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Articles 1 - 30 of 143
Full-Text Articles in Law
The General-Law Right To Bear Arms, William Baude, Robert Leider
The General-Law Right To Bear Arms, William Baude, Robert Leider
Notre Dame Law Review
In this Article, we argue that Bruen's intended methodological shift has been widely misunderstood by the bench and bar. This has led to confusion and misapplication in the lower courts, as well as much scholarly criticism of the test that is, we think, misdirected. As we will explain, Bruen calls for a form of legal originalism, applying a classical view of fundamental rights as a form of unwritten customary law. This is consistent with the text and history of the Constitution and leads to results that are less mechanical and more sensible than many lower courts have thought. Understanding …
Bruen’S Enforcement Puzzle: Unearthing And Adjudicating The Historical Enforcement Record In Second Amendment Cases, Andrew Willinger
Bruen’S Enforcement Puzzle: Unearthing And Adjudicating The Historical Enforcement Record In Second Amendment Cases, Andrew Willinger
Notre Dame Law Review
The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen brings historical complexity to the fore by instituting a history-focused test for the Second Amendment that demands analogues from the Founding or Reconstruction eras to support modern gun regulations. The majority opinion in Bruen considers, in multiple places, how certain historical gun regulations may have been enforced. In each instance, the Court suggests that evidence of racially disparate enforcement of a historical law is relevant to whether that law is part of the American historical tradition and an appropriate analogue. Historical enforcement data appear to …
Historical Fact, Ryan C. Williams
Historical Fact, Ryan C. Williams
Notre Dame Law Review
The growing emphasis on history as a criterion of constitutional decision-making in Supreme Court jurisprudence has raised the importance of a distinctive type of judicial fact-finding—namely, the investigation and resolution of contested questions of historical fact. Although history has always played an important role in constitutional adjudication, its primary role has traditionally been as an input to constitutional interpretation. But in cases like New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Court has increasingly demanded that factual determinations regarding the content, meaning, purposes, and effects of decisions taken in the distant past should also guide the lower …
Diverse Originalism, History & Tradition, Christina Mulligan
Diverse Originalism, History & Tradition, Christina Mulligan
Notre Dame Law Review
The Supreme Court’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen decision appears to be an originalist opinion, ostensibly looking for the meaning of the Constitution’s text by looking to the public’s understanding of the language used. But Bruen's test actually fails to follow a public meaning originalist methodology. The Court focuses present-day constitutional interpreters on evidence of constitutional meaning that only reflects a portion of the public—the politically empowered men who were in a position to pass legislation. Two unfortunate outcomes follow. First, by limiting potential evidence of public meaning so severely, the Court raises the risk …
The History Of Bans On Types Of Arms Before 1900, David B. Kopel, Joseph G.S. Greenlee
The History Of Bans On Types Of Arms Before 1900, David B. Kopel, Joseph G.S. Greenlee
Journal of Legislation
This Article describes the history of bans on particular types of arms in America, through 1899. It also describes arms bans in England until the time of American independence. Arms encompassed in this article include firearms, knives, swords, blunt weapons, and many others. While arms advanced considerably from medieval England through the nineteenth-century United States, bans on particular types of arms were rare.
