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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Million-Dollar Diversity Docket, Steven Gensler, Roger Michalski
The Million-Dollar Diversity Docket, Steven Gensler, Roger Michalski
BYU Law Review
Congress has always imposed an amount in controversy requirement for general diversity jurisdiction. Congress initially set the jurisdictional amount at $500 in 1789 and has raised it six times, most recently in 1996 to its current $75,000 threshold. That requirement has been described as ensuring that the federal courts not become bogged down by “petty” or “insubstantial” state-law cases. Given that it has been twenty-five years since the last increase, we are probably overdue for another one. But to what amount? For what purpose? And with what effects on the size and composition of the diversity docket? What would happen …
Political Partisanship And Sincere Religious Conviction, Mark Satta
Political Partisanship And Sincere Religious Conviction, Mark Satta
BYU Law Review
In order for a religious conviction to receive protection under the First Amendment or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), it must be a sincere religious conviction. Some critics of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby have suggested that the plaintiffs in that case and in related cases were motivated more by political ideology than by sincere religious conviction. The remedy, they argue, is for courts to be quicker to scrutinize claims of religious sincerity. In this Article, I consider another possibility—namely, that current sociopolitical partisanship in the United States has eroded a clear distinction between political …
The Case Of The Smart City, Bruce Peabody, Kyle Morgan
The Case Of The Smart City, Bruce Peabody, Kyle Morgan
Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law
January 7, 2021, marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of Marsh v. Alabama, the case in which the Supreme Court of the United States extended the protections of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to a privately held “company town.” This article makes the case that the longstanding Marsh precedent, and the basic jurisprudential framework it set out, remain important in working through twenty-first century problems regarding public-private partnerships and their impact on constitutional rights. We bring this old ruling into our new century by extrapolating a hypothetical legal controversy from legislation currently under consideration in the states. Thus, the heart of our …