Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 30 of 239
Full-Text Articles in Law
Fee Simple Failures: Rural Landscapes And Race, Jessica A. Shoemaker
Fee Simple Failures: Rural Landscapes And Race, Jessica A. Shoemaker
Michigan Law Review
Property law’s roots are rural. America pursued an early agrarian vision that understood real property rights as instrumental to achieving a country of free, engaged citizens who cared for their communities and stewarded their physical place in it. But we have drifted far from this ideal. Today, American agriculture is industrialized, and rural communities are in decline. The fee simple ownership form has failed every agrarian objective but one: the maintenance of white landownership. For it was also embedded in the original American experiment that land ownership would be racialized for the benefit of its white citizens, through acts of …
Suspect Spheres, Not Enumerated Powers: A Guide For Leaving The Lamppost, Richard Primus, Roderick M. Hills Jr.
Suspect Spheres, Not Enumerated Powers: A Guide For Leaving The Lamppost, Richard Primus, Roderick M. Hills Jr.
Michigan Law Review
Despite longstanding orthodoxy, the Constitution’s enumeration of congressional powers does virtually nothing to limit federal lawmaking. That’s not because of some bizarrely persistent judicial failure to read the Constitution correctly. It’s because the enumeration of congressional powers is not a well-designed technology for limiting federal legislation. Rather than trying to make the enumeration do work that it will not do, decisionmakers should find better ways of thinking about what lawmaking should be done locally rather than nationally. This Article suggests such a rubric, one that asks not whether Congress has permission to do a certain thing but whether a certain …
The Limits Of Deliberation About The Public's Values, Mark Seidenfeld
The Limits Of Deliberation About The Public's Values, Mark Seidenfeld
Michigan Law Review
A Review of The Public's Law: Origins and Architecture of Progressive Democracy by Blake Emerson.
A Different Type Of Property: White Women And The Human Property They Kept, Michele Goodwin
A Different Type Of Property: White Women And The Human Property They Kept, Michele Goodwin
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. by Harriet A. Jacobs, and They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers.
United/States: A Revolutionary History Of American Statehood, Craig Green
United/States: A Revolutionary History Of American Statehood, Craig Green
Michigan Law Review
Where did states come from? Almost everyone thinks that states descended immediately, originally, and directly from British colonies, while only afterward joining together as the United States. As a matter of legal history, that is incorrect. States and the United States were created by revolutionary independence, and they developed simultaneously in that context as improvised entities that were profoundly interdependent and mutually constitutive, rather than separate or sequential.
“States-first” histories have provided foundational support for past and present arguments favoring states’ rights and state sovereignty. This Article gathers preconstitutional evidence about state constitutions, American independence, and territorial boundaries to challenge …
Conceptualizing Legal Childhood In The Twenty-First Century, Clare Huntington, Elizabeth S. Scott
Conceptualizing Legal Childhood In The Twenty-First Century, Clare Huntington, Elizabeth S. Scott
Michigan Law Review
The law governing children is complex, sometimes appearing almost incoherent. The relatively simple framework established in the Progressive Era, in which parents had primary authority over children, subject to limited state oversight, has broken down over the past few decades. Lawmakers started granting children some adult rights and privileges, raising questions about their traditional status as vulnerable, dependent, and legally incompetent beings. As children emerged as legal persons, children’s rights advocates challenged the rationale for parental authority, contending that robust parental rights often harm children. And a wave of punitive reforms in response to juvenile crime in the 1990s undermined …
Fixing America's Founding, Maeve Glass
Fixing America's Founding, Maeve Glass
Michigan Law Review
Review of Jonathan Gienapp's The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era.
Translating The Constitution, Jack M. Balkin
Translating The Constitution, Jack M. Balkin
Michigan Law Review
Review of Lawrence Lessig's Fidelity and Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution.
Coin, Currency, And Constitution: Reconsidering The National Bank Precedent, David S. Schwartz
Coin, Currency, And Constitution: Reconsidering The National Bank Precedent, David S. Schwartz
Michigan Law Review
Review of Eric Lomazoff's Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy: Politics and Law in the Early American Republic.
Fascism And Monopoly, Daniel A. Crane
Fascism And Monopoly, Daniel A. Crane
Michigan Law Review
The recent revival of political interest in antitrust has resurfaced a longstanding debate about the role of industrial concentration and monopoly in enabling Hitler’s rise to power and the Third Reich’s wars of aggression. Proponents of stronger antitrust enforcement argue that monopolies and cartels brought the Nazis to power and warn that rising concentration in the American economy could similarly threaten democracy. Skeptics demur, observing that German big business largely opposed Hitler during the crucial years of his ascent. Drawing on business histories and archival material from the U.S. Office of Military Government’s Decartelization Branch, this Article assesses the historical …
Tax Policy And Our Democracy, Clinton G. Wallace
Tax Policy And Our Democracy, Clinton G. Wallace
Michigan Law Review
Review of Anthony C. Infanti's Our Selfish Tax Laws: Toward Tax Reform That Mirrors Our Better Selves.
