Law Commons^™

Mischief Managed? The Unconstitutionality Of Sec Aljs Under The Appointments Clause, Jackson C. Blais

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note argues that SEC ALJs are inferior officers of the United States and, as a result, are unconstitutional under the Appointments Clause. Part I examines the current state of ALJs and the jurisprudence of the Appointments Clause. Part II provides an analysis of the circuit split between the Tenth and D.C. Circuits over the question of SEC ALJs and the Appointments Clause. Part III argues that the Tenth Circuit in Bandimere v. SEC correctly decided the question presented. This Part further urges the Supreme Court to reverse the D.C. Circuit’s holding in Lucia and, in so doing, adhere to …

Qualified Immunity: Time To Change The Message, Karen M. Blum

Notre Dame Law Review

This Essay will proceed in four parts. Parts I, II, and III will highlight, through some recent illustrative cases, areas where the qualified immunity defense has been especially ineffective and inefficient by: (Part I) hampering the development of constitutional law and impeding the redress of constitutional wrongs; (Part II) draining resources of litigants and courts through interlocutory appeals that are frequently without merit and often jurisdictionally suspect; and (Part III) breeding confusion into the roles of the judge and the jury in our judicial system, effectively enhancing the judge’s role at the expense of the constitutional right to jury trial. …

Formalism, Ferguson, And The Future Of Qualified Immunity, Fred O. Smith Jr.

Notre Dame Law Review

This Essay explores whether formalism and accountability are compatible lodestars as we steer toward a new future for qualified immunity. Ultimately, I argue that two existing proposals would bring the doctrine closer to its text and history, mitigate against fragmentation in the law of constitutional torts, and narrow the rights-remedies gap when government officials violate the Constitution. One proposal, by John Jeffries, would create a fault-based system, where government officials and entities alike would be liable for constitutional violations that are both unreasonable and unconstitutional. Another proposal would render governmental employers’ liable for the acts of their agents.

Qualified Immunity And Fault, John F. Preis

Notre Dame Law Review

This Essay describes, critiques, and attempts to reform the role of fault in the defense of qualified immunity. It first argues, in Part I, that the defense does not properly assess fault because it immunizes persons who are at fault and holds liable persons who are not. The chief cause of this problem is that the defense is focused on an exceedingly narrow source of law: appellate judicial opinions. Appellate opinions are, not surprisingly, rarely read by government officers and, even when their substance is communicated to officers, they only comprise one of many factors that affect the blameworthiness of …

The Branch Best Qualified To Abolish Immunity, Scott Michelman

Notre Dame Law Review

Qualified immunity—the legal doctrine that shields government officials from suit for constitutional violations unless the right they violate “is sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that what he is doing violates that right”—has come under increasing judicial and scholarly criticism from diverse ideological viewpoints. This Essay considers the question of which branch of government should fix it. I take as a starting point the many critiques of qualified immunity and then turn to the question of whether courts should wait for Congress to reform this problematic doctrine. Do considerations of stare decisis or institutional competence counsel in …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors, Mark Mckenna, Rebecca Tushnet, Yvette Joy Liebesman, John A. Conway

Court Briefs

Untethered to a sufficient public policy interest, right of publicity claims have exploded nationwide. Plaintiffs have asserted claims against inspirational plaques featuring civil rights icons, Rosa and Raymond Parks Inst. for Self Dev. v. Target Corp., 812 F.3d 824 (11th Cir. 2016),artwork commemorating significant events, Moore v. Weinstein Co., LLC, 545 Fed. App’x. 405 , 407 (6th Cir. 2013); ETW Corp. v. Jireh Publ’g, Inc., 332 F.3d 915 (6th Cir. 2003), Wikipedia edits that truthfully connected an astronaut with the watch he wore on his Moon walk, Scott v. Citizen Watch Co. of Am., Inc., 17-CV-00436-NC, 2018 WL 1626773 (N.D. …

Employment Division V. Smith And State Free Exercise Protections: Should State Courts Feel Obligated To Apply The Federal Standard In Adjudicating Alleged Violations Of Their State Free Exercise Clauses?, Matthew Linnabary

