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Articles 31 - 38 of 38
Full-Text Articles in Law
Modeling The Second Amendment Right To Carry Arms (I): Judicial Tradition And The Scope Of "Bearing Arms" For Self-Defense, Michael P. O'Shea
Modeling The Second Amendment Right To Carry Arms (I): Judicial Tradition And The Scope Of "Bearing Arms" For Self-Defense, Michael P. O'Shea
American University Law Review
This Article sheds light on a major constitutional question opened up by the United States Supreme Court’s landmark decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago: Does the Second Amendment “right to bear arms” include a right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home? Some courts and commentators have declared that Heller held that the Second Amendment right is limited to the home, so that restrictions on handgun carrying do not even fall within the scope of the Second Amendment. Others assert that the potential applicability of the right to bear arms outside …
Constitution Day 2012: The American Judiciary, Robert Berry
Constitution Day 2012: The American Judiciary, Robert Berry
Librarian Publications
Robert Berry, research librarian for the social sciences at the Sacred Heart University Library, has written an essay about the role of the American Judiciary in interpreting laws of the United States government. The essay was written for the occasion of Constitution Day 2012 at Sacred Heart University.
Toward A Meaning-Full Establishment Clause Neutrality, Bruce Ledewitz
Toward A Meaning-Full Establishment Clause Neutrality, Bruce Ledewitz
Ledewitz Papers
Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.
A Look At The Establishment Clause Through The Prism Of Religious Perspectives: Religious Majorities, Religious Minorities, And Nonbelievers, Samuel J. Levine
A Look At The Establishment Clause Through The Prism Of Religious Perspectives: Religious Majorities, Religious Minorities, And Nonbelievers, Samuel J. Levine
Scholarly Works
This article traces the Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence through several decades, examining a number of landmark cases through the prism of religious minority perspectives. In so doing, the Article aims to demonstrate the significance of religious perspectives in the development of both the doctrine and rhetoric of the Establishment Clause. The Article then turns to the current state of the Establishment Clause, expanding upon these themes through a close look at the 2004 and 2005 cases Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, Van Orden v. Perry, and McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky. The article concludes …
Robert Taylor, An Appreciation, Bruce Ledewitz
Robert Taylor, An Appreciation, Bruce Ledewitz
Ledewitz Papers
Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.
The Anti-Messiness Principle In Statutory Interpretation, Anita S. Krishnakumar
The Anti-Messiness Principle In Statutory Interpretation, Anita S. Krishnakumar
Faculty Publications
Many of the Supreme Court's statutory interpretation opinions reflect a juisprudential aversion to interpreting statutes in a manner that will prove "messy" for implementing courts to administer. Yet the practice of construing statutes to avoid "messiness" has gone largely unnoticed in the statutory interpretation literature. This Article seeks to illuminate the Court's use of "anti-messiness" arguments to interpret statutes and to bring theoretical attention to the principle of "messiness" avoidance. The Article begins by defining the concept of anti-messiness and providing a typology of common anti-messiness arguments used by the Supreme Court. It then considers some dangers inherent in the …
Rehnquist's Missing Letter: A Former Law Clerk's 1955 Thoughts On Justice Jackson And Brown, John Q. Barrett, Brad Snyder
Rehnquist's Missing Letter: A Former Law Clerk's 1955 Thoughts On Justice Jackson And Brown, John Q. Barrett, Brad Snyder
Faculty Publications
"I think that Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed." That's what Supreme Court law clerk William H. Rehnquist wrote privately in December 1952 to his boss, Justice Robert H. Jackson. When the memorandum was made public in 1971 and Rehnquist's Supreme Court confirmation hung in the balance, he claimed that the memorandum reflected Jackson's views, not Rehnquist's. Rehnquist was confirmed, but his explanation triggered charges that he had lied and smeared the memory of one of the Court's most revered justices. This Essay analyzes a newly discovered document—a letter Rehnquist wrote to Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1955, …
Lower Court Constitutionalism: Circuit Court Discretion In A Complex Adaptive System, Doni Gewirtzman
Lower Court Constitutionalism: Circuit Court Discretion In A Complex Adaptive System, Doni Gewirtzman
American University Law Review
While federal circuit courts play an essential role in defining what the Constitution means, one would never know it from looking at most constitutional scholarship. The bulk of constitutional theory sees judge-made constitutional law through a distorted lens, one that focuses solely on the Supreme Court with virtually no attention paid to other parts of the judicial hierarchy. On the rare occasions where circuit courts appear on the radar screen, they are treated either as megaphones for communicating the Supreme Court’s directives or as tools for implementing the theorist’s own interpretive agenda. Both approaches would homogenize the way circuit courts …