Digital Commons Network^™

Racing Dobbs, Katherine M. Franke, Ria Tabacco Mar

Faculty Scholarship

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade's limits on a state's ability to restrict, and indeed completely outlaw, abortion. The case raises fundamentally important questions about rights to reproductive autonomy, bodily integrity, sex equality, privacy, and health.

Upon closer examination, Dobbs is also about race and the nation's racial history, as the two papers published here argue. In Dreding Dobbs, Professor Katherine Franke suggests that Dobbs should be read alongside the Supreme Court's 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which the Court held that Black people-even free or freed Black …

Originalism, Official History, And Perspectives Versus Methodologies, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

This paper addresses a well-worn topic: originalism, the theory that judges should interpret the Constitution in a manner consistent with the intent of its framers. I am interested in the real-world effects of originalism. The primary effect advanced by originalists is the tendency of the approach to constrain the discretion of judges. However, another effect of originalism that I identify is the creation of official histories, a practice that imposes a hidden tax on society. Another question I consider is whether originalism should be considered a methodology of analyzing the law or a perspective on the law. I argue that …

Defending Dobbs: Ending The Futile Search For A Constitutional Right To Abortion, Robert J. Pushaw, Jr.

San Diego Law Review

In short, the Court is on the right track in cases like Dobbs by retreating from eccentric, unreviewable, common law policymaking and instead focusing on the Constitution itself.

Alas, average Americans, politicians, pundits, and even lawyers rarely read Court opinions but instead care only about whether they personally agree with the outcome, as the reaction to Dobbs illustrates. One can hardly blame them, as the Court’s constitutional opinions have often featured legal window dressing for results already reached on political or ideological grounds. Therefore, the current majority of Justices must illuminate the public about the Court’s proper role in interpreting …

The Supreme Court’S Worst Decision In Recent Years – Garcetti V. Ceballos, The Dred Scott Decision For Public Employees, David L. Hudson Jr.

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Abortion Rights In The Supreme Court: A Tale Of Three Wedges, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

No abstract provided.

Atoning For Dred Scott And Plessy While Substantially Abolishing The Death Penalty, Scott W. Howe

Washington Law Review

Has the Supreme Court adequately atoned for Dred Scott and Plessy? A Court majority has never confessed and apologized for the horrors associated with those decisions. And the horrors are so great that Dred Scott and Plessy have become the anti-canon of constitutional law. Given the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the Court’s historical complicity in the brutal campaign against African Americans, this Article contends that the Court could appropriately do more to atone.

The Article asserts that the Court could profitably pursue atonement while abolishing capital punishment for aggravated murder. The Article shows why substantial abolition of the capital sanction would …

A Painful History : Symbols Of The Confederacy: A Conversation About The Tension Between Preserving History And Declaring Contemporary Values 1-19-2018, Michael M. Bowden

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Newsroom: A Painful History 1-19-2018, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Klan's Constitution, Jared Goldstein

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Separate But (Un)Equal: Why Institutionalized Anti-Racism Is The Answer To The Never-Ending Cycle Of Plessy V. Ferguson, Maureen Johnson

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Anchors Aweigh: Analyzing Birthright Citizenship As Declared (Not Established) By The Fourteenth Amendment, Elizabeth Farrington

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Wealth Inequality As Explained By Quantitative Easing And Law's Inertia, John J. Chung

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Due Process And Fundamental Rights, Martin A. Schwartz

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Three Supreme Court “Failures” And A Story Of Supreme Court Success, Corinna Barrett Lain

Law Faculty Publications

Plessy v. Ferguson. Buck v. Bell. Korematsu v. United States. Together, these three decisions legitimated ‘separate but equal,’ sanctioned the forced sterilization of thousands, and ratified the removal of Japanese Americans from their homes during World War II. By Erwin Chemerinsky’s measure in The Case Against the Supreme Court, all three are Supreme Court failures—cases in which the Court should have protected vulnerable minorities, but failed to do so. Considered in historical context, however, a dramatically different impression of these cases, and the Supreme Court that decided them, emerges. In two of the cases—Plessy and Buck—the Court’s ruling reflected the …

