution, Timothy D. Intelisano
Beating Justice: Corporal Punishment In American Schools And The Evolving Moral Constitution, Timothy D. Intelisano
William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice
This Note will discuss the Supreme Court’s holding in Ingraham v. Wright, and the subsequent developments in public school corporal punishment practices. Rather than focus exclusively on the case law, this Note will dive into the statistical data outlining which students are most often subjected to corporal punishment. Often, it is Black students and Autistic students who are subject to the harshest treatment.
This Note will outline the different avenues that courts could and should take to overrule Ingraham. Because a circuit split exists—on the issue of how to resolve these claims—overturning Ingraham and declaring corporal punishment per …
The New Insular Cases, Willie Santana
The New Insular Cases, Willie Santana
William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice
The Insular Cases is a name given to a series of cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court dealing with the status of the territories the United States acquired at the turn of the twentieth century. The Insular Cases rely on outmoded assumptions about the peoples who live in those islands, ninety-eight percent of whom belong to racial and ethnic minorities, and extend the extraconstitutional doctrine of territorial incorporation, a Plessy-style doctrine of separate governance for these territories that is different than the territories that preceded them. These cases, and the doctrine they announced, have been universally decried as …
Decolonizing Equal Sovereignty, Rosa Hayes
Decolonizing Equal Sovereignty, Rosa Hayes
William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice
In Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013), the Supreme Court announced that a tradition of equal sovereignty among the states prohibits unwarranted federal intrusions into state sovereignty and invoked this newly created doctrine to strike down Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act. Scholarly critiques in Shelby County’s immediate aftermath debated the constitutional validity of the Court’s equal sovereignty reasoning and warned of the dire threat the VRA’s effacement posed to voting rights—concerns that recent litigation have vindicated.
But other recent litigation suggests that, abstracted from its problematic and consequential origins, equal sovereignty may be deployed …
A New Takings Clause? The Implications Of Cedar Point Nursery V. Hassid For Property Rights And Moratoria, Benjamin Alexander Mogren
A New Takings Clause? The Implications Of Cedar Point Nursery V. Hassid For Property Rights And Moratoria, Benjamin Alexander Mogren
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
In part, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution holds that “no person . . . shall [have their] private property . . . taken for public use, without just compensation.” In Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “a California regulation that permits union organizers to enter the property of agricultural business to talk with employees about supporting a union is unconstitutional.” The purpose of this Note is to discuss what Cedar Point Nursery means generally for the future of Takings Clause analysis and will argue that Cedar Point Nursery should be seen as a …
Indoctrination By Elimination: Why Banning Critical Race Theory In Public Schools Is Unconstitutional, Emma Postel
Indoctrination By Elimination: Why Banning Critical Race Theory In Public Schools Is Unconstitutional, Emma Postel
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
This Note argues that Texas public school students’ First Amendment Rights have been violated by the passage of Senate Bill 3 (SB 3), which bans the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in K–12 public schools. The First Amendment is violated here because (1) students have a First Amendment right to speech, and this law bans protected speech; (2) students have a right to receive information, and this ban prevents them from receiving information; and (3) schools are meant to be the marketplace of ideas for students and banning CRT amounts to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. This Note does not suggest …
Constitutional Memories, Jack M. Balkin
Constitutional Memories, Jack M. Balkin
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
Many arguments in constitutional law invoke collective memory. Collective memory is what a group—for example, a religion, a profession, a people, or a nation—remembers and forgets about its past. This combination of remembering and forgetting helps constitute the group’s identity and structures its values and its commitments. Precisely because memory is selective, it may or may not correspond to the best account of historical facts.
The use of collective memory in constitutional argument is constitutional memory. It shapes people’s views about what the law means and why people have authority. Lawyers and judges continually invoke and construct memory; judicial decisions …
The Collective Right Endures: Pre-Heller Precedent And Our Understanding Of The Modern Second Amendment, William Reach
The Collective Right Endures: Pre-Heller Precedent And Our Understanding Of The Modern Second Amendment, William Reach
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
Prior to 2008, legal scholars who examined the Second Amendment fell roughly into two camps: those who believed “the right of the people to . . . bear arms” only covered state militias, and those who believed it extended to individual citizens.
