Law Commons^™

What Is "United" About The United States?, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Jack Balkin’s The Cycles of Constitutional Time aims, among other things, to preserve and promote what Jack regards as “democracy and republicanism,” understood as “a joint enterprise by citizens and their representatives to pursue and promote the public good.” My question is whether and how this normative project is possible in a world full of perceptions of social, political, and moral phenomena akin to the white dress/blue dress internet controversy of 2015. Even if Madison had the better of Montesquieu in 1788 (and that is questionable), the United States has grown dramatically since the founding era, in a patchwork, and …

Power Transitions In A Troubled Democracy, Peter L. Strauss, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

Written as our contribution to a festschrift for the noted Italian administrative law scholar Marco D’Alberti, this essay addresses transition between Presidents Trump and Biden, in the context of political power transitions in the United States more generally. Although the Trump-Biden transition was marked by extraordinary behaviors and events, we thought even the transition’s mundane elements might prove interesting to those for whom transitions occur in a parliamentary context. There, succession can happen quickly once an election’s results are known, and happens with the new political government immediately formed and in office. The layer of a new administration’s political leadership …

The Uncertain Future Of Administrative Law, Jeremy K. Kessler, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

A volatile series of presidential transitions has only intensified the century-long conflict between progressive defenders and conservative critics of the administrative state. Yet neither side has adequately confronted the fact that the growth of uncertainty and the corresponding spread of guidance – a kind of provisional “rule” that invites its own revision – mark a break in the development of the administrative state as significant as the rise of notice-and-comment rulemaking in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas rulemaking corrected social shortsightedness by enlisting science in the service of lawful administration, guidance acknowledges that both science and law are in need …

The Belt-And-Suspenders Canon, Ethan J. Leib, James J. Brudney

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay christens a new canon into the doctrines of statutory interpretation, one that can counter the too-powerful canon that has courts imposing norms against redundancy in their readings of statutes. Judges engaging in statutory interpretation must do a better job of recognizing how and why legislatures choose not to draft with perfect parsimony. Our Essay highlights the multifarious ways legislatures in federal and state governments self-consciously and thoughtfully – rather than regrettably and lazily – think about employing “belt-and-suspenders” efforts in their drafting practices. We then analyze in depth courts’ disparate efforts to integrate a belt-and-suspenders canon into their …

Constitutional Law And The Presidential Nomination Process, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The Constitution says nothing about the presidential nominating process and has had little direct role in the evolution of that process from congressional caucuses to party national conventions to our current primary-dominated system of selecting convention delegates. Yet, constitutional law is a factor in empowering and constraining the principal actors in the nomination process and in shaping the framework for potential future changes.

The constitutional law of the presidential nomination process operates along two axes: government-party, and state-national. The government-party dimension focuses on the tension between the states and the federal government in writing the rules for and administering the …

Legislatures, Executives And Political Control Of Government, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter examines how political control over government is exercised today in the UK, the US, and France, focusing on control of the executive branch by the legislature and control of the administrative executive by the political executive. These three jurisdictions were chosen because they are paradigmatic examples of different political regimes: parliamentarism, separation of powers presidentialism, and semi-presidentialism. In theory, these different institutional structures should affect how political control is understood and wielded. In the traditional Westminster parliamentary model, for example, the government is formed from the leadership of the majority party in Parliament and it is the government …

Lawful Searches Incident To Unlawful Arrests: A Reform Proposal, Mark A. Summers

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Evaluating Stock-Trading Practices And Their Regulation, Merritt B. Fox, Kevin S. Haeberle

Faculty Scholarship

High-frequency trading, dark pools, and the practices associated with them have come under tremendous scrutiny lately, giving rise to much hot rhetoric. Missing from the discussion, however, is a principled, comprehensive standard for evaluating such practices and the law that governs them. This Article fills that gap by providing a general framework for making serious normative judgments about stock-trading behavior and its regulation. In particular, we argue that such practices and laws should be evaluated with an eye to the secondary trading market’s impact on four main aspects of our economy: the use of existing productive capacity, the allocation of …

Competitive Federalism: Five Clarifying Questions, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

Before I looked into the two fine books we are reviewing here,1 I would have said that arguments from federalism are typically fraudulent, neither more nor less than deliberate attempts to cloud the discussion of real issues. Now that I have read what Sotirios A. Barber and Michael S. Greve have written, I am largely confirmed in my prejudices. But my suspicions about federalism contentions have been shaken a bit – enough to ask some questions of Professor Greve, whose answers might persuade me that there is some good in this federalism business, after all. I doubt it, but I …

2013 Survey Of Juvenile Law, Michael J. Dale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Wounds Of War: Meeting The Needs Of Active-Duty Military Personnel And Veterans With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Olympia Duhart, Kathy L. Cerminara

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Extradition Treaty Between Jamaica And The United States: Its History And The Saga Of Christopher "Dudus" Coke", Kenneth L. Lewis

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

I'M A Laycockian! (For The Most Part), Jay D. Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

You know you’ve made it, scholarly-wise speaking, when a major publishing house and a preeminent university approach you to ask whether they could publish a four-volume set of your collected works. Such is the situation of Douglas Laycock (DL), long-time Professor at the University of Texas School of Law, now moving from the University of Michigan to the University of Virginia and most certainly on just about everyone’s short list of greatest church–state scholars of the past quarter-century. Volume One of the collection was published in 2010; it is subtitled “Overviews & History” and contains roughly forty pieces written by …

Fulfilling Government 2.0'S Promise With Robust Privacy Protections, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

The public can now “friend” the White House and scores of agencies on social networks, virtual worlds, and video-sharing sites. The Obama Administration sees this trend as crucial to enhancing governmental transparency, public participation, and collaboration. As the President has underscored, government needs to tap into the public’s expertise because it doesn’t have all of the answers.

To be sure, Government 2.0 might improve civic engagement. But it also might produce privacy vulnerabilities because agencies often gain access to individuals’ social network profiles, photographs, videos, and contact lists when interacting with individuals online. Little would prevent agencies from using and …

Fulfilling Government 2.0'S Promise With Robust Privacy Protections, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

The public can now “friend” the White House and scores of agencies on social networks, virtual worlds, and video-sharing sites. The Obama Administration sees this trend as crucial to enhancing governmental transparency, public participation, and collaboration. As the President has underscored, government needs to tap into the public’s expertise because it doesn’t have all of the answers. To be sure, Government 2.0 might improve civic engagement. But it also might produce privacy vulnerabilities because agencies often gain access to individuals’ social network profiles, photographs, videos, and contact lists when interacting with individuals online. Little would prevent agencies from using and …

Government Speech 2.0, Helen L. Norton, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

New expressive technologies continue to transform the ways in which members of the public speak to one another. Not surprisingly, emerging technologies have changed the ways in which government speaks as well. Despite substantial shifts in how the government and other parties actually communicate, however, the Supreme Court to date has developed its government speech doctrine – which recognizes “government speech” as a defense to First Amendment challenges by plaintiffs who claim that the government has impermissibly excluded their expression based on viewpoint – only in the context of disputes involving fairly traditional forms of expression. In none of these …

A Tale Of Two Paradigms: Judicial Review And Judicial Duty, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

What is the role of judges in holding government acts unconstitutional? The conventional paradigm is "judicial review." From this perspective, judges have a distinct power to