Digital Commons Network^™

The Integrity Of Marriage, Kaiponanea T. Matsumura

William & Mary Law Review

While the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges resolved a dispute about access to legal marriage, it also exposed a rift between the Justices about what rights, obligations, and social meanings marriage should entail. The majority opinion described marriage as a “unified whole” comprised of “essential attributes,” both legal and extralegal. The dissents, in contrast, were more skeptical about marriage’s inherent legal content. Justice Scalia, for instance, characterized marriage as a mere bundle of “civil consequences” attached to “whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements [the law] wishes.” This side debate has taken center stage in several recent disputes. In …

Wealth, Equal Protection, And Due Process, Brandon L. Garrett

William & Mary Law Review

Increasingly, constitutional litigation challenging wealth inequality focuses on the intersection of the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses. That intersection—between equality and due process—deserves far more careful exploration. What I call “equal process” claims arise from a line of Supreme Court and lower court cases in which wealth inequality is the central concern. For example, the Supreme Court in Bearden v. Georgia conducted analysis of a claim that criminal defendants were treated differently based on wealth in which due process and equal protection principles converged. That equal process connection is at the forefront of a wave of national litigation concerning …

When (And Why) The Levee Breaks: A Suggested Causation Framework For Takings Claims That Arise From Government-Induced Flooding, Charles D. Wallace

William & Mary Law Review

In 1968, the United States Army Corps of Engineers finished constructing the seventy-six-mile Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MR-GO) navigational channel. Congress authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to begin construction to create a shipping route between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. However, the MRGO also caused significant erosion and other environmental detriments that greatly increased the risk of flooding around its vicinity. The Army Corps of Engineers learned about many of these detriments and risks through numerous studies it conducted between 1998 and 2005, but never fully addressed them.

Hurricane Katrina eventually showcased the MR-GO’s defects in violent fashion. …

"When The President Does It": Why Congress Should Take The Lead In Investigations Of Executive Wrongdoing, Andrew B. Pardue

William & Mary Law Review

Asked by British journalist David Frost whether the President of the United States has the ability to authorize illegal acts when he believes such action is justified, Richard Nixon infamously replied: “Well, when the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” A majority of Americans disagreed with the former President’s assessment. But the question remains: If the President is theoretically capable of breaking the law while in office, what is the best way to determine whether a crime has actually been committed? This question has forced lawmakers to attempt to reconcile various investigatory mechanisms—all differing in their independence …

Constitutional Moral Hazard And Campus Speech, Jamal Greene

William & Mary Law Review

One underappreciated cost of constitutional rights enforcement is moral hazard. In economics, moral hazard refers to the increased propensity of insured individuals to engage in costly behavior. This Essay concerns what I call “constitutional moral hazard,” defined as the use of constitutional rights (or their conspicuous absence) to shield potentially destructive behavior from moral or pragmatic assessment. What I have in mind here is not simply the risk that people will make poor decisions when they have a right to do so, but that people may, at times, make poor decisions because they have a right. Moral hazard is not …

The Federal Courts’ Rulemaking Buffer, Jordan M. Singer

William & Mary Law Review

Procedural rulemaking is often thought of as a second-order task for the federal court system, relevant to the courts’ work but not essential to their function. In reality, rulemaking plays an integral role in the court system’s operation by actively insulating the courts from environmental pressure. This Article explains how power over procedural rulemaking protects the federal courts from environmental uncertainty and describes the court system’s efforts to maintain the effectiveness of the rulemaking buffer in response to historical and contemporary challenges.

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act At Age 10: Gina’S Controversial Assertion That Data Transparency Protects Privacy And Civil Rights, Barbara J. Evans

William & Mary Law Review

The genomic testing industry is an edifice built on data transparency: transparent and often unconsented sharing of our genetic information with researchers to fuel scientific discovery, transparent sharing of our test results to help regulators infer whether the tests are safe and effective, and transparent sharing of our health information to help treat other patients on the premise that we gain reciprocity of advantage when each person’s health care is informed by the best available data about all of us. Transparency undeniably confers many social benefits but creates risks to the civil rights of the people whose genetic information is …

State Regulations Are Failing Our Children: An Analysis Of Child Marriage Laws In The United States, Rachel L. Schuman

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

No Arbitrary Power: An Originalist Theory Of The Due Process Of Law, Randy E. Barnett, Evan D. Bernick

William & Mary Law Review

“Due process of law” is arguably the most controversial and frequently litigated phrase in the Constitution of the United States. Although the dominant originalist view has long been that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process of Law Clauses are solely “process” guarantees that do not constrain the content or “substance” of legislation at all, originalist scholars have in recent years made fresh inquiries into the historical evidence and concluded that there is a weighty case for some form of substantive due process. In this Article, we review and critique those findings, employing our theory of good-faith originalist interpretation and …

Trusting The Federalism Process Under Unique Circumstances: United States Election Administration And Cybersecurity, Eric S. Lynch

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Antitrust As Speech Control, Hillary Greene, Dennis A. Yao

William & Mary Law Review

Antitrust law, at times, dictates who, when, and about what people can and cannot speak. It would seem then that the First Amendment might have something to say about those constraints. And it does, though perhaps less directly and to a lesser degree than one might expect. This Article examines the interface between those regimes while recasting antitrust thinking in terms of speech control.

