Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 20 of 20
Full-Text Articles in Law
A Perfectly Empty Gift, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus
A Perfectly Empty Gift, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire. by Sam Erman.
Ely At The Altar: Political Process Theory Through The Lens Of The Marriage Debate, Jane S. Schacter
Ely At The Altar: Political Process Theory Through The Lens Of The Marriage Debate, Jane S. Schacter
Michigan Law Review
Political process theory, closely associated with the work of John Hart Ely and footnote four in United States v. Carolene Products, has long been a staple of constitutional law and theory. It is best known for the idea that courts may legitimately reject the decisions of a majority when the democratic process that produced the decision was unfair to a disadvantaged social group. This Article analyzes political process theory through the lens of the contemporary debate over same-sex marriage. Its analysis is grounded in state supreme court decisions on the constitutionality of barring same-sex marriage, as well as the high-profile, …
Constitutional Borrowing, Nelson Tebbe, Robert L. Tsai
Constitutional Borrowing, Nelson Tebbe, Robert L. Tsai
Michigan Law Review
Borrowing from one domain to promote ideas in another domain is a staple of constitutional decisionmaking. Precedents, arguments, concepts, tropes, and heuristics all can be carried across doctrinal boundaries for purposes of persuasion. Yet the practice itself remains underanalyzed. This Article seeks to bring greater theoretical attention to the matter It defines what constitutional borrowing is and what it is not, presents a typology that describes its common forms, undertakes a principled defense of borrowing, and identifies some of the risks involved. Our examples draw particular attention to places where legal mechanisms and ideas migrate between fields of law associated …
Sexualized Racism/Gendered Violence: Outraging The Body Politic In The Reconstruction South, Lisa Cardyn
Sexualized Racism/Gendered Violence: Outraging The Body Politic In The Reconstruction South, Lisa Cardyn
Michigan Law Review
From its establishment in the months following the Civil War by a motley assortment of disgruntled former rebels, the first Ku Klux Klan, like its many vigilante counterparts, employed terror to realize its invidious social and political aspirations. This terror assumed disparate shapes - from the storied nightriding of disguised bands on horseback, to cryptic threats, horrific assaults, and, not infrequently, murder. While students of Reconstruction have considered many facets of klan violence, none to date has focused exclusively on sexual violence in its historical specificity. Yet, as the work of Catherine Clinton, Laura Edwards, and Martha Hodes persuasively demonstrates, …
What's Wrong With Our Talk About Race? On History, Particularity, And Affirmative Action, James Boyd White
What's Wrong With Our Talk About Race? On History, Particularity, And Affirmative Action, James Boyd White
Michigan Law Review
One of the striking and original achievements of the Michigan Law Review in its first century was the publication in 1989 of a Symposium entitled Legal Storytelling. Organized by the remarkable editor-in-chief, Kevin Kennedy - who tragically died not long after his graduation - the Symposium not only brought an important topic to the forefront of legal thinking, it did so in an extraordinarily interesting way. For this was not a mere collection of papers; the authors met in small editorial groups to discuss their work in detail, and as a result the whole project has a remarkable coherence and …
When Constitutional Worlds Colide: Resurrecting The Framers' Bill Of Rights And Criminal Procedure, George C. Thomas Iii
When Constitutional Worlds Colide: Resurrecting The Framers' Bill Of Rights And Criminal Procedure, George C. Thomas Iii
Michigan Law Review
For two hundred years, the Supreme Court has been interpreting the Bill of Rights. Imagine Chief Justice John Marshall sitting in the dim, narrow Supreme Court chambers, pondering the interpretation of the Sixth Amendment right to compulsory process in United States v. Burr. Aaron Burr was charged with treason for planning to invade the Louisiana Territory and create a separate government there. To help prepare his defense, Burr wanted to see a letter written by General James Wilkinson to President Jefferson. In ruling on Burr's motion to compel disclosure, Marshall departed from the literal language of the Sixth Amendment - …
Morgan Kousser's Noble Dream, Heather K. Gerken
Morgan Kousser's Noble Dream, Heather K. Gerken
Michigan Law Review
J. Morgan Kousser, professor of history and social science at the California Institute of Technology, is an unusual academic. He enjoys the respect of two quite different groups - historians and civil rights litigators. As a historian, Kousser has written a number of important works on the American South in the tradition of his mentor, C. Vann Woodward, including a foundational book on southern political history, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910. Many of his writings have become seminal texts among election law scholars. Kousser has also used his historical skills …
Because We Love You, Rosemary B. Quigley
Because We Love You, Rosemary B. Quigley
Michigan Law Review
I remember the impotence I felt on the eve of the Gulf War in January 1991. No one could have known at that moment what a brief conflict it would be. We had every reason to believe that the Middle East would be hurled into turmoil. And if protracted war ensued, a draft would surely follow. I watched my college boyfriend sink into despair, with the help of a Bob Mould CD, at the prospect of being called to give his life for his country. I remained uncharacteristically mute. In the face of this battle, our positions were too unequal …
Healing The Blind Goddess: Race And Criminal Justice, Mark D. Rosenbaum, Daniel P. Tokaji
Healing The Blind Goddess: Race And Criminal Justice, Mark D. Rosenbaum, Daniel P. Tokaji
Michigan Law Review
Once again, issues of race, ethnicity, and class within our criminal justice system have been thrust into the public spotlight. On both sides of the country, in our nation's two largest cities, police are being called to account for acts of violence directed toward poor people of color. In New York City, a West African immigrant named Amadou Diallo was killed by four white police officers, who fired forty-one bullets at the unarmed man as he stood in the vestibule of his apartment building in a poor section of the Bronx. Did race influence the officers' decisions to fire the …
The Importance Of Being Biased, Anthony M. Dillof
