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Full-Text Articles in Law
Equality, Sovereignty, And The Family In Morales-Santana, Kristin Collins
Equality, Sovereignty, And The Family In Morales-Santana, Kristin Collins
Faculty Scholarship
In Sessions v. Morales-Santana, 3 the Supreme Court encountered a body of citizenship law that has long relied on family membership in the construction of the nation’s borders and the composition of the polity.4 The particular statute at issue in the case regulates the transmission of citizenship from American parents to their foreign-born children at birth, a form of citizenship known today as derivative citizenship.5 When those children are born outside marriage, the derivative citizenship statute makes it more difficult for American fathers, as compared with American mothers, to transmit citizenship to their foreign-born children.6 Over …
Precedent And Speech, Randy J. Kozel
Precedent And Speech, Randy J. Kozel
Journal Articles
The U.S. Supreme Court has shown a notable willingness to reconsider its First Amendment precedents. In recent years the Court has departed from its prior statements regarding the constitutional value of false speech. It has revamped its process for identifying categorical exceptions to First Amendment protection. It has changed its position on corporate electioneering and aggregate campaign contributions. In short, it has revised the ground rules of expressive freedom in ways both large and small.
The Court generally describes its past decisions as enjoying a presumption of validity through the doctrine of stare decisis. This Article contends that within the …
The Disparate Impact Canon, Michael T. Morley
The Disparate Impact Canon, Michael T. Morley
Scholarly Publications
No abstract provided.
Scalia In The Casebooks, Brian T. Fitzpatrick, Paulson K. Varghese
Scalia In The Casebooks, Brian T. Fitzpatrick, Paulson K. Varghese
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
In the time since Justice Antonin Scalia’s untimely death, much has been written about what his influence has been and what his influence will be. In this Essay, we try to quantify Scalia’s influence in law school constitutional-law curricula by studying how often his ideas are explored in constitutional-law casebooks. In particular, relative to other justices, we look at how often Scalia’s opinions (for the Court, or his separate opinions) are excerpted in the principal cases and how often he is referred to by name in the notes preceding and following the principal cases. We find that Scalia is at …
The Tragedy Of Justice Scalia, Mitchell N. Berman
The Tragedy Of Justice Scalia, Mitchell N. Berman
All Faculty Scholarship
Justice Antonin Scalia was, by the time of his death last February, the Supreme Court’s best known and most influential member. He was also its most polarizing, a jurist whom most students of American law either love or hate. This essay, styled as a twenty-year retrospective on A Matter of Interpretation, Scalia’s Tanner lectures on statutory and constitutional interpretation, aims to prod partisans on both sides of our central legal and political divisions to better appreciate at least some of what their opponents see—the other side of Scalia’s legacy. Along the way, it critically assesses Scalia’s particular brand of …
Reciprocal Legitimation In The Federal Courts System, Neil S. Siegel
Reciprocal Legitimation In The Federal Courts System, Neil S. Siegel
Faculty Scholarship
Much scholarship in law and political science has long understood the U.S. Supreme Court to be the “apex” court in the federal judicial system, and so to relate hierarchically to “lower” federal courts. On that top-down view, exemplified by the work of Alexander Bickel and many subsequent scholars, the Court is the principal, and lower federal courts are its faithful agents. Other scholarship takes a bottom-up approach, viewing lower federal courts as faithless agents or analyzing the “percolation” of issues in those courts before the Court decides. This Article identifies circumstances in which the relationship between the Court and other …
Intersectionality And The Constitution Of Family Status, Serena Mayeri
Intersectionality And The Constitution Of Family Status, Serena Mayeri
All Faculty Scholarship
Marital supremacy—the legal privileging of marriage—is, and always has been, deeply intertwined with inequalities of race, class, gender, and region. Many if not most of the plaintiffs who challenged legal discrimination based on family status in the 1960s and 1970s were impoverished women, men, and children of color who made constitutional equality claims. Yet the constitutional law of the family is largely silent about the status-based impact of laws that prefer marriage and disadvantage non-marital families. While some lower courts engaged with race-, sex-, and wealth-based discrimination arguments in family status cases, the Supreme Court largely avoided recognizing, much less …
Conservatives And The Court, Robert F. Nagel
Applying Strict Scrutiny: An Empirical Analysis Of Free Exercise Cases, Caleb C. Wolanek, Heidi H. Liu
Applying Strict Scrutiny: An Empirical Analysis Of Free Exercise Cases, Caleb C. Wolanek, Heidi H. Liu
All Faculty Scholarship
Strict scrutiny and the free exercise of religion have had an uneasy relationship in American jurisprudence. In this Article, we trace the history of strict scrutiny in free exercise cases and outline how it applies today. Then, using a unique dataset of cases from a 25-year period, we detail the characteristics of these cases. Finally, we discuss the implications for future cases. Our research indicates that even though claimants currently win a large percentage of cases, those victories might not be durable.