Law Commons^™

Scott V. Sandford: The Court's Most Dreadful Case And How It Changed History, Paul Finkelman

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Dred Scott, without doubt, is the most controversial case in the history of the United States Supreme Court. Unlike the controversies that surround other decisions of the Court, the controversy surrounding Dred Scott does not turn on if the outcome or Chief Justice Taney's analysis was wrong, but rather on why the outcome and Chief Justice Taney's analysis were wrong. This article focuses on the political goals Taney attempted to accomplish through his decision in Dred Scott. Though there existed reasons for Taney's belief that his decision in Dred Scott would once and for all end the political …

Thirteen Ways Of Looking At Dred Scott, Jack M. Balkin, Sanford Levinson

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Dred Scott v. Sandford is a classic case that is relevant to almost every important question of contemporary constitutional theory.

Dred Scott connected race to social status, to citizenship, and to being a part of the American people. One hundred fifty years later these connections still haunt us; and the twin questions of who is truly American and who America belongs to still roil our national debates.

Dred Scott is a case about threats to national security and whether the Constitution is a suicide pact. It concerns whether the Constitution follows the flag and whether constitutional rights obtain in federally …

Rethinking Dred Scott: New Context For An Old Case, Austin Allen

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Scholars have misunderstood the context in which Dred Scott emerged. Leading historical interpretations of the decision have relied too heavily on accounts developed by antebellum Republicans and on mid-twentieth-century legal theory. This article offers an alternative account of Dred Scott's origins and argues that the decision emerged from a series of unintended consequences resulting from the Taney Court's efforts to incorporate a Jacksonian vision of governance into constitutional law. By 1857, this effort had generated tensions that made a sweeping decision like Dred Scott nearly unavoidable. The inescapable nature of Dred Scott carries implications for constitutional theorists, especially those …

The New Fiction: Dred Scott And The Language Of Judicial Authority, Mark A. Graber

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Claims that the Justices in Dred Scott abandoned a tradition of judicial restraint rely on an anachronistic measure for judicial activism. Antebellum Justices asserted that laws were unconstitutional only when restraining state officials. Judicial etiquette, in their opinion, required more circumspection when imposing constitutional limits on a coordinate branch of the national government. Contrary to accepted wisdom, the Justices before the Civil War imposed constitutional limitations on federal power in approximately twenty cases. They did so, however, without explicitly declaring federal legislation unconstitutional. The Justices in some federal cases ignored the plain meaning of federal statutes on the ground that …

Dred Scott: Tiered Citizenship And Tiered Personhood, Henry L. Chambers Jr.

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The Dred Scott Court accepted and perpetuated the notion that our Constitution afforded multiple tiers of citizenship and multiple tiers of personhood through which different groups of citizens and different groups of persons would receive varying sets of rights. Through their language and interpretation, the Reconstruction Amendments largely resolved this issue by providing a formal equality that created a single tier of citizenship and a single tier of personhood. Though, as a formal matter, tiered citizenship and tiered personhood are unacceptable, the issue is not fully resolved as a practical matter. Tiered citizenship and tiered personhood may exist when the …

Emergence Of Equality As A Constitutional Value: The First Century, William M. Wiecek

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Equality as a constitutional value was unprecedented when it made its appearance in 1868 in the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It reflected antebellum abolitionist ideals adopted hesitantly by Northern Republicans during Reconstruction, but these were incompatible with the expectations of most white Americans of the era, as well as with all previous American experiences. In this sense, equality was a revolutionary constitutional value. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment intended the Equal Protection Clause and its embedded ideal of interracial equality to reverse the racist dicta of the Dred Scott opinion, to validate the Civil Rights Act …

The Last Angry Man: Benjamin Robbins Curtis And The Dred Scott Case, Earl M. Maltz

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The dissenting opinion of Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis in Dred Scott has generally received lavish praise from commentators. Curtis is typically praised not only for his substantive conclusions, but also for his seemingly dispassionate analysis of the legal issues presented by the case. In many respects, this praise is well-deserved; Curtis's discussions of the issues of slavery in the territories and citizenship for free blacks are models of legal reasoning. However, a close analysis of other aspects of his opinion reveals that Curtis's analysis was at times distorted by his anger with the actions of Chief Justice Taney and other …

