Law Commons^™

Against Political Theory In Constitutional Interpretation, Christopher S. Havasy, Joshua C. Macey, Brian Richardson

Vanderbilt Law Review

Judges and academics have long relied on the work of a small number of Enlightenment political theorists-—particularly Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone—-to discern meaning from vague and ambiguous constitutional provisions. This Essay cautions that Enlightenment political theory should rarely, if ever, be cited as an authoritative source of constitutional meaning. There are three principal problems with constitutional interpretation based on eighteenth-century political theory. First, Enlightenment thinkers developed distinct and incompatible theories about how to structure a republican form of government. That makes it difficult to decide which among the conflicting theories should possess constitutional significance. Second, the Framers did not write …

Reliance Interests In Statutory And Constitutional Interpretation, William N. Eskridge Jr., John Garver Professor Of Jurisprudence

Vanderbilt Law Review

People and companies rely on public law when they plan their activities; society relies on legal entitlements when it adapts to new technology, economic conditions, and social groups; legislators, administrators, and judges rely on settled law when they pass, implement, and interpret statutes (respectively). Such private, societal, and public “reliance interests” are the “dark matter” of America’s law of interpretation. They underwrite most interpretive doctrine, and their perceived force broadly and deeply affects the application of doctrine.

Reliance interests anchor the constitutional bias in favor of interpretive continuity, and they provide guardrails for the leading theories of interpretation-—namely-—textualism or original …

Constitutional Limits On The Imposition And Revocation Of Probation, Parole, And Supervised Release After Haymond, Nancy J. King

Vanderbilt Law Review

In its Apprendi line of cases, the Supreme Court has held that any fact found at sentencing (other than prior conviction) that aggravates the punishment range otherwise authorized by the conviction is an “element” that must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury. Whether Apprendi controls factfinding for the imposition and revocation of probation, parole, and supervised release is critically important. Seven of ten adults under correctional control in the United States are serving terms of state probation and post-confinement supervision, and roughly half of all prison admissions result from revocations of such terms. But scholars have yet …

The Ghost Of John Hart Ely, Ryan D. Doerfler, Samuel Moyn

Vanderbilt Law Review

The ghost of John Hart Ely haunts the American liberal constitutional imagination. Despite the failure long ago of any progressive constitutional vision in an increasingly conservative Supreme Court, Ely’s conjectures about the superiority of judges relative to legislatures in the protection of minorities and the policing of the democratic process remain second nature. Indeed, they have been credible enough among liberals to underwrite an anxious or even hostile attitude toward judicial reform. In order to exorcise Ely’s ghost and lay it to rest, this Article challenges his twin conjectures. First, the Article argues that there is little historical and no …

Rethinking Swing Voters, Jonathan S. Gould

Vanderbilt Law Review

In recent decades, swing voters in courts and legislatures have made many of the United States’ most important decisions of law and policy. It would be easy to conclude from the recent history of the Supreme Court and Congress that democracy or majority rule inevitably entails placing many of a society’s most important decisions in the hands of swing voters. Far from being inevitable, however, swing voters result from a highly contingent set of circumstances, both ideological and institutional.

This Article probes these contingencies, describing and evaluating swing voters and the power they hold. It first explains the conditions under …

Checks And Balances In The Criminal Law, Daniel Epps

Vanderbilt Law Review

The separation of powers is considered essential in the criminal law, where liberty and even life are at stake. Yet the reasons for separating criminal powers are surprisingly opaque, and the “separation of powers” is often used to refer to distinct, and sometimes contradictory, concepts.

This Article reexamines the justifications for the separation of powers in criminal law. It asks what is important about separating criminal powers and what values such separation serves. It concludes that in criminal justice, the traditional Madisonian approach of separating powers between functionally differentiated political institutions—legislature, executive, and judiciary—bears no necessary connection to important values …

Federalism And The Military Power Of The United States, Robert Leider

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article examines the original meaning of the constitutional provisions governing the raising and organization of military forces. It argues that the Framers carefully divided the military between the federal and state governments. This division provided structural checks against the misuse of military power and made it more difficult to use offensive military force. These structural checks have been compromised by the creation of the U.S. Army Reserve, the dual enlistment of National Guard officers and soldiers, and the acceptance of conscription into the national army, all of which have enhanced federal military power beyond its original constitutional limits.

