Digital Commons Network^™

Was Shelley V. Kraemer Incorrectly Decided? Some New Answers (Winner Of The 2006 Outstanding Scholarly Paper Award From The Association Of American Law Schools), Mark D. Rosen

Mark D. Rosen

Shelley v. Kraemer, the 1948 decision that famously forbade state courts from enforcing racially restrictive covenants, has proven to be immensely difficult to justify. Under Shelley's attribution rationale, a contract's substantive provisions are to be attributed to the state when a court enforces the contract. Thus although Shelley ruled that racially restrictive covenants themselves were perfectly legal, it held that judicial enforcement of the covenants constituted state action that violated the Equal Protection Clause. Shelley's attribution rationale meant that courts could not enforce contracts with provisions that could not have been constitutionally enacted by a legislature. This Article shows, however, …

Troubled Doctrine, Extraordinary Deference: The State Action Requirement And Amateur Sports, Dionne L. Koller

Dionne L. Koller

The state action doctrine has been criticized for decades. Among the criticisms is that the doctrine as applied will fail to account for changing realities in the exercise of state power. Building on this criticism, this article makes the claim that the state action doctrine’s failure to account for the realities of increased state power in amateur sports has important consequences for the amateur athletes and others who are regulated by ostensibly private organizations such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), and the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). While some commentators previously have …

Towards An Explicit Balancing Inquiry: R.A.V. And Black Through The Lens Of Foreign Freedom Of Expression Jurisprudence , Matthew S. Melamed

Matthew S Melamed

The article concerns the balancing inquiry that currently provides implicit structure to recent United States Supreme Court decisions concerning the constitutionality of laws banning cross burning, as exemplified in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul and Virginia v. Black. Part I identifies the historical antipathy towards balancing inspired by the First Amendment, simultaneously considering the jurisprudential failure of First Amendment fundamentalism and the powerful ideological hold that it nevertheless still exerts. Part II briefly introduces the motivation and means by which the European Court of Human Rights and the Canadian Constitutional Court utilize explicit balancing tests in freedom of expression …

The Looming Collapse Of Restrictions On Judicial Campaign Speech, Nat S. Stern

Nat S Stern

In Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, the Supreme Court in 2002 struck down Minnesota’s ban on a judicial candidate’s “announc[ing] his or her views on disputed legal or political issues.” Since then, the American Bar Association and many states have revised their codes of judicial conduct to comply with White’s specific holding while seeking to retain other limitations on judicial campaign speech. Such efforts, however, ignore the broader implications of the Court’s opinion in White. Both the logic of that opinion and the ideological inclinations of the current Court point to the likely invalidation of major portions of these …

Prediction Markets And The First Amendment, Miriam A. Cherry

Miriam A. Cherry

What would happen if new laws banning on-line gambling were used to target prediction markets? The answer is a clash with the First Amendment. The continuing development of prediction markets is important because of their success at foretelling the future. Unfortunately, overly restrictive gambling laws could jeopardize the progress of prediction markets. In this Article, we identify the expressive elements inherent in prediction markets and explore how legislation such as the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 might harm such predictive speech. This Article is the first to explore First Amendment protections for prediction markets, and in so doing, …

Webmail At Work: The Case For Protection Against Employer Monitoring , Marc A. Sherman

Marc Adam Sherman

This paper is about privacy in the workplace. Specifically, I address the issue of employer monitoring of employee email. The law allows employers to monitor their workers’ email – even when messages contain private information. However, although the law is clear with respect to employer-provided email, it is not yet defined as to webmail. That is – this paper shows that relevant statutes and court decisions generally have not yet addressed the privacy issues that arise when an employer monitors email sent by an employee via the employee’s personal web-based email account.

