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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Anti-Leveraging Principle And The Spending Clause After Nfib, Samuel R. Bagenstos
The Anti-Leveraging Principle And The Spending Clause After Nfib, Samuel R. Bagenstos
Articles
This Article offers an initial assessment of the Supreme Court’s Spending Clause holding in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (NFIB), which addressed the constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act. As Justice Ginsburg pointed out, NFIB marks “the first time ever” that the Court has held that a spending condition unconstitutionally coerced the states. The implications of that holding are potentially massive, and some of the language in the decision, if read broadly, would seriously threaten the constitutionality of a broad swath of federal spending legislation. Notwithstanding some of the Court’s language, this Article contends that the case …
"The Magna Carta Of Free Enterprise" Really?" , Daniel A. Crane
"The Magna Carta Of Free Enterprise" Really?" , Daniel A. Crane
Articles
In U.S. v. Topco Associates, Inc., Justice Thurgood Marshall announced that "[a] ntitrust laws in general, and the Sherman Act in particular, are the Magna Carta of free enterprise.", In The Antitrust Constitution, Thomas Nachbar takes seriously the idea that federal antitrust laws serve a constitutional function. He argues that, contrary to common assumptions, the antitrust laws cannot be understood merely as a form of economic utilitarianism. Rather, they serve the additional purpose of preventing "regulatory harm," the assertion of law-like control over the conduct of others outside the sphere of one's own property interests.
The Pastor, The Burning House, And The Double Jeopardy Clause: The True Story Behind Evans V. Michigan, David A. Moran
The Pastor, The Burning House, And The Double Jeopardy Clause: The True Story Behind Evans V. Michigan, David A. Moran
Articles
The true story behind Evans v. Michigan is that a man who was probably innocent, and who would almost certainly have been acquitted by the jury, had his trial shortened after it became obvious to the judge that the police had picked up a man who had nothing to do with the fire. In other words, the facts set forth by the Michigan Supreme Court, and repeated by Alito, were grossly misleading. And because I, like Alito, believed the Michigan Supreme Court’s version of the facts, I made a silly mistake when I agreed to take the case. That silly …
Plata V. Brown And Realignment: Jails, Prisons, Courts, And Politics, Margo Schlanger
Plata V. Brown And Realignment: Jails, Prisons, Courts, And Politics, Margo Schlanger
Articles
The year 2011 marked an important milestone in American institutional reform litigation. That year, a bare majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion in Brown v. Plata by Justice Anthony Kennedy, affirmed a district court order requiring California to remedy its longstanding constitutional deficits in prison medical and mental health care by reducing prison crowding. Not since 1978 had the Court ratified a lower court's crowding-related order in a jail or prison case, and the order before the Court in 2011 was fairly aggressive; theoretically, it could have (although this was never a real prospect) induced the release …
Effective Trial Counsel After Martinez V. Ryan: Focusing On The Adequacy Of State Procedures, Eve Brensike Primus
Effective Trial Counsel After Martinez V. Ryan: Focusing On The Adequacy Of State Procedures, Eve Brensike Primus
Articles
Everyone knows that excessive caseloads, poor funding, and a lack of training plague indigent defense delivery systems throughout the states, such that the promise of Gideon v. Wainwright is largely unfulfilled. Commentators have disagreed about how best to breathe life into Gideon . Many disclaim any possibility that federal habeas corpus review of state criminal cases could catalyze reform give n the many procedural obstacle s that currently prevent state prisoners from getting into federal court. But the Supreme Court has recently taken a renewed interest in using federal habeas review to address the problem of ineffective attorneys in state …
A Rejoinder To Professor Schauer's Commentary, Yale Kamisar
A Rejoinder To Professor Schauer's Commentary, Yale Kamisar
Articles
It is quite a treat to have Professor Frederick Schauer comment on my Miranda article.1 Professor Schauer is a renowned authority on freedom of speech and the author of many thoughtful, probing articles in other areas as well, especially jurisprudence. I am pleased that in large measure, Schauer, too, laments the erosion of Miranda in the last four-and-a-half decades2 and that he, too, was unhappy with the pre-Miranda due process/“totality of circumstances”/“voluntariness” test.3 I also like what Schauer had to say about “prophylactic rules,” a term that has sometimes been used to disparage the Miranda rules.4 As Schauer observes, the …
Grutter's Denouement: Three Templates From The Roberts Court, Ellen D. Katz
Grutter's Denouement: Three Templates From The Roberts Court, Ellen D. Katz
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Precedent from the Roberts Court shows the Justices taking three distinct approaches to precedent they dislike. Each provides a template for the Court to criticize race-based affirmative action in higher education, as Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin is widely expected to do. Most narrowly, the Court might use Fisher to issue a warning, much like it did in 2009 when it sidestepped a constitutional challenge to the Voting Rights Act; under this approach, the opinion would spell out why the Justices think the diversity celebrated in Grutter v. Bollinger no longer provides sufficient justification for the use of …
The Sky Is Still Not Falling, Richard D. Friedman
The Sky Is Still Not Falling, Richard D. Friedman
Articles