This …

Reconstructing The Congressional Guarantee Of Republican Government, David S. Louk

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article considers whether the Clause might serve as an additional constitutional basis for federal legislation and explores the interpretive arguments Congress might raise to justify the power to reform electoral processes in the states under the Clause. This Article also questions the prevailing view that the Supreme Court has always treated the Clause as functionally nonjusticiable. It argues that even following established precedents, the contemporary Court might well engage with the merits of legislation and litigation commenced under the Clause, given the Court’s recent penchant for enhanced scrutiny of congressional enforcement powers under the Reconstruction Amendments. Such challenges would …

Popular Constitutional Argument, Tom Donnelly

Vanderbilt Law Review

Critics have long attacked popular constitutionalists for offering few clues about how their theory might work in practice—-especially inside the courts. These critics are right. Popular constitutionalism—as a matter of both theory and practice—remains a work in progress. In this Article, I take up the challenge of developing an account of (what I call) popular constitutional argument. Briefly stated, popular constitutional argument is a form of argument that draws on the American people’s considered judgments as a source of constitutional authority—akin to traditional sources like text, history, structure, and doctrine. Turning to constitutional theory, I situate popular constitutional argument within …

Discovery Cost Allocation, Due Process, And The Constitution's Role In Civil Litigation, Martin H. Redish

Vanderbilt Law Review

The issue of discovery cost allocation, long ignored by both courts and scholars, has become something of a cause celebre in the last few years. An article which I coauthored on the subject was part of that renewed interest.' In 2011, my former student, Colleen McNamara, and I wrote an article urging a dramatic change not only in the manner of how discovery costs are allocated, but an entirely new way of understanding the concept of discovery costs. 2 Since the original promulgation of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938, it has been universally assumed that discovery costs …

Consenting To Adjudication Outside The Article Iii Courts, F. Andrew Hessick

Vanderbilt Law Review

Article III confers the judicial power on the federal courts, and it provides the judges of those courts with life tenure and salary guarantees to ensure that they decide disputes according to law instead of popular pressure. Despite this careful arrangement, the Supreme Court has not restricted the judicial power to the Article III courts. Instead, it has held that Article I tribunals-whose judges do not enjoy the salary and tenure guarantees provided by Article III-may adjudicate disputes if the parties consent to the tribunals' jurisdiction. This consent exception provides the basis for thousands of adjudications by Article I judges …

The Constitutional Case For "Chevron" Deference, Jonathan R. Siegel

Vanderbilt Law Review

An icon of administrative law is under attack. Prominent figures in the legal world are attacking Chevron. The critics could hardly have gone after a bigger target. Chevron is the most-cited administrative law case of all time. Every law student who has taken a basic course in administrative law is familiar with the principle of "Chevron deference," under which courts must defer to an executive agency's reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous provision of a statute the agency administers. The current attack on Chevron does not merely suggest that courts should limit the case's application. It is true that the Supreme …

Interpreting An Unamendable Text, Thomas W. Merrill

Vanderbilt Law Review

Many of the most important legal texts in the United States are highly unamendable. This applies not only to the Constitution, which has not been amended in over forty years, but also to many framework statutes, like the Administrative Procedure Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act. The problem is becoming increasingly severe, as political polarization makes amendment of these texts even more unlikely. This Article considers how interpreters should respond to highly unamendable texts. Unamendable texts have a number of pathologies, such as excluding the people and their representatives from any direct participation in legal change. They also pose an …

Restore, Revert, Repeat: Examining The Decompensation Cycle And The Due Process Limitations On The Treatment Of Incompetent Defendants, Margaret W. Smith

Vanderbilt Law Review

Though correctional facilities are one of the largest providers of mental health care in the country, the treatment provided often fails to address the needs of many mentally ill inmates. Indeed, after receiving treatment at a state mental health facility, many pretrial detainees who have been recently restored to competency revert to an incompetent state-or decompensate-upon their return to jail, at which point they must return to the state treatment facility to be restored to competency once again. This Note is the first to explore this "decompensation cycle," highlighting the significance of the problem and demonstrating how mental health treatment …

Funding Restrictions And Separation Of Powers, Zachary S. Price

Vanderbilt Law Review

Congress's "power of the purse"-its authority to deny access to public funds-is one of its most essential constitutional authorities. A central mechanism through which English parliaments clawed liberty from reluctant monarchs, it remains a crucial check on executive overreaching. It may provide power to stop a president in his tracks. And yet, two centuries after the founding, the scope of this congressional power and its relationship with constitutional executive authorities remains both contested and inadequately theorized.