Legality And Legitimacy In Dred Scott: The Crisis Of The Incomplete Constitution, Michael P. Zuckert

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The original Constitution was incomplete in that it contained a disparity between the principles of legitimacy of the system and the legality of the institution of slavery. Political communities marked by such disharmony are beset with pressures to make the system consistent in one way or another. Such indeed was the fate of the U.S. during the antebellum era. Three typical responses arose: to make legality correspond to legality (by redefining the principles of legitimacy of the system), to make legality conform to legitimacy (by doing away with slavery), or to maintain the tension in ever more creative ways. The …

Benjamin Curtis: Top Of The List, R. Owen Williams

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Among the many brave and brilliant dissents from the Supreme Court, few are more historically significant than that of Benjamin Curtis in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Earl Maltz insists that the traditional view of Curtis as a dispassionate Justice is incorrect; Curtis is better seen as the "Last Angry Man." This paper considers the famous dissent, the man who wrote it, and the technical analysis Maltz claims as sine qua non to a proper understanding of the opinion.

Foreign Authority, American Exceptionalism, And The Dred Scott Case, Sarah H. Cleveland

Chicago-Kent Law Review

One distinctive feature of the Dred Scott decision for modern readers is the extent to which the Supreme Court Justices looked to foreign and international law in support of their decisions. The legal status of a slave who entered a free jurisdiction was a question that had been confronted by many courts at home and abroad, and international law had played an important role in American and European adjudication of slavery questions. The Justices therefore were confronted with the strikingly modern question of the extent to which U.S. law embraced, or distinguished itself from, foreign practice. Arguments from foreign and …

Searching For A Needle In A Haystack: The Constitutionality Of Police Dna Dragnets, Sepideh Esmaili

Chicago-Kent Law Review

DNA dragnets—the mass warrantless DNA testing of individuals whom authorities have neither probable cause nor reasonable suspicion to believe perpetrated a crime, but who merely live or work near a crime scene—have increasingly been used by police departments in a desperate attempt to solve puzzling crimes. The lack of success and the Fourth Amendment constitutional concerns raised by DNA dragnets, however, lead this practice to be suspect. Under the Fourth Amendment, all searches of an individual must be reasonable. The reasonableness of any search typically depends on the government obtaining a warrant prior to the search. While there are well-established …

Signed General Releases May Be Worth Less Than Employers Expected: Circuits Split On Whether Former Employee Can Sign Release, Reap Its Benefit, And Sue For Fmla Claim Anyway, Muniza Bawaney

Chicago-Kent Law Review

A circuit split has recently developed regarding the correct interpretation of 29 C.F.R. § 825.220(d), a regulation issued pursuant to the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which states in pertinent part, "Employees cannot waive, nor may employers induce employees to waive, their rights under FMLA." The Fifth Circuit correctly concluded that 29 C.F.R. § 825.220(d) bars only the prospective waiver of substantive rights under the FMLA and does not reach the post-dispute release or settlement of FMLA claims. Subsequently, the Fourth Circuit alternatively concluded that § 825.220(d) prohibits the prospective and retrospective waiver or release of both the …

Hepatitis C In Prisons: Evolving Toward Decency Through Adequate Medical Care And Public Health Reform, Andrew Brunsden

Articles & Chapters

Hepatitis C (HCV) in prisons is a public health crisis tied to current drug policy's emphasis on the mass incarceration of drug users. Prison policy acts as a barrier to HCV care by limiting medical care for the infected, especially drug users, and by inhibiting public health measures addressing the epidemic. This Comment argues that courts mistakenly limit prisoners' Eighth Amendment right to basic medical care when they defer to prisons that apply HCV policies as categorical rules of treatment. Where current standards of care mandate individualized patient evaluation for treatment, prison policies that eschew this principle exhibit deliberate indifference …

Working Toward Democracy: Thurgood Marshall And The Constitution Of Kenya, Mary L. Dudziak