After District of Columbia v. Heller conclusively established that the “Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms," discussion of the collective right to bear arms largely receded from public discussion and most litigation surrounding the Second Amendment shifted to define the outer edges of the individual right. But the pre-Heller showdown between these …
The Legal Origins Of Catholic Conscientious Objection, Jeremy Kessler
The Legal Origins Of Catholic Conscientious Objection, Jeremy Kessler
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
This Article traces the origins of Catholic conscientious objection as a theory and practice of American constitutionalism. It argues that Catholic conscientious objection emerged during the 1960s from a confluence of left-wing and right-wing Catholic efforts to participate in American democratic culture more fully. The refusal of the American government to allow legitimate Catholic conscientious objection to the Vietnam War became a cause célèbre for clerical and lay leaders and provided a blueprint for Catholic legal critiques of other forms of federal regulation in the late 1960s and early 1970s—most especially regulations concerning the provision of contraception and abortion.
Over …
The Next Fight Over Guns In America, Timothy Zick, Diana Palmer
The Next Fight Over Guns In America, Timothy Zick, Diana Palmer
Popular Media
With Thursday’s Supreme Court decision [in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen], the only real remaining question is not whether Americans can carry firearms, but where.
Recovering The Lost General Welfare Clause, David S. Schwartz
Recovering The Lost General Welfare Clause, David S. Schwartz
William & Mary Law Review
The General Welfare Clause of Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 of the Constitution enumerates a power to “provide for the common defense and general welfare.” A literal interpretation of this clause (“the general welfare interpretation”) would authorize Congress to legislate for any national purpose, and therefore to address all national problems— for example, the COVID-19 pandemic—in ways that would be precluded under the prevailing understanding of limited enumerated powers. But conventional doctrine rejects the general welfare interpretation and construes the General Welfare Clause to confer the so-called “Spending Power,” a power only to spend, but not to regulate, for …
The Constitutional Right To Carry Firearms On Campus, Jared A. Tuck
The Constitutional Right To Carry Firearms On Campus, Jared A. Tuck
William & Mary Law Review
Do individuals have the fundamental right under the Second Amendment to carry firearms on the campus of a public university? Additionally, can a public university totally ban firearms on its campus without impeding on the constitutional right to keep and bear arms protected by the Second Amendment? This Note will argue that individuals have a narrow, but constitutionally guaranteed, right to carry firearms on the campus of a public university. Therefore, it is beyond the power of states and public universities to totally ban firearms from campus premises.
Race-Based Remedies In Criminal Law, Ion Meyn
Race-Based Remedies In Criminal Law, Ion Meyn
William & Mary Law Review
This Article evaluates the constitutional feasibility of using race-based remedies to address racial disparities in the criminal system. Compared to white communities, communities of color are over-policed and over-incarcerated. Criminal system stakeholders recognize that these conditions undermine perceptions of legitimacy critical to ensuring public safety. As jurisdictions assiduously attempt race-neutral fixes, they also acknowledge the shortcomings of such interventions. Nevertheless, jurisdictions dismiss the feasibility of deploying more effective race-conscious strategies due to the shadow of a constitutional challenge. The apprehension is understandable. Debates around affirmative action in higher education and government contracting reveal fierce hostility toward race-based remedies.
This Article, …
Making The Impractical, Practical: A Modest And Overdue Approach To Reforming Fourth Amendment Consent Search Doctrine, Augustine P. Manga
Making The Impractical, Practical: A Modest And Overdue Approach To Reforming Fourth Amendment Consent Search Doctrine, Augustine P. Manga
William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice
At some point in your life, you may have a personal encounter with a police officer. During that moment, you may feel utterly powerless, especially if you do not know your rights. One important right that police are not required to inform people of is their right to deny an officer’s request to search their property. Forty-eight years ago, the Supreme Court made its position clear in Schneckloth v. Bustamonte that requiring law enforcement to provide citizens with this warning would be “thoroughly impractical.” Since then, the relationship between law enforcement and society—especially communities of color—has gradually deteriorated, and states …
Federalism, Free Competition, And Sherman Act Preemption Of State Restraints, Alan J. Meese
Federalism, Free Competition, And Sherman Act Preemption Of State Restraints, Alan J. Meese
Faculty Publications
The Sherman Act establishes free competition as the rule governing interstate trade. Banning private restraints cannot ensure that competitive markets allocate the nation's resources. State laws can pose identical threats to free markets, posing an obstacle to achieving Congress's goal to protect free competition.
