Law Commons^™

The Supreme Court Acknowledges Congress’ Authority To Confer Informational Standing In Spokeo, Inc. V. Robins, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins does not fully resolve when an intangible injury such as a defendant’s misreporting of a plaintiff’s personal information is sufficient to constitute a “concrete injury” for Article III standing. However, the Spokeo decision makes clear that Congress has a significant role in defining intangible injuries for Article III standing beyond what was considered an injury under the American or English common law. Some commentators had thought Spokeo might overrule the Court’s prior decisions in Akins and Public Citizen, which both held that a plaintiff may have standing based solely upon …

Guns, Sex, And Race: The Second Amendment Through A Feminist Lens, Verna L. Williams

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This article uses a recent move on the part of feminist legal advocates-social justice feminism ("SJF')--to explore the contours of the Second Amendment. Feminist legal theory, specifically SJF, reveals that the Second Amendment and attendant societal understandings ofthe right to keep and bear arms played a role in establishing and reproducing white male dominance. Understood in this way, the Court's decisions in Heller and McDonald reinforce structural oppression under the guise of promoting individual rights. To make that case, this article proceeds in four parts. Part I briefly addresses the question of why a feminist lens is useful in this …

The Antidemocratic Sixth Amendment, Janet Moore

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Criminal procedure experts often claim that poor people have no Sixth Amendment right to choose their criminal defense lawyers. These experts insist that the Supreme Court has reserved the Sixth Amendment right to choose for the small minority of defendants who can afford to hire counsel. This Article upends that conventional wisdom with new doctrinal, theoretical, and practical arguments supporting a Sixth Amendment right to choose for all defendants, including the overwhelming majority who are indigent. The Article’s fresh case analysis shows the Supreme Court’s “no-choice” statements are dicta, which the Court’s own reasoning and rulings refute. The Article’s new …

Data Breaches, Identity Theft And Article Iii Standing: Will The Supreme Court Resolve The Split In The Circuits, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In data breach cases, the lower federal courts have split on the question of whether the plaintiffs meet Article III standing requirements for injury and causation. In its 2013 decision Clapper v. Amnesty International USA, the Supreme Court, in a case involving alleged electronic surveillance by the U.S. government’s National Security Agency, declared that a plaintiff alleging that it will suffer future injuries from a defendant’s allegedly improper conduct must show that such injuries are “certainly impending.” Since the Clapper decision, a majority of the lower federal courts addressing “lost data” or potential identity theft cases in which there is …

Federalism As A Constitutional Principle, Ernest Young

University of Cincinnati Law Review

Justice O’Connor rightly called federalism “our oldest question of constitutional law.”1 But the constitutional balance between the nation and the states is hardly what the cool kids are talking about these days. My first-year con law students show up each Fall expecting to learn about same-sex marriage, flag burning, and abortion; they’re plainly disappointed when they pick up the syllabus and see how much of the course is going to be about government structure.

The first part of my talk resists that intuition. The notion that federalism is passé is so tragically wrongheaded that I can’t bear to leave it …

Standing To View Other People's Land: The D.C. Circuit's Divided Decision In Sierra Club V. Jewell, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In its divided 2014 decision in Sierra Club v. Jewell, the D.C. Circuit held that plaintiffs who observe landscape have Article III standing to sue in federal court to protect those views even if they have no legal right to physically enter the private property that they view. The D.C. Circuit’s decision could significantly enlarge the standing of plaintiffs to sue federal agencies or private parties over changes to private lands that the plaintiffs have no right to enter. Because the Supreme Court has inconsistently applied both strict and liberal approaches to standing, it is difficult to predict how it …

Retaliation And The Reasonable Person, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

When a worker complains about discrimination, federal law is supposed to protect that worker from later retaliation. Recent scholarly attention focuses on how courts limit retaliation claims by narrowly framing the causation inquiry. A larger threat to retaliation law is developing in the lower courts. Courts are declaring a wide swath of conduct as insufficiently serious to constitute retaliation.

