Law Commons^™

Constituciones Duraderas – Una Crítica Democrática (Enduring Constitutions – A Democratic Critique), Allan C. Hutchinson, Joel Colon-Rios

Allan C. Hutchinson

This paper argues that formal constitutions and their institutional paraphernalia do more to inhibit and mitigate the emancipatory potential of democracy than to nurture and realize it. Spanish Abstract: La relación entre democracia y constituciones es larga y turbulenta. La tendencia de los que se inclinan hacia el lado constitucionalista ha sido la de percibir a la democracia como una amenaza al orden político y a la preservación de ciertos valores considerados importantes, mientras que los que adoptan una postura democrática, más que cualquier otra cosa, tienden a tratar a las constituciones como un obstáculo a la participación popular. En …

Dignity, Vol 1, Issue 1, 2016, Donna M. Hughes Dr.

Donna M. Hughes

Nonprofits, Politics, And Privacy, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

No abstract provided.

Politics At The Pulpit: Tax Benefits, Substantial Burdens, And Institutional Free Exercise, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

More than fifty years ago, Congress enacted a prohibition against political campaign intervention for all charities, including churches and other houses of worship, as a condition for receiving tax deductible contributions. Yet the IRS has never taken a house of worship to court for alleged violation of the prohibition through political comments from the pulpit, presumably at least in part because of concerns about the constitutionality of doing so. This decision is surprising, because a careful review of Free Exercise Clause case law - both before and after the landmark Employment Division v. Smith decision - reveals that the prohibition …

The Much Maligned 527 And Institutional Choice, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

The continuing controversy over 527 organizations has led Congress to impose extensive disclosure requirements on these political organizations and to consider imposing extensive restrictions on their funding as well. The debate about what laws should govern these entities has, however, so far almost completely ignored the fact that such laws raise a complicated institutional choice question. This Article seeks to resolve that question by developing a new institutional choice framework to guide this and similar choices. The Article first explores the context for making this determination by describing the current laws governing 527s, including both federal election laws administered by …

Grasping Smoke: Enforcing The Ban On Political Activity By Charities, Lloyd Histoshi Mayer

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

The rule that charities are not allowed to intervene in political campaigns has now been in place for over fifty years. Despite uncertainty about the exact reasons for Congress' enactment of it, skepticism by some about its validity for both constitutional and public policy reasons, and continued confusion about its exact parameters, this rule has survived virtually unchanged for all of those years. Yet while overall noncompliance with the income tax laws has drawn significant scholarly attention, few scholars have focused on violations of this prohibition and the IRS' attempts to enforce it. This Article focuses on the elusive issue …

Sex Trafficking Of Women Around U.S. Military Bases In South Korea: Impact Of New U.S. Laws And Policies Since 2000, Amy Levesque, Donna M. Hughes Dr.

Donna M. Hughes

Fostering Resilience And Belonging In Marginalized Law Students, Carol Pauli

Carol Pauli

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Case Complexity In Judicial Decision Making., Laura P. Moyer

Laura Moyer

The literature on ideology and decision making offers conflicting expectations about how judges’ ideology should affect their votes in cases that raise many legal issues. Using cases from the U.S. Courts of Appeals, I examine the strength of ideology as a predictor of sincere voting in single and multi-issue cases and test whether the same effect for ideology can be seen for liberal and conservative judges. For all judges, ideology yields a larger effect as the number of issues increases; however, conservative judges are much more likely than liberal judges to cast sincere votes at all levels of complexity.

