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Tax Assignment And Revenue Sharing In Nigeria: Challenges And Options, S. C. Rapu

Economic and Financial Review

This paper build on the history as well as the current legal framework of tax assignment and revenue-sharing in Nigeria to identify the challenges while also drawing from the theoretical framework for policy options which will provide for a stable federal system in Nigeria. The paper recommended among others the strengthening of states internal revenue bases, adjustments on the vertical and horizontal revenue-sharing formula, effective compliance with the allocation of the mandatory 10% of states internally generated revenue. The paper concludes that changes to the existing tax assignment and revenue-sharing arrangements will go a long way in protecting our nascent …

Economic Regulation In The United States: The Constitutional Framework, Mark C. Christie

University of Richmond Law Review

The United States of America is well-known (and occasionally well-liked or loathed) as the world's largest free-market capitalist nation. Indeed, many assume that since the United States for more than two centuries has had an economic system based on liberal principles, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of capitalism must have been embedded in the United States Constitution from the beginning of the American republic. Yet government at all levels in the United States has historically exercised significant regulation of economic and commercial activity-regulation inconsistent with laissez-faire capitalism. The purpose of this article is to consider several questions: (1) what are the …

The Ninth Amendment: It Means What It Says, Randy E. Barnett

ExpressO

Although the Ninth Amendment appears on its face to protect unenumerated individual rights of the same sort as those that were enumerated in the Bill of Rights, courts and scholars have long deprived it of any relevance to constitutional adjudication. With the growing interest in originalist methods of interpretation since the 1980s, however, this situation has changed. In the past twenty years, five originalist models of the Ninth Amendment have been propounded by scholars: The state law rights model, the residual rights model, the individual natural rights model, the collective rights model, and the federalism model. This article examines thirteen …

The Imaginary Connection Between The Great Law Of Peace And The United States Constitution: A Reply To Professor Schaaf, Erik M. Jensen

Faculty Publications

This article challenges the politically correct theory advanced in a 1989 article by Gregory Schaaf, “From the Great Law of Peace to the Constitution of the United States: A Revision of America’s Democratic Roots.” Professor Schaaf argued that large parts of the U.S. Constitution were based on the Great Law of Peace, the founding document of the Iroquois Confederacy. This article points to the lack of primary authority supporting such a counterintuitive proposition and questions the likelihood that Iroquois principles could have silently influenced American founders. Finally, the article questions whether it is desirable to try to further the status …

The Penumbral Public Domain: Constitutional Limits On Quasi-Copyright Legislation, Aaron K. Perzanowski

Faculty Publications

This Article attempts to reconcile the breadth of the modern Commerce Clause with the notion of meaningful and enforceable limits on Congress' copyright authority under Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.

The Article aims to achieve two objectives. First, it seeks to outline a general approach to identifying and resolving inter-clause conflicts, sketching a methodology that has been lacking in the courts' sparse treatment of such conflicts. Second, it applies that general framework to the copyright power in order to outline the scope of constitutional prohibitions against quasi-copyright protections. In particular, this application focuses on the federal anti-bootlegging statutes and …

Constitution Day, Humboldt State University

Constitution

Bibliography of a display of government documents from Humboldt State University, California.

Play In The Joints Between The Religion Clauses' And Other Supreme Court Catachreses, Carl H. Esbeck

Faculty Publications

Consistent with its fumbling of late when dealing with cases involving religion, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken to reciting the metaphor of play in the joints between the Religion Clauses. This manner of framing the issue before the Court presumes that the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses run in opposing directions, and indeed will often conflict. It then becomes the Court's task, as it sees it, to determine if the law in question falls safely in the narrows where there is space for legislative action neither compelled by the Free Exercise Clause nor prohibited by the Establishment Clause. The …

Конституционное Право Иорданского Королевства, Leonid G. Berlyavskiy

Leonid G. Berlyavskiy

Jordan shows a rare example of stability in the Middle East, abilities to establish the peace connexion with the next states, to find political compromises in the country. Not last role have played in it the person and political experience of king Hussein ben-Talala, having rather considerable authority both on the Arabian world, and on the next Israel

Do Constitutions Requiring Adherence To Shari'a Threaten Human Rights? How Egypt's Constitutional Court Reconciles Islamic Law With The Liberal Rule Of Law, Clark B. Lombardi, Nathan J. Brown

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Democracy's Handmaid, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

