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Full-Text Articles in Law
Back To The Sources? What’S Clear And Not So Clear About The Original Intent Of The First Amendment, John Witte Jr.
Back To The Sources? What’S Clear And Not So Clear About The Original Intent Of The First Amendment, John Witte Jr.
Faculty Articles
This Article peels through these layers of founding documents before exploring the final sixteen words of the First Amendment religion clauses. Part I explores the founding generation’s main teachings on religious freedom, identifying the major principles that they held in common. Part II sets out a few representative state constitutional provisions on religious freedom created from 1776 to 1784. Part III reviews briefly the actions by the Continental Congress on religion and religious freedom issued between 1774 and 1789. Part IV touches on the deprecated place of religious freedom in the drafting of the 1787 United States Constitution. Part V …
White Supremacy, Police Brutality, And Family Separation: Preventing Crimes Against Humanity Within The United States, Elena Baylis
White Supremacy, Police Brutality, And Family Separation: Preventing Crimes Against Humanity Within The United States, Elena Baylis
Articles
Although the United States tends to treat crimes against humanity as a danger that exists only in authoritarian or war-torn states, in fact, there is a real risk of crimes against humanity occurring within the United States, as illustrated by events such as systemic police brutality against Black Americans, the federal government’s family separation policy that took thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the southern border, and the dramatic escalation of White supremacist and extremist violence culminating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In spite of this risk, the United States does not have …
Interest-Based Incorporation: Statutory Realism Exploring Federalism, Delegation, And Democratic Design, Sheldon Evans
Interest-Based Incorporation: Statutory Realism Exploring Federalism, Delegation, And Democratic Design, Sheldon Evans
Faculty Publications
Statutory interpretation is a unique legal field that appreciates fiction as much as fact. For years, judges and scholars have acknowledged that canons of interpretation are often based on erudite assumptions of how Congress drafts federal statutes. But a recent surge in legal realism has shown just how erroneous many of these assumptions are. Scholars have created a robust study of congressional practices that challenge many formalist canons of interpretation that are divorced from how Congress thinks about, drafts, and enacts federal statutes. This conversation, however, has yet to confront statutory incorporation, which describes when Congress incorporates state law into …
The Runaway Presidential Power Over Diplomacy, Jean Galbraith
The Runaway Presidential Power Over Diplomacy, Jean Galbraith
All Faculty Scholarship
The President claims exclusive control over diplomacy within our constitutional system. Relying on this claim, executive branch lawyers repeatedly reject congressional mandates regarding international engagement. In their view, Congress cannot specify what the policy of the United States is with respect to foreign corruption, cannot bar a technology-focused agency from communicating with China, cannot impose notice requirements for withdrawal from a treaty with Russia, cannot instruct Treasury officials how to vote in the World Bank, and cannot require the disclosure of a trade-related report. And these are just a few of many examples from recent years. The President’s assertedly exclusive …
House Rules: Congress And The Attorney-Client Privilege, David Rapallo
House Rules: Congress And The Attorney-Client Privilege, David Rapallo
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In 2020, the Supreme Court rendered a landmark decision in Trump v. Mazars establishing four factors for determining the validity of congressional subpoenas for a sitting president’s personal papers. In an unanticipated move, Chief Justice John Roberts added that recipients of congressional subpoenas have “long been understood” to retain not only constitutional privileges, but common law privileges developed by judges, including the attorney-client privilege. This was particularly surprising since Trump was not relying on the attorney-client privilege and the Court had never treated this common law privilege as overriding Congress’s Article I power to set its own procedures for conducting …