Many courts hold that it is legal for an employer to threaten to fire a worker, to place the worker on administrative leave, or to negatively evaluate the worker because she complained about discriminatory conduct. Even if the worker has evidence …

Does United States V. Windsor (The Doma Case) Open The Door To Congressional Standing Rights?, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In rare cases, a President refuses to defend a statute he believes is unconstitutional. The law is unclear whether Congress or either House of Congress has Article III standing to defend a statute that the President refuses to defend. In United States v. Windsor, the Supreme Court in 2013 addressed the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The Obama Administration took the middle position of not defending DOMA, but still enforcing it despite its view that the statute was unconstitutional to assist federal courts in reviewing the constitutionality of the statute. It was unclear whether an appeal was …

The Long-Term Implications Of Gonzaga V. Doe, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

State and local governments are often responsible for disbursing federal medical, educational, and welfare benefits. What happens when they deny or revoke them unfairly? Some recipients have used 42 U.S.C. § 1983 as a way to enforce the underlying statutes. The Supreme Court decision in Gonzaga University v. Doe, 536 U.S. 273 (2002), made this more difficult. In doing so, the Court adopted stringent rules for the use of § 1983 to enforce any federal laws, including the nation’s civil rights laws.

Prudential Standing Doctrine Abolished Or Waiting For A Comeback?: Lexmark International, Inc. V. Static Control Components, Inc., Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., Justice Scalia writing for a unanimous Court partially achieved his goal of abolishing the prudential standing doctrine. First, the Court concluded that the zone of interests test concerns whether Congress has authorized a particular plaintiff to sue and is not a prudential standing question despite several Court decisions classifying it as such. However, there is a continuing controversy in the D.C. Circuit about applying the test to suits by competitors, especially in environmental cases. The better approach is to allow competitor standing in at least …

The Tort Label, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Courts and commentators often label federal discrimination statutes as torts. Since the late 1980s, the courts increasingly applied tort concepts to these statutes. This Article discusses how courts placed employment discrimination law within the organizational umbrella of tort law without examining whether the two areas share enough theoretical and doctrinal affinities.

While discrimination statutes are torts in some general sense that they do not arise out of criminal law and are not solely contractual, it is far from clear that these statutes are enough like traditional torts to justify the reflexive and automatic use of tort law. Employment discrimination statutes …

Let's Pretend Discrimination Is A Tort, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In the past decade, the Supreme Court has repeatedly invoked tort common law to interpret federal discrimination statutes. During this same time period, the Supreme Court increasingly invoked textualism as the appropriate methodology for interpreting these statutes. One immediate effect of these two trends - tortification and textualism - is to restrict discrimination law by tightening causal standards.

This Article explores how interpreting discrimination statutes through the lenses of tort law and textualism can expand, rather than restrict, discrimination law. It assumes that courts will continue to characterize discrimination statutes as torts and as deriving from the common law, despite …

Torts And Civil Rights Law: Migration And Conflict: Symposium Introduction, Sandra F. Sperino

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Curiously, the connection between civil rights and civil wrongs has not been a topic that has captivated the attention of large numbers of legal scholars over the years. The distance that has developed between the two fields likely reflects their placement on opposite sides of the public-private divide, with Title VII and other anti-discrimination statutes forming part of public law, while torts is a classic, private law subject. To compound the division, both subjects are to some extent still under-theorized. Employment discrimination scholarship is often caught up in the process of analyzing the doctrinal implications of the latest Supreme Court …

Is Prudential Standing Jurisdictional?, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The Supreme Court has clearly treated the Constitution’s Article III standing requirements as mandatory jurisdictional hurdles that a plaintiff must meet for each form of relief sought before federal courts may consider the merits of a case. But the Supreme Court has never squarely held that prudential standing is a jurisdictional issue that must be decided before the merits in every single case. A 1975 Supreme Court decision suggested in dicta that prudential standing doctrine plays a crucial role in preventing federal courts from addressing political questions, but a 1984 Court decision implied in dicta that prudential standing is less …

No Article Iii Standing For Private Plaintiffs Challenging State Greenhouse Gas Regulations: The Ninth Circuit's Decision In Washington Environmental Council V. Bellon, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In Washington Environmental Council v. Bellon, the Ninth Circuit recently held that private plaintiffs did not have standing to sue in federal court to challenge certain state greenhouse gas (GHG) regulations because the plaintiffs failed to allege that the emissions were significant enough to make a “meaningful contribution” to global GHG levels. By contrast, in Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court held a state government had standing to sue the federal government for its failure to regulate national GHG emissions because states are “entitled to special solicitude in our standing analysis.” Massachusetts implied but did not decide that private parties …

Clapper V. Amnesty International: Two Or Three Competing Philosophies Of Standing Law?, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In its 2013 decision Clapper v. Amnesty International, the Supreme Court invoked separation of powers principles in holding that public interest groups alleging that the Government was spying on their foreign clients failed to demonstrate Article III standing because they could not prove that the future surveillance injury that they purportedly feared was “certainly impending.” Justice Breyer’s dissenting opinion argued “commonsense” suggested that the Government was spying on the plaintiffs’ foreign clients and proposed a “reasonable” or “high” probability standing test. Implicitly, the Clapper decision presented a third approach to standing decisions. In footnote 5, the majority opinion acknowledged that …

