Digital Commons Network^™

A Theory Of Substantive Standards Of Review: The Case Of Corporate Law, Tomer S. Stein

Scholarly Works

In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the Supreme Court limited deference to universities. In West Virginia v. EPA, the Court reduced its deference to administrative agencies. In Coster v. UIP Cos., Inc., the Delaware Supreme Court limited deference to boards of directors, proclaimed a new standard of review, and then retracted the new standard of review (maybe). Common to these constitutional, administrative, and corporate law cases is unpredictability, uncertainty, and inconsistency in the use and application of substantive standards of review. This doctrinal chaos is explicitly acknowledged by the very judges that formulate …

National Federation Of Independent Business V. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 (2012), Elizabeth Weeks, Mary Ann Chirba, Alice A. Noble

Scholarly Works

In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, decided in 2012, twenty-six states as well as private individuals and an organization of independent businesses challenged the constitutionality of two key components of the Affordable Care Act. The Court upheld the individual mandate but converted the Medicaid eligibility expansion from mandatory to optional for states. Elizabeth Weeks’ feminist rewrite breaks down the public law-private law distinction to get beyond the traditional view of health insurance as a commercial product providing individual financial protection against risk and instead to view it as effecting a risk pool premised on cross-subsidization of the health-care …

Reconceptualizing Hybrid Rights, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

In landmark decisions on religious liberty and same-sex marriage, and many other cases as well, the Supreme Court has placed its imprimatur on so called “hybrid rights.” These rights spring from the interaction of two or more constitutional clauses, none of which alone suffices to give rise to the operative protection. Controversy surrounds hybrid rights in part because there exists no judicial account of their justifiability. To be sure, some scholarly treatments suggest that these rights emanate from the “structures” or “penumbras” of the Constitution. But critics respond that hybrid rights lack legitimacy for that very reason because structural and …

Quiet-Revolution Rulings In Constitutional Law, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

The Supreme Court ordinarily supports its establishment of major constitutional principles with detailed justifications in its opinions. On occasion, however, the Court proceeds in a very different way, issuing landmark pronouncements without giving any supportive reasons at all. This Article documents the recurring character and deep importance of these “quietrevolution rulings” in constitutional law. It shows that—however surprising it might seem—rulings of this sort have played key roles in shaping incorporation; reverse incorporation; congressional power; federal courts; and freedom-ofspeech, freedom-of-religion, and equal-protection law. According to the synthesis offered here, these rulings fall into two categories. One set of cases involves …

Submarine Statutes, Christian Turner

Scholarly Works

I define as “submarine statutes” a category of statutes that affect the meaning of later-passed statutes. A submarine statute calls for courts to apply future statutes differently than they would have otherwise. An example is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which requires, in some circumstances, exemptions for religious exercise from otherwise compulsory statutory requirements. A new statute can only be understood if its interaction with RFRA is also understood. While scholars have debated the constitutionality of some statutes like these, mainly analyzing the legitimacy of their entrenching quality, I argue that submarine statutes carry an overlooked cost. Namely, they add …

The “Sovereigns Of Cyberspace” And State Action: The First Amendment’S Application (Or Lack Thereof) To Third-Party Platforms, Jonathan Peters

Scholarly Works

Many scholars have commented that the state action doctrine forecloses use of the First Amendment to constrain the policies and practices of online service providers. But few have comprehensively studied this issue, and the seminal article exploring “[c]yberspace and the [s]tate [a]ction [d]ebate” is fifteen years old, published before the U.S. Supreme Court reformulated the federal approach to state action. It is important to give the state action doctrine regular scholarly attention, not least because it is increasingly clear that “the private sector has a shared responsibility to help safeguard free expression.” It is critical to understand whether the First …

The Downstream Consequences Of Misdemeanor Pretrial Detention, Paul Heaton, Sandra G. Mayson, Megan Stevenson

