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Full-Text Articles in Law
Corpus Linguistics Criticisms Of Heller Misuse Corpus Linguistics, Michael Showalter
Corpus Linguistics Criticisms Of Heller Misuse Corpus Linguistics, Michael Showalter
SMU Law Review Forum
A number of linguistics experts have asserted that new corpus-linguistics evidence undermines the U.S. Supreme Court’s conclusion in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment phrase keep and bear arms means to possess and carry weapons. At the time of ratification, the term bear arms carried both an idiomatic sense meaning “to serve as a soldier” and a literal sense meaning “to carry weapons.” The Heller majority concluded that the Second Amendment uses the literal sense, partly because the idiomatic reading has the absurd implication of causing the Amendment to protect a right to serve as a soldier. …
"Second-Class" Rhetoric, Ideology, And Doctrinal Change, Eric M. Ruben, Joseph Blocher
"Second-Class" Rhetoric, Ideology, And Doctrinal Change, Eric M. Ruben, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters
A common refrain in current constitutional discourse is that lawmakers and judges are systematically disfavoring certain rights. This allegation has been made about the rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, but it is most prominent in debates about the right to keep and bear arms. Such “second-class” treatment, the argument goes, signals that the Supreme Court must intervene aggressively to police the disrespected rights. Past empirical work casts doubt on the descriptive claim that judges and policymakers are disrespecting the Second Amendment, but that simply highlights how little we know about how the second-class argument functions as …
A Functional Approach To Agency (In)Action, Lidiya Mishchenko
A Functional Approach To Agency (In)Action, Lidiya Mishchenko
SMU Law Review
In the last five years, the Supreme Court has had a frenzied approach to judicial review of agency action, with two wings of the Court pulling it in opposite directions. The ideological divide of the Court on deference to agency action was on stark display in three recent cases dealing with the Patent and Trademark Office’s (PTO’s) new proceeding for reevaluating issued patents (inter partes review (IPR)). Specifically, in three vacillating opinions, the Court expanded, contracted, and then again expanded the scope of whether and to what extent a decision by the PTO Director to institute this new proceeding can …