The Sherman Act would thus override anticompetitive state laws under ordinary preemption standards. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court rejected such preemption in Parker v. Brown, creating the "state action doctrine." Parker and its progeny hold that state-imposed restraints are immune from Sherman Act preemption, even if they impose significant harm on out-of-state consumers. Parker's progeny …
Manufacturing Sovereign State Mootness, Daniel Bruce
Manufacturing Sovereign State Mootness, Daniel Bruce
William & Mary Law Review
The idea that public defendants should receive any special treatment in the mootness context has been subject to intense criticism among commentators. Most notably, in the lead-up to the New York Rifle decision, Joseph Davis and Nicholas Reaves—two prominent First Amendment litigators from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty—urged the Supreme Court to take the opportunity to correct the lower courts’ practice of blessing government abuse of the voluntary cessation doctrine. Indeed, the Supreme Court has never adopted a presumption in favor of government defendants such as the one applied by the Seventh Circuit in Killeen, and it failed to …
"Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! These Mass Arrests Have Got To Go!": The Expressive Fourth Amendment Argument, Karen J. Pita Loor
"Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! These Mass Arrests Have Got To Go!": The Expressive Fourth Amendment Argument, Karen J. Pita Loor
William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice
The racial justice protests ignited by the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 constitute the largest protest movement in the United States. Estimates suggest that between fifteen and twenty-six million people protested across the country during the summer of 2020 alone. Not only were the number of protestors staggering, but so were the number of arrests. Within one week of when the video of George Floyd’s murder went viral, police arrested ten thousand people demanding justice on American streets, with police often arresting activists en masse. This Essay explores mass arrests and how they square with Fourth Amendment …
The Modest Impact Of The Modern Confrontation Clause, Jeffrey Bellin, Diana Bibb
The Modest Impact Of The Modern Confrontation Clause, Jeffrey Bellin, Diana Bibb
Faculty Publications
The Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause grants criminal defendants the right "to be confronted with the witnesses against" them. A strict reading of this text would transform the criminal justice landscape by prohibiting the prosecution's use of hearsay at trial. But until recently, the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Clause was closer to the opposite. By tying the confrontation right to traditional hearsay exceptions, the Court's longstanding precedents granted prosecutors broad freedom to use out-of-court statements to convict criminal defendants.
The Supreme Court's 2004 decision in Crawford v. Washington was supposed to change all that. By severing the link between the …
Breathing Room For The Right Of Assembly, Tabatha Abu El-Haj
Breathing Room For The Right Of Assembly, Tabatha Abu El-Haj
William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice
This Article explores the legal and political fault lines that the wave of protests highlighting police violence and systemic racism in the summer of 2020 reveal. It focuses in depth on Detroit, Michigan, as a window into the ways that the First Amendment, as currently construed, under-protects those seeking political change and racial reckoning by demonstrating in the streets.
Shelter From The Storm: Human Rights Protections For Single-Mother Families In The Time Of Covid-19, Theresa Glennon, Alexis Fennell, Kaylin Hawkins, Madison Mcnulty
Shelter From The Storm: Human Rights Protections For Single-Mother Families In The Time Of Covid-19, Theresa Glennon, Alexis Fennell, Kaylin Hawkins, Madison Mcnulty
William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice
COVID-19’s arrival, and the changes it has unleashed, reveal how longstanding legal and policy decisions produced structural inequalities that have left so many families, and especially single-parent families with children, all too insecure. The fragility of single-mother families is amplified by the multifaceted discrimination they face. While all single parents, including single fathers and other single relatives who are raising children, share many of these burdens, this Article focuses on the challenges confronting single mothers.