Scholarly Works

In misdemeanor cases, pretrial detention poses a particular problem because it may induce innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to exit jail, potentially creating widespread error in case adjudication. While practitioners have long recognized this possibility, empirical evidence on the downstream impacts of pretrial detention on misdemeanor defendants and their cases remains limited. This Article uses detailed data on hundreds of thousands of misdemeanor cases resolved in Harris County, Texas—the thirdlargest county in the United States—to measure the effects of pretrial detention on case outcomes and future crime. We find that detained defendants are 25% more likely than similarly …

Adjudicating Religious Sincerity, Nathan Chapman

Scholarly Works

Recent disputes about the “contraception mandate” under the Affordable Care Act and about the provision of goods and services for same-sex weddings have drawn attention to the law of religious accommodations. So far, however, one of the requirements of a religious accommodation claim has escaped sustained scholarly attention: a claimant must be sincere. Historically, scholars have contested this requirement on the ground that adjudicating religious sincerity requires government officials to delve too deeply into religious questions, something the Establishment Clause forbids. Until recently, however, the doctrine was fairly clear: though the government may not evaluate the objective accuracy or plausibility …

Freedom Of Speech And The Criminal Law, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

Because the Free Speech Clause limits government power to enact penal statutes, it has a close relationship to American criminal law. This Article explores that relationship at a time when a fast-growing “decriminalization movement” has taken hold across the nation. At the heart of the Article is the idea that free speech law has developed in ways that have positioned the Supreme Court to use that law to impose significant new limits on the criminalization of speech. More particularly, this article claims that the Court has developed three distinct decision-making strategies for decriminalizing speech based on constitutional principles. The first …

Rethinking Religious Minorities' Political Power, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

This Article challenges the assumption that small religious groups enjoy little political power. According to the standard view, courts, because of their countermajoritarian qualities, are indispensable for protecting religious minority groups from oppression by the majority. But this assumption fails to account for the many and varied ways in which the majoritarian branches have chosen to protect and accommodate even unpopular religious minority groups, as well as the courts’ failures to do so.

The Article offers a public choice analysis to account for the surprising majoritarian reality of religious accommodationism. Further, it explores the important implications of this reality for …

First Amendment Neighbors, Sonja R. West

Scholarly Works

An abdication of the Press Clause reflects the most basic of analytical errors: It treats the text of the Press Clause as redundant and ignores the specialized functions that the Framers meant for the Press Clause to play. Failing to give the Press Clause constitutional recognition by declaring it too difficult to interpret or by dismissing it as "mere surplusage" is utterly at odds with our constitutional traditions. The Religion Clauses provide an example on how to give the text of the Press Clause true meaning.

In interpreting the Religion Clauses, the Supreme Court has taken a different attitude than …

Fueling Controversy, Randy Beck

Scholarly Works

In a recent Yale Law Journal article, Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel question the received wisdom that the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade generated a political backlash, inflaming conflict over abortion and damaging the political process. The evidence they highlight shows that political conflict over abortion predated the Roe opinion, spurred by the Catholic Church and by Republican Party strategists seeking to foster party realignment. This enriched picture of the political and social landscape at the time of the decision undermines any simplistic suggestion that Roe served as “the sole cause of backlash” or “single-handedly caused societal polarization …

The Future Of Footnote Four, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

The Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Carolene Products Co. generated the most famous footnote-and perhaps the most famous passage-in all of the American Judiciary's treatment of constitutional law. Among other things, Footnote Four suggested that "prejudice against discrete and insular minorities may be a special condition, which tends seriously to curtail the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities, and which may call for a correspondingly more searching judicial inquiry." The importance of this principle cannot be overstated. It pervaded the work of the Warren Court and has played a prominent role …

Suing States For Money: Constitutional Remedies After Alden And Florida Prepaid, Michael Wells

Scholarly Works

On June 23, 1999, the Supreme Court handed down three noteworthy decisions bearing on the law of constitutional remedies. Alden v. Maine struck down an attempt by Congress, acting under its Article I powers, to subject states to suits in state court on federal statutory grounds. Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Education Expense Board v. College Savings Bank curbed Congress' power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to authorize suits against state governments on constitutional grounds, reasoning that a case cannot be made for the federal cause of action unless state law remedies are inadequate. A companion case, College Savings Bank …