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The Look Within: Property, Capacity, And Suffrage In Nineteenth-Century America, Jacob Katz Cogan

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Note looks at the trajectory of suffrage reform from the late eighteenth century to the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment and argues that reformers were obsessed with the inner qualities of persons. Whereas the eighteenth century had located a person's capacity for political participation externally (in material things, such as property), the nineteenth century found these qualities internally (in innate and heritable traits, such as intelligence). To chart the transformation, this Note examines the debates over suffrage in the state constitutional conventions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as contemporaneous commentaries.

Part I will describe the …

Textualism's Selective Canons Of Statutory Construction: Reinvigorating Individual Liberties, Legislative Authority, And Deference To Executive Agencies, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article demonstrates that textualist Judges, most notably Justices Scalia, Thomas, and, to a lesser extent, Kennedy, have applied some canons too aggressively, and slighted others. Textualist Judges have overused clear-statement rules that narrow statutory meaning, especially as a means to promote federalism and states' rights. On the other hand, textualists have neglected canons that promote individual liberty or executive authority Because canons must be applied on a case-by-case basis and different canons can conflict, it is impossible to formulate one rule for how they should be applied. Nevertheless, the common textualist approach of selectively favoring some canons at the …

Taking Our Actual Constitution Seriously, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In this review, by concentrating on the general aim of Dworkin's book, I hope to contribute to the discussion this book is sure to generate. What does the "moral reading" of our Constitution amount to, and what alternative do we have to endorsing such a reading? I ask these questions from what I would call a jurisprudential
perspective. For, while I do teach Jurisprudence, I do not teach Constitutional Law, other than some constitutional law themes that find their way into my Property and Wills & Trusts courses. Accordingly, I am not well placed to review the details or
the …