Interpretation, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Interpretation is the means by which the Constitution and its clauses are brought to bear on actual cases and controversies. Although much of the Constitution appears self-explanatory, as with its requirement that the president be at least thirty-five years old, much is subject to reasonable disagreement. The approaches to interpretation that form this chapter’s subject are the main tools scholars and judges have developed to resolve that disagreement. Those tools encompass five domains of argumentation, broadly conceived: text, history, structure, precedent, and consequences. As a general matter, interpretation that draws on resources wholly outside these five domains — via an …

Dred Scott: A Nightmare For The Originalists, Sol Wachtler

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

'Dred Scott V. Sandford' Analysis, Sarah E. Roessler

Student Publications

The Scott v. Sandford decision will forever be known as a dark moment in America's history. The Supreme Court chose to rule on a controversial issue, and they made the wrong decision. Scott v. Sandford is an example of what can happen when the Court chooses to side with personal opinion instead of what is right.

A Fatal Loss Of Balance: Dred Scott Revisited , Daniel A. Farber

Daniel A Farber

This essay focuses on three aspects of the Dred Scott opinion: its effort to ensure that blacks could never be citizens, let alone equal ones; its deployment of a "limited government" argument for a narrow interpretation of Congress's enumerated power over the territories; and its path-breaking defense of property rights against government regulation. These constitutional tropes of racism, narrowing of federal power, and protection of property were to remain dominant for another seventy-five years. Apart from the failings of the opinion itself, Dred Scott also represents an extraordinary case of presidential tampering with the judicial process and a breakdown in …

Slavery, Free Blacks And Citizenship, Henry L. Chambers, Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

Reconstruction Amendments says about the nature of American citizenship. The essay is organized as follows. Part I of the essay explores citizenship and membership by discussing belonging-based citizenship and rights-based citizenship. Part II describes how American and African American citizenship were constructed prior to the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. Part III notes a few cases to explain how the Reconstruction Amendment's jurisprudence has developed in the wake of Dred Scott v. Sandford' and possibly led to a tilt toward a rights-based citizenship rather than a somewhat more robust belonging-based citizenship.

The 'Federal Law Of Marriage': Deference, Deviation, And Doma, W. Burlette Carter

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The article discusses the history of federal inroads into marriage by examining federal interventions during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, argues that, in some cases but not all, marriages' federal benefits are indeed intended to support natural procreation, argues that DOMA's underlying statutes are key to ascertaining the purposes of federal marriage benefits and burdens, distinguishes sexual orientation discrimination from race discrimination and offers a proposal for dealing with equal protection challenges to denials of marriage rights to same sex couples. The proposal, which depends upon dual standards of review, recognizes the historical denial of family rights to same …

Dred Scott, John San(D)Ford, And The Case For Collusion, David T. Hardy

David T. Hardy

Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford was one of the most critical cases in Supreme Court history, “an astonisher,” as Lincoln phrased it. In the “Opinion of the Court,” which was not actually the opinion of the Court (parts of it mustered only three votes), Chief Justice Taney stretched to insulate slavery in every way manageable. The ruling became instead an application of the “law of unintended consequences.” It led to the rise of Abraham Lincoln (who devoted much of his “House Undivided” speech to it), the destruction of Stephen Douglas’ presidential campaign (since it held his core position …

Table Annexed To Article: “The Idea Of Freedom Might Be Too Great A Temptation For Them To Resist,”, Peter Aschenbrenner

Peter J. Aschenbrenner

In Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), the Supreme Court passed up a chance to thread George Washington’s experience in transporting household staff across state lines; Washington obeyed Pennsylvania’s predicate: that a human being held to slavery in one state became free after six months in Pennsylvania. Since the features of this species of mobilia varied with the jurisdiction, the Supreme Court should have taken this landscape into account. George Washington did not import, with his household workers, ‘rules and understandings’ from Virginia.