Constitutional Newspeak: Learning To Love The Affordable Care Act Decision, A. Christopher Bryant

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In his classic dystopian novel, 1984, George Orwell imagines a world in which language is regularly contorted to mean its opposite - as in the waging of war by the Ministry of Peace and infliction of torture by the Ministry of Love. A core claim of Orwell's was that such abuse of language - which in his novel he labeled "Newspeak"-would ultimately channel thought. Whatever the merits of this claim as a theory of linguistics, constitutional developments too recent to be called history demonstrate that as a practical matter Orwell was on to something. The Court's June 28 decision both …

Constitutional Forbearance, A. Christopher Bryant

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This essay begins by developing the concept of constitutional forbearance and exploring the role it plays in the craft of good judging. This first Part also illustrates what is meant by constitutional forbearance by recovering a forgotten but illustrative example from a century ago. Part II then argues that the need for forbearance has at present become unusually acute. Finally, in Part III this essay identifies some of the qualities of the Obama care cases that make them such singular opportunities for the exercise of this much needed judicial virtue and answers some anticipated objections to thinking about the cases …

Political Hot Potato: How Closing Loopholes Can Get Policymakers Cooked, Stephanie Mcmahon

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Loopholes in the law are weaknesses that allow the law to be circumvented. Once created, they prove hard to eliminate. Acase study of the evolving tax unit used in the federal income tax explores policymakers' response to loopholes. The1913 income tax created an opportunity for wealthy married couples to shift ownership of family income between spouses, then to file separately, and, as a result, to reduce their collective taxes. In 1948, Congress closed this loophole by extending the income-splitting benefit to all married taxpayers filing jointly. Congress acted only after the federal judiciary and Treasury Department pleaded for congressional …

Judge Posner’S 'Practical' Theory Of Standing: Closer To Justice Breyer’S Approach To Standing Than Justice Scalia’S, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In American Bottom Conservancy v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit questioned three different grounds articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court for the constitutional doctrine of standing in federal courts and instead argued that the “solidest grounds” for the doctrine of standing are “practical.” In part because of his self-described “pragmatic” approach to legal reasoning, Judge Posner’s maverick views may have led Republican presidents to pass him over for being nominated to the Supreme Court in favor of less brilliant but more predictable conservative judges. Judge Posner’s pragmatic or practical approach to standing …

Nigro V. United States: The Most Disingenuous Supreme Court Opinion, Ever, A. Christopher Bryant

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The chief challenge presented by an opportunity to comment on the "Worst Supreme Court Opinion, Ever," is that so many candidates vie for the title. Fortunately, Professor Stempel has stipulated that the identification of a champion in no way implies acquiescence in any unnamed judicial wrongs. No sane scholar could accept the invitation on any other terms.

No doubt my choice of the Court's Prohibition-Era ruling in Nigro v. United States is a surprising one. Most scholars and lawyers have probably never even heard of the decision nor of the 1914 federal narcotics law that it unconscionably upheld. Nigro's obscurity …

Foreign Law As Legislative Fact In Constitutional Cases, A. Christopher Bryant

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Do we really need another law review article about foreign law in constitutional interpretation? In fact, we do. In the vast literature on the subject, a fundamental point has received scant attention. In the recent rulings that have stoked the present controversy, the Supreme Court has employed foreign law not as law, but rather merely as evidence of a legislative fact made relevant by domestic constitutional law. Commentators, however, have largely directed their attention to the merits of a genuine constitutional comparativism in which foreign law serves as a model for the creation of domestic constitutional doctrine. Many commentators have …

What Mcdonald Means For Unenumerated Rights, A. Christopher Bryant

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In June a splintered Supreme Court held in McDonald v. City of Chicago that the Second Amendment applied to state and local governments. But the case was about much more than handguns. It presented the Court with an unprecedented opportunity to correct its own erroneous precedent and revive the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause. The plurality declined the offer not, as Justice Alito’s opinion suggested, out of a profound respect for stare decisis, but rather because at least four Justices like the consequences of that ancient error, especially insofar as unenumerated rights are concerned. This observation in turn raises …

Realizing Padilla's Promise: Ensuring Noncitizen Defendants Are Advised Of The Immigration Consequences Of A Criminal Convictions, Yolanda Vazquez

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

On March 31, 2010 the United States Supreme court decided Padilla v. Kentucky and created a Sixth Amendment duty for defense attorneys to advise defendants of the immigration consequences of a criminal conviction. While Padilla answered the broad question of whether there is a duty to advise a defendant under the Sixth Amendment, it left many questions unanswered. One critical inquiry is how defense attorneys and the courts will determine what advice concerning the immigration consequences of the criminal conviction will satisfy defense counsels’ Sixth Amendment duty under Padilla.