The Political Branches And The Law Of Nations, Bradford R. Clark, Anthony J. Bellia

Anthony J. Bellia

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the U.S. Supreme Court went out of its way to follow background rules of the law of nations, particularly the law of state-state relations. As we have recently argued, the Court followed the law of nations because adherence to such law preserved the constitutional prerogatives of the political branches to conduct foreign relations and decide momentous questions of war and peace. Although we focused primarily on the extent to which the Constitution obligated courts to follow the law of nations in the early republic, the explanation we offered rested on an important, …

Law, Religion, And Politics: Understanding The Separation Of Church And State, Richard Garnett

Richard W Garnett

Professor Richard Garnett, of University of Notre Dame Law School, presented on the topic Law, Religion, and Politics: Understanding the Separation of Church and State. This workshop was presented as part of the Hesburgh Lecture Series through the Alumni & Friends of University of Notre Dame and was co-sponsored by the Notre Dame Alumni Club of Miami. This workshop examined how to understand the Constitution's "separation of church and state" and what it requires of religious believers and institutions.

Private Enforcement, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang, Herbert Kritzer

Sean Farhang

Our aim in this Article is to advance understanding of private enforcement of statutory and administrative law in the United States and to raise questions that will be useful to those who are concerned with regulatory design in other countries. To that end, we briefly discuss aspects of American culture, history, and political institutions that reasonably can be thought to have contributed to the growth and subsequent development of private enforcement. We also set forth key elements of the general legal landscape in which decisions about private enforcement are made, aspects of which should be central to the choice of …

The Subterranean Counterrevolution: The Supreme Court, The Media, And Litigation Retrenchment, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

Sean Farhang

This article is part of a larger project to study the counterrevolution against private enforcement of federal law from an institutional perspective. In a series of articles emerging from the project, we show how the Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court (wielding both judicial power under Article III of the Constitution and delegated legislative power under the Rules Enabling Act) fared in efforts to reverse or dull the effects of statutory and other incentives for private enforcement. An institutional perspective helps to explain the outcome we document: the long-term erosion of the infrastructure of private enforcement as a result of …

Litigation Reform: An Institutional Approach, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

Sean Farhang

The program of regulation through private litigation that Democratic Congresses purposefully created starting in the late 1960s soon met opposition emanating primarily from the Republican party. In the long campaign for retrenchment that began in the Reagan administration, consequential reform proved difficult and ultimately failed in Congress. Litigation reformers turned to the courts and, in marked contrast to their legislative failure, were well-rewarded, achieving growing rates of voting support from an increasingly conservative Supreme Court on issues curtailing private enforcement under individual statutes. We also demonstrate that the judiciary’s control of procedure has been central to the campaign to retrench …

Class Actions And The Counterrevolution Against Federal Litigation, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

Sean Farhang

In this article we situate consideration of class actions in a framework, and fortify it with data, that we have developed as part of a larger project, the goal of which is to assess the counterrevolution against private enforcement of federal law from an institutional perspective. In a series of articles emerging from the project, we have documented how the Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court (wielding both judicial power under Article III of the Constitution and delegated legislative power under the Rules Enabling Act) fared in efforts to reverse or dull the effects of statutory and other incentives for …

Education Rights And Wrongs: Publicly Funded Vouchers, State Consitutions, And Education Death Spirals, Michael Heise

Michael Heise

No abstract provided.

Institutional Pluralism From The Standpoint Of Its Victims: Calling The Question On Indiscriminate (In)Tolerance, Jose M. Gabilondo

José Gabilondo

Borrowing from postmodernity, new Right intellectuals have become adept at plucking core terms from the liberal register, stripping away their history and social context, and making them do the conceptual work of backlash. A recent example is the theme of the 2009 annual meeting of the AALS: institutional pluralism. The phrase has a surface resemblance to traditional liberal values but, in truth, acts as a Trojan horse for discrimination projects that many may find troubling. By putting the phrase in its social context, this essay reveals the ideological interests at work in the idea.

When God Hates: How Liberal Guilt Lets The New Right Get Away With Murder, Jose M. Gabilondo

José Gabilondo

No abstract provided.

From Paper To Electronic Order: The Digitalization Of The Check In The Usa*, Benjamin Geva

Benjamin Geva

No abstract provided.