Racial Purges, Robert L. Tsai
Racial Purges, Robert L. Tsai
Michigan Law Review
Review of Beth Lew-Williams' The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.
The Outcome Of Influence: Hitler’S American Model And Transnational Legal History, Mary L. Dudziak
The Outcome Of Influence: Hitler’S American Model And Transnational Legal History, Mary L. Dudziak
Michigan Law Review
Review of James Q. Whitman's Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.
Looking Backward And Forward At The Suspension Clause, G. Edward White
Looking Backward And Forward At The Suspension Clause, G. Edward White
Michigan Law Review
Review of Amanda L. Tyler's Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay.
Fourth Amendment Fairness, Richard M. Re
Fourth Amendment Fairness, Richard M. Re
Michigan Law Review
Fourth Amendment doctrine is attentive to a wide range of interests, including security, informational privacy, and dignity. How should courts reconcile these competing concerns when deciding which searches and seizures are “unreasonable”? Current doctrine typically answers this question by pointing to interest aggregation: the various interests at stake are added up, placed on figurative scales, and compared, with the goal of promoting overall social welfare. But interest aggregation is disconnected from many settled doctrinal rules and leads to results that are unfair for individuals. The main alternative is originalism; but historical sources themselves suggest that the Fourth Amendment calls for …
Be Careful What You Wish For? Reducing Inequality In The Twenty-First Century, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Orli K. Avi-Yonah
Be Careful What You Wish For? Reducing Inequality In The Twenty-First Century, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Orli K. Avi-Yonah
Michigan Law Review
A review of Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century.
Why The Burger Court Mattered, David A. Strauss
Why The Burger Court Mattered, David A. Strauss
Michigan Law Review
A review of Michael J. Graetz and Linda Greenhouse, The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right.
Sex And Religion: Unholy Bedfellows, Mary-Rose Papandrea
Sex And Religion: Unholy Bedfellows, Mary-Rose Papandrea
Michigan Law Review
A review of Geoffrey R. Stone, Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century.
All Bathwater, No Baby: Expressive Theories Of Punishment And The Death Penalty, Susan A. Bandes
All Bathwater, No Baby: Expressive Theories Of Punishment And The Death Penalty, Susan A. Bandes
Michigan Law Review
A review of Carol S. Steiker and Jordan M. Steiker, Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment.
The Cunning Of Reason: Michael Klarman's The Framers' Coup, Charles Fried
The Cunning Of Reason: Michael Klarman's The Framers' Coup, Charles Fried
Michigan Law Review
A review of Michael J. Klarman, The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution.
Medicine As A Public Calling, Nicholas Bagley
Medicine As A Public Calling, Nicholas Bagley
Michigan Law Review
The debate over how to tame private medical spending tends to pit advocates of government-provided insurance—a single-payer scheme—against those who would prefer to harness market forces to hold down costs. When it is mentioned at all, the possibility of regulating the medical industry as a public utility is brusquely dismissed as anathema to the American regulatory tradition. This dismissiveness, however, rests on a failure to appreciate just how deeply the public utility model shaped health law in the twentieth century— and how it continues to shape health law today. Closer economic regulation of the medical industry may or may not …
The Sweeping Domestic War Powers Of Congress, Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash
The Sweeping Domestic War Powers Of Congress, Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash
Michigan Law Review
With the Habeas Clause standing as a curious exception, the Constitution seems mysteriously mute regarding federal authority during invasions and rebellions. In truth, the Constitution speaks volumes about these domestic wars. The inability to perceive the contours of the domestic wartime Constitution stems, in part, from unfamiliarity with the multifarious emergency legislation enacted during the Revolutionary War. During that war, state and national legislatures authorized the seizure of property, military trial of civilians, and temporary dictatorships. Ratified against the backdrop of these fairly recent wartime measures, the Constitution, via the Necessary and Proper Clause and other provisions, rather clearly augmented …
Saving Originalism, Robert J. Delahunty, John Yoo
Saving Originalism, Robert J. Delahunty, John Yoo
Michigan Law Review
It is sometimes said that biographers cannot help but come to admire, even love, their subjects. And that adage seems to ring true of Professor Amar, the foremost “biographer” of the Constitution. He loves it not just as a governing structure, or a political system, but as a document. He loves the Constitution in the same way that a fan of English literature might treasure Milton’s Paradise Lost or Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He loves the Constitution not just for the good: the separation of powers, federalism, and the Bill of Rights. He also loves it for its nooks and crannies, idiosyncrasies, …