Pretrial Commitment And The Fourth Amendment, Laurent Sacharoff
Pretrial Commitment And The Fourth Amendment, Laurent Sacharoff
Notre Dame Law Review
Today, the Fourth Amendment Warrant Clause governs arrest warrants and search warrants only. But in the founding era, the Warrant Clause governed a third type of warrant: the “warrant of commitment.” Judges issued these warrants to jail defendants pending trial. This Article argues that the Fourth Amendment Warrant Clause, with its oath and probable cause standard, should be understood today to apply to this third type of warrant. That means the Warrant Clause would govern any initial appearance where a judge first commits a defendant—a process that currently falls far short of fulfilling its constitutional and historical function. History supports …
Proportionalities, Youngjae Lee
Proportionalities, Youngjae Lee
Notre Dame Law Review Reflection
“Proportionality” is ubiquitous. The idea that punishment should be proportional to crime is familiar in criminal law and has a lengthy history. But that is not the only place where one encounters the concept of proportionality in law and ethics. The idea of proportionality is important also in the self-defense context, where the right to defend oneself with force is limited by the principle of proportionality. Proportionality plays a role in the context of war, especially in the idea that the military advantage one side may draw from an attack must not be excessive in relation to the loss of …
Rethinking Legislative Facts, Haley N. Proctor
Rethinking Legislative Facts, Haley N. Proctor
Notre Dame Law Review
As the factual nature of legal inquiry has become increasingly apparent over the past century, courts and commentators have fallen into the habit of labeling the facts behind the law “legislative facts.” Loosely, legislative facts are general facts courts rely upon to formulate law or policy, but that definition is as contested as it is vague. Most agree that legislative facts exist in some form or another, but few agree on what that form is, on who should find them, and how. This Article seeks to account for and resolve that confusion. Theories of legislative fact focus on the role …
An Originalist Approach To Puerto Rico: Arguments Against The Status Quo, Micah Allred
An Originalist Approach To Puerto Rico: Arguments Against The Status Quo, Micah Allred
Notre Dame Law Review Reflection
Few originalists have grappled with a fundamental question about Puerto Rico: whether the Constitution permits the United States to hold the island indefinitely as nonstate territory. There are reasons to doubt that it does. The main purpose of the Constitution’s territorial provisions was to allow Congress to transition the then West-ern Territory into states. And, as a structural matter, Congress’s direct authority over Puerto Ricans conflicts with important constitutional principles such as federalism. But for originalists, arguments from purpose and structure are helpful only insofar as they elucidate the original meaning of the Constitution’s text. This Article lays out two …
Admiralty, Abstention, And The Allure Of Old Cases, Maggie Gardner
Admiralty, Abstention, And The Allure Of Old Cases, Maggie Gardner
Notre Dame Law Review
The current Supreme Court has made clear that history matters. But doing history well is hard. There is thus an allure to old cases because they provide a link to the past that is more accessible for nonhistorian lawyers. This Article warns against that allure by showing how the use of old cases also poses methodological challenges. The Article uses as a case study the emerging doctrine of foreign relations abstention. Before the Supreme Court, advocates argued that this new doctrine is in fact rooted in early admiralty cases. Those advocates did not, however, canvass the early admiralty practice, relying …
Congressional Power To Institute A Wealth Tax, Will Clark
Congressional Power To Institute A Wealth Tax, Will Clark
Notre Dame Law Review Reflection
Over the last few years, several high-profile politicians have pushed to impose a federal “wealth tax.” For example, a recent bill introduced in the Senate would create a two percent tax on the value of assets between fifty million and one billion dollars, plus a higher percentage on wealth valued over one billion dollars. The proponents of the tax argue that it would reduce the growing wealth inequality in the United States, while opponents say that it would disincentivize investment in the American economy.
Policy arguments, however, are only relevant if the federal government has the authority to institute such …
Living Recipes . . . And Constitutions, John Vlahoplus
Living Recipes . . . And Constitutions, John Vlahoplus
Notre Dame Law Review Reflection
Professor Gary Lawson and Zachary Pohlman assert that we can only follow recipes and by analogy the Constitution by complying with the original public or authorial meaning of the instructions in their texts. Absent an instruction in the recipe’s text authorizing changes, any departure from historical meaning amends the recipe rather than follows it.