Duke Law Journal

This Article is a work of transnational legal history. Drawing upon new research in foreign archives, it sheds new light on the life of Thurgood Marshall, exploring for the first time an episode that he cared very deeply about. his work with African nationalists on an independence constitution for Kenya. The story is paradoxical, for Marshall, a civil rights legend in America, would seek to protect the rights of white landholders in Kenya who had gained their land through discriminatory land laws, but were soon to lose political power. In order to understand why Marshall would take pride in entrenching …

Against Individually Signed Judicial Opinions, James Markham

Duke Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Jurisdictional Heritage Of The Grand Jury Clause, Roger A. Fairfax

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Introduction, John Henry Schlegel

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Federal Court Self-Preservation And Terri Schiavo, Jack M. Beermann

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Belief: An Essay In Understanding, Shubha Ghosh

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Looking At The Overlooked: Portraits Of Law School Deans, Peter Goodrich

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Iraq Paradox: Minority And Group Rights In A Viable Constitution, Makau Mutua

Buffalo Law Review

On October 15, 2005 an Iraq ravaged by a civil war spawned by the 2003 American invasion and subsequent occupation voted to decide the fate of a permanent constitution for the country. Although many Sunni Arabs took part in the vote, the referendum lost in the three governorates where they form a majority. But the constitution was approved because opponents only succeeded in recording "no" votes larger than two-thirds in only two of Iraq's eighteen provinces, in effect one province short of a veto. A two-thirds rejection in three provinces would have doomed the charter and the transition to a …

The Modern Transformation Of Civil Law, George L. Priest

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bin Laden's War, David A. Westbrook

Buffalo Law Review

The GWOT/Global Jihad is different from prior conflicts (including the ideological struggle of the Cold War), and these differences have important strategic consequences which are not reflected in current US policy. First, US strategy has proceeded on traditional, and inapposite, understandings of the politics that informs this war. Second, radical neofundamentalism is a new form of political organization, attuned to a globalized world, with a distinctive form of violence quite different from the violence organized by the bureaucratic apparatus of a modern professional military grounded in a nation state. Third, the politics of radical neofundamentalism has strategic consequences. On the …

Coercion And Terrorism Prosecutions In The Shadow Of Military Detention, Tung Yin

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Disabled Ada: How A Narrowing Ada Threatens To Exclude The Cognitively Disabled, Nathan Catchpole, Aaron Miller

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Teaching From The Closet: Freedom Of Expression And Outspeech By Public School Teachers, Eva Dubuisson

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Materiality And Social Change: The Case For Replacing "The Reasonable Investor" With "The Least Sophisticated Investor" In Inefficient Markets, Margaret V. Sachs

Scholarly Works

The current materiality standard for federal securities fraud is a mid-twentieth-century construct that fails to accommodate certain twenty-first century realities. This Article argues that its reach should be restricted to preserve it for the many circumstances in which it continues to function well.

The current standard measures materiality from the standpoint of "the reasonable investor," a savvy person who grasps market fundamentals. This standard has a fatal flaw: its inability to protect unsophisticated investors who are duped by implausible falsehoods in inefficient markets. This flaw can no longer be ignored given Internet and telemarketing securities fraud and its many unsophisticated, …

Court Review: Volume 42, Issue 3-4 - Complete Issue

Court Review: The Journal of the American Judges Association

No abstract provided.

Court Review: Volume 42, Issue 3-4 - Table Of Contents

Court Review: The Journal of the American Judges Association

No abstract provided.

Court Review: Volume 42, Issue 3-4 - Editor's Note

Court Review: The Journal of the American Judges Association

This issue presents four viewpoints on current issues involving judicial elections, politics, and the effect of public opinion on the courts. In our lead article, Shira Goodman and Lynn Marks of Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts tell the story of Pennsylvania’s 2005 retention election for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. With very little warning, public opposition developed to the retention of two justices: one was retained with 54% of the vote and one was thrown out of office with only 49% voting to retain him. The election was unusual because it did not relate to opinions issued by either justice. Rather, the …