Cases since Crawford have mainly fallen into two categories. One involves accusations of crime, made by the apparent victim shortly after the incident. In Michigan v. Bryant, a majority of the Court adopted an unfortunately constricted view of the word "testimonial" in this context. That decision was a consequence of the Court having failed to adopt a robust view of when an accused forfeits the confrontation right. How the Court will deal with this situation-one mistake made in an attempt to compensate for another-is a perplexing and important question. This Essay, though, concentrates on the other principal category of post-Crawford …
Confrontation And Forensic Laboratory Reports, Round Four, Richard D. Friedman
Confrontation And Forensic Laboratory Reports, Round Four, Richard D. Friedman
Articles
Crawford v. Washington radically transformed the doctrine governing the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution. Before Crawford, a prosecutor could introduce against an accused evidence of a hearsay statement, even one made in contemplation that it would be used in prosecution, so long as the statement fit within a "firmly rooted" hearsay exception or the court otherwise determined that the statement was sufficiently reliable to warrant admissibility. Crawford recognized that the Clause is a procedural guarantee, governing the manner in which prosecution witnesses give their testimony. Therefore, a prosecutor may not introduce a statement that is testimonial …
Who Said The Crawford Revolution Would Be Easy?, Richard D. Friedman
Who Said The Crawford Revolution Would Be Easy?, Richard D. Friedman
Articles
One of the central protections of our system of criminal justice is the right of the accused in all criminal prosecutions "to be confronted with the witnesses against him." It provides assurance that prosecution witnesses will give their testimony in the way demanded for centuries by Anglo-American courts-in the presence of the accused, subject to cross-examination- rather than in any other way. Witnesses may not, for example, testify by speaking privately to governmental agents in a police station or in their living rooms. Since shortly after it was adopted, however, the confrontation right became obscured by the ascendance of a …
How The Gun-Free School Zones Act Saved The Individual Mandate, Richard A. Primus
How The Gun-Free School Zones Act Saved The Individual Mandate, Richard A. Primus
Articles
For all the drama surrounding the Commerce Clause challenge to the in-dividual mandate provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”), the doctrinal question presented is simple. Under existing doctrine, the provision is as valid as can be. To be sure, the Supreme Court could alter existing doctrine, and many interesting things could be written about the dynamics that sometimes prompt judges to strike out in new directions under the pressures of cases like this one. But it is not my intention to pursue that possibility here. My own suspicion, for what it is worth, is that the …
Juvenile Life Without Parole: Unconstitutional In Michigan?, Kimberly A. Thomas
Juvenile Life Without Parole: Unconstitutional In Michigan?, Kimberly A. Thomas
Articles
Last term, in Graham v Florida,1 the United States Supreme Court found unconstitutional the sentence of life without parole for a juvenile who committed a non-homicide offense. This attention to the sentencing of juvenile offenders is a continuation of the Court's decision in Roper v Simmons,2 in which the Court held that juvenile offenders could not constitutionally receive the death penalty. This scrutiny should be a signal to Michigan to examine its own jurisprudence on juveniles receiving sentences of life without parole. Michigan has the second-highest number of persons serving sentences of life without parole for offenses committed when they …
The Illusory Right To Counsel, Eve Brensike Primus
The Illusory Right To Counsel, Eve Brensike Primus
Articles
Imagine a woman wrongly accused of murdering her fianc6. She is arrested and charged with first-degree murder. If convicted, she faces a mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Her family scrapes together enough money to hire two attorneys to represent her at trial. There is no physical evidence connecting her to the murder, but the prosecution builds its case on circumstantial inferences. Her trial attorneys admit that they were so cocky and confident that she would be acquitted that they did not bother to investigate her case or file a single pre-trial motion. Rather, they waived the …
The Functions Of Ethical Originalism, Richard A. Primus
The Functions Of Ethical Originalism, Richard A. Primus
Articles
Supreme Court Justices frequently divide on questions of original meaning, and the divisions have a way of mapping what we might suspect are the Justices’ leanings about the merits of cases irrespective of originalist considerations. The same is true for law professors and other participants in constitutional discourse: people’s views of original constitutional meaning tend to align well with their (nonoriginalist) preferences for how present constitutional controversies should be resolved. To be sure, there are exceptions. Some people are better than others at suspending presentist considerations when examining historical materials, and some people are better than others at recognizing when …
Two Masters, Carl E. Schneider
Two Masters, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
American government rests on the principle of distrust of government. Not only is power within the federal government checked and balanced. Power is divided between the federal government and the state governments. So what if a state law conflicts with a federal law? The Constitution says that the "Constitution, and the Laws of the United States ... shall be the supreme Law of the Land; ... any Thing in the ... Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." Sometimes the conflict between federal and state law is obvious and the Supremacy Clause is easily applied. But sometimes ...
