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Full-Text Articles in Law
Everything I Need To Know About Presidents I Learned From Dr. Seuss, Gary S. Lawson
Everything I Need To Know About Presidents I Learned From Dr. Seuss, Gary S. Lawson
Faculty Scholarship
Oaths are out of fashion these days. This is an era in which it is widely considered unreasonable to expect the President of the United States to obey basic principles of law and justice, much less to honor something as abstract as an oath. Perjury the violation of a legally binding oath-is publicly defended as proof of the offender's humanity rather than his criminality. And one should not even mention in polite company something as gauche as honoring an oath of marriage. Those pesky vows of marital fidelity were, after all, just words.
Falling Out Of Love With America: The Clinton Impeachment And The Madisonian Constitution, Frank O. Bowman Iii
Falling Out Of Love With America: The Clinton Impeachment And The Madisonian Constitution, Frank O. Bowman Iii
Faculty Publications
First, were the Nixon and Clinton affairs truly as different as my memory makes them? Were the villains of Watergate as villainous and the heroes as heroic as I remember them? Were nearly all the players on both sides of l'affaire Lewinsky as shallow and fatuous as they seemed? Or to put the question in broader historical context, was the impeachment of Bill Clinton truly distinct, not only from Watergate, but from all of the other (fortunately few) occasions on which a president was seriously threatened with removal from office? Second, if the Clinton impeachment really was as bizarre, unprecedented, …
Avoiding Constitutional Questions As A Three-Branch Problem, William K. Kelley
Avoiding Constitutional Questions As A Three-Branch Problem, William K. Kelley
Journal Articles
This article criticizes the cardinal rule of statutory construction known as the avoidance canon - that statutes must be interpreted to avoid raising serious constitutional questions - as failing to respect the proper constitutional roles of both Congress and the Executive. It argues that the avoidance canon in practice cannot be grounded in legislative supremacy, which is the common justification for it offered by the Supreme Court, because it assumes without foundation that Congress would always prefer not to come close to the constitutional line in enacting statutes. Instead, the avoidance canon creates pressure for courts to adopt statutory meanings …