Democratic theory presupposes open channels of dialogue, but focuses almost exclusively on matters of institutional design writ large. The philosophy of language explicates linguistic infrastructure, but often avoids exploring the political significance of its findings. In this Article, I draw from the two disciplines to reach new insights about the democracy enhancing qualities of popular constitutional language. Employing examples from the founding era, the struggle for black civil rights, the religious awakening of the last two decades, and the search for gay equality, I present a model of constitutional dialogue that emphasizes common modalities and mobilized vernacular. According to this …

Women And Law: A Comparative Analysis Of The United States And Indian Supreme Courts’ Equality Jurisprudence, Eileen Kaufman

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Judicial Power And Mobilizable History, Richard A. Primus

Articles

One contribution that law professors can make to constitutional discourse, I suggest, is the nurturing of new mobilizable histories. A "mobilizable history," as I will use the term, is a narrative, image, or other historical source that is sufficiently well-known to the community of constitutional decisionmakers so as to be able to support a credible argument in the discourse of constitutional law. It draws upon materials that are within the collective memory of constitutional interpreters; indeed, a necessary step in nurturing a new mobilizable history is to introduce new information into that collective memory or to raise the prominence of …

The President Over The Public: The Plebiscitary Presidency At Center Stage, Lori Cox Han

Political Science Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"In this chapter, I will address the question of the usefulness of the public presidency in the current political environment (that is, can a president’s communication strategy make a difference in terms of what he achieves), as well as the constitutional danger, if any, posed by a president’s attempt at public leadership. Has the public presidency, and its focus on the public aspects of the office, thrown the constitutional balance of power between the three branches out of balance? Does the president really gain political power within the constitutional framework of our government if he is a skilled and effective …

Irrational War And Constitutional Design: A Reply To Professors Nzelibe And Yoo, Paul F. Diehl, Tom Ginsburg

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Reply proceeds as follows. Part I outlines the argument of the Nzelibe and Yoo paper. Part II considers their principal-agent analysis in the context of the American political system. Part III elaborates on the "democratic peace" literature, demonstrating that it does not support the conclusions that they draw. Part IV addresses the argument that we are in a new strategic situation, such that old rules ought not apply. Part V concludes.

A Symposium On The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism And Judicial Review; Introduction, Daniel W. Hamilton

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Reconceptualizing Federalism, Erwin Chemerinsky

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court In Bondage: Constitutional Stare Decisis, Legal Formalism, And The Future Of Unenumerated Rights, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay advances a formalist conception of constitutional stare decisis. The author argues that instrumentalist accounts of precedent are inherently unsatisfying and that the Supreme Court should abandon adherence to the doctrine that it is free to overrule its own prior decisions. These moves are embedded in a larger theoretical framework--a revival of formalist ideas in legal theory that he calls "neoformalism" to distinguish his view from the so-called "formalism" caricatured by the legal realists (and from some other views that are called "formalist").

In Part II, The Critique of Unenumerated Constitutional Rights, the author sets the stage by …

Grados De Libertad: Democracia Y Antidemocracia En Cuby Y Luisiana, 1898-1900, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

This comparative study between the quest for political racial inclusivity in 1890s Louisiana and the fight against state-sanctioned racialized violence in Cuba in the early 1900s exposes similarities, tensions, and differences between the two systems. The article traces the evolving contests for citizenship and suffrage in each climate at the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the twentieth, juxtaposing the expression of race, suffrage, and citizenship in the constitution and political climate of each locale. In 1898, the new Louisiana state constitution disenfranchised African-Americans, while in 1900 Cuba was positioning itself for a grant of universal …

Reviving Constitutionalism In Iraq: Key Provisions Of The Interim Constitution, His Excellency Feisal Amin Al-Istrabadi

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Democracy's Handmaid, Robert L. Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Democratic theory presupposes open channels of dialogue, but focuses almost exclusively on matters of institutional design writ large. The philosophy of language explicates linguistic infrastructure, but often avoids exploring the political significance of its findings. In this Article, Tsai draws from the two disciplines to reach new insights about the democracy enhancing qualities of popular constitutional language. Employing examples from the founding era, the struggle for black civil rights, the religious awakening of the last two decades, and the search for gay equality, he presents a model of constitutional dialogue that emphasizes common modalities and mobilized vernacular. According to this …

Popular Constitutionalism In The Civil War: A Trial Run, Daniel W. Hamilton

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Note: Legal Excisions: The Rights Of Foreigners In Japan, Timothy Webster

