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The Power Of Congress "Without Limitation": The Property Clause And Federal Regulation Of Private Property, Peter A. Appel

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Congress has overlooked a powerful tool for regulating within state jurisdictions: the Property Clause of the United States Constitution. The United States Government owns land in every state and approximately thirty percent of the total land in the United States. The federal government's authority to regulate its property within states derives from the Property Clause and has been described by the Supreme Court as "without limitation."

Professor Appel traces the historical development of the Constitution's Property Clause, from its pre-constitutional origins through modern Supreme Court decisions and academic conceptions. Professor Appel compares the narrow view of Property Clause scholarship - …

Race To The Stars: A Federalism Argument For Leaving The Right Of Publicity In The Hands Of The States, Usha Rodrigues

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This Note will argue that, given the variation in the right of publicity from state to state, and the relative newness of this property right, Congress should refrain from passing a law to federalize it. Although there are sound arguments for adopting this right, there are also reasons to hesitate. Given that only half of the states have adopted it, federalization seems premature. This Note will only obliquely address the main objection usually leveled at a robust right of publicity, namely that it stifles creativity and implicates First Amendment concerns. The focus instead will be on the right of individual …

Were There Adequate State Grounds In Bush V. Gore?, Michael L. Wells

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Few Supreme Court decisions provoke the immediate and intensely negative verdict that law professors passed on Bush v. Gore. Some of the criticism is deserved. Others have questioned whether the ruling rests on any general principle at all, given the care the Court took to limit its reasoning to the extraordinary circumstances of the Florida presidential election.

It is all too easy to leap from this well-founded critique of the Court's reasoning to the conclusion that the majority – all of whom were appointed by Republican presidents – were bent on installing George W. Bush in the White House by …

Structural Review, Pseudo-Second-Look Decision Making, And The Risk Of Diluting Constitutional Liberty, Dan T. Coenen

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In this Essay, I will pause to note some reasons why the "sham decision" critique of structural review is, for me, unpersuasive. I also will offer a few comments on the proper relationship between structural and substantive review. I note, in particular, that an endorsement of "activist" structural review need not lead to a "nonactivist" approach to substantive review, far less to its total abandonment. I also suggest that a vigorous embrace of structural rules may well lead to more, rather than less, overall judicial protection of fundamental rights.

A Constitution Of Collaboration: Protecting Fundamental Values With Second-Look Rules Of Interbranch Dialogue, Dan T. Coenen

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Often the Supreme Court directly engages nonjudicial officials in a shared elaboration of constitutional rights. It does so through the use of doctrines that focus on whether nonjudicial actors have taken an appropriately close and sensitive look at policy judgments that threaten important constitutional values. In many of these cases, the Court in effect "remands" constitutionally controversial programs to the political branches--inviting a more studied consideration of the program than attended its initial adoption, and leaving open the possibility that the readopted program will be upheld against constitutional attack.

The Court's structural doctrines range from the familiar vagueness rule to …

Foreword: Symposium Re-Examining First Principles: Deterrence And Corrective Justice In Constitutional Torts, Thomas A. Eaton

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This Symposium provides a forum for a careful and thoughtful consideration of whether constitutional tort law can deter wrongdoing and is consistent with principles of corrective justice.

Corrective Justice And Constitutional Torts, Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Michael L. Wells

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Tort liability in the private realm may be understood as "an instrument aimed...at deterrence...[and] a way of achieving corrective justice between the parties." Following the common law model, the Supreme Court has borrowed this normative framework for constitutional torts, ruling that the aims of liability for damages are to vindicate constitutional rights and to deter constitutional violations. A recent article by Daryl Levinson takes issue with this approach. Levinson argues that the superficial similarities between public torts and private torts conceal real differences, to which neither the Court nor scholars have paid adequate attention. The main point of his article, …

Section 1983, The First Amendment, And Public Employee Speech: Shaping The Right To Fit The Remedy (And Vice Versa), Michael Wells

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This Article is not about theories of free speech and how they bear on the public employment context, nor does it contribute to the academic debate over what the aims of public employee speech law ought to be. I take the Court at its word when it says that its aim is to give substantial weight to both the value of speech and the government's interest as an employer. Unlike Massaro and Ingber, I take it as a given that the government may insist on hierarchy and obedience to authority in the workplace. Unlike Rosenthal, I begin from the Court's …

Institutional Arrangements And Individual Rights: A Comment On Professor Tribe's Critique Of The Modern Court's Treatment Of Constitutional Liberty, Dan T. Coenen

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Professor Coenen analyzes Professor Tribe's contention that the present day Supreme Court's constitutional work is marked by an unjustified two-track approach. Professor Tribe has built this claim on an elaborate assessment of Saenz v. Roe, in which the Court -- to the surprise of many prognosticators -- invalidated a state statute that imposed temporary limitations on welfare benefits for new residents. He contends that the Court employed the open-stanced constitutional methodology of “structural inference” in deciding Saenz only because that case involved institutional arrangements. According to Professor Tribe, the modern Court has carefully (and unjustifiably) confined its use of structural …