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Articles 61 - 90 of 360
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Potential Life In The Doctrine, Leah Litman
Potential Life In The Doctrine, Leah Litman
Articles
In their article, Abortion: A Woman’s Private Choice, Erwin Chemerinsky and Michele Goodwin seek to shore up the doctrinal basis for a woman’s constitutional right to end her pregnancy. While Chemerinsky and Goodwin are partly concerned about the status of abortion rights in the United States because of President Donald Trump’s promise prior to taking office to appoint Justices to the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v. Wade, they also maintain that some of the threat to abortion rights arises from an uncomfortable tension in the doctrine that recognizes states’ interest in potential life. I agree with Chemerinsky and …
The Gibbons Fallacy, Richard A. Primus
The Gibbons Fallacy, Richard A. Primus
Articles
In Gibbons v. Ogden, Chief Justice John Marshall famously wrote that "the enumeration presupposes something not enumerated." Modern courts use that phrase to mean that the Constitutions enumeration of congressional powers indicates that those powers are, as a whole, less than a grant of general legislative authority. But Marshall wasn't saying that. He wasn't talking about the Constitution's overall enumeration of congressional powers at all. He was writing about a different enumeration - the enumeration of three classes of commerce within the Commerce Clause. And Marshall's analysis of the Commerce Clause in Gibbons does not imply that the enumerated …
Random If Not "Rare"? The Eighth Amendment Weaknesses Of Post-Miller Legislation, Kimberly Thomas
Random If Not "Rare"? The Eighth Amendment Weaknesses Of Post-Miller Legislation, Kimberly Thomas
Articles
First, this Article surveys the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to analogize life without parole for juveniles to the death penalty for adults, and discusses the Eighth Amendment law regarding the parameters around death penalty statutory schemes. Second, this Article examines the state legislative response to Miller, and scrutinizes it with the Court's Eighth Amendment death penalty law-and the states' responses to this case law-in mind. This Article highlights the failure of juvenile homicide sentencing provisions to: 1) narrow offenses that are eligible for life without parole sentences; 2) further limit, once a guilty finding is made, the categories of …
What We Think, What We Know And What We Think We Know About False Convictions, Samuel Gross
What We Think, What We Know And What We Think We Know About False Convictions, Samuel Gross
Articles
False convictions are notoriously difficult to study because they can neither be observed when they occur nor identified after the fact by any plausible research strategy. Our best shot is to collect data on those that come to light in legal proceedings that result in the exoneration of the convicted defendants. In May 2012, the National Registry of Exonerations released its first report, covering 873 exonerations from January 1989 through February 2012. By October 15, 2016, we had added 1,027 cases: 599 exonerations since March 1, 2012, and 428 that had already happened when we issued our initial report but …
Doe V. University Of Michigan: Free Speech On Campus 25 Years Later, Leonard M. Niehoff
Doe V. University Of Michigan: Free Speech On Campus 25 Years Later, Leonard M. Niehoff
Articles
I would like to use as the launching pad for my remarks today the 1989 federal district court decision in Doe v. University of Michigan. Doe is the seminal case on campus speech codes and it just recently passed its twenty-fifth anniversary. I thought this symposium would be a good occasion to look back, see where we were, assess where we are, and ask whether we have made any progress. Spoiler alert: the news is not good.
