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Let Them Eat Cake Or Let Him Not Bake? Summary And Analysis Of Masterpiece Cakeshop V. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Michael Beato

Florida Law Review

Unlike most cases brought before the United States Supreme Court, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission captured the nation’s attention. In this case, free speech rights were pitted against an anti-discrimination law, and religious rights were pitted against the dignity of same-sex marriage. While these constitutional doctrines might seem nuanced and obscure to most, the central issue of the case is easy to grasp: Can a baker, on free speech and free exercise grounds, refuse to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple? The Court, in a 7–2 decision, ruled solely on the free exercise claim, which, at …

Oh What A Truism The Tenth Amendment Is: State Sovereignty, Sovereign Immunity, And Individual Liberties, Sharon E. Rush

Florida Law Review

The United States Supreme Court takes the Tenth Amendment and state sovereignty seriously. It also takes the Eleventh Amendment and state sovereign immunity seriously. Moreover, the contemporary Court’s interpretations of Congress’s Article I powers are based on its concomitant interpretations of the Tenth and Eleventh Amendments. The Court has infused these interpretations with the idea that an inherent part of a state’s sovereignty is not just its prerogative not to have its treasuries invaded, but also includes its right not to have its dignity assaulted. Protecting the dignity of states and other critical principles that inform the Court’s Article I, …

Animus And Its Discontents, William D. Araiza

Florida Law Review

The concept of “animus” has taken center stage in high-stakes constitutional rights adjudication. Both in major equal protection cases and, more recently, in litigation over President Trump’s immigration bans and religion-based denials of commercial services to lesbians and gays, animus has emerged as a favored doctrinal tool of courts committed to protecting individual rights against majoritarian oppression. Despite—or perhaps because of—its prominence, the animus concept has remained controversial. Scholars have remarked on the difficulty of uncovering animus, its tendency to inflame the culture wars, and its potential to distract attention from other doctrinal paths that might be viewed as more …

A Statutory National Security President, Amy L. Stein

Florida Law Review

Not all presidential power to address national security threats stems from the Constitution. Some presidential national security powers stem from statute, creating complicated questions about the limits of these powers delegated to the President by Congress. Scholars who have explored ways to achieve the proper balance between responsiveness and accountability have generally focused on the proper degree of deference that courts should provide to the President interpreting statutory provisions, with little confidence in the utility and efficacy of statutory constraints.

This Article counters this narrative by arguing that a key to achieving this balance may lie in such constraints. Instead …

Can The State Proclaim Life After Death? Hellerstedt And Regulating The Disposition Of Fetal Remains, Thomas J. Molony

Florida Law Review

The United States Supreme Court dealt a significant blow to abortion opponents in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, but the 2016 ruling did not dampen their resolve. Just days after Texas lost the Hellerstedt battle, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) returned to the fight and proposed regulations requiring health care facilities to inter or cremate the remains of aborted and miscarried fetuses. Undeterred by a preliminary injunction entered against those regulations once they became final, the Texas legislature enacted a law with similar effect in June 2017.

The Texas law, however, proved to be good ground for …

Unusual Deference, William W. Berry Iii

Florida Law Review

Three Eighth Amendment decisions—Harmelin v. Michigan, Pulley v. Harris, and McCleskey v. Kemp—have had enduring, and ultimately, cruel and unusual consequences on the administration of criminal justice in the United States. What links these cases is the same fundamental analytical misstep—the decision to ignore core constitutional principles and instead defer to state punishment practices. The confusion arises from the text of the Eighth Amendment where the Supreme Court has read the “cruel and unusual” punishment proscription to rest in part on majoritarian practices. This is a classical analytical mistake—while the Amendment might prohibit rare punishments, it does not make the …

Sweet Child O’ Mine: Adult Adoption & Same-Sex Marriage In The Post-Obergefell Era, Robert Keefe

Florida Law Review

Gay and lesbian partners used adult adoption to create family relationships and to ensure inheritance and property rights in the decades before the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Same-sex partners who chose adult adoption as an alternative to marriage before the Obergefell decision must now dissolve the adoption in order to exercise their constitutional right to marry due to state incest laws prohibiting marriages between parents and their adopted children. It is difficult, however, to dissolve an adoption, and anecdotal evidence indicates that some judges have refused to dissolve adoptions between same sex partners. …

By Any Other Name: Rational Basis Inquiry And The Federal Government’S Fiduciary Duty Of Care, Gary Lawson, Guy I. Seidman