Do Your Job: Judicial Review Of Occupational Licensing In The Face Of Economic Protectionism, Nicole A. Weeks

Vanderbilt Law Review

Despite efforts to challenge certain occupational licensing schemes as impermissibly driven by naked economic protectionism, federal appellate courts disagree on the legitimacy owed to the protectionist motivations that commonly prompt these regulations. To eliminate the current confusion, this Note advocates for the application of rational-basis-with-judicial-engagement review. The Supreme Court has demonstrated a willingness to engage in such analysis before-in both its animus jurisprudence over the past decades and more recently in its meticulous cost-benefit inquiry in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt-thereby weakening its claims of incompetence in evaluating the motivations of lawmakers. To avoid hindering the economic well being of …

Reverse Political Process Theory, Aaron Tang

Vanderbilt Law Review

Despite occasional suggestions to the contrary, the Supreme Court has long since stopped interpreting the Constitution to afford special protection to certain groups on the ground that they are powerless to defend their own interests in the political process. From a series of decisions reviewing laws that burden whites under the same strict scrutiny as laws that burden racial minorities, to the more recent same-sex marriage decision based principally on the fundamental nature of marriage (rather than the political status of gays and lesbians), it is now an uncontroversial observation that when it comes to applying the open-textured provisions of …

"Plausible Cause": Explanatory Standards In The Age Of Powerful Machines, Kiel Brennan-Marquez

Vanderbilt Law Review

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 …

The Jurisdiction Canon, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article concerns the interpretation of jurisdictional statutes. The fundamental postulate of the law of the federal courts is that the federal courts are courts of limited subject-matter jurisdiction. That principle is reinforced by a canon of statutory interpretation according to which statutes conferring federal subject-matter jurisdiction are to be construed narrowly, with ambiguities resolved against the availability of federal jurisdiction. This interpretive canon is over a century old and has been recited in thousands of federal cases, but its future has become uncertain. The Supreme Court recently stated that the canon does not apply to many of today's most …

A Tribute To Justice Scalia: Why Bad Cases Make Bad Methodology, Brian T. Fitzpatrick

Vanderbilt Law Review

The Vanderbilt Law Review asked me to write a short memorial tribute to my old boss, Justice Antonin Scalia, and I am fortunate that Dean Chemerinsky's new book provides an apt occasion to do so. To be as blunt as the Justice would have been: he would have hated this book. Not because Dean Chemerinsky is not a gifted writer; he most surely is. But because the entire methodology of the book-a methodology I call "bad-cases" reasoning-was anathema to the Justice. The Justice may not have been right about everything, but he was right about this: bad-cases reasoning is bad …

Introduction: Is The Supreme Court Failing At Its Job, Or Are We Failing At Ours?, Suzanna Sherry

Vanderbilt Law Review

It is a pleasure and a privilege to write an introduction to this Symposium celebrating Dean Erwin Chemerinsky's important new book, The Case Against the Supreme Court. Chemerinsky is one of the leading constitutional scholars of our time and a frequent advocate before the U.S. Supreme Court. If he thinks there is a case to be made against the Court, we should all take it very seriously indeed. Chemerinsky's thesis may be stated in a few sentences. The primary role of the Supreme Court, in his view, is to "protect the rights of minorities who cannot rely on the political …

Thinking About The Supreme Court's Successes And Failures, Erwin Chemerinsky

Vanderbilt Law Review

The Supreme Court often has failed at its most important tasks and at the most important times. I set out this thesis at the beginning the book:

To be clear, I am not saying that the Supreme Court has failed at these crucial tasks every time. Making a case against the Supreme Court does not require taking such an extreme position. I also will talk about areas where the Court has succeeded in protecting minorities and in enforcing the limits of the Constitution. My claim is that the Court has often failed where and when it has been most needed. …

Constitutionalizing Corporate Law, Elizabeth Pollman

Vanderbilt Law Review

The Supreme Court has recently decided some of the most important and controversial cases involving the federal rights of corporations in over two hundred years of jurisprudence. In rulings ranging from corporate political spending to religious liberty rights, the Court has dramatically expanded the zone in which corporations can act free from regulation. This Article argues these decisions represent a doctrinal shift, even from previous cases granting rights to corporations. The modern corporate rights doctrine has put unprecedented weight on state corporate law to act as a mechanism for resolving disputes among corporate participants regarding the expressive and religious activity …