After revealing this webmail gap in the law, …

The Looming Collapse Of Restrictions On Judicial Campaign Speech, Nat S. Stern

Nat S Stern

In Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, the Supreme Court in 2002 struck down Minnesota’s ban on a judicial candidate’s “announc[ing] his or her views on disputed legal or political issues.” Since then, the American Bar Association and many states have revised their codes of judicial conduct to comply with White’s specific holding while seeking to retain other limitations on judicial campaign speech. Such efforts, however, ignore the broader implications of the Court’s opinion in White. Both the logic of that opinion and the ideological inclinations of the current Court point to the likely invalidation of major portions of these …

Neuroimaging And The "Complexity" Of Capital Punishment, Orlando Carter Snead

O. Carter Snead

The growing use of brain imaging technology to explore the causes of morally, socially, and legally relevant behavior is the subject of much discussion and controversy in both scholarly and popular circles. From the efforts of cognitive neuroscientists in the courtroom and in the public square, the contours of a project to transform capital sentencing both in principle and practice have emerged. In the short term, such scientists seek to intervene in the process of capital sentencing by serving as mitigation experts for defendants, where they invoke neuroimaging research on the roots of criminal violence to support their arguments. Over …

El Derecho A No Cumplir La Ley, Juan Carlos Riofrío Martínez-Villalba

Juan Carlos Riofrío Martínez-Villalba

No abstract provided.

Privacy And Access To Public Records In The Information Age

Sol Bermann

Online public record access brings a wealth of benefits ranging from greater government access and accountability to increased cost-savings and efficiencies. However, due to the presence of highly sensitive, personal data, an increase in public records access also brings potential dangers, including heightened risk of identity theft and frivolous snooping into the affairs of others.

Historically, public records have had some measure of public accessibility in order to empower citizens with the ability to observe the goings-on of government, leading to greater government accountability. Until the rise of the internet, citizens have had their privacy protected through practical obscurity (the …

Fired For Blogging: Are There Legal Protections For Employees Who Blog?, Robert Sprague

Robert Sprague

No abstract provided.

The Migration Of Constitutional Ideas, Sujit Choudhry

Sujit Choudhry

The migration of constitutional ideas across jurisdictions is one of the central features of contemporary constitutional practice. The increasing use of comparative jurisprudence in interpreting constitutions is one example of this. In this 2007 book, leading figures in the study of comparative constitutionalism and comparative constitutional politics from North America, Europe and Australia discuss the dynamic processes whereby constitutional systems influence each other. They explore basic methodological questions which have thus far received little attention, and examine the complex relationship between national and supranational constitutionalism - an issue of considerable contemporary interest in Europe. The migration of constitutional ideas is …

Against Orthodoxy: Miranda Is Not Prophylactic And The Constitution Is Not Perfect, Lawrence Rosenthal

Lawrence Rosenthal

In the four decades since the decision in Miranda v. Arizona, two point of consensus have emerged about that decision. The first area of agreement is that Miranda’s rationale for requiring its now-famous warnings is wrong, or at least dramatically overstated. In Michigan v. Tucker, the Court first labeled Miranda warnings as “prophylactic standards.” For their part, Miranda’s advocates do not spend much time defending its conception of unwarned custodial interrogation as inherently coercive. The second point of agreement is that Miranda has turned out to be a failure combating the coercive nature of custodial interrogation. Despite Miranda, coerced confessions …

Female Immigrant Workers And The Law: Limits And Opportunities, Maria Ontiveros

Maria L. Ontiveros

This paper explains the reasons that traditional United States labor and employment laws are incapable of effectively addressing the types of workplace problems confronting female immigrant workers. It critiques the protections supposedly offered by the free market, labor standards, antidiscrimination laws and collective bargaining. It argues that statutory exclusion, immigration issues, nonrecognition of injury, and cultural limitations thwart the effectiveness of traditional approaches. It then describes a variety of initiatives and approaches being taken at the domestic and international level that more effectively address these problems. These initiatives include the use of the Thirteenth Amendment and antitrafficking legislation, as well …

Writing Public Order Laws That Pass Constitutional Muster, Lawrence Rosenthal

Lawrence Rosenthal

No abstract provided.

Majority Politics And Race Based Remedies, Darren Hutchinson

Darren L Hutchinson

No abstract provided.

Collective Deliberative Democracy As An Indigenous Right To Self-Determination, Russell Miller

Russell A. Miller

No abstract provided.

Judicial Policy - Making And The Peculiar Function Of Law, Richard Kay

Richard Kay

While the nature of legal systems is a perpetually contested question, it is fairly uncontroversial that each must contain certain essential characteristics. First, each must suppose some picture of the appropriate way for human beings subject to it to live together in society. Second, to secure that proper arrangement, each must employ, to a greater or lesser degree, the device of general rules of conduct. Finally, in all but the simplest systems, the effectiveness of those rules must be guaranteed by some process of adjudication. The relationships among these three factors – social values, legal rules and judging – comprise …

Business Blogs And Commercial Speech: A New Analytical Framework For The 21st Century, Robert Sprague

Robert Sprague

No abstract provided.