Social Facts, Legal Fictions, And The Attribution Of Slave Status: The Puzzle Of Prescription, Rebecca J. Scott
Social Facts, Legal Fictions, And The Attribution Of Slave Status: The Puzzle Of Prescription, Rebecca J. Scott
Articles
In case after case, prosecutors, judges and juries therefore still struggle to come up with a definition of slavery, looking for some set of criteria or indicia that will enable them to discern whether the phenomenon they are observing constitutes enslavement. In this definitional effort, contemporary jurists may imagine that in the past, surely the question was simpler: someone either was or was not a slave. However, the existence of a set of laws declaring that persons could be owned as property did not, even in the nineteenth century, answer by itself the question of whether a given person was …
An Empirical Study Of Implicit Takings., James E. Krier, Stewart E. Sterk
An Empirical Study Of Implicit Takings., James E. Krier, Stewart E. Sterk
Articles
Takings scholarship has long focused on the niceties of Supreme Court doctrine, while ignoring the operation of takings law "on the ground" in the state and lower federal courts, which together decide the vast bulk of all takings cases. This study, based primarily on an empirical analysis of more than 2000 reported decisions ovcr the period 1979 through 2012, attempts to fill that void. This study establishes that the Supreme Court's categorical rules govern almost no state takings cases, and that takings claims based on government regulation almost invariably fail. By contrast, when takings claims arise out of government action …
How The Ada Regulates And Restricts Solitary Confinement For People With Mental Disabilities, Margo Schlanger
How The Ada Regulates And Restricts Solitary Confinement For People With Mental Disabilities, Margo Schlanger
Other Publications
In a landmark decision two decades ago, United States District Judge Thelton Henderson emphasized the toxic effects of solitary confinement for inmates with mental illness. In Madrid v. Gomez, a case about California’s Pelican Bay prison, Judge Henderson wrote that isolated conditions in the Special Housing Unit, or SHU, while not amounting to cruel and unusual punishment for all prisoners, were unconstitutional for those “at a particularly high risk for suffering very serious or severe injury to their mental health . . . .” Vulnerable prisoners included those with pre-existing mental illness, intellectual disabilities, and brain damage. Henderson concluded that …
Contemporary Practice Of The United States Relating To International Law, Kristina Daugirdas, Julian Davis Mortenson
Contemporary Practice Of The United States Relating To International Law, Kristina Daugirdas, Julian Davis Mortenson
Articles
In this section: • Iran and United States Continue to Implement Nuclear Deal, Although Disputes Persist • United States Continues to Challenge Chinese Claims in South China Sea; Law of the Sea Tribunal Issues Award Against China in Philippines-China Arbitration • U.S. Navy Report Concludes That Iran’s 2015 Capture of U.S. Sailors Violated International Law • United States Justifies Its Use of Force in Libya Under International and National Law • U.S. Drone Strike Kills Taliban Leader in Pakistan • U.S. Government Releases Casualty Report, Executive Order, and Presidential Policy Guidance Related to Its Counterterrorism Strike Practices • The Department …
Testing Racial Profiling: Empirical Assessment Of Disparate Treatment By Police, Sonja B. Starr
Testing Racial Profiling: Empirical Assessment Of Disparate Treatment By Police, Sonja B. Starr
Articles
In this Article, I explore why measuring disparate-treatment discrimination by police is so difficult, and consider the ways that researchers' existing tools can make headway on these challenges and the ways they fall short. Lab experiments have provided useful information about implicit racial bias, but they cannot directly tell us how these biases actually affect real-world behavior. Meanwhile, for observational researchers, there are various hurdles, but the hardest one to overcome is generally the absence of data on the citizen conduct that at least partially shapes policing decisions. Most crime, and certainly most noncriminal "suspicious" or probable-cause-generating behavior, goes unreported …
Commentary On The Emerging Constitutional Indigenous Peoples Land Rights In Tanzania, Daniel Halberstam
Commentary On The Emerging Constitutional Indigenous Peoples Land Rights In Tanzania, Daniel Halberstam
Articles
The pastoralists and hunter-gatherer indigenous peoples in Tanzania continue lobbying their recognition as such and protection of their land rights. This article discusses the extent to which the indigenous peoples are legally recognized and the state of their security of land tenure. With the hindsight of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007 and the 2003 Report of the African Commission Working Group of Experts on Indigenous Population, this article probes the emerging indigenous land rights within the broader understating of the minority rights in the Draft Constitution of Tanzania 2014 as well as the Draft Policy …
Debunking Humphrey's Executor, Daniel A. Crane
Debunking Humphrey's Executor, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
