Law Commons^™

Liberty And Community In Constitutional Law: The Abortion Cases In Comparative Perspective, Donald P. Kommers

Journal Articles

In the mid-1970s the high courts of several western democracies handed down constitutional decisions concerning the legal regulation of abortion. All of the courts sustained their abortion statutes except the United States and West Germany, which moved in opposite directions. The US Supreme Court voided the conservative abortion statutes of various states while West Germany's highest court nullified an abortion statute that took a liberal stance on abortion. The extended opinions of the American and German courts and their contrasting grounds for decision make them fitting candidates for a comparative analysis of abortion jurisprudence. The abortion issue illustrates the tension …

Constitutional Law - Moore V. U.S. House Of Representatives: A Possible Expansion Of Congressmen's Standing To Sue, David T. Link, Jeffrey L. Elverman, Thomas E. Lange

Journal Articles

In Moore v. U.S. House of Representatives,I the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit addressed the question of whether individual congressmen have standing to sue the Congress. In Moore, members of the House of Representatives sought declaratory relief to invalidate the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA).2 The congressmen contended that TEFRA originated in the Senate in violation of the origination clause of the United States Constitution, 3 which requires that bills for raising revenue originate in the House of Representatives. Although the District of Columbia Circuit ultimately denied relief on the …

The Formulaic Constitution, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

The Supreme Court's constitutional jurisprudence of late has been filled with formulae - tests that must be met, hurdles that must be overcome. This multi-pronged analytical technique is, according to Professor Nagel, distancing the Justices from both their audience, the American public, and their text, the Constitution. In an effort to retain the authority of that text, the Court is instead displacing it; in an effort to persuade that audience, the Court is instead excluding it. Furthermore, the Court's attempt to constrain judges has actually created an irresponsible judicial freedom, while its attempt to locate a middle ground between the …

Rules And Standards, Pierre Schlag

Publications

No abstract provided.

Framers Intent: The Illegitimate Uses Of History, Pierre Schlag

Publications

No abstract provided.

Cooperative Federalism Under The Surface Mining Control And Reclamation Act: Is This Any Way To Run A Government?, Mark Squillace

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Pathological Perspective And The First Amendment, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Constitutions are designed to control, or at least influence, future events – political events, adjudicative events, to some extent even interactions between private parties. Yet the future is unknowable, largely unpredictable, and inevitably variable. At any moment there exists a short-run future, a long-run future, and a future in between. The future is virtually certain to contain some progress, some regression, some stability, some volatility. How is a constitution supposed to operate upon this vast panoply?

That is a question that ought to loom large in the deliberations of persons who propose and ratify new constitutions and new constitutional amendments. …

Distrust Of Democracy, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The current rediscovery of state constitutions has had a singular and curious feature: it has been focused largely on state constitutional provisions that are analogous, if not identical, to provisions of the United States Constitution. Scholars and jurists have devoted their attention to state protections of speech, state equal protection clauses, state privileges against self-incrimination, and state proscriptions of cruel and unusual punishments, and have developed interpretations of these texts that diverge from those adopted by the United States Supreme Court in construing comparable federal constitutional provisions. These attempts to play state variations on federal constitutional themes have not been …

The Origins And Original Significance Of The Just Compensation Clause Of The Fifth Amendment, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The principle that the state necessarily owes compensation when it takes private property was not generally accepted in either colonial or revolutionary America. Uncompensated takings were frequent and found justification first in appeals to the crown and later in republicanism, the ideology of the Revolution. The post-independence movement for just compensation requirements at the state and national level was part of a broader ideological shift away from republicanism, which stressed the primacy of the common good, and toward liberalism. At the time the Bill of Rights was adopted, that shift had not been completed, but the trends of the revolutionary …

The Development Of The Law Of Seditious Libel And The Control Of The Press, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

This article presents a new account of the development of the law of seditious libel from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth. It also outlines a new version of the relationship between the government and the press during that period. The article argues that it was the gradual erosion, during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of the legal foundations of the government's policies toward the press that eventually made necessary a new policy based on the law of libel. In the midsixteenth century, the Crown possessed a wide variety of means for dealing with the printed press, …

Less Than The Sum Of Its Parts, Charles F. Abernathy

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Constitutional Choices is not a newly created treatise but a collection of essays on a diverse range of topics. Most were printed previously in serial publications, and the others, one suspects, arose from projects undertaken independently of one another over the last few years. Such reprintings may strike some as a waste of paper and purchasers' money, but, as The New Yorker Album of Drawings amply proves, additional insight is often gained from seeing parts brought together as a whole. But that is not the case here, for the whole of Tribe's new book is less than the sum of …

Book Review Of Reconsecrating America, By George Goldberg, Ruti G. Teitel

Other Publications

No abstract provided.