Federal policy choices stand in sharp contrast to the political rhetoric of government support for families. Social and economic policy in the twentieth century developed …
Petitions From The Grave: Why Federal Executions Are A Violation Of The Suspension Clause, Taran Wessells
Petitions From The Grave: Why Federal Executions Are A Violation Of The Suspension Clause, Taran Wessells
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
This Note will address the intersection of wrongful convictions, the federal death penalty, and habeas corpus to conclude that the federal death penalty is an unconstitutional violation of the Suspension Clause of the United States Constitution. Part I of this Note will establish that Congress may not suspend the writ of habeas corpus outside of wartime. Then, Part II will show that wrongfully convicted prisoners therefore have a constitutional right to a habeas petition if they discover new, exonerating evidence. Part III will argue that because executed prisoners cannot file a habeas petition for release, executing wrongfully convicted prisoners is …
The President And Individual Rights, Mark Tushnet
The President And Individual Rights, Mark Tushnet
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
No abstract provided.
The Emerging Lessons Of Trump V. Hawaii, Shalini Bhargava Ray
The Emerging Lessons Of Trump V. Hawaii, Shalini Bhargava Ray
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
In the years since the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Hawaii, federal district courts have adjudicated dozens of rights-based challenges to executive action in immigration law. Plaintiffs, including U.S. citizens, civil rights organizations, and immigrants themselves, have alleged violations of the First Amendment and the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause with some regularity based on President Trump’s animus toward immigrants. This Article assesses Hawaii’s impact on these challenges to immigration policy, and it offers two observations. First, Hawaii has amplified federal courts’ practice of privileging administrative law claims over constitutional ones. For example, courts considering …
The Original Meaning Of The Habeas Corpus Suspension Clause, The Right Of Natural Liberty, And Executive Discretion, John Harrison
The Original Meaning Of The Habeas Corpus Suspension Clause, The Right Of Natural Liberty, And Executive Discretion, John Harrison
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
The Habeas Corpus Suspension Clause of Article I, Section 9, is primarily a limit on Congress’s authority to authorize detention by the executive. It is not mainly concerned with the remedial writ of habeas corpus, but rather with the primary right of natural liberty. Suspensions of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus are statutes that vest very broad discretion in the executive to decide which individuals to hold in custody. Detention of combatants under the law of war need not rest on a valid suspension, whether the combatant is an alien or a citizen of the United States. …
Destructive Federal Decentralization, David Fontana
Destructive Federal Decentralization, David Fontana
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
This Article—written for a symposium hosted by the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal—focuses on the efforts by the Trump administration to relocate federal officials outside of Washington to reduce the capacity of the federal government. Federalism and the separation of powers are usually the twin pillars of structural constitutional law. Locating federal officials outside of Washington— federal decentralization—has been an additional tool of diffusing power that has started to gain some scholarly attention. These debates largely focus on structural constitutional law as constructive—as improving the capacity and operation of the federal and state governments. The power …
Who Constrains Presidential Exercise Of Delegated Powers?, Rebecca L. Brown
Who Constrains Presidential Exercise Of Delegated Powers?, Rebecca L. Brown
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
Building on the work of administrative law scholars who have identified and illuminated the several components of the problem over the years, this Article will seek to show what has happened when a cluster of separate circumstances have come together to create a new and serious threat to individual liberty when the President exercises expansive delegated authority. Several doctrinal components lead to this confluence: First, the moribund “intelligible principle” test has evolved to provide little or no constraint on this or any other delegation. Second, a delegation to the President, specifically, is not subject to the procedural requirements of the …
Marriage Mandates: Compelled Disclosures Of Race, Sex, And Gender Data In Marriage Licensing Schemes, Mikaela A. Phillips
Marriage Mandates: Compelled Disclosures Of Race, Sex, And Gender Data In Marriage Licensing Schemes, Mikaela A. Phillips
William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice
This Note argues that mandatory disclosures of personal information—specifically race, sex, and gender—on a marriage license application constitute compelled speech under the First Amendment and should be subject to heightened scrutiny. Disclosing one’s race, sex, or gender on a marriage license application is an affirmative act, and individuals may wish to have their identity remain anonymous. These mandatory disclosures send a message that this information is still relevant to marriage regulation. Neither race nor gender is based in science; rather they are historical and social constructs created to uphold a system of white supremacy and heteronormativity. Thus, such statements are …