The Supreme Court’s 1935 Humphrey’s Executor decision paved the way for the modern administrative state by holding that Congress could constitutionally limit the President’s powers to remove heads of regulatory agencies. The Court articulated a quartet of features of the Federal Trade Commission’s (“FTC”) statutory design that ostensibly justified the Commission’s constitutional independence. It was to be nonpartisan and apolitical, uniquely expert, and performing quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial, rather than executive, functions. In recent years, the staying power of Humphrey’s Executor has been called into question as a matter of constitutional design. This Essay reconsiders Humphrey’s Executor from a different angle. …
Building Labor's Constitution, Kate Andrias
Building Labor's Constitution, Kate Andrias
Articles
In the last few years, scholars have sought to revitalize a range of constitutional arguments against mounting economic inequality and in favor of labor rights. They urge contemporary worker movements to lay claim to the Constitution. But worker movements, for the most part, have not done so. This Essay takes seriously that choice. It examines reasons for the absence of constitutional argumentation by contemporary worker movements, particularly the role of courts and legal elites in our constitutional system, and it contends that labor’s ongoing statutory and regulatory reform efforts are essential prerequisites to the development of progressive constitutional labor rights. …
Separations Of Wealth: Inequality And The Erosion Of Checks And Balances, Kate Andrias
Separations Of Wealth: Inequality And The Erosion Of Checks And Balances, Kate Andrias
Articles
American government is dysfunctional: Gridlock, filibusters, and expanding presidential power, everyone seems to agree, threaten our basic system of constitutional governance. Who, or what, is to blame? In the standard account, the fault lies with the increasing polarization of our political parties. That standard story, however, ignores an important culprit: Concentrated wealth and its organization to achieve political ends. The only way to understand our current constitutional predicament—and to rectify it—is to pay more attention to the role that organized wealth plays in our system of checks and balances. This Article shows that the increasing concentration of wealth and political …
Is Theocracy Our Politics? Thoughts On William Baude's 'Is Originalism Our Law?', Richard A. Primus
Is Theocracy Our Politics? Thoughts On William Baude's 'Is Originalism Our Law?', Richard A. Primus
Articles
In Is Originalism Our Law?, William Baude has made a good kind of argument in favor of originalism. Rather than contending that originalism is the only coherent theory for interpreting a constitution, he makes the more modest claim that it happens to be the way that American judges interpret our Constitution. If he is right—if originalism is our law—then judges deciding constitutional cases ought to be originalists. But what exactly would the content of that obligation be? Calling some interpretive method “our law” might suggest that judges have an obligation to decide cases by reference to that method. But the …
Anti-Incarcerative Remedies For Illegal Conditions Of Confinement, Margo Schlanger
Anti-Incarcerative Remedies For Illegal Conditions Of Confinement, Margo Schlanger
Articles
Opposition to mass incarceration has entered the mainstream. But except in a few states, mass decarceration has not, so far, followed: By the end of 2014 (the last data available), nationwide prison population had shrunk only 3% off its (2009) peak. Jail population, similarly, was down just 5% from its (2008) peak. All told, our current incarceration rate - 7 per 1,000 population - is the same as in 2002, and four times the level in 1970, when American incarceration rates began their rise. Our bloated prisoner population includes many groups of prisoners who are especially likely to face grievous …
Resentencing In The Shadow Of Johnson V. United States, Leah Litman
Resentencing In The Shadow Of Johnson V. United States, Leah Litman
Articles
On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court handed down a decision many years in the making—Johnson v. United States. Johnson held that the ‘‘residual clause’’ of the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA) is unconstitutionally vague. Although Johnson may have been overshadowed in the final days of a monumental Supreme Court term, the decision is a significant one that will have important consequences for the criminal justice system. ACCA’s residual clause imposed a severe 15-year mandatory minimum term of imprisonment, and many federal prisoners qualify for ACCA’s mandatory minimum. Johnson did away with ACCA’s residual clause such that defendants will no …
A Look Back At The "Gatehouses And Mansions" Of American Criminal Procedure, Yale Kamisar
A Look Back At The "Gatehouses And Mansions" Of American Criminal Procedure, Yale Kamisar
Articles
I am indebted to Professor William Pizzi for remembering—and praising—the “Gatehouses and Mansions” essay I wrote fifty years ago. A great many articles and books have been written about Miranda. So it is nice to be remembered for an article published a year before that famous case was ever decided.
