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Full-Text Articles in Law
Pure Politics, Girardeau A. Spann
Pure Politics, Girardeau A. Spann
Michigan Law Review
Part I of this article considers the impact that judicial discretion has on the traditional model of judicial review, and that model's reliance on the Supreme Court as the primary guardian of minority interests. Part II argues that the interests of racial minorities can be better advanced through the ordinary political process than through the process of Supreme Court adjudication. Part Ill emphasizes that minority participation in Supreme Court proceedings cannot ultimately be avoided and, accordingly, suggests a political model of the Court that minorities can use in an effort to neutralize the Court's distortion of the political process. Part …
Progressive And Conservative Constitutionalism, Robin West
Progressive And Conservative Constitutionalism, Robin West
Michigan Law Review
The article's central thesis is that the understandings of the constitutional tradition most central to both paradigms are determined by sometimes implicit, but more often explicit, political dispositions toward various forms of social and private power, and the normative authority to which social and private power gives rise. Very broadly, conservative constitutionalists view private or social normative authority as the legitimate and best source of guidance for state action; accordingly, they view both the Constitution and constitutional adjudication as means of preserving and protecting that authority and the power that undergirds it against either legislative or judicial encroachment. Progressive constitutionalists, …
Privacy In Connecticut, Arthur E. Sutherland
Privacy In Connecticut, Arthur E. Sutherland
Michigan Law Review
Occasionally a judgment of our Supreme Court, delivered in a superficially petty case, suddenly before our startled eyes displays fundamentals of our constitutional theory. Thus, in Griswold v. Connecticut, holding unconstitutional an 1879 Connecticut statute forbidding all persons to use contraceptive devices, the Court found it necessary to discover a "right of privacy" latent in the Bill of Rights and incorporated into the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment. The outcome of the case is satisfying; all nine Justices joined in saying, in one way or another, that Connecticut's statute was nonsense. I am happy to see this …
Reapportionment In The Supreme Court And Congress: Constitutional Struggle For Fair Representation, Robert G. Dixon Jr.
Reapportionment In The Supreme Court And Congress: Constitutional Struggle For Fair Representation, Robert G. Dixon Jr.
Michigan Law Review
Fair representation is the ultimate goal. At the time of the Reapportionment Decisions, much change was overdue in some states, and at least some change was overdue in most states. We are a democratic people and our institutions presuppose according population a dominant role in formulas of representation. However, by its exclusive focus on bare numbers, the Court may have transformed one of the most intricate, fascinating, and elusive problems of democracy into a simple exercise of applying elementary arithmetic to census data. In so doing, the Court may have disabled itself from effectively considering the more subtle issues …