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

State courts should feel free to apply whatever test is most appropriate based on the textual provisions of their state constitution that protects the free exercise or worship of its citizens. Of course, such freedom to the state courts is greatly limited in many states by the passage of their own Religious Freedom Restoration Acts. These acts generally set forth precisely how the courts must determine whether or not a law violates the free exercise or worship of a claimant. Even if not limited by a RFRA—which would generally require strict scrutiny—a state court should apply strict scrutiny to violations …

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 …

Originalism, Cass R. Sunstein

Notre Dame Law Review

Originalism might be defended on two very different grounds. The first is that it is in some sense mandatory—for example, that it follows from the very idea of interpretation, from having a written Constitution, or from the only legitimate justifications for judicial review. The second is that originalism is best on broadly consequentialist grounds. While the first kind of defense is not convincing, the second cannot be ruled off limits. In an imaginable world, it is right; in our world, it is usually not. But in the context of impeachment, originalism is indeed best, because there are no sufficiently helpful …

Introduction: Administrative Lawmaking In The Twenty-First Century, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

Notre Dame Law Review

It is always hard to map a river while sailing midstream, but the current state of administrative law is particularly resistant to neat tracing. Until the past few years, administrative law and scholarship was marked by pragmatic compromise: judicial deference on questions of law (but not too much and not all the time) and freedom for agencies on questions of politics and policy (but not to an unseemly degree). There was disagreement around the edges—and some voices in the wilderness calling for radical change—but they operated within a shared framework of admittedly unstated, and perhaps conflicting, assumptions about the administrative …

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 …

How Agencies Choose Whether To Enforce The Law: A Preliminary Investigation, Aaron L. Nielson

Notre Dame Law Review

One of the most controversial aspects of administrative law in recent years concerns agency decisions not to enforce the law. Such nonenforcement is often beneficial or, in any event, inevitable. A particular violation may be so distant from what Congress or the agency had in mind when the general prohibition was put on the books that enforcement makes little sense. Likewise, because agencies have finite resources, they cannot enforce the law in all situations. At the same time, however, nonenforcement can also raise difficult questions about basic notions of fairness and administrative regularity, as well as separation of powers concerns. …

Qui Tam Litigation Against Government Officials: Constitutional Implications Of A Neglected History, Randy Beck

Notre Dame Law Review

The Supreme Court concluded twenty-five years ago, in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, that uninjured private plaintiffs may not litigate “generalized grievances” about the legality of executive branch conduct. According to the Lujan Court, Congress lacked power to authorize suit by a plaintiff who could not establish some “particularized” injury from the challenged conduct. The Court believed litigation to require executive branch legal compliance, brought by an uninjured private party, is not a “case” or “controversy” within the Article III judicial power and impermissibly reassigns the President’s Article II responsibility to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” …

Symbolism And Separation Of Powers In Agency Design, Kristin E. Hickman

Notre Dame Law Review

My goal with this Essay is a modest one: to raise a few reservations regarding judicial refashioning of agency design via this severance remedy for separation of powers violations. To that end, the Essay will proceed fairly straightforwardly. I will describe three cases or sets of cases in which the Supreme Court or the D.C. Circuit has employed the severance remedy: Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a series of D.C. Circuit cases brought by the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System against the Copyright Royalty Board, and PHH Corp. v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Then I will highlight three …

Accountability For Nonenforcement, Urska Velikonja

Notre Dame Law Review

Changes in enforcement can move in more than one direction: enforcement can increase significantly as the Securities and Exchange Commission saw in the aftermath of the accounting scandals or the Madoff Ponzi scheme, and decrease precipitously, as evidenced at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Acting Director Mick Mulvaney. There is no reason in constitutional or administrative law to treat changes in enforcement policy differently depending on whether enforcement increases or decreases. Policy choices raise similar questions about reviewability and accountability, regardless of whether they increase or decrease enforcement. They also raise symmetrical questions about fair notice and due process …