Florida Law Review

Under modern law, federal legislation is subject to “rational basis review” under the doctrinal rubric of “substantive due process.” That construction of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process of Law Clause is notoriously difficult to justify as a matter of original constitutional meaning. Something functionally very similar to substantive due process, however, is easily justifiable as a matter of original constitutional meaning once one understands that the Constitution, for interpretative purposes, is best seen as a kind of fiduciary instrument. Fiduciary instruments operate against a background of legal norms that notably include a duty of care on the part of agents. …

The Possibility Of Illiberal Constitutionalism?, Mark Tushnet

Florida Law Review

This Essay examines the possibility of an illiberal constitutionalism in which some citizens have “second-class” status – protected against arbitrary government action but with restricted rights. Drawing on scholarship dealing with “dual states” and federalism, the Essay argues that illiberal constitutionalism is possible conceptually but may be quite difficult to sustain over time in the face of the openness of even illiberal polities to demographic and similar changes.

Privacy, Mass Intrusion And The Modern Data Breach, Jon L. Mills, Kelsey Harclerode

Florida Law Review

Massive data breaches have practically become a daily occurrence. These breaches reveal intrusive private information about individuals, as well as priceless corporate secrets. Ashley Madison’s breach ruined lives and resulted in suicides. The HSBC breach, accomplished by one of their own, revealed valuable commercial information about the bank and personal information about HSBC customers. The employee responsible for the breach has since been convicted of aggravated personal espionage, while third-party news outlets have been free to republish the hacked information.

Some information disclosed in data breaches can serve a public purpose. The Snowden disclosures, for example, revealed sensitive government information …

Contextualizing The Free Exercise Of Religion, Adam Lamparello

Florida Law Review

The level of protection afforded to an individual’s First Amendment right to freely exercise religion should depend upon the context within which it is exercised. Put differently, an individual’s right to religious liberty should be balanced against other individuals’ right to equal protection of the law, and the broader societal interest in protecting individuals from invidious discrimination. This Article proposes a multifactor test that fully protects the right to freely exercise one’s religion while simultaneously safeguarding equal protection and antidiscrimination guarantees. Specifically, the level of protection afforded to a free exercise claim should depend, among other things, on whether it …

Undignified: The Supreme Court, Racial Justice, And Dignity Claims, Darren Lenard Hutchinson

Florida Law Review

The Supreme Court has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause as a formal equality mandate. In response, legal scholars have advocated alternative conceptions of equality, such as antisubordination theory, that interpret equal protection in more substantive terms. Antisubordination theory would consider the social context in which race-based policies emerge and recognize material distinctions between policies intended to oppress racial minorities and those designed to ameliorate past and current racism. Antisubordination theory would also closely scrutinize facially neutral state action that systemically disadvantages vulnerable social groups. The Court has largely ignored these reform proposals. Modern Supreme Court rulings, however, have invoked the …

Motivating Constitutional Compliance, Erica Hashimoto

Florida Law Review

Some constitutional rights of criminal defendants lend themselves to systematic violations at the trial level. In particular, state officials may gravitate toward such violations when (1) the nature of the relevant right renders violations difficult to detect at the trial level, and (2) constitutional compliance imposes especially high costs. For rights with those two characteristics, a trial-level remedy may not adequately protect the right, and a robust appellate remedy may be necessary to provide an adequate incentive for constitutional compliance. But because the Court has not considered the importance of deterring constitutional violations outside of the exclusionary rule context, it …

Because, The Internet: The Limits Of Online Campaign Finance Disclosure, Vitaliy Kats

Florida Law Review

During the 2011–2012 election cycle, Shaun McCutcheon contributed $33,088 to sixteen different candidates for federal office. McCutcheon’s donations complied with the base limits the Federal Election Commission (FEC) set for contributions to individual candidates.McCutcheon wanted to contribute more but was barred by the FEC’s aggregate limit on contributions.In June of 2012, McCutcheon and the Republication National Committee (RNC) filed a complaint before a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. McCutcheon and the RNC claimed that the aggregate limits on contributions to candidates and political committees were unconstitutional under the First Amendment.The three-judge panel granted …

Docs V. Glocks: Speech, Guns, Discrimination, And Privacy – Is Anyone Winning?, Marla Spector Bowman

Florida Law Review

Americans discuss some of the most intimate details of their lives within the small confines of their neighborhood doctor's office. Many Americans, however, may be taken aback if their physician asked them whether they owned a firearm during a routine physical examination. Although most Americans might not consider firearms education to be their physician's primary purpose, a significant number of doctors in Florida, and throughout the medical community, consider promoting firearms safety a part of practicing preventative medicine.

