Digital Commons Network^™

Death Penalty Jurisprudence In New York And The Supremacy Clause Of The United States Constitution: How Supreme Is It ?, Joseph E. Fahey

ExpressO

This article deals with the treatment of the Supremacy Clause by the New York Court of Appeals in the evolution of its death penalty jurisprudence. It traces the application of the Clause by the Court and its abandonment in its imposition of stronger guarantees under the New York State Constitution

Hate The Vile Campaign Ads? Blame The Supreme Court, Alan E. Garfield

Alan E Garfield

No abstract provided.

First Principles For Virginia's Fifth Century, Hon. Robert F. Mcdonnell

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Collectivism And Ex-Offender Residence Exclusion Laws, Wayne A. Logan

Scholarly Publications

The U.S. has often been imperiled by the competing interests of individual states, and while past threats have most frequently assumed economic or political form, this article addresses a different threat: state efforts to limit where ex-offenders (those convicted of sex crimes in particular) can live. The laws have thus far withstood constitutional challenge, with courts deferring to the police power of states. This deference, however, ignores the negative externalities created when states jettison their human dross, and defies Justice Cardozo's oft-repeated constitutional tenet that the “the peoples of the several states must sink or swim together.” The article discusses …

The New Constitutional Order And The Heartening Of Conservative Constitutional Aspirations, James E. Fleming

Faculty Scholarship

The basic question for this conference is whether we as a people have entered, or are on the verge of entering, a new constitutional order. In 2003, Mark Tushnet published a terrific book, The New Constitutional Order, an expansion of his insightful Foreword: The New Constitutional Order and the Chastening of Constitutional Ambition in the Harvard Law Review.2 The title of that book was an inspiration for the title of this conference. And the title of that article is the basis for the title of my article. For years, liberals and progressives have been anticipating or announcing a conservative revolution …

Original Intent In The First Congress, Louis J. Sirico Jr.

Working Paper Series

Most of the literature on this country’s Founding Era concludes that at least in the very early years, the Founders did not look to original intent to construe the Constitution. However, this study looks not at what the Founders said they believed, but how they acted. In the First Federal Congress, the members did use arguments based on original intent. This study identifies their originalist arguments and categorizes them into five rhetorical categories. It concludes that these arguments did not dominate the debates, but were one type of argument among many.

Reverse-Erie, Kevin M. Clermont

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Traditional Erie is like a false front on a movie set, with nobody seeing the unfinished rear side. That other side depicts the extent of federal law applicable in state courts, which is determined under a doctrine called reverse-Erie. While everyone has an Erie theory and stands ready to debate it, almost no one has a theory of reverse-Erie, and no one at all has developed a clear choice-of-law methodology for it. Reverse-Erie, often misunderstood, mischaracterized, and misapplied by judges and commentators, goes strangely ignored by most scholars. And it goes ignored even though it holds a key to understanding …

The Glucksberg Renaissance: Substantive Due Process Since Lawrence V. Texas, Brian Hawkins

Michigan Law Review

On their faces, Washington v. Glucksberg and Lawrence v. Texas seem to have little in common. In Glucksberg, the Supreme Court upheld a law prohibiting assisted suicide and rejected a claim that the Constitution protects a "right to die"; in Lawrence, the Court struck down a law prohibiting homosexual sodomy and embraced a claim that the Constitution protects homosexual persons' choices to engage in intimate relationships. Thus, in both subject matter and result, Lawrence and Glucksberg appear far apart. The Lawrence Court, however, faced a peculiar challenge in reaching its decision, and its response to that challenge brings …

Burkean Minimalism, Cass R. Sunstein

Michigan Law Review

Burkean minimalism has long played an important role in constitutional law. Like other judicial minimalists, Burkeans believe in rulings that are at once narrow and theoretically unambitious; what Burkeans add is an insistence on respect for traditional practices and an intense distrust of those who would renovate social practices by reference to moral or political reasoning of their own. An understanding of the uses and limits of Burkean minimalism helps to illuminate a number of current debates, including those involving substantive due process, the Establishment Clause, and the power of the president to protect national security. Burkean minimalists oppose, and …

The Ninth Amendment: It Means What It Says, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Although the Ninth Amendment appears on its face to protect unenumerated individual rights of the same sort as those that were enumerated in the Bill of Rights, courts and scholars have long deprived it of any relevance to constitutional adjudication. With the growing interest in originalist methods of interpretation since the 1980s, however, this situation has changed. In the past twenty years, five originalist models of the Ninth Amendment have been propounded by scholars: The state law rights model, the residual rights model, the individual natural rights model, the collective rights model, and the federalism model. This article examines thirteen …