This response uses the works of renowned chefs to sketch a competing theory. Following a recipe requires a cook to consider many of the same factors as pluralist and living constitution theories of law including text, history, purpose, current circumstances, personal experience, and individual judgment. Even …
Democracy's Forgotten Possessions: U.S. Territories' Right To Statehood Through Constitutional Liquidation, Joshua Stephen Ebiner
Democracy's Forgotten Possessions: U.S. Territories' Right To Statehood Through Constitutional Liquidation, Joshua Stephen Ebiner
Notre Dame Law Review
This Note argues that the Territories must be granted statehood consistent with the equal footing doctrine. This thesis does not challenge Congress’s power to acquire or govern territory, or its constitutional authority to admit (and place reasonable conditions on the admission of) territory into the Union as states. These matters have long been settled through constitutional practice. Neither does this thesis suggest that acquired territory must be immediately annexed into the Union, since there are valid reasons to delay such a decision. Instead, the claim is that permanently inhabited territories that have longstanding, constitutionally significant relationships with the United States …
Interring The Unitary Executive, Christine Kexel Chabot
Interring The Unitary Executive, Christine Kexel Chabot
Notre Dame Law Review
The President’s power to remove and control subordinate executive officers has sparked a constitutional debate that began in 1789 and rages on today. Leading originalists claim that the Constitution created a “unitary executive” President whose plenary removal power affords her “exclusive control” over subordinates’ exercise of executive power. Text assigning the President a removal power and exclusive control appears nowhere in the Constitution, however, and unitary scholars have instead relied on select historical understandings and negative inferences drawn from a supposed lack of independent regulatory structures at the Founding. The comprehensive historical record introduced by this Article lays this debate …
A New Report Of Entick V. Carrington (1765), Christian Burset, T. T. Arvind
A New Report Of Entick V. Carrington (1765), Christian Burset, T. T. Arvind
Journal Articles
The Supreme Court has described Entick v. Carrington (1765) as “the true and ultimate expression of constitutional law” for the Founding generation. For more than 250 years, judges and commentators have read that case for guidance about the rule of law, executive authority, and the original meaning of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. But we have been reading a flawed version. This Article publishes, for the first time, a previously unknown manuscript report of Entick v. Carrington. We explain why this version is more reliable than other reports of the case, and how this new discovery challenges prevailing assumptions about …
Advisory Opinions And The Problem Of Legal Authority, Christian R. Burset
Advisory Opinions And The Problem Of Legal Authority, Christian R. Burset
Journal Articles
The prohibition against advisory opinions is fundamental to our understanding of federal judicial power, but we’ve misunderstood its origins. Discussions of the doctrine begin not with a constitutional text or even a court case, but a letter in which the Jay Court rejected President Washington’s request for legal advice. Courts and scholars have offered a variety of explanations for the Jay Court’s behavior. But they all depict the earliest Justices as responding to uniquely American concerns about advisory opinions.
This Article offers a different explanation. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, it shows that judges throughout the anglophone world—not only …
The Traditions Of American Constitutional Law, Marc O. Degirolami
The Traditions Of American Constitutional Law, Marc O. Degirolami
Notre Dame Law Review
This Article identifies a new method of constitutional interpretation: the use of tradition as constitutive of constitutional meaning. It studies what the Supreme Court means by invoking tradition and whether what it means remains constant across the document and over time. Traditionalist interpretation is pervasive, consistent, and recurrent across the Court’s constitutional doctrine. So, too, are criticisms of traditionalist interpretation. There are also more immediate reasons to study the role of tradition in constitutional interpretation. The Court’s two newest members, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, have indicated that tradition informs their understanding of constitutional meaning. The study of traditionalist …
Glorious Revolution To American Revolution: The English Origin Of The Right To Keep And Bear Arms, Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain
Glorious Revolution To American Revolution: The English Origin Of The Right To Keep And Bear Arms, Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain
Notre Dame Law Review
It is definitively not my intention to wade into such debates about the wisdom of the Second Amendment or to deal with pending or recent court interpretations. Rather, I want to explore how it came to be and what role British history had in its genesis. For Americans like myself, such history helps us to understand the meaning of our own Constitution. For the Britons, it is a powerful example of how your own constitutional principles shaped the legal landscape of far-flung countries once within the British Empire. And for those simply interested in law as a discipline, irrespective of …
Why Didn't The Common Law Follow The Flag?, Christian Burset
Why Didn't The Common Law Follow The Flag?, Christian Burset
Journal Articles
This Article considers a puzzle about how different kinds of law came to be distributed around the world. The legal systems of some European colonies largely reflected the laws of the colonizer. Other colonies exhibited a greater degree of legal pluralism, in which the state administered a mix of different legal systems. Conventional explanations for this variation look to the extent of European settlement: where colonizers settled in large numbers, they chose to bring their own laws; otherwise, they preferred to retain preexisting ones. This Article challenges that assumption by offering a new account of how and why the British …
Equity, Samuel L. Bray
Equity, Samuel L. Bray
Book Chapters
From the Publisher
Chapter 2
How has equity been received in the United States? Two themes stand out. One is that of ‘nice adjustment’: the case-specific adjustment of legal rules to avoid the harsh results of applying rules to unforeseen circumstances. The second is the idea of judicial command: ordering the particular defendant in the circumstances to do equity without contradicting the common law. While the former has waned in the US, the latter has overly strengthened. The reasons of legal culture are discussed.
