Digital Commons Network^™

Due Process Abroad, Nathan Chapman

Scholarly Works

Defining the scope of the Constitution’s application outside U.S. territory is more important than ever. This month the Supreme Court will hear oral argument about whether the Constitution applies when a U.S. officer shoots a Mexican child across the border. Meanwhile the federal courts are scrambling to evaluate the constitutionality of an Executive Order that, among other things, deprives immigrants of their right to reenter the United States. Yet the extraterritorial reach of the Due Process Clause — the broadest constitutional limit on the government’s authority to deprive persons of “life, liberty, and property” — remains obscure. Up to now, …

Chevron In The Circuit Courts: The Codebook Appendix, Kent H. Barnett, Christopher J. Walker

Scholarly Works

For our empirical study on the use of Chevron deference in the federal courts of appeals, we utilized the following Codebook. This Codebook draws substantially from the codebook appended to William Eskridge and Lauren Baer's pathbreaking study of administrative law's deference doctrines at the Supreme Court. Our research assistants and we followed the instructions below when coding judicial decisions. To address questions as they arose and to ensure consistent coding, we maintained close contact with each other and our research assistants throughout the project and clarified the Codebook to address additional issues. Further details concerning our methodology (and its limitations) …

Deontological Originalism: Moral Truth, Liberty, And, Constitutional Due Process: Part I - Originalism And Deontology, Peter Brandon Bayer

Scholarly Works

This article offers what has been needed but lacking in modern legal commentary: thorough, meticulous and timely proof that, pursuant to principles of Originalism, the Constitution - the highest law of the United States - mandates that any governmental act is unconstitutional if it is immoral.

Specifically, this article returns fundamental constitutional jurisprudence to where it rightly was until roughly a century ago; and, where, recently, it has been returning in the form of Supreme Court substantive due process precedents based on human dignity. The overarching concept, which I call Deontological Originalism, asserts that both the Founders of this Nation …

Why Some Religious Accommodations For Mandatory Vaccinations Violate The Establishment Clause, Hillel Y. Levin

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All states require parents to inoculate their children against deadly diseases prior to enrolling them in public schools, but the vast majority of states also allow parents to opt out on religious grounds. This religious accommodation imposes potentially grave costs on the children of non-vaccinating parents and on those who cannot be immunized. The Establishment Clause prohibits religious accommodations that impose such costs on third parties in some cases, but not in all. This presents a difficult line-drawing problem. The Supreme Court has offered little guidance, and scholars are divided.

This Article addresses the problem of religious accommodations that impose …

A Politics-Reinforcing Political Question Doctrine, Harlan G. Cohen

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The modern political question doctrine has long been criticized for shielding the political branches from proper judicial scrutiny and allowing the courts to abdicate their responsibilities. Critics of the doctrine thus cheered when the Supreme Court, in Zivotofsky I, announced a narrowing of the doctrine. Their joy though may have been short-lived. Almost immediately, Zivotofsky II demonstrated the dark side of judicial review of the separation of powers between Congress and the President: deciding separations of powers cases may permanently cut one of the political branches out of certain debates. Judicial scrutiny in a particular case could eliminate political scrutiny …

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

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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 …

Telling Stories In The Supreme Court: Voices Briefs And The Role Of Democracy In Constitutional Deliberation, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

On January 4, 2016, over 112 women lawyers, law professors, and former judges told the world that they had had an abortion. In a daring amicus brief that captured national media attention, the women “came out” to their clients; to the lawyers with or against whom they practice; to the judges before whom they appear; and to the Justices of the Supreme Court.