Constitutionalism In Divided Societies, Sujit Choudhry

Sujit Choudhry

No abstract provided.

Wrestling With God: The Courts' Tortuous Treatment Of Religion (Paperback), Patrick Garry

Patrick M. Garry

The relationship between church and state is both controversial and unsettled. For decades, the courts have vacillated dramatically in their rulings on when a particular governmental accommodation rises to the level of an impermissible state establishment of religion. Without a comprehensive theory of the First Amendment establishment clause, religion cases have devolved into a jurisprudence of minutiae. Seemingly insignificant occurrences, such as a student reading a religious story or a teacher wearing a cross on a necklace, have led to years of litigation. And because of the constant threat of judicial intrusion, a pervasive social anxiety exists about the presence …

The Party’S Over: Partisan Gerrymandering And The First Amendment, David A. Schultz

David A Schultz

No abstract provided.

Chasing 'Enemy Combatants' And Circumventing International Law: A License For Sanctioned Abuse, Peter J. Honigsberg

Peter J Honigsberg

In 1944, in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court made a major error in judgment. It ruled that the executive may forcibly remove over 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes and relocate them in American detention camps. In two recent Supreme Court cases, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the court made similar errors in judgment by accepting the administration's term "enemy combatant." The Supreme Court's errors were compounded when Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 in October, 2006, statutorily defining the term enemy combatant for the first time. By acknowledging the term enemy combatant, the …

Introduction: Dred Scott After 150 Years: A Grievous Wound Remembered, John L. Gedid

John L. Gedid

No abstract provided.

Challenges To Civilian Control Of The Military: A Rational Choice Approach To The War On Terror, John C. Yoo

John C Yoo

An overlooked gap in the legal study of national security decisionmaking is civil-military relations. Civilian control of the military remains one of the fundamental norms of our constitutional system, and it appears regularly in the day-to-day functioning of our national security institutions. The War on Terror has exacerbated growing tensions between the civilian leadership and the American military, particularly with the Judge Advocate General's Corps. We propose a rational choice framework to understand and better address challenges to civilian-military relations.

Executive Power V. International Law, John C. Yoo, Robert J. Delahunty

John C Yoo

Critics of the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have made the claim that the President cannot order conduct that is inconsistent with international law. Not only is the argument under-theorized, it runs counter to the best reading of the constitutional text, structure, and the history of American practice. A careful examination of the constitutional text, for example, shows that international law that does not take the form of a treaty or other authoritative adoption by the political branches will not enjoy supremacy effect. If international law cannot claim the status …

Parliamentary Privileges As Façade: Political Reforms And Constitutional Adjudication, Shubhankar Dam

Shubhankar Dam

Does the Indian Parliament have the power to expel its members under the "powers, privileges and immunities" guaranteed by the Constitution? The Indian Supreme Court was confronted with the question in Raja Ram Pal v. Hon'ble Speaker, Lok Sabha and Others. Powers, privileges and immunities of the Indian Parliament are provided under Article 105. Supposedly based on an interpretation on Article 105(3), Sabharwal C.J., writing for the majority (Thakker J. concurring), concluded that Parliament did have the power to expel and that the same was subject to judicial review. Raveendran J. dissented. The particular privilege of the House of Commons, …

Situating The Core And Structure Of Experience In Constitutional Interpretation: Judicial Reasoning Under The Indian Constitution, Shubhankar Dam

Shubhankar Dam

This article is about texts: texts of legal provisions and texts of judgments. How much does the text of a legal provision tell us about its meaning? How much does a judgment tell us about the reasons for any given meaning of the text? Rather than in the abstract, the article unfolds both these questions in the context of the Indian Constitution. More specifically, it unfolds the questions in the context of an issue of great constitutional importance the Indian Supreme Court was confronted with in B. R. Kapur v. State of Tamil Nadu and Another. Can a person convicted …

Regulating Land Use In A Constitutional Shadow: The Institutional Contexts Of Exactions, Mark Fenster

Mark Fenster

The Takings Clause, Version 2005: The Legal Process Of Constitutional Property Rights, Mark Fenster

Mark Fenster