Corporate Speech, Securities Regulation, And An Institutional Approach To The First Amendment, Michael R. Siebecker

William & Mary Law Review

Does the First Amendment shield politically tinged corporate speech from the compelled disclosure and reporting requirements embedded in the U.S. securities laws? The question arises in the securities regulation context because of an impending jurisprudential train wreck between the Supreme Court's commercial speech doctrine and its approach to corporate political speech. As corporations begin mixing commercial messages with political commentary, First Amendment jurisprudence simply provides insufficient guidance on the role government should play in regulating that speech. Although First Amendment jurisprudence generally counsels against governmental restrictions on corporate political speech without regard to the truth or falsity of the message, …

The Rhetoric For Ratification: The Argument Of "The Federalist" And Its Impact On Constitutional Interpretation, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

Courts, lawyers, and scholars have long assumed that The Federalist Papers supply important information for use in constitutional argument and interpretation. In recent years, commentators have questioned this view. Their skepticism grows out of two major concerns. First, Justice Scalia's challenge to the use of legislative history in the statutory context casts a cloud over judicial use of background texts such as The Federalist in seeking the meaning of the Constitution. Second, even if courts may rely on some background materials in interpreting the Constitution, there is reason to conclude that The Federalist does not qualify as the sort of …

Never Get Out'a The Boat: Stenberg V. Carhart And The Future Of American Law, Michael Scaperlanda, John M. Breen

Michael A. Scaperlanda

No abstract provided.

Never Get Out'a The Boat: Stenberg V. Carhart And The Future Of American Law, Michael Scaperlanda, John M. Breen

John M. Breen

No abstract provided.

Daubert And The Disappearing Jury Trial, Allan Kanner

ExpressO

Since being decided by the Supreme Court in 1993, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals has earned its place as one of the most misinterpreted and misapplied decisions in modern history. Meant to liberalize the standards for admissions of proof, the decision has had the opposite effect. The gatekeeper powers given to judges via Daubert, coupled with the internal and external incentives to prevent jury trials, has placed our entire civil justice system at risk.

The Public Forum Doctrine And Public Housing Authorities: Can You Say That Here?, Martin J. Rooney

ExpressO

This article reviews a number of federal cases applying the Public Forum Doctrine of the First Amendment. The doctrine concerns the use of public property for expressive purposes. These cases explore the application of this doctrine to situations were the government is acting as landlord, and not as sovereign. Several of these federal cases have been seriously questioned, if not outright rejected, by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The state court has taken a much more absolutist view of the Free Speech – First Amendment rights of public housing tenants than has most of the federal case law.

Ley Federal Del Procedimiento Contencioso Administrativo., Bruno L. Costantini García

Bruno L. Costantini García

Ponencia sobre la Ley Federal del Procedimiento Contencioso Administrativo, impartida por Bruno L. Costantini García.

A Complete Property Right Amendment, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

The trend of the eminent domain reform and "Kelo plus" initiatives is toward a comprehensive Constitutional property right incorporating the elements of level of review, nature of government action, and extent of compensation. This article contains a draft amendment which reflects these concerns.

Commenting On The Views Of Roger Pilon, Arthur R. Landever

Law Faculty Presentations and Testimony

Professor Landever comments upon the views of Roger Pilon of the Cato Institute on interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

Compulsory Labor In A National Emergency: Public Service Or Involuntary Servitude? The Case Of Crippled Ports, Michael H. Leroy

ExpressO

The 13th Amendment ban on involuntary servitude has new relevance as the U.S. grapples with national emergencies such as catastrophic hurricanes, flu pandemics, and terrorism. This Article considers work refusal and coerced work performance in life-threatening employment contexts. Overwhelmed by fear, hundreds of police officers and health care workers abandoned their jobs during Hurricane Katrina. Postal clerks worked against their will without masks in facilities with anthrax. A report by Congress worries that avian flu will cause sick and frightened medical personnel to stay away from work, thus jeopardizing a coherent response to a crisis.

How far can the U.S. …

Medical Self-Defense, Prohibited Experimental Therapies, And Payment For Organs, Eugene Volokh

ExpressO

Three sisters lie in adjoining hospital rooms. A fourth lives a block away. All are in deadly peril.

