Digital Commons Network^™

Reining In The Supreme Court: Are Term Limits The Answer?, Arthur D. Hellman

Book Chapters

Once again, life tenure for Supreme Court Justices is under attack. The most prominent proposal for reform is to adopt a system of staggered non-renewable terms of 18 years, designed so that each President would have the opportunity to fill two vacancies during a four-year term. This book chapter, based on a presentation at a conference at Duke Law School, addresses the criticisms of life tenure and analyzes the likely consequences of moving to a system of 18-year staggered terms for Supreme Court Justices.

One of the main arguments for term limits is, in essence, that the Supreme Court should …

Constitutions As "Living Trees"? Comparative Constitutional Law And Interpretive Metaphors, Vicki C. Jackson

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Cafa And Erie: Unconstitutional Consequences?, Justin D. Forlenza

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Religion, Division, And The First Amendment, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

Nearly thirty-five years ago, in Lemon v. Kurtzman, Chief Justice Warren Burger declared that state programs or policies could excessive(ly) - and, therefore, unconstitutionally - entangle government and religion, not only by requiring or allowing intrusive public monitoring of religious institutions and activities, but also through what he called their divisive political potential. Chief Justice Burger asserted also, and more fundamentally, that political division along religious lines was one of the principal evils against which the First Amendment was intended to protect. And from this Hobbesian premise about the inten(t) animating the First Amendment, he proceeded on the assumption that …

Restoring The Lost Constitution, Not The Constitution In Exile, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Constitution we have now is redacted. Any practicing lawyer will tell you that you cannot go into court and argue the Ninth Amendment. You cannot go into court and argue the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Until United States v. Lopez you could not argue the Commerce Clause; after Gonzales v. Raich, it is not clear you can argue the Commerce Clause anymore. You cannot argue the Necessary and Proper Clause. You cannot argue the Republican Guarantee Clause. You cannot argue the Second Amendment outside the Fifth Circuit. Whole sections of the Constitution are now gone. This is the …

Disrobed: The Constitution Of Modesty, Anita L. Allen

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

In Search Of A Conservative Vision Of Constitutional Privacy: Two Case Studies From The Rehnquist Court, Mark C. Rahdert

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

Looking Ahead: October Term 2007, Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Scholarly Works

A look at some interesting cases likely to come before the U.S. Supreme Court, including Parker v. District of Columbia, the case in which the D.C. gun ban was overturned.

The Detention Of Material Witnesses And The Fourth Amendment, Joseph G. Cook

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Constitutional Rights Of Non-Custodial Parents, David D. Meyer

Hofstra Law Review

No abstract provided.

State Executive Lawmaking In Crisis, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Courts and scholars have largely overlooked the constitutional source and scope of a state executive's powers to avert and respond to crises. This Article addresses how actual and perceived legal barriers to executive authority under state constitutions can have major consequences beyond a state's borders during times of crisis. It proposes to empower state executives to address federal and regional goals without any previous authorization from the state legislature-a presumption of state executive lawmaking, subject to state legislative override, which would give a state or local executive expansive lawmaking authority within its system of government to address national and regional …

Missed Opportunities: How The Courts Struck Down The Florida School Voucher Program, Irina D. Manta

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Florida's intermediate appellate court and Supreme Court recently struck down a state-wide school voucher program that allows children in failing public schools to use government monies to attend private schools of their parents' choosing. The intermediate appellate court based its reasoning on a state constitutional provision that prohibits aid to religious institutions, thus refusing to recognize the discriminatory nature of the provision or at least denying that it should apply to the voucher program. Rather than correcting the holding below, the Florida Supreme Court decided not to address the issue altogether and instead incorrectly interpreted an unrelated section of the …

Legal Ethics And The Constitution, Alan Dershowitz

Hofstra Law Review

No abstract provided.

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

Hofstra Law Review

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 …

Reading Back, Reading Black, I. Bennett Capers

Hofstra Law Review

This essay builds on post-colonial theory and black literary theory to pose a pair of questions. If the reading of Western literature can be enriched by examining the great canonical texts through the lens of race, can a similar enrichment obtain from using a similar reading practice to read the law? Stanley Fish has argued that we each belong to interpretive communities, and that members of these communities are guided in their readings of texts by a common consciousness, which produces interpretive "strategies [that] exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read." …

The Rise, Development And Future Directions Of Critical Race Theory And Related Scholarship, Athena D. Mutua

Journal Articles

This essay tells the story of the rise, development and future directions of critical race theory and related scholarship. In telling the story, I suggest that critical race theory (CRT) rises, in part, as a challenge to the emergence of colorblind ideology in law, a major theme of the scholarship. I also contend that conflict, as a process of intellectual and institutional growth, marks the development of critical race theory and provides concrete and experiential examples of some of its key insights and themes. These conflicts are waged in various institutional settings over the structural and discursive meanings of race …

Morals-Based Justifications For Lawmaking: Before And After Lawrence V. Texas, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Forever, it seems, the power to shape public morality has been seen as central to American governance. As one of the morality tradition's chief promoters, the Supreme Court itself has regularly endorsed and applauded government's police power to regulate the public's morality along with the public's health and welfare.

How, then, can we make sense of the Court's declaration in Lawrence v. Texas that the state's interest in preserving or promoting a particular morality among its constituents did not amount even to a legitimate interest to justify a Texas law criminalizing sexual intimacy between consenting adults? Has the Court unforeseeably …

Bartnicki V. Vopper, 532 U.S. 514 (2001), Alan Garfield

Alan E Garfield

No abstract provided.

A Shared Constitutionalism: Stemm Cells And The Case For Transatlanticism, Russell Miller

Russell A. Miller

No abstract provided.

Book Review(Reviewing Arguing Marbury V. Madison (Mark Tushnet Ed., 2005), Robert Lipkin

Robert Justin Lipkin

No abstract provided.

Constituting Fundamental Environmental Rights Worldwide, James R. May

James R. May

This article discusses the extent to which nations worldwide have constituted such “fundamental environmental rights” (FERs). Constitutions provide a framework for social order. They also reflect a paradox. While constitutions are usually the product of a convulsive event of majoritarian democracy, most contain antimajoritarian features designed to protect so-called fundamental rights against the tyranny of the majority. Traditional fundamental rights, such as those found in the Bill of Rights to the Constitution of the United States, include protecting for its citizens free speech, religious exercise and voting rights. Does a fundamental, enforceable, individual right to a clean and healthy environment …

Freedom Of Expression (R): Overzealous Copyright Bozos And Other Enemies Of Creativity (Book Review), Matthew Rimmer

Matthew Rimmer

Sovereignty And The American Courts At The Cocktail Party Of International Law: The Dangers Of Domestic Invocations Of Foreign And International Law, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

With increasing frequency and heightened debate, United States courts have been citing foreign and “international” law as authority for domestic decisions. This trend is inappropriate, undemocratic, and dangerous. The trend touches on fundamental concepts of sovereignty, democracy, the judicial role, and overall issues of effective governance. There are multiple problems with the judiciary’s reliance on extraterritorial and extra-constitutional foreign or international sources to guide their decisions. Perhaps the most fundamental flaw is its interference with rule of law values. To borrow from Judge Harold Levanthal, the use of international sources in judicial decision-making might be described as “the equivalent of …