Litigation Strategies For Dealing With The Indigent Defense Crisis, Eve Brensike Primus
Litigation Strategies For Dealing With The Indigent Defense Crisis, Eve Brensike Primus
Articles
The indigent defense delivery system in the United States is in a state of crisis. Public defenders routinely handle well over 1,000 cases a year, more than three times the number of cases that the American Bar Association says one attorney can handle effectively. As a result, many defendants sit in jail for months before even speaking to their court-appointed lawyers. And when defendants do meet their attorneys, they are often disappointed to learn that these lawyers are too overwhelmed to provide adequate representation. With public defenders or assigned counsel representing more than 80% of criminal defendants nationwide, the indigent …
Constitutional Expectations, Richard A. Primus
Constitutional Expectations, Richard A. Primus
Articles
The inauguration of Barack Obama was marred by one of the smallest constitutional crises in American history. As we all remember, the President did not quite recite his oath as it appears in the Constitution. The error bothered enough people that the White House redid the ceremony a day later, taking care to get the constitutional text exactly right. Or that, at least, is what everyone thinks happened. What actually happened is more interesting. The second time through, the President again departed from the Constitution's text. But the second time, nobody minded. Or even noticed. In that unremarked feature of …
Public Consensus As Constitutional Authority, Richard A. Primus
Public Consensus As Constitutional Authority, Richard A. Primus
Articles
Barry Friedman's new book The Will of the People attempts to dissolve constitutional law's countermajoritariand ifficulty by showing that, in practice,t he Supreme Court does only what the public will tolerate. His account succeeds if "the countermajoritarian difficulty" refers to the threat that courts will run the country in ways that contravene majority preference, but not if the "the countermajoritarian difficulty" refers to the need to explain the legitimate sources of judicial authority in cases where decisions do contravene majority preference. Friedman's book does not pursue the second possibility, and may suggest that doing so is unimportant, in part because …
Article I, Article Iii, And The Limits Of Enumeration, Gil Seinfeld
Article I, Article Iii, And The Limits Of Enumeration, Gil Seinfeld
Articles
Article I, Section 8 and Article Ill, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution deploy parallel strategies for constraining the power of the federal government. They enumerate powers that the national legislature and judiciary, respectively, are permitted to exercise and thereby implicitly prohibit these two branches of government from exercising powers not enumerated. According to conventional thinking, this strategy has failed in connection with Article I and succeeded in connection with Article III. That is, it is widely acknowledged that Congress routinely exercises powers that are difficult to square with the Article I enumeration; but it is commonly thought that the …
What Does Graham Mean In Michigan?, Kimberly A. Thomas
What Does Graham Mean In Michigan?, Kimberly A. Thomas
Articles
In Graham v. Florida, the United States Supreme Court held that life without parole could not be imposed on a juvenile offender for a nonhomicide crime.1 In this context, the Graham Court extensively discussed the diminished culpability of juvenile criminal defendants, as compared to adults. The Court relied on current scientific research regarding adolescent development and neuroscience. While the narrowest holding of Graham has little impact in Michigan, the science it relies on, and the potential broader implications for adolescents in Michigan, are significant.
Limits Of Interpretivism, Richard A. Primus
Limits Of Interpretivism, Richard A. Primus
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Justice Stephen Markman sits on the Supreme Court of my home state of Michigan. In that capacity, he says, he is involved in a struggle between two kinds of judging. On one side are judges like him. They follow the rules. On the other side are unconstrained judges who decide cases on the basis of what they think the law ought to be. This picture is relatively simple, and Justice Markman apparently approves of its simplicity. But matters may in fact be a good deal more complex.
Giles V. California: A Personal Reflection, Richard D. Friedman
Giles V. California: A Personal Reflection, Richard D. Friedman
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In this Essay, Professor Friedman places Giles v. California in the context of the recent transformation of the law governing the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment. He contends that a robust doctrine of forfeiture is an integral part of a sound conception of the confrontation right. One reason this is so is that cases fitting within the traditional hearsay exception for dying declarations can be explained as instances of forfeiture. This explanation leads to a simple structure of confrontation law, qualified by the principle that the confrontation right may be waived or forfeited but not subject to genuine exceptions. …
Procedural Obstacles To Reviewing Ineffective Assistance Of Trial Counsel Claims In State And Federal Postconviction Proceedings., Eve Brensike Primus
Procedural Obstacles To Reviewing Ineffective Assistance Of Trial Counsel Claims In State And Federal Postconviction Proceedings., Eve Brensike Primus
Articles
Ineffective assistance of trial counsel is one of the most frequently raised claims in state and federal postconviction petitions. This is hardly surprising given reports of trial attorneys who refuse to investigate their cases before trial, never meet with their clients before the day of trial, and fail to file any motions or object to inadmissible evidence offered at trial. Unfortunately, the current structure of indigent defense funding makes it impossible for many public defenders to provide effective representation to their clients.