Taking Care Of Federal Law, Leah Litman
Taking Care Of Federal Law, Leah Litman
Articles
Article II of the Constitution vests the “executive power” in the President and directs the President to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” But do these provisions mean that only the President may execute federal law? Two lines of Supreme Court precedent suggest conflicting answers to that question. In several prominent separation-of-powers cases, the Court has suggested that only the President may execute federal law: “The Constitution requires that a President chosen by the entire Nation oversee the execution of the laws.” Therefore, the Court has reasoned, Congress may not create private rights of action that allow nonexecutive …
Residual Impact: Resentencing Implications Of Johnson's Potential Ruling On Acca's Constitutionality, Leah Litman
Residual Impact: Resentencing Implications Of Johnson's Potential Ruling On Acca's Constitutionality, Leah Litman
Articles
In January 2015, the Supreme Court directed the parties to brief and argue an additional question in Johnson v. United States: “Whether the residual clause in the Armed Career Criminal Act of 1984, 18 U.S.C. § 924(e)(2)(B)(ii), is unconstitutionally vague.” The order represents an unusual move because the defendant had not raised the vagueness issue and the Court issued the order after it had already heard argument on the question raised in the petition for certiorari. Commentators therefore view the order as a signal that the Court will likely invalidate the residual clause. This decision will have been several years …
Reflections On Comity In The Law Of American Federalism, Gil Seinfeld
Reflections On Comity In The Law Of American Federalism, Gil Seinfeld
Articles
Comity is a nebulous concept familiar to us from the law of international relations. Roughly speaking, it describes a set of reciprocal norms among nations that call for one state to recognize, and sometimes defer to, the laws, judgments, or interests of another. Comity also features prominently in the law of American federalism, but in that context, it operates within limits that have received almost no attention from scholarly commentators. Specifically, although courts routinely describe duties that run from one state to another, or from the federal government to the states, as exercises in comity, they almost never rely on …
Intelligence Legalism And The National Security Agency’S Civil Liberties Gap, Margo Schlanger
Intelligence Legalism And The National Security Agency’S Civil Liberties Gap, Margo Schlanger
Articles
Since June 2013, we have seen unprecedented security breaches and disclosures relating to American electronic surveillance. The nearly daily drip, and occasional gush, of once-secret policy and operational information makes it possible to analyze and understand National Security Agency activities, including the organizations and processes inside and outside the NSA that are supposed to safeguard American’s civil liberties as the agency goes about its intelligence gathering business. Some have suggested that what we have learned is that the NSA is running wild, lawlessly flouting legal constraints on its behavior. This assessment is unfair. In fact, the picture that emerges from …
Enforcing The Fifteenth Amendment, Ellen D. Katz
Enforcing The Fifteenth Amendment, Ellen D. Katz
Book Chapters
This chapter examines efforts to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment in the period from United States v. Reese through Shelby County v. Holder. Reese and Shelby County expose the most rigorous stance the Court has employed to review congressional efforts to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment, while the years in-between show Congress and the Court working more in tandem, at times displaying remarkable indifference to blatant violations of the Fifteenth Amendment, and elsewhere working cooperatively to help vindicate the Amendment’s promise. Defying simple explanation, this vacillation between cooperation and resistance captures the complex and deeply consequential way concerns about federal power, …
The Child Quasi-Witness, Richard D. Friedman, Stephen J. Ceci
The Child Quasi-Witness, Richard D. Friedman, Stephen J. Ceci
Articles
This Essay provides a solution to the conundrum of statements made by very young children and offered against an accused in a criminal prosecution. Currently prevailing doctrine allows one of three basic outcomes. First, in some cases the child testifies at trial. But this is not always feasible, and when it is, cross-examination is a poor method for determining the truth. Second, evidence of the child's statement may be excluded, which denies the adjudicative process of potentially valuable information. Third, the evidence may be admitted without the child testifying at trial, which leaves the accused with no practical ability to …