This Article discusses the potential detrimental impact of Padilla’s ambiguous holding …

Advising Noncitizen Defendants On The Immigration Consequences Of Criminal Convictions: The Ethical Answer For The Criminal Defense Lawyer, The Court, And The Sixth Amendment, Yolanda Vazquez

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article discusses the tension between the Sixth Amendment analysis by courts on the issue of immigration consequences of criminal convictions and the moral and ethical duties that an attorney owes his noncitizen client. Under the majority of jurisdictions, federal circuit and state courts hold that there is no duty to advise on this issue because they are deemed to be “collateral”. However, a growing number of these jurisdictions have begun to find a Sixth Amendment violation for failure to advise. These jurisdictions have created a Sixth Amendment duty only when: 1) the attorney “knew or should have known” the …

What Best To Protect Transsexuals From Discrimination: Using Current Legislation Or Adopting A New Judicial Framework, S. Elizabeth Malloy

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This article specifically examines the issues and controversies that transsexual individuals have encountered as a result of their lack of protection under anti-discrimination laws, particularly the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Title VII. Part I is an overview of our society's binary sex/gender system and how this system serves to exclude and disenfranchise transsexuals. Part II examines the relationship between disability law and transsexuals, both explaining why they were excluded from the ADA and how state disability laws have provided more protection. Part III discusses how transsexuals have fared under a Title VII sex discrimination approach. This section also …

The Pursuit Of Perfection: Congressional Power To Enforce The Reconstruction Amendments, A. Christopher Bryant

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In June 2009 the Supreme Court avoided a decision on the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act's preclearance requirement, while at the same time managing to foreshadow that provision's ultimate demise. In a separate opinion, Justice Thomas announced that he would have reached the issue and invalidated the preclearance requirement. Conceding that unconstitutional racial discrimination in the administration of elections continued to be an unfortunate reality, he asserted that Congress was not permitted to pursue "perfect compliance" with the Constitution's mandate via the use of "broad prophylactic legislation."

Justice Thomas's statement accurately, though to be sure rather starkly, expressed an …

Summers V. Earth Island Institute Rejects Probabilistic Standing, But A 'Realistic Threat' Of Harm Is A Better Standing Test, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In Summers v. Earth Island Institute, the Supreme Court recently rejected Justice Breyer’s dissenting opinion’s proposed test for organizational standing based upon the statistical probability that some of an organization’s members will likely be harmed in the near future by a defendant’s allegedly illegal actions. Implicitly, however, the Court had recognized some form of probabilistic standing in Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw, which found standing where plaintiffs avoid recreational activities because of “reasonable concerns” about future health injuries from pollution; Summers did not overrule Laidlaw. There is an inherent tension between the Summers and Laidlaw decisions. This Article applies …

The Supreme Court's New Public-Private Distinction Under The Dormant Commerce Clause: Avoiding The Traditional Versus Nontraditional Classification Trap, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In its 2007 decision United Haulers Association, Inc. v. Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste Management Authority, the Supreme Court for the first time held that the ‘dormant’ Commerce Clause doctrine (DCCD) allows for a distinction between appropriate laws establishing local government monopolies that provide public services such as waste disposal as opposed to inappropriate laws favoring the self interest of in-state private businesses over out-of-state competition. In addition, the Court emphasized that courts should apply the DCCD more leniently in the area of waste disposal because it is a traditional local government function. In its 2008 decision Department of Revenue of Kentucky …

Should States Have Greater Standing Rights Than Ordinary Citizens?: Massachusetts V. Epa's New Standing Test For States, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In Massachusetts v. EPA, 127 S. Ct. 1438 (2007), the Supreme Court held that carbon dioxide (CO²) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) are air pollutants within the meaning of the Clean Air Act (CAA). Although its decision on the merits is important, the Court's conclusion that Massachusetts had standing to file suit because states are entitled to more lenient standing criteria may have a greater impact in the long-term on legal doctrine. In Massachusetts, the Supreme Court for the first time clearly gave greater standing rights to states than ordinary citizens. The Court, however, failed to explain to what extent …