The Depravity Of The 1930s And The Modern Administrative State, Steven G. Calabresi, Gary Lawson
The Depravity Of The 1930s And The Modern Administrative State, Steven G. Calabresi, Gary Lawson
Notre Dame Law Review
Gillian Metzger’s 2017 Harvard Law Review foreword, entitled 1930s Redux: The Administrative State Under Siege, is a paean to the modern administrative state, with its massive subdelegations of legislative and judicial power to so-called “expert” bureaucrats, who are layered well out of reach of electoral accountability yet do not have the constitutional status of Article III judges. We disagree with this celebration of technocratic government on just about every level, but this Article focuses on two relatively narrow points.
First, responding more to implicit assumptions that pervade modern discourse than specifically to Professor Metzger’s analysis, we challenge the normally …
Securities Law In The Sixties: The Supreme Court, The Second Circuit, And The Triumph Of Purpose Over Text, A.C. Pritchard, Robert B. Thompson
Securities Law In The Sixties: The Supreme Court, The Second Circuit, And The Triumph Of Purpose Over Text, A.C. Pritchard, Robert B. Thompson
Notre Dame Law Review
This Article analyzes the Supreme Court’s leading securities cases from 1962 to 1972—SEC v. Capital Gains Research Bureau, Inc.; J.I. Case Co. v. Borak; Mills v. Electric Auto-Lite Co.; Superintendent of Insurance v. Bankers Life & Casualty Co.; and Affiliated Ute of Utah v. United States—relying not just on the published opinions, but also the Justices’ internal letters, memos, and conference notes. The Sixties Court did not simply apply the text as enacted by Congress, but instead invoked the securities laws’ purposes as a guide to interpretation. The Court became a partner of Congress …
Rejoining Moral Culpability With Criminal Liability: Reconsideration Of The Felony Murder Doctrine For The Current Time, William Bald
Rejoining Moral Culpability With Criminal Liability: Reconsideration Of The Felony Murder Doctrine For The Current Time, William Bald
Journal of Legislation
No abstract provided.
The Attorney General And Early Appointments Clause Practice, Aditya Bamzai
The Attorney General And Early Appointments Clause Practice, Aditya Bamzai
Notre Dame Law Review
This Article proceeds as follows. In Part I, I provide an overview of the Appointments Clause and the officer-employee line as it currently stands in caselaw and in executive branch practice. I also summarize the Appointments Clause practices of the First Congress. In Part II, I address the opinions of the Attorneys General, and their attempt to rationalize and to explain the statutes enacted by the First Congress and the appointments practices of the nation. In Part III, I derive some implications and conclusions, generally for the Appointments Clause and specifically for the Administrative Law Judge controversy that is currently …
The Canon Of Rational Basis Review, Katie R. Eyer
The Canon Of Rational Basis Review, Katie R. Eyer
Notre Dame Law Review
The modern constitutional law canon fundamentally misdescribes rational basis review. Through a series of errors—of omission, simplification, and recharacterization—we have largely erased a robust history of the use of rational basis review by social movements to generate constitutional change. Instead, the story the canon tells is one of dismal prospects for challengers of government action—in which rational basis review is an empty, almost meaningless form of review.