Faculty Publications

This article examines various moments in the constitutional rights of foreigners in Japan. Beginning with the drafting of the Japanese Constitution, it shows how Japanese members of the drafting committee did not passively accept whatever their American counterparts “foisted” on them, but quite deliberately sculpted and limited the reach of the Constitution through word choice and selective translation. It then examines several lawsuits, from the 1970s to the 2000s, where foreigners have asserted various rights in Japanese courts. In the absence of constitutional rights, foreigners must rely on Japanese statutory law, guided by international law, to buttress their claims to …

The Market Participant Doctrine And The Clear Statement Rule, David S. Bogen

Seattle University Law Review

When the state acts as a market regulator, the dormant Commerce Clause invalidates discriminatory regulation without the need for an order against the state. The courts simply refuse to enforce the state law on the ground that it is unconstitutional. When the state acts as a market participant, however, the court would have to direct its order against the state or its officials to negate the discrimination. This produces a direct confrontation with the state, the same kind of confrontation the clear statement rule was designed to avoid. Part II of this article examines the theory of the dormant Commerce …

The Future Of Federalism? Pierce County V. Guillen As A Case Study, Lynn A. Baker

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Equality Paradise: Paradoxes Of The Law's Power To Advance Equality, Marcia L. Mccormick

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper, written for Texas Wesleyan Law School's Gloucester Conference, ¿Too Pure an Air: Law and the Quest for Freedom, Justice, and Equality,¿ is a brief exploration of a broader project. Every civil rights movement must struggle with how to allocate scarce resources to accomplish the broadest change possible. This paper compares the legal and political strategies of the Black rights movement and the women's rights movement in the United States, comparing both the strategy choices and the results. These two movement followed essentially the same strategies. Where they have attained success and where each has failed demonstrates the limits …

I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means: How Kripke And Wittgenstein's Analysis On Rule Following Undermines Justice Scalia's Textualism And Originalism, Daniel S. Goldberg

Cleveland State Law Review

This Article deals with constitutional hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the art or theory of interpretation. Deciding what the constitutionally appropriate rule is in any given case hinges on what methods any particular judge utilizes to interpret the Constitution. Constitutional hermeneutics, then, is the theory of constitutional interpretation. In this paper, I address a specific constitutional hermeneutic: textualism-originalism. This Article is a critique of the constitutional hermeneutic of textualism-originalism. As such, my thesis is that the model of interpretation embodied by textualism-originalism cannot possibly serve to do what its proponents assert it does: constrain judicial interpretation. This is because textualism-originalism depends on …

Reading, Writing, And Radicalism: The Limits On Government Control Over Private Schooling In An Age Of Terrorism., Avigael N. Cymrot

St. Mary's Law Journal

There are constitutional limitations that govern attempts to regulate the teaching of terrorism-encouraging ideologies. According to a 1999-2000 study by the National Center of Education Statistics, there are 152 full-time Islamic schools in the United States, schooling about 19,000 students. The primary concern is not that children will be instructed to immediately engage in terrorist acts, but that the teaching of a radical Islamist ideology will predispose them to join radical Islamist terrorist movements and engage in violence. The Free Exercise Clause and parental rights doctrine, however, might not by themselves bar the state from interfering in private education to …

The Cul De Sac Of Race Preference Discourse, Christopher A. Bracey

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Affirmative action policy remains a contentious issue in public debate despite public endorsement by America’s leading institutions and validation by the United States Supreme Court. But the decades old disagreement is mired in an unproductive rhetorical stalemate marked by entrenched ideology rather than healthy dialogue. Instead of evolving, racial dialogue about the relevance of race in university admissions and hiring decisions is trapped in a cycle of resentment.

In this article, I argue that the stagnation of race preference discourse arises because the basic rhetorical themes advanced by opponents have evolved little over 150 years since the racial reform efforts …

The Riddle Of Hiram Revels, Richard A. Primus

Articles

In 1870, a black man named Hiram Revels was named to represent Mississippi in the Senate. Senate Democrats objected to seating him and pointed out that the Constitution specifies that no person may be a senator who has not been a citizen of the United States for at least nine years. Before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, the Democrats argued, Revels had not been a citizen on account of the Supreme Court's 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Thus, even if Revels were a citizen in 1870, he had held that status for only two years. …

The Marriage Protection Act: A Lesson In Congressional Over-Reaching, Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.