The Importance Of Being Biased, Anthony M. Dillof
Michigan Law Review
The war against bias crimes is far from finished. In contrast, the battle over bias-crime laws is largely over. Bias-crime laws, as commonly formulated, increase the penalties for crimes motivated by bias. The Supreme Court has held that such laws do not violate the First Amendment. Virtually every state has enacted some sort of biascrime law. Even the federal government, which may consider itself without power to enact a general bias-crime law, has made bias a sentence-aggravating factor for the range of federal criminal offenses. Bias-crime laws thus are an established feature of the legal landscape. Against this background, Frederick …
Life On Campus Really Ain't So Bad, Avern Cohn
Life On Campus Really Ain't So Bad, Avern Cohn
Michigan Law Review
The Shadow University is a highly tendentious account of Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate's view of academic and student life in America's colleges and universities over the last twenty years. Kors and Silverglate see these colleges and universities turning from promoting personal and academic freedom to suppressing open expression and denying basic liberties to students and faculty alike. To make their point, they have scoured college and university campuses from coast to coast to find incidents involving student speech code violations, as well as student and faculty discipline and misbehavior proceedings. They also examine multicultural and diversity programs …
Punishing Hateful Motives: Old Wine In A New Bottle Revives Calls For Prohibition, Carol S. Steiker
Punishing Hateful Motives: Old Wine In A New Bottle Revives Calls For Prohibition, Carol S. Steiker
Michigan Law Review
Hate crimes are nothing new: crimes in which the victim is selected because of the victim's membership in some distinctive group (be it racial, ethnic, religious, or other) have been with us as long as such groups have coexisted within legal systems. What is relatively new is their recognition and designation as a discrete phenomenon. But as appellations like "sexual harassment" and "community policing" have begun to teach us, words are only the beginning of the life cycle of a new socio-legal concept. What follows are debates about whether the new category is really a coherent one, what activities should …
The Countermajoritarian Paradox, Neal Davis
The Countermajoritarian Paradox, Neal Davis
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. by David J. Garrow
The Law's Conscience: Equitable Constitutionalism In America, Neil A. Riemann
The Law's Conscience: Equitable Constitutionalism In America, Neil A. Riemann
Michigan Law Review
A Review of The Law's Conscience: Equitable Constitutionalism in America by Peter Charles Hoffer
Decoding Richmond: Affirmative Action And The Elusive Meaning Of Constitutional Equality, Michel Rosenfeld
Decoding Richmond: Affirmative Action And The Elusive Meaning Of Constitutional Equality, Michel Rosenfeld
Michigan Law Review
This Article first briefly considers the conceptual and constitutional framework out of which the controversy in Croson emerges. Next, the Article turns to Croson itself, and focuses on the Court's adoption of the strict scrutiny test, on the disagreement among the Justices concerning the test's meaning and implications, and on the Court's use of decontextualization to manipulate the key conceptual and factual issues at stake. Finally, drawing upon the principle of equality of opportunity, the Article endeavors to demonstrate how the adoption of particular principles of substantive equality can lead to a comprehensive and coherent constitutional resolution of the affirmative …
Philosophical Perspectives On Affirmative Action, Kenneth W. Simons
Philosophical Perspectives On Affirmative Action, Kenneth W. Simons
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Equality and Preferential Treatment: A Philosophy & Public Affairs Reader edited by Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon
Educational Financing, Equal Protection Of The Laws, And The Supreme Court, Michigan Law Review
Educational Financing, Equal Protection Of The Laws, And The Supreme Court, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
Recently, state systems of financing public education have been overturned or seriously threatened by several state and federal court cases based on the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment. Rodriguez v. San Antonio Independent School District, which invalidated the Texas system of educational financing, will be argued before the Supreme Court next term. This Comment will examine the doctrinal and policy problems that the Court will confront and the alternative solutions that are available to the Court when it considers the constitutionality of the Texas system, which is typical of the educational financing programs that have generated so …
Constitutional Law - Equal Protection - Racial Discrimination And The Role Of The State, William C. Griffith S.Ed.
Constitutional Law - Equal Protection - Racial Discrimination And The Role Of The State, William C. Griffith S.Ed.
Michigan Law Review
Constitutional history from the 1857 Dred Scott decision to the 1954 Brown decision records "a movement from status to contract" for the American Negro. Although uncertainty clouds the definition of "state action," the civil rights of the Negro under the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment have been clearly established. The Negro citizen has arrived; the Negro minority group remains one of the gravest social problems of twentieth century America. De facto school segregation, limited economic opportunity, and inadequate housing are problems not solved by invocation of the fourteenth amendment or incantation of the Declaration of Independence. Solution, …
Greenberg: Race Relations And American Law, Spencer L. Kimball
Greenberg: Race Relations And American Law, Spencer L. Kimball
Michigan Law Review
A Review of RACE RELATIONS AND AMERICAN LAW. By Jack Greenberg.
Taxation-Constitutional Law-Classifcation Of Corporations
Taxation-Constitutional Law-Classifcation Of Corporations
Michigan Law Review
The equal protection clause does not detract from the right of the state justly to exert its taxing power or prevent it from adjusting its legislation to differences in situation or forbid classification in that connection, but it does require that the classification be not arbitrary, but based on a real and substantial difference having a reasonable relation to the subject of the particular legislation. Though this is the generally accepted rule as to classification, it has long been recognized by the Supreme Court that the very nature of taxation demands that the legislatures be given the widest sort of …