When a group of Florida legislators saw this behavior as a threat to the Second Amendment, gun owner access to healthcare, and …

Single-Family Zoning, Intimate Association, And The Right To Choose Household Companions, Rigel C. Oliveri

Florida Law Review

Many local governments use single-family zoning ordinances to restrict occupancy in residential areas to households whose members are all related to one another by blood, marriage, or adoption. The Supreme Court upheld such ordinances in the 1974 case of Belle Terre v. Boraas, and they have been used to prevent all sorts of groups from living together-from unmarried couples who are raising children to college students. This Article contends that Belle Terre is wholly incompatible with the Court's modern jurisprudence on privacy and the right of intimate association. The case appears to have survived this long because of a reflexive …

Big Data Blacklisting, Margaret Hu

Florida Law Review

“Big data blacklisting” is the process of categorizing individuals as administratively “guilty until proven innocent” by virtue of suspicious digital data and database screening results. Database screening and digital watchlisting systems are increasingly used to determine who can work, vote, fly, etc. In a big data world, through the deployment of these big data tools, both substantive and procedural due process protections may be threatened in new and nearly invisible ways. Substantive due process rights safeguard fundamental liberty interests. Procedural due process rights prevent arbitrary deprivations by the government of constitutionally protected interests. This Article frames the increasing digital mediation …

Because, The Internet: The Limits Of Online Campaign Finance Disclosure, Vitaliy Kats

Florida Law Review

During the 2011–2012 election cycle, Shaun McCutcheon contributed $33,088 to sixteen different candidates for federal office. McCutcheon’s donations complied with the base limits the Federal Election Commission (FEC) set for contributions to individual candidates.McCutcheon wanted to contribute more but was barred by the FEC’s aggregate limit on contributions.In June of 2012, McCutcheon and the Republication National Committee (RNC) filed a complaint before a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. McCutcheon and the RNC claimed that the aggregate limits on contributions to candidates and political committees were unconstitutional under the First Amendment.The three-judge panel granted …

Docs V. Glocks: Speech, Guns, Discrimination, And Privacy – Is Anyone Winning?, Marla Spector Bowman

Florida Law Review

Americans discuss some of the most intimate details of their lives within the small confines of their neighborhood doctor's office. Many Americans, however, may be taken aback if their physician asked them whether they owned a firearm during a routine physical examination. Although most Americans might not consider firearms education to be their physician's primary purpose, a significant number of doctors in Florida, and throughout the medical community, consider promoting firearms safety a part of practicing preventative medicine.

When a group of Florida legislators saw this behavior as a threat to the Second Amendment, gun owner access to healthcare, and …

Takings And Extortion, Daniel P. Selmi

Florida Law Review

The Supreme Court has repeatedly employed an extortion narrative in deciding when governmental actions imposing exactions on development projects constitute takings under the Fifth Amendment. In that narrative, local officials act in ever-present bad faith by misusing their regulatory powers to coerce concessions by developers seeking land use approvals. While the extortion narrative has received little attention, it operates as an explanatory device for understanding the Court’s takings jurisprudence in the exactions field. The narrative has justified the expansion of exactions takings law beyond real property, substantially altered the deference normally accorded by the Court to local government actions, and …

The Second Amendment Right To Be Negligent, Andrew Jay Mcclurg

Florida Law Review

Only two constitutional rights—the First and Second Amendments—have a realistic capacity, through judicial interpretation or legislative action or inaction, to confer a “right to be negligent” on private citizens; that is, a right to engage in objectively unreasonable risk-creating conduct without legal consequences. In the First Amendment context, for example, the Supreme Court, in New York Times v. Sullivan and its progeny, expressly embraced a right to be negligent in defaming public officials and public figures to protect speech. This Article asserts that through both common and statutory law, the United States has enshrined a de facto Second Amendment right …

Content-Neutral And Content-Based Regulations Of Speech: A Distinction That Is No Longer Worth The Fuss, R. George Wright

Florida Law Review

The binary distinction between content-neutral and content-based speech regulations is of central importance in First Amendment doctrine. This distinction has been the subject of U.S. Supreme Court attention on several occasions. As the case law has evolved, however, this apparently crucial distinction has become less clear, coherent, and practical, such that further attempts to establish any clear hierarchical distinction are no longer worth the effort.

This surprising state of affairs has arisen from several judicial developments, operating jointly as well as separately. These developments,discussed below,have eroded a basic assumption underlying much of free speech jurisprudence: that content-based restrictions are uniformly …

Marriage Equality, Workplace Inequality: The Next Gay Rights Battle, Keith Cunningham-Paremeter

Florida Law Review

Same-sex marriage is not the only civil rights issue impacting the gay community. Although the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges represented a momentous victory on same-sex marriage, workplace protections affect far more people and remain a high priority for many lesbians and gay men. Today, even though the Supreme Court has invalidated state marriage restrictions across the country, federal law still makes it perfectly permissible to fire a gay man for telling a coworker about his sexuality or to discharge a woman for displaying her wife’s picture at work.