The Never-Ending Assault On The Administrative State, Jack M. Beermann

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article is an exploration of the twists and turns of the never-ending assault on the administrative state. Without attempting to resolve all of the separation of powers controversies that have existed since the beginning of the Republic, this Article examines and analyzes the fundamental constitutional challenges to the administrative state as well as the more peripheral constitutional difficulties involving the administrative state and the nonconstitutional legal challenges that have arisen over the decades. In my view, the legal and political arguments made in favor of major structural changes to the administrative state do not provide sufficient normative bases for …

The Ambiguous Ambiguity Inquiry: Seeking To Clarify Judicial Determinations Of Clarity Versus Ambiguity In Statutory Interpretation, Meredith A. Holland

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note will apply Judge Kavanaugh’s proposed mechanism to the interpretation of the Title IX prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex. Part I discusses recent cases decided by the Roberts Court that demonstrate the difficulties with the current jurisprudential approach to the clarity versus ambiguity determination. Part II explores Judge Kavanaugh’s recent proposal for reducing threshold findings of ambiguity. Part III considers various interpretive methods and applies Judge Kavanaugh’s proposal in the context of Title IX. Finally, this Note concludes that Judge Kavanaugh’s approach, while most dramatically transforming the purposivist approach, also has consequences for the textualist inquiry.

Executive Orders As Lawful Limits On Agency Policymaking Discretion, Adam J. White

Notre Dame Law Review

After briefly retracing previous Presidents’ general uses of executive orders and debates over presidential power more generally, culminating with the late twentieth century executive orders on White House regulatory oversight, I review the case of Sherley v. Sebelius, in which the D.C. Circuit held that when an agency receives an executive order lawfully cabining or directing the its regulatory discretion, it is excused from its otherwise general duty to respond to rulemaking comments challenging its policy choice. Then, examining this general duty of agencies to respond to rulemaking comments, I consider whether the D.C. Circuit’s approach comports with the …

The Nondelegation Doctrine: Alive And Well, Jason Iuliano, Keith E. Whittington

Notre Dame Law Review

The nondelegation doctrine is dead. It is difficult to think of a more frequently repeated or widely accepted legal conclusion. For generations, scholars have maintained that the doctrine was cast aside by the New Deal Court and is now nothing more than a historical curiosity. In this Article, we argue that the conventional wisdom is mistaken in an important respect.

Drawing on an original dataset of more than one thousand nondelegation challenges, we find that, although the doctrine has disappeared at the federal level, it has thrived at the state level. In fact, in the decades since the New Deal, …

Precedent And Preclusion, Alan M. Trammell

Notre Dame Law Review

Preclusion rules prevent parties from revisiting matters that they have already litigated. A corollary of that principle is that preclusion usually does not apply to nonparties, who have not yet benefited from their own “day in court.” But precedent works the other way around. Binding precedent applies to litigants in a future case, even those who never had an opportunity to participate in the precedent-creating lawsuit. The doctrines once operated in distinct spheres, but today they often govern the same questions and apply under the same circumstances, yet to achieve opposite ends. Why, then, does due process promise someone a …

The Death Penalty As Incapacitation, Marah S. Mcleod

Journal Articles

Courts and commentators give scant attention to the incapacitation rationale for capital punishment, focusing instead on retribution and deterrence. The idea that execution may be justified to prevent further violence by dangerous prisoners is often ignored in death penalty commentary. The view on the ground could not be more different. Hundreds of executions have been premised on the need to protect society from dangerous offenders. Two states require a finding of future dangerousness for any death sentence, and over a dozen others treat it as an aggravating factor that turns murder into a capital crime.