High Value Lies, Ugly Truths, And The First Amendment, Alan K. Chen, Justin Marceau

Vanderbilt Law Review

Lying has a complicated relationship with the First Amendment. It is beyond question that some lies-such as perjury and fraud-are simply not covered by the Constitution's free speech clause.' But it is equally clear that some lies, even intentionally lying about military honors, are entitled to First Amendment protection. Until very recently, however, it has been taken for granted in Supreme Court doctrine and academic writing that any constitutional protection for lies is purely prophylactic-it provides protection to the truth-speaker by also incidentally protecting the liar. What remains unresolved is whether other rationales might also justify First Amendment protection for …

Original Meaning And The Precedent Fallback, Randy J. Kozel

Vanderbilt Law Review

There is longstanding tension between originalism and judicial precedent. With its resolute focus on deciphering the enacted Constitution, the originalist methodology raises questions about whether judges can legitimately defer to their own pronouncements. Numerous scholars have responded by debating whether and when the Constitution's original meaning should yield to contrary precedent. This Article considers the role of judicial precedent not when it conflicts with the Constitution's original meaning but rather when the consultation of text and historical evidence is insufficient to resolve a case. In those situations, deference to precedent can serve as a fallback rule of constitutional adjudication. The …

Statutory Interpretations And The Therapy Of The Obvious, Edward L. Rubin

Vanderbilt Law Review

Arthur Koestler wrote that "the more original a discovery the more obvious it seems afterward."' The same may be said about theories of law, and specifically about Robert Katzmann's new book, Judging Statutes. Judge Katzmann's approach to statutory interpretation seems so plausible and balanced that it is hard to believe that anyone ever believed anything else. In this particular case, however, there is in fact an "anything else." It is, of course, Justice Antonin Scalia's campaign to displace intentionalist or purposivist approaches to interpretation with what has come to be called "textualism," and his related effort to rule out reliance …

Perpetuities And The Genius Of A Free State, Joshua C. Tate

Vanderbilt Law Review

Legal history, like all history, is inevitably a speculative affair. No one can be sure what the editors of Justinian's Digest might have excised from long-lost works of classical Roman law; nor can one know for certain what went through the minds of certain justices of the U.S. Supreme Court in the mid-twentieth century when they formed and reformed their views on Roosevelt's New Deal. Of course, scholars can try to chip away at this uncertainty: great progress can be made through educated guesses and learned theories. But certainty about the past is reserved for those who lived in it. …

The Obligation Of Members Of Congress To Consider Constitutionality While Deliberating And Voting: The Deficiencies Of House Rule Xii And A Proposed Rule For The Senate, Russ Feingold

Vanderbilt Law Review

Most scholarly attention on constitutional interpretation is focused on the judicial branch and its role in our system of separation of powers. Nonetheless, constitutional interpretation should not take place solely in the courts. Rather, history suggests our Framers envisioned that members of Congress, as well as the President and the courts, would have an independent and important role to play in interpreting our Constitution. Yet this obligation has eroded such that House Speaker John Boehner, with the support of the Tea Party and his Republican colleagues, called for a "sea change" in the way the House of Representatives operates, with …

Enforcement Discretion And Executive Duty, Zachary S. Price

Vanderbilt Law Review

Recent Presidents have claimed wide-ranging authority to decline enforcement of federal laws. The Obama Administration, for example, has announced policies of abstaining from investigation and prosecution of certain federal marijuana crimes, postponing enforcement of key provisions of the Affordable Care Act, and suspending enforcement of removal statutes against certain undocumented immigrants. While these examples highlight how exercises of executive enforcement discretion-the authority to turn a blind eye to legal violations-may effectively reshape federal policy, prior scholarship has offered no satisfactory account of the proper scope of, and constitutional basis for, this putative executive authority. This Article fills that gap. Through …

Bond, Buckley, And The Boundaries Of Separation Of Powers Standing, William Marks

Vanderbilt Law Review

A constitutional crisis is at hand. It is 2017, and a new President of the United States has taken office.' The new President generally opposes environmental regulations and accordingly nominated a candidate for Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA") with a deregulatory track record. The Senate, however, stood in the way: a proenvironment party holds the majority and threatened to filibuster. New presidents in this situation typically withdraw their nominations to avoid political embarrassment. But this time was different. In a forceful display of executive authority, the President unilaterally installed the nominee as the EPA Administrator. True, this action …