Law Commons^™

Neither Trumps Nor Interests: Rights, Pluralism, And The Recovery Of Constitutional Judgment, Paul Linden-Retek

Cleveland State Law Review

This Article develops a novel framework for the adjudication of rights in an age of partisan and societal polarization. In so doing, it defends judicial review in a divided polity on new grounds. The Article makes two broad interventions.

First, the Article cautions against recent calls to shift rights adjudication in the United States from Dworkinian categoricalism toward proportionality analysis. Such calls correctly identify how categoricalism, by embracing the absolute nature of rights as “trumps,” pits citizens harshly against one another. The problem, however, is that proportionality’s proponents fail to see how it imposes a rights absolutism of its own. …

Ending The Economic War Among States, Nathan Altstadt

Cleveland State Law Review

The United States is under siege; however, the cause is not a foreign adversary. Rather, infighting among states to attract and retain big businesses is jeopardizing the Nation’s economic prosperity.

States compete for businesses, using tax incentives, hoping to capitalize on the benefits these businesses represent. Benefits include improved job growth numbers, a future increase in tax revenue, or, simply, elevated political clout. While competition can lead to a more efficient use of resources, unregulated competition between states for businesses does not illustrate this theory. A national auction for a business, where states are blind to rival offers, may, and …

A Constitutional Theory Of Territoriality: The Case Of Puerto Rico, Joel Colón-Ríos, Yaniv Roznai

Cleveland State Law Review

This Article offers an analysis of the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States that, unlike most of the existing literature, goes beyond discussions of the jurisprudence of U.S. courts and avoids providing merely descriptive or justificatory accounts. Using the tools of constitutional theory, we seek to describe the nature of what we call the “basic structure of territoriality,” the way that structure reproduces itself, and the possibility of its replacement. The basic structure of territoriality, we argue, is comprised by ten fundamental legal rules and five principles. Although those principles are not legally enforceable, they inform in important …