Alice is seven months pregnant, and the pregnancy threatens her life. Her fetus has long been viable, so she no longer has the Roe/Casey right to abortion on demand. But because her life is in jeopardy, she has a constitutional right to save her life by hiring a doctor to perform a post-viability abortion, though it means the death of a viable fetus. She would even have such a right if the pregnancy were only posing a serious threat to her health, …

St. George Tucker’S Second Amendment: Deconstructing ‘The True Palladium Of Liberty’, Stephen P. Halbrook

ExpressO

St. George Tucker, known as “America’s Blackstone” and author of the first commentary on the Constitution in 1803, described the Second Amendment right of the people to keep and bear arms as “the true palladium of liberty.” In a recent symposium at the William and Mary College of Law, Prof. Saul Cornell presented Tucker as an adherent of the view that the Amendment guarantees a collective or civic right to bear arms in the militia, not an individual right to have arms for self defense or as a dissuasion to tyranny. In response, my article scrutinizes Tucker’s work in detail …

Off To Elba: The Legitimacy Of Sex Offender Residence And Employment Restrictions, Joseph L. Lester

ExpressO

Overborne by a mob mentality for justice, officials at every level of government are enacting laws that effectively exile convicted sex offenders from their midst with little contemplation as to the appropriateness or constitutionality of their actions. These laws fundamentally alter the liberties and freedom of convicted sex offenders to satisfy the ignorant fear of the masses. As a result, residence and employment restrictions which in theory are to protect society, in practice only exacerbate the perceived recidivism problem. When such laws are passed and the political process is broken, it is necessary for the judicial branch to step forward …

From Origin To Delta: Changing Landscape Of Modern Constitutionalism, Jiunn-Rong Yeh, Wen-Chen Chang

ExpressO

This article deals with the question of whether and to what extent the two forces of democratization and globalization have altered our understandings of constitutionalism. We attempt to theorize a changing landscape of constitutionalism that includes transitional and transnational perspectives and examine respectively their features, functions and characteristics. First, we analyze respective developments of transitional and transnational constitutionalism by identifying their features, perspectives, functions, and characteristics. Then we examine to what extent and in what ways the developments in transitional and transnational constitutionalism pose challenges to our traditional understanding of modern constitutional laws. Finally, we shall picture a new constitutional …

Uncivil Religion: "Judeo-Christianity" And The Ten Commandments, Frederick Mark Gedicks, Roger Hendrix

ExpressO

In the recent Decalogue Cases, Justice Scalia argued that when it comes to “public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our Nation's historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits th[e] disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.” Justice Scalia's argument represents the latest attempt to insulate American civil religion from Establishment Clause attack. A “civil religion” is a set of nondenominational values, symbols, rituals, and assumptions which create both reverence of national history and formation of a communal national bond. The most recent incarnation of American civil …

Federalism, Positive Law, And The Emergence Of The American Administrative State: Prohibition In The Taft Court Era, Robert Post

William & Mary Law Review

This Article offers a detailed analysis of major Taft Court decisions involving prohibition, including Olmstead v. United States, Carroll v. United States, United States v. Lanza, Lambert v. Yellowley, and Tumey v. Ohio. Prohibition, and the Eighteenth Amendment by which it was constitutionally entrenched, was the result of a social movement that fused progressive beliefs in efficiency with conservative beliefs in individual responsibility and self-control.

During the 1920s the Supreme Court was a strictly "bone-dry"institution that regularly sustained the administrative and law enforcement techniques deployed by the federal government in its losing effort to prevent the manufacture and sale of …

The Nsa Domestic Surveillance Program: An Analysis Of Congressional Oversight During An Era Of One-Party Rule, Tara M. Sugiyama, Marisa Perry

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

On December 16, 2005, the New York Times sounded a fire alarm when it revealed that, in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks, President George W Bush had issued a secret executive order permitting the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct warrantless surveillance on individuals to unearth nascent terrorist activity. Congress responded to the disclosure of the NSA domestic surveillance program largely by shirking its oversight duties. This Note argues that when a single party controls both the executive and the legislative branches, the fire-alarm model fails to provide sufficient congressional oversight. Short of future elections altering the balance …

Democracy Means That The People Make The Law, Gerald Torres

New England Journal of Public Policy

Gerald Torres delivered the Robert C. Wood lecture at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston in 2006. This is his talk.

Civil Due Process, Criminal Due Process, Niki Kuckes

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Verifiable Electronic Voting System: An Open Source Solution, Halina Kaminski, Mark Perry

Computer Science Publications

Elections, referenda and polls are vital processes for the operation of a modern democracy. They form the mechanism for transferring power from citizens to their representatives. Although some commentators claim that the pencil-and-paper systems used in countries such as Canada and UK are still the best method of avoiding voterigging, recent election problems, and the need for faster, better, cheaper vote counting, have stimulated great interest in managing the election process through the use of electronic voting systems. While computer scientists, for the most part, have been warning of the possible perils of such action, vendors have forged ahead with …