On Class-Not-Race, Samuel R. Bagenstos
On Class-Not-Race, Samuel R. Bagenstos
Book Chapters
Throughout the civil rights era, strong voices have argued that policy interventions should focus on class or socioeconomic status, not race. At times, this position-taking has seemed merely tactical, opportunistic, or in bad faith. Many who have opposed race-based civil rights interventions on this basis have not turned around to support robust efforts to reduce class-based or socioeconomic inequality. That sort of opportunism is interesting and important for understanding policy debates in civil rights, but it is not my focus here. I am more interested here in the people who clearly mean it. For example, President Lyndon Baines Johnson—who can …
The Limits Of Enumeration, Richard A. Primus
The Limits Of Enumeration, Richard A. Primus
Articles
According to a well-known principle of constitutional interpretation here identified as the “internal-limits canon,” the powers of Congress must always be construed as authorizing less legislation than a general police power would. This Article argues that the internallimits canon is unsound. Whether the powers of Congress would in practice authorize any legislation that a police power would authorize is a matter of contingency: it depends on the relationship between the powers and the social world at a given time. There is no reason why, at a given time, the powers cannot turn out to authorize any legislation that a police …
Substantive Habeas, Kimberly A. Thomas
Substantive Habeas, Kimberly A. Thomas
Articles
Substantive Habeas identifies the US. Supreme Court's recent shift in its habeas jurisprudence from procedure to the substance of habeas review and explores the implications of this change. For decades, the US. Supreme Court has attempted to control the flood of habeas corpus petitions by imposing procedural requirements on prisoners seeking to challenge constitutional error in their cases. These restrictive procedural rules have remained at the center of habeas decision making until recently. Over the past few years, instead of further constraining the procedural gateway for habeas cases, the Supreme Court has shifted its focus to the substance of habeas. …
Gideon V. Wainwright--From A 1963 Perspective, Jerold H. Israel
Gideon V. Wainwright--From A 1963 Perspective, Jerold H. Israel
Articles
Gideon v. Wainwright is more than a “landmark” Supreme Court ruling in the field of constitutional criminal procedure. As evidenced by the range of celebrators of Gideon’s Fiftieth Anniversary (extending far beyond the legal academy) and Gideon’s inclusion in the basic coverage of high school government courses, Gideon today is an icon of the American justice system. I have no quarrel with that iconic status, but I certainly did not see any such potential in Gideon when I analyzed the Court’s ruling shortly after it was announced in March of 1963. I had previously agreed to write an article for …
The Bond Court's Institutional Truce, Monica Hakimi
The Bond Court's Institutional Truce, Monica Hakimi
Articles
As many readers are aware, Bond v. United States is a quirky case. The federal government prosecuted under the implementing legislation for the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) a betrayed wife who used chemical agents to try to harm her husband’s lover. The wife argued that, as applied to her, the implementing legislation violated the Tenth Amendment. She thus raised difficult questions about the scope of the treaty power and of Congress’s authority to implement treaties through the Necessary and Proper Clause. The Bond Court avoided those questions with a clear statement rule: “we can insist on a clear indication that …
The Future Resists Control, Richard A. Primus
The Future Resists Control, Richard A. Primus
Reviews
Bruce Ackerman long ago persuaded me that Article V has not been the only route—or even the normal route—to legitimate constitutional change. Volume 3 admirably adds nuance to Ackerman’s account of what happens instead. But nuance can be a vice of a theory as well as a virtue, depending on whether the goal is to understand a phenomenon in its complexity or to provide an actionable program for the future. We The People aims to do both: it is, after all, a grand project, probably the most important in constitutional thought in the last thirty years. But in spite of …