This Article critically evaluates the relationship between same-sex marriage …

How The Federal Cause Of Action Relates To Rights, Remedies, And Jurisdiction, John F. Preis

Florida Law Review

Time and again, the U.S. Supreme Court has declared that the federal cause of action is “analytically distinct” from rights, remedies, and jurisdiction. Yet, just pages away in the U.S. Reports are other cases in which rights, remedies, and jurisdiction all hinge on the existence of a cause of action. What, then, is the proper relationship between these concepts?

The goal of this Article is to articulate that relationship. This Article traces the history of the cause of action from eighteenth-century England to its modern usage in the federal courts. This history demonstrates that the federal cause of action is …

Consent Searches And Fourth Amendment Reasonableness, Alafair S. Burke

Florida Law Review

This Article builds on a growing body of scholarship discussing the role of reasonableness in consent-search doctrine. Although the language of “voluntary consent” implies a subjective inquiry into the state of mind of the person granting consent, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly injected an objective standard of reasonableness into its analysis of a citizen’s consent. Several scholars have characterized the Court’s consent jurisprudence as focusing not on true voluntariness but on the reasonableness of police conduct, which they argue is appropriate because the touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is “reasonableness.” While the renewed scholarly focus on the role of …

How The Federal Cause Of Action Relates To Rights, Remedies, And Jurisdiction, John F. Preis

Florida Law Review

Time and again, the U.S. Supreme Court has declared that the federal cause of action is “analytically distinct” from rights, remedies, and jurisdiction. Yet, just pages away in the U.S. Reports are other cases in which rights, remedies, and jurisdiction all hinge on the existence of a cause of action. What, then, is the proper relationship between these concepts?

The goal of this Article is to articulate that relationship. This Article traces the history of the cause of action from eighteenth-century England to its modern usage in the federal courts. This history demonstrates that the federal cause of action is …

Consent Searches And Fourth Amendment Reasonableness, Alafair S. Burke

Florida Law Review

This Article builds on a growing body of scholarship discussing the role of reasonableness in consent-search doctrine. Although the language of “voluntary consent” implies a subjective inquiry into the state of mind of the person granting consent, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly injected an objective standard of reasonableness into its analysis of a citizen’s consent. Several scholars have characterized the Court’s consent jurisprudence as focusing not on true voluntariness but on the reasonableness of police conduct, which they argue is appropriate because the touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is “reasonableness.” While the renewed scholarly focus on the role of …

How The Federal Cause Of Action Relates To Rights, Remedies, And Jurisdiction, John F. Preis

Florida Law Review

Time and again, the U.S. Supreme Court has declared that the federal cause of action is “analytically distinct” from rights, remedies, and jurisdiction. Yet, just pages away in the U.S. Reports are other cases in which rights, remedies, and jurisdiction all hinge on the existence of a cause of action. What, then, is the proper relationship between these concepts?

The goal of this Article is to articulate that relationship. This Article traces the history of the cause of action from eighteenth-century England to its modern usage in the federal courts. This history demonstrates that the federal cause of action is …

Consent Searches And Fourth Amendment Reasonableness, Alafair S. Burke

Florida Law Review

This Article builds on a growing body of scholarship discussing the role of reasonableness in consent-search doctrine. Although the language of “voluntary consent” implies a subjective inquiry into the state of mind of the person granting consent, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly injected an objective standard of reasonableness into its analysis of a citizen’s consent. Several scholars have characterized the Court’s consent jurisprudence as focusing not on true voluntariness but on the reasonableness of police conduct, which they argue is appropriate because the touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is “reasonableness.” While the renewed scholarly focus on the role of …

You Have The Right To Remain Silent, But Anything You Don’T Say May Be Used Against You: The Admissibility Of Silence As Evidence After Salinas V. Texas, Andrew M. Hapner

Florida Law Review

In Salinas v. Texas, the United States Supreme Court held that a suspect’s refusal to answer an officer’s questions during a noncustodial, pre-Miranda, criminal interrogation is admissible at trial as substantive evidence of guilt. In a plurality decision, Justice Samuel Alito emphasized that before a suspect can rely on the privilege against self-incrimination, the suspect must invoke the privilege. Consequently, because silence does not invoke the privilege, and because the petitioner failed to expressly invoke the privilege in words, the prosecutor’s use of his pre-Miranda silence during a noncustodial interrogation did not violate the Fifth Amendment. …