How can courts and commentators …

Reconstructing An Administrative Republic, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

Journal Articles

The book Constitutional Coup, by Professor Jon D. Michaels, offers a learned, lucid, and important argument about the relationship between privatization, constitutional structure, and public values in administrative governance. In particular, Michaels argues that the press toward privatization in this domain poses a serious threat to the United States' separation of powers and the public interest. This review essay introduces readers to Michaels' argument and then raises two questions: First, it asks whether Michaels’ method of constitutional interpretation and doctrinal analysis accelerate the trend toward privatization and consolidation of power in agency heads, the very evils he seeks to avoid. …

Why Federal Courts Apply The Law Of Nations Even Though It Is Not The Supreme Law Of The Land, Anthony J. Bellia, Bradford R. Clark

Journal Articles

We are grateful to the judges and scholars who participated in this Symposium examining our book, The Law of Nations and the United States Constitution. One of our goals in writing this book was to reinvigorate and advance the debate over the role of customary international law in U.S. courts. The papers in this Symposium advance this debate by deepening understandings of how the Constitution interacts with customary international law. Our goal in this Article is to address two questions raised by this Symposium that go to the heart of the status of the law of nations under the Constitution. …

Precedent And Constitutional Structure, Randy J. Kozel

Journal Articles

The Constitution does not talk about precedent, at least not explicitly, but several of its features suggest a place for deference to prior decisions. It isolates the judicial function and insulates federal courts from official and electoral control, promoting a vision of impersonality and continuity. It charges courts with applying a charter that is vague and ambiguous in important respects. And it was enacted at a time when prominent thinkers were already discussing the use of precedent to channel judicial discretion. Taken in combination, these features make deference to precedent a sound inference from the Constitution’s structure, text, and historical …

Flint Of Outrage, Toni M. Massaro, Ellen Elizabeth Brooks

Notre Dame Law Review

Officials replaced safe water sources with contaminated water sources for tens of thousands of people living in Flint, Michigan, from April 2014 to October 2015. Overwhelming evidence indicates that the officials knew the water was potentially harmful to residents’ health and property. This unfathomable disregard for the residents of Flint sparked national outrage and prompted criminal charges as well as multiple civil suits.

Residents’ civil claims included two strands of substantive due process: that the actions infringed residents’ fundamental liberty rights to bodily integrity and to state protection from harmful acts by third parties, and that the government actions “shocked …

The Case Against Oral Argument: The Effects Of Confirmation Bias On The Outcome Of Selected Cases In The Seventh Circuit Court Of Appeals, Christine M. Venter

Journal Articles

Scholars have long been divided over the role, function, and significance, if any, of oral argument in judicial decision-making.' Federal courts seem similarly divided, as some circuits routinely grant oral argument in almost every case, while others grant oral argument in only a small fraction of appeals. This divide should not be dismissed as merely an idiosyncratic debate or as a response to excessive workload, particularly when one considers that approximately 53,000 appeals were filed in federal courts of appeals in the year ending September 30, 2016.2 Since the Supreme Court grants certiorari in only approximately eighty cases each year, …

Brief Of Amici Curiae On Behalf Of Intellectual Property Professors In Support Of Appellant And In Support Of Reversal, Mark Mckenna, Rebecca Tushnet

Court Briefs

ASTM’s fundamental complaint is about unauthorized use of its intangible content—the standards for which it claims copyright ownership. Dastar unambiguously holds, however, that only confusion regarding the source of physical goods is actionable under the Lanham Act; confusion regarding the authorship of the standards or their authorization is not actionable. ASTM cannot avoid Dastar just because Public Resource creates digital copies of those standards. Consumers encounter the ASTM marks only as part of the standards, into which ATSM chose to embed the marks. As a result, any “confusion” could only be the result of the content itself. Dastar teaches that …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Intellectual Property Law Professors In Favor Of Judgement As A Matter Of Law, Mark Mckenna, Rebecca Tushnet, John A. Conway

Court Briefs

Plaintiff’s false designation of origin and false endorsement claims, such as they are, rest on the assertion that defendants falsely represented themselves as the origin of intellectual property on which the Oculus Rift is based. Those claims are barred by Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003), which holds that only confusion regarding the origin of physical goods is actionable under the Lanham Act.

The Classical Avoidance Canon As A Principle Of Good-Faith Construction, Brian Taylor Goldman

Journal of Legislation

No abstract provided.

The Constitution That Couldn’T: Examining The Implicit Imbalance Of Constitutional Power In The Context Of Nominations, And The Need For Its Remedy, James E. Britton

Journal of Legislation

No abstract provided.