This Article suggests that far from the weak and ineffectual mechanism that most contemporary accounts suggest, rational basis review has, in the modern era, served as one of the primary equal protection entry …
A New Deal Approach To Statutory Interpretation: Selected Cases Authored By Justice Robert Jackson, Charles Patrick Thomas
A New Deal Approach To Statutory Interpretation: Selected Cases Authored By Justice Robert Jackson, Charles Patrick Thomas
Journal of Legislation
No abstract provided.
Preclusion And Criminal Judgment, Lee Kovarsky
Preclusion And Criminal Judgment, Lee Kovarsky
Notre Dame Law Review
The defining question in modern habeas corpus law involves the finality
of a state conviction: What preclusive effect does (and should) a criminal
judgment have? Res judicata and collateral estoppel —the famous preclusion
rules for civil judgments—accommodate basic legal interests in fairness,
certitude, and sovereignty. Legal institutions carefully calibrate the preclusive
effect of civil judgments because judicial resources are scarce, because
the reliability and legitimacy of prior process can vary, and because courts
wield the authority of a repeat-playing sovereign that will find its own civil
judgments attacked in foreign litigation. In stark contrast to the legal sophistication
lavished on …
Beyond Law And Fact: Jury Evaluation Of Law Enforcement, Lauren M. Ouziel
Beyond Law And Fact: Jury Evaluation Of Law Enforcement, Lauren M. Ouziel
Notre Dame Law Review
Criminal trials today are as much about the adequacy and legitimacy of the defendant’s accusers—police and prosecutors—as the alleged deeds of the accused. Yet we lack theory to conceptualize this reality, doctrine to set its parameters, and institutional mechanisms to adapt to it. The traditional framework used by courts and scholars to delineate the jury’s role—along the continuum between “fact-finding” and “law-finding”—is inadequate to the task. Jury evaluations of law enforcement are more accurately conceptualized as enforcement-finding, a process that functions both in and outside that continuum. In considering enforcement-finding’s justification and proper scope, history offers a useful analytical frame. …
A Structural Etiology Of The U.S. Constitution, Charles Lincoln
A Structural Etiology Of The U.S. Constitution, Charles Lincoln
Journal of Legislation
This article offers an interpretation of the problems addressed by and the eventual purpose of the United States government. Simultaneously, it seeks to analyze and explain the continued three-part structure of the United States federal government as outlined in the Constitution. Subsequently I define the three parts of the federal government—judiciary, executive, and legislative—as explained through the lens of the Platonic paradigm of (logos = word = law), (thymos = external driving spirit = executive), and (eros = general welfare = legislative) extrapolated from Plato’s dialogues.
First, the article establishes Plato’s theory of the three-part Platonic soul …
A “Second Magna Carta”: The English Habeas Corpus Act And The Statutory Origins Of The Habeas Privilege, Amanda L. Tyler
A “Second Magna Carta”: The English Habeas Corpus Act And The Statutory Origins Of The Habeas Privilege, Amanda L. Tyler
Notre Dame Law Review
In my own scholarship, Fallon and Meltzer’s work on habeas models prompted me to dig deeper into the historical backdrop that informed ratification of the Suspension Clause and think harder about the relevance of that history for questions of constitutional interpretation. This, in turn, has spurred work that has occupied me for many years since. In the spirit of engaging with my federal courts professor one more time, this Article tells the story of the statutory origins of the habeas privilege—what Blackstone called a “second magna carta”—and argues that any explication of the constitutional privilege and discussion of how …