Our review of the antitrust-First Amendment legal landscape focuses on the role of speech control. It reveals that while First Amendment issues are explicitly addressed relatively infrequently within antitrust decisions that is, in part, because certain …

Accommodating Competition: Harmonizing National Constitutional And Antitrust Commitments, Jonathan B. Baker

William & Mary Law Review

This Article shows how the norm supporting governmental action to protect and foster competitive markets was harmonized with economic rights to contract and property during the 19th century, and with the development of the social safety net during the 20th century. It explains why the Constitution, as understood today, does not check the erosion of the entrenched but threatened national commitment to assuring competitive markets.

Scrutinizing Anticompetitive State Regulations Through Constitutional And Antitrust Lenses, Daniel A. Crane

William & Mary Law Review

State and local regulations that anticompetitively favor certain producers to the detriment of consumers are a pervasive problem in our economy. Their existence is explicable by a variety of structural features—including asymmetry between consumer and producer interests, cost externalization, and institutional and political factors entrenching incumbent technologies. Formulating legal tools to combat such economic parochialism is challenging in the post-Lochner world, where any move toward heightened judicial review of economic regulation poses the perceived threat of a return to economic substantive due process. This Article considers and compares two potential tools for reviewing such regulations—a constitutional principle against anticompetitive parochialism …

Parker V. Brown, The Eleventh Amendment, And Anticompetitive State Regulation, William H. Page, John E. Lopatka

William & Mary Law Review

The Parker v. Brown (or “state action”) doctrine and the Eleventh Amendment of the Constitution impose different limits on antitrust suits challenging anticompetitive state regulation. The Supreme Court has developed these two versions of state sovereign immunity separately, and lower courts usually apply the immunities independently of each other (even in the same cases) without explaining their relationship. Nevertheless, the Court has derived the two immunities from the same principle of sovereign immunity, so it is worth considering why and how they differ, and what the consequences of the differences are for antitrust policy. The state action immunity is based …

Religious Freedom Through Market Freedom: The Sherman Act And The Marketplace For Religion, Barak D. Richman

William & Mary Law Review

In prior work, I examined certain restraints by private religious organizations and concluded that the First Amendment did not immunize these organizations from antitrust liability. In short, the First Amendment did not preempt enforcing the Sherman Act against certain religious monopolies or cartels.

This Article offers a stronger argument: First Amendment values demand antitrust enforcement. Because American religious freedoms, enshrined in the Constitution and reflected in American history, are quintessentially exercised when decentralized communities create their own religious expression, the First Amendment’s religion clauses are best exemplified by a proverbial marketplace for religions. Any effort to stifle a market organization …

“Competition Policy In Its Broadest Sense:” Michael Pertschuk’S Chairmanship Of The Federal Trade Commission 1977-1981, William E. Kovacic

William & Mary Law Review

In the late 1960s and through the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) undertook an ambitious program of reforms. Among other measures, the agency expanded the focus of antitrust enforcement to address economic concentration, including the use of Section 5 of the FTC Act to restructure dominant firms and oligopolies. In many ways Michael Pertschuk, who chaired the agency from 1977 to 1981, became the symbol of the FTC’s efforts to stretch the boundaries of antitrust policy—to pursue a conception of “competition policy in its broadest sense.” Despite a number of valuable accomplishments, the FTC achieved relatively few litigation successes, …

Antitrust And The Politics Of State Action, Thomas B. Nachbar

William & Mary Law Review

In North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners, the Court refused to exempt the board from the second element of Parker immunity—active supervision by the state—because the Board was made up largely of “active market participants.” This Article argues that the “active market participant” rule laid out in North Carolina State Board, while intuitively appealing, ignores important political values represented by antitrust law, values most evident in the context of state action immunity. By focusing on the potential market harm from self-interested regulators, the Court ignored a series of political harms inherent in the structure of the North …

The (Limited) Constitutional Right To Compete In An Occupation, Rebecca Haw Allensworth

William & Mary Law Review

Is there a constitutional right to compete in an occupation? The “right to earn a living” movement, gaining steam in policy circles and winning some battles in the lower courts, says so. Advocates for this right say that the right to compete in an occupation stands on equal footing with our most sacred constitutional rights such as the right to be free from racial discrimination. This Article takes a different view, arguing that while there is a limited constitutional right to compete in an occupation, it is—and should be—weaker than these advocates claim. Some state licensing laws run afoul of …

Taking Shelter Under The Fourth Amendment: The Constitutionality Of Policing Methods At State-Sponsored Natural Disaster Shelters, Kyle M. Wood

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Enforcing Principled Constitutional Limits On Federal Power: A Neo-Federalist Refinement Of Justice Cardozo's Jurisprudence, Robert J. Pushaw Jr.

William & Mary Law Review

Since the New Deal of the mid-1930s, Congress has asserted virtually absolute power to (1) “regulate Commerce ... among the States,” (2) tax and spend for the “general Welfare,” and (3) delegate “legislative Power[ ]” to the executive branch. From 1937 until 1994, the Supreme Court rejected every claim that such statutes had exceeded Congress’s Article I authority and usurped the states’ reserved powers under the Tenth Amendment. Over the past quarter century, conservative Justices have tried, and failed, to develop principled constitutional limits on the federal government while keeping the modern administrative and social welfare state largely intact.

The …