The past three years have seen an explosion of such “voices briefs,” 16 in Obergefell and 17 in Whole Woman’s Health. The briefs can be powerful, but their use is controversial. They tell the stories of non-parties—strangers …

Deontological Originalism: Moral Truth, Liberty, And, Constitutional Due Process: Part Ii - Deontological Constitutionalism And The Ascendency Of Kantian Due Process, Peter Brandon Bayer

Scholarly Works

This article offers what has been needed but lacking in modern legal commentary: thorough, meticulous and timely proof that, pursuant to principles of Originalism, the Constitution - the highest law of the United States - mandates that any governmental act is unconstitutional if it is immoral.

Specifically, this article returns fundamental constitutional jurisprudence to where it rightly was until roughly a century ago; and, where, recently, it has been returning in the form of Supreme Court substantive due process precedents based on human dignity. The overarching concept, which I call Deontological Originalism, asserts that both the Founders of this Nation …

Who Has Standing To Sue The President Over Allegedly Unconstitutional Emoluments?, Matthew I. Hall

Scholarly Works

Three pending lawsuits challenge President Trump's practice of accepting payments and other benefits from foreign governments through his businesses as violative of the Foreign Emoluments Clause. They also allege that the President's practice of accepting payments and benefits from state or federal governmental units violates the Domestic Emoluments Clause. These actions raise interesting questions about the meaning of two little-discussed provisions of the Constitution. But before reaching the merits the courts will first have to grapple with issues of justiciability - in particular, with the question whether plaintiffs have "standing" to bring their claims in federal court. This article explains …

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 …

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

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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 Fragility Of The Free American Press, Ronnell Anderson Jones, Sonja R. West

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President Donald Trump has faced criticism for attacking the press and for abandoning longstanding traditions of accommodating and respecting it. This Essay argues that the national discussion spurred by Trump’s treatment of the press has fallen short of capturing the true seriousness of the situation. Trump’s assault on the custom of press accommodation follows a generation-long collapse of other major press protections. In order to fully understand the critical juncture at which American press freedom now stands, we must expand the discussion beyond talk of a rogue president’s aberrant attacks on the press and consider the increasingly fragile edifice on …

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

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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 …

Wittgenstein's Poker: Contested Constitutionalism And The Limits Of Public Meaning Originalism, Ian C. Bartrum

Scholarly Works

Constitutional originalism is much in the news as our new President fills the Supreme Court vacancy Antonin Scalia's death has created. "Public meaning" originalism is probably the most influential version of originalism in current theoretical circles. This essay argues that, while these "New Originalists" have thoughtfully escaped some of the debilitating criticisms leveled against their predecessors, the result is a profoundly impoverished interpretive methodology that has little to offer most modern constitutional controversies. In particular, the fact that our constitutional practices are contested-that is, we often do not seek semantic or legal agreement-makes particular linguistic indeterminacies highly problematic for approaches …

The Due Process Bona Fides Of Executive Self-Pardons And Blanket Pardons, Peter Brandon Bayer

Scholarly Works

Contrary to much commentary and possibly some seemingly settled law, this essay argues that an American President (or a similarly situated state officer or office) may issue individual and "blanket"-or mass-clemency benefiting classes of named or unnamed individuals, and in addition may pardon himself, but only if doing so comports with the principles of fundamental fairness that define due process of law under the Constitution's Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Accordingly, the Constitution permits acts of clemency to foster mercy, compassion, and forgiveness, or to promote the purported best interests of the nation, or even to further an executive's political advantages, …

Recent Applications Of The Supreme Court's Hands-Off Approach To Religious Doctrine: From Hosanna-Tabor And Holt To Hobby Lobby And Zubik, Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

In each of the past four terms, the United States Supreme Court has decided a case with important implications for the interpretation and application of the Religion Clauses of the United States Constitution: Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & Sch. v. EEOC, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Inc., Holt v. Hobbs, and, most recently, Zubik v. Burwell. Although the Court’s decisions in these cases addressed—and seemed to resolve—a number of questions central to Free Exercise and Establishment Clause jurisprudence, including recognition of the “ministerial exception” and religious rights of a corporate entity, the decisions left a number of questions unanswered, such as …