Law, Politics, And Legacy Building At The Mclachlin Court In 2014, Jamie Cameron

Jamie Cameron

This Article was written for Osgoode Hall Law School’s annual Constitutional Cases conference, and provides the keynote overview of the McLachlin Court’s 2014 constitutional jurisprudence. The Court’s 2014 constitutional decisions (Appointment and Senate References; Tsilqot’in Nation; Trial Lawyers) and restrictions on Mr. Big operations (Hart), in combination with a tsunami of Charter decisions early in 2015 (the 2015 Labour Trilogy; Carter v. Canada; R. v. Nur; and others), made this a legacy-building year. More than an overview, this Article probes the nature of the McLachlin Court’s legacy this year and the relationship between legal and political dynamics, to ask: in …

Understanding Crime Under Capitalism: A Critique Of American Criminal Justice And Introduction To Marxist Jurisprudence, Steven E. Gilmore

Steven E Gilmore

The Transparency Fix: Advocating Legal Rights And Their Alternatives In The Pursuit Of A Visible State, Mark Fenster

Mark Fenster

The administrative norm of transparency, which promises a solution to the problem of government secrecy, requires political advocacy organized from outside the state. The traditional approach, typically the result of organized campaigns to make the state visible to the public, has been to enact freedom of information laws (FOI) that require government disclosure and grant enforceable rights to the public. The legal solution has not proven wholly satisfactory, however. In the past two decades, numerous advocacy movements have offered different fixes to the information asymmetry problem that the administrative state creates. These alternatives now augment and sometimes compete with legal …

The Implausibility Of Secrecy, Mark Fenster

Mark Fenster

Government secrecy frequently fails. Despite the executive branch’s obsessive hoarding of certain kinds of documents and its constitutional authority to do so, recent high-profile events — among them the WikiLeaks episode, the Obama administration’s infamous leak prosecutions, and the widespread disclosure by high-level officials of flattering confidential information to sympathetic reporters — undercut the image of a state that can classify and control its information. The effort to control government information requires human, bureaucratic, technological, and textual mechanisms that regularly founder or collapse in an administrative state, sometimes immediately and sometimes after an interval. Leaks, mistakes, and open sources all …

Getting Faith Out Of The Gutters: Resolving The Debate Over Political Campaign Participation By Religious Organizations Through Fiscal Subsidiarity, W. Edward Afield

W. Edward "Ted" Afield

No abstract provided.

Star-Spangled: The Flag As Tool Of Protest And Nationalism, Brian Larson, Genelle I. Belmas

Brian Larson

Politically Motivated Bar Discipline, James E. Moliterno

James E. Moliterno

Bar discipline and admission denial have a century-long history of misuse in times of national crisis and upheaval. The terror war is such a time, and the threat of bar discipline has once again become an overreaction to justifiable fear and turmoil. Political misuse of bar machinery is characterized by its setting in the midst of turmoil, by its target, and by its lack of merit. The current instance of politically motivated bar discipline bears the marks of its historical antecedents.

Originalism And The Executive, Neil Kinkopf

Neil J. Kinkopf

No abstract provided.

Rejecting Sovereign Immunity In Public Law Litigation, Howard M. Wasserman

Howard M Wasserman

No abstract provided.

War: Rhetoric And Norm-Creation In Response To Terror, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Tawia B. Ansah

Everything is very simple in war," said Carl von Clausewitz, "but the simplest thing is difficult." This essay will suggest that the resort to the language of war, as "natural" and "starkly simple" as it is, nevertheless has a profound impact on how the law's intervention is shaped, or how the laws governing the transnational use of force are interpreted to accommodate a "war" on terrorism. I argue that although "war" is absent from the principal international legal instruments by which states are guided (and obligated) in their relations with other states, the concepts suppressed by this elision have an …

דיני החקיקה (The Law Of Lawmaking), Ittai Bar-Siman-Tov

Dr. Ittai Bar-Siman-Tov