“The Idea Of Freedom Might Be Too Great A Temptation For Them To Resist", Peter J. Aschenbrenner

Peter J. Aschenbrenner

A Fatal Loss Of Balance: Dred Scott Revisited , Daniel A. Farber

Pepperdine Law Review

This essay focuses on three aspects of the Dred Scott opinion: its effort to ensure that blacks could never be citizens, let alone equal ones; its deployment of a "limited government" argument for a narrow interpretation of Congress's enumerated power over the territories; and its path-breaking defense of property rights against government regulation. These constitutional tropes of racism, narrowing of federal power, and protection of property were to remain dominant for another seventy-five years. Apart from the failings of the opinion itself, Dred Scott also represents an extraordinary case of presidential tampering with the judicial process and a breakdown in …

Table Annexed To Article: Mr. Taney’S ‘Capital Gap’: Charting The Growth Of The Federal Colony System, 1789-1960, Peter Aschenbrenner

Peter J. Aschenbrenner

When Chief Justice Roger Taney conceded the existence of ‘colonies … established and maintained’ by the federal government, albeit denying ‘power given’ in the Constitution, he had the corpus of American history to contend with. The ‘capital gap,’ as OCL defines it, supplies several measures: the balance of power between regions, the remaining inventory of nascent (ready to be made) states (=territories), the remaining inventory of available territories in gross or subdividable, and for the latter two, the net of these inventories on a regional basis. Taney’s opinion, in this fourth in a series, rises or falls on the historical …

Mr. Taney’S ‘Capital Gap’: Charting The Growth Of The Federal Colony System, 1789-1960, Peter J. Aschenbrenner

Peter J. Aschenbrenner

When Chief Justice Roger Taney conceded the existence of ‘colonies … established and maintained’ by the federal government, albeit denying ‘power given’ in the Constitution, he had the corpus of American history to contend with. The ‘capital gap,’ as OCL defines it, supplies several measures: the balance of power between regions, the remaining inventory of nascent (ready to be made) states (=territories), the remaining inventory of available territories in gross or subdividable, and for the latter two, the net of these inventories on a regional basis. Taney’s opinion, in this fourth in a series, rises or falls on the historical …

The Anticanon, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Argument from the "anticanon," the set of cases whose central propositions all legitimate decisions must refute, has become a persistent but curious feature of American constitutional law. These cases, Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Lochner v. New York, and Korematsu v. United States, are consistently cited in Supreme Court opinions, in constitutional law casebooks, and at confirmation hearings as prime examples of weak constitutional analysis. Upon reflection, however, anticanonical cases do not involve unusually bad reasoning, nor are they uniquely morally repugnant. Rather, these cases are held out as examples for reasons external to …

Majority Rule Not A Clearly Stated Component Of United States Constitution Or Supreme Court Decisions-Supreme Court And Judicial Rulings Could Even Be Seen As Advisory Not Binding Based On The Us Constitution, James T. Struck

James T Struck

Majority rule may play a role in the election of a president, but the Constitution does not apply such rule to the Supreme Court or other courts in a stated or clear way. Supreme Court decisions may be seen as advisory based on the lack of mention of judicial roles in the US Constitution, but contempt concepts indicate that judicial decisions are supposed to be seen as binding. Many judicial decisions can be seen as advisory, although clearly tradition has seen judicial rulings as binding and enforceable rather than advisory. From the perspective of the US Constitution, we could see …

The Origins Of The Privileges Or Immunities Clause, Part I: “Privileges And Immunities” As An Antebellum Term Of Art, Kurt T. Lash

Law Faculty Publications

Historical accounts of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment generally assume that John Bingham based the text on Article IV of the original Constitution and that Bingham, like other Reconstruction Republicans, viewed Justice Washington’s opinion in Corfield v. Coryell as the definitive statement of the meaning of Article IV. According to this view, Justice Miller in the Slaughterhouse Cases failed to follow both framers’ intent and obvious textual meaning when he distinguished Section One’s privileges or immunities from Article IV’s privileges and immunities.

A close analysis of antebellum law, however, suggests that Justice Miller’s …

Dred Scott Vs. The Dred Scott Case: History And Memory Of A Signal Moment In American Slavery, 1857-2007, Adam Arenson

Adam Arenson

The Dred Scott Case centered on the Scott family—Dred and Harriet, and their daughters Eliza and Lizzie—but in the recorded history, after March 6, 1857 the Scotts suddenly fade, as if their lives ended that day in the courthouse. They did not. Elsewhere I have examined how the Dred Scott decision catalyzed the transformation of St. Louis politics, turning Missouri toward gradual emancipation just as the South’s proslavery advocates were declaring victory. And I have described how the Scotts’ lives were recovered to memory through the actions spearheaded by their descendents. Here I chronicle how the legacies of the Dred …