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The Superfluous Fifteenth Amendment?, Travis Crum

Northwestern University Law Review

This Article starts a conversation about reorienting voting rights doctrine toward the Fifteenth Amendment. In advancing this claim, I explore an unappreciated debate—the “Article V debate”—in the Fortieth Congress about whether nationwide black suffrage could and should be achieved through a statute, a constitutional amendment, or both. As the first significant post-ratification discussion of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Article V debate provides valuable insights about the original public understandings of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the distinction between civil and political rights.

The Article V debate reveals that the Radical Republicans’ initial proposal for nationwide black suffrage included both …

The Rugged Individual's Guide To The Fourth Amendment: How The Court's Idealized Citizen Shapes, Influences, And Excludes The Exercise Of Constitutional Rights, Scott E. Sundby

Articles

Few figures inspire us like individuals who stand up for their rights and beliefs despite the peril that may follow. One cannot help but feel awe looking at the famous photograph of the lone Tiananmen

Square protestor facing down a line of Red Army tanks, his willowy frame clothed in a simple white shirt and black pants as he holds a shopping bag. Or who can help but feel humbled by the courage of Rosa Parks, a seamstress, who was willing to be arrested rather than sit in the back of the bus?

But while these stories of everyday individuals …

Lyman Trumbull: Author Of The Thirteenth Amendment, Author Of The Civil Rights Act, And The First Second Amendment Lawyer, David B. Kopel

David B Kopel

Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull is not well-known today, but he is one of the "Founding Sons" who transformed the nation and the Constitution before, during, and after the Civil War. He wrote the Thirteenth Amendment, the first Freedmen's Bureau Bill, and the Civil Rights Act. He sponsored the first federal statutes which actually freed slaves. As Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and later as a civil rights attorney, he did more to protect Second Amendment rights--including taking a test case to the U.S. Supreme Court (Presser v. Illinois)--than did any other lawyer or legislator in the century after Jefferson …

Terror And Race, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The United States is now engaged in an internationally prominent war on terror. That war, however, is being waged in a way that threatens to cause the same types of harm to the democratic values of the United States that the Nation's terrorist enemies are hoping to inflict. Foreign terrorists are attempting to undermine the fundamental liberties that United States culture claims to hold dear. But those are the same liberties that our own government has asked us to forego in its effort to win the war on terror. The paradoxical irony entailed in the United States government's demand that …

A Bill Of Rights For The United Kingdom: From London To Strasbourg By The Northwest Passage?, Stephen Sedley

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

In anticipation of the United Kingdom's patriation of the European Convention on Human Rights, the author explores the possible impact that a Bill of Rights will have on the U.K. system of justice from a European and U.K. perspective. The author argues that, from a European perspective, the U.K. has an established history of yielding to supra-national law given its membership in the European Union. However, from a U.K. perspective, this will present new challenges, as the constitutionality of domestic legislation is subject to increased judicial scrutiny in ensuring conformance with European Convention obligations. The author argues that the pressures …

Prohibition Of Lawful Assembly When Opposed By Threat Of Violence

Indiana Law Journal

Constitutional Law Note