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Faculty Scholarship

Duke Law

Federal government

2012

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law

Its Hour Come Round At Last? State Sovereign Immunity And The Great State Debt Crisis Of The Early Twenty-First Century, Ernest A. Young Jan 2012

Its Hour Come Round At Last? State Sovereign Immunity And The Great State Debt Crisis Of The Early Twenty-First Century, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

State sovereign immunity is a sort of constitutional comet, streaking across the sky once a century to the amazement and consternation of legal commentators. The comet’s appearance has usually coincided with major state debt crises: The Revolutionary War debts brought us Chisholm v. Georgia and the Eleventh Amendment, and the Reconstruction debts brought us Hans v. Louisiana and the Amendment’s extension to federal question cases. This essay argues that much of our law of state sovereign immunity, including its odd fictions and otherwise-incongruous exceptions, can be understood as an effort to maintain immunity’s core purpose — protecting the states from …


‘The Ordinary Diet Of The Law’: The Presumption Against Preemption In The Roberts Court, Ernest A. Young Jan 2012

‘The Ordinary Diet Of The Law’: The Presumption Against Preemption In The Roberts Court, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

In a preemption case decided over a decade ago, Justice Breyer wrote that “in today’s world, filled with legal complexity, the true test of federalist principle may lie . . . in those many statutory cases where courts interpret the mass of technical detail that is the ordinary diet of the law.” This article surveys the Roberts Court’s preemption jurisprudence, focusing on five cases decided in OT 2010. Young argues that Justice Breyer was right — that is, that because current federalism jurisprudence largely eschews any effort to define exclusive spheres of state and federal regulatory jurisdiction, the most important …


The Liberty Of Free Riders: The Minimum Coverage Provision, Mill’S “Harm Principle,” And American Social Morality, Jedediah Purdy, Neil S. Siegel Jan 2012

The Liberty Of Free Riders: The Minimum Coverage Provision, Mill’S “Harm Principle,” And American Social Morality, Jedediah Purdy, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, the authors show that cost-shifting and adverse selection problems link the federalism dimension of the debate over the Affordable Care Act to the doctrinally separate and suppressed individual rights dimension. As the scope of these free-rider problems justifies federal power to require individuals to obtain health insurance coverage, so the very existence of the free-rider problems illuminates the difficulty of arguing directly — as opposed to indirectly through the Commerce Clause — that the minimum coverage provision infringes individual liberty. The interdependence between some people’s decisions to forgo insurance and the well-being of other people means that …