Withdrawal: The Roberts Court And The Retreat From Election Law, Ellen D. Katz
Withdrawal: The Roberts Court And The Retreat From Election Law, Ellen D. Katz
Articles
Last Term the Supreme Court handed down four decisions that upheld diverse efforts by state governments to regulate the electoral process. The Court turned back challenges to New York’s method for nominating judicial candidates, Washington’s modified blanket primary system, Indiana’s voter identification requirement, and Alabama’s use of gubernatorial appointment to fill county commission vacancies in Mobile County. Unlike other recent election decisions, these were not close cases. All nine Justices supported the New York holding, while supermajorities voted in favor of the result in the others. This consensus, moreover, emerged even as the Court voted to reverse unanimous decisions by …
From Bush V. Gore To Namudno: A Response To Professor Amar, Ellen D. Katz
From Bush V. Gore To Namudno: A Response To Professor Amar, Ellen D. Katz
Articles
In his Dunwody Lecture, Professor Akhil Amar invites us to revisit the Bush v. Gore controversy and consider what went wrong. This short essay responds to Professor Amar by taking up his invitation and looking at the decision through a seemingly improbable lens, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last June in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. One (NAMUDNO) v. Holder. Among its many surprises, NAMUDNO helps illuminate the Court’s fundamental error nine years ago. Professor Amar forcefully argues that the mistrust with which the Justices in the Bush v. Gore majority viewed the Florida Supreme Court was both unjustified …
Can Glucksberg Survive Lawrence? Another Look At The End Of Life And Personal Autonomy, Yale Kamisar
Can Glucksberg Survive Lawrence? Another Look At The End Of Life And Personal Autonomy, Yale Kamisar
Articles
In Washington v. Glucksberg, the Court declined to find a right to physician-assisted suicide ("PAS") in the Constitution. Not a single Justice dissented. One would expect such a ruling to be quite secure. But Lawrence v. Texas, holding that a state cannot make consensual homosexual conduct a crime, is not easy to reconcile with Glucksberg. Lawrence certainly takes a much more expansive view of substantive due process than did Glucksberg. It is conceivable that the five Justices who made up the Lawrence majority-all of whom still sit on the Court-might overrule Glucksberg. For various reasons, …
Is A Forensic Laboratory Report Identifying A Substance As A Narcotic 'Testimonial'?, Richard D. Friedman
Is A Forensic Laboratory Report Identifying A Substance As A Narcotic 'Testimonial'?, Richard D. Friedman
Articles
Is a state forensic analyst's laboratory report, prepared for use in a criminal proceeding and identifying a substance as cocaine, "testimonial" evidence and so subject to the demands of the Confrontation Clause as set forth in Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004)?
Does An Accused Forfeit The Confrontation Right By Murdering A Witness, Absent A Purpose To Render Her Unavailable?, Richard D. Friedman
Does An Accused Forfeit The Confrontation Right By Murdering A Witness, Absent A Purpose To Render Her Unavailable?, Richard D. Friedman
Articles
If an accused murdered a witness, should he be deemed to have forfeited the right under the Sixth Amendment "to be confronted with" the witness, absent proof that the accused committed the murder for the purpose of rendering her unavailable as a witness?
When Should Original Meanings Matter?, Richard A. Primus
When Should Original Meanings Matter?, Richard A. Primus
Articles
Constitutional theory lacks an account of when each of the familiar sources of authority-text, original meaning, precedent, and so on-should be given weight. The dominant tendency is to regard all sources as potentially applicable in every case. In contrast, this Article proposes that each source of authority is pertinent in some categories of cases but not in others, much as a physical tool is appropriate for some but not all kinds of household tasks. The Article then applies this approach to identify the categories of cases in which original meaning is, or is not, a valid factor in constitutional decisionmaking.
Requiem For Section 1983, Paul D. Reingold
Requiem For Section 1983, Paul D. Reingold
Articles
Section 1983 no longer serves as a remedial statute for the people most in need of its protection. Those who have suffered a violation of their civil rights at the hands of state authorities, but who cannot afford a lawyer because they have only modest damages or seek only equitable remedies, are foreclosed from relief because lawyers shun their cases. Today civil rights plaintiffs are treated the same as ordinary tort plaintiffs by the private bar: without high damages, civil rights plaintiffs are denied access to the courts because no one will represent them. Congress understood that civil rights laws …