Paths Of Resistance To Our Imperial First Amendment, Bertrall L. Ross Ii
Paths Of Resistance To Our Imperial First Amendment, Bertrall L. Ross Ii
Michigan Law Review
In the campaign finance realm, we are in the age of the imperial First Amendment. Over the past nine years, litigants bringing First Amendment claims against campaign finance regulations have prevailed in every case in the Supreme Court. A conservative core of five justices has developed virtually categorical protections for campaign speech and has continued to expand those protections into domains that states once had the authority to regulate. As the First Amendment’s empire expands, other values give way. Four key cases from this era illustrate the reach of this imperial First Amendment. In Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc. v. …
The Scope Of Precedent, Randy J. Kozel
The Scope Of Precedent, Randy J. Kozel
Michigan Law Review
The scope of Supreme Court precedent is capacious. Justices of the Court commonly defer to sweeping rationales and elaborate doctrinal frameworks articulated by their predecessors. This practice infuses judicial precedent with the prescriptive power of enacted constitutional and statutory text. The lower federal courts follow suit, regularly abiding by the Supreme Court’s broad pronouncements. These phenomena cannot be explained by—and, indeed, oftentimes subvert—the classic distinction between binding holdings and dispensable dicta. This Article connects the scope of precedent with recurring and foundational debates about the proper ends of judicial interpretation. A precedent’s forward- looking effect should not depend on the …
Some Kind Of Judge: Henry Friendly And The Law Of Federal Courts, Aaron P. Brecher
Some Kind Of Judge: Henry Friendly And The Law Of Federal Courts, Aaron P. Brecher
Michigan Law Review
Uberfans of the federal judiciary owe a lot to David Dorsen. His illuminating biography of Judge Henry Friendly is a fitting tribute to the contributions of a jurist that many consider to be among the finest judges never to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Judicial biography is a difficult genre to do well, and most authors choose to focus on Supreme Court justices. But Henry Friendly, Greatest Judge of His Era is an excellent source of information on Friendly’s life and, far more important, his views on the law and his relationships with some of the most fascinating figures …
A Pragmatic Republic, If You Can Keep It, William R. Sherman
A Pragmatic Republic, If You Can Keep It, William R. Sherman
Michigan Law Review
These things we know to be true: Our modern administrative state is a leviathan unimaginable by the Founders. It stands on thin constitutional ice, on cracks between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. It burdens and entangles state and local governments in schemes that threaten federalism. And it presents an irresolvable dilemma regarding democratic accountability and political independence. We know these things to be true because these precepts animate some of the most significant cases and public law scholarship of our time. Underlying our examination of administrative agencies is an assumption that the problems they present would have been bizarre …
Missing Mcveigh, Michael E. Tigar
Missing Mcveigh, Michael E. Tigar
Michigan Law Review
The bombing that killed at least 169 people became an event by which time was thereafter measured — at least in Oklahoma. Ninety minutes after the bombing, a state trooper arrested Timothy McVeigh on a traffic charge; within hours, he was linked to the bombing, and the legal process began. Terry Nichols, who had met McVeigh when they were in the army together, was arrested in Herington, Kansas, where he lived with his wife and daughter. The Tenth Circuit chief judge designated Richard Matsch, chief judge for the District of Colorado, to preside over the case. Judge Matsch came to …
Racial Templates, Richard Delgado, Juan F. Perea
Racial Templates, Richard Delgado, Juan F. Perea
Michigan Law Review
This riveting tale of greed, international skullduggery, and behind-the-scenes heroism recounts the events that led up to America’s “wicked war” with Mexico. It depicts how expansionist ambitions in high circles fueled jingoistic propaganda (pp. 25, 34–35, 58), fed a public eager for national muscle flexing (pp. 57, 103, 108), and set the stage for a military skirmish in a disputed region between two rivers (pp. 75–77, 95, 100, 138) that provided the pretext for a savage and short-lived military campaign against the weak new nation of Mexico in which the U.S. Army, under General Scott, marched all the way to …
A Time For Presidential Power? War Time And The Constrained Executive, David Levine
A Time For Presidential Power? War Time And The Constrained Executive, David Levine
Michigan Law Review
Between 2002 and 2008 I served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force. Though I had been deployed overseas several times, my primary place of duty was in the United States. When I landed at Baghdad International Airport in June 2006, however, several things immediately changed for me as a result of military regulations. I had to carry my sidearm and dog tags at all times. I could not eat anywhere other than a U.S. military installation. I could not drink alcohol. My pay was a bit higher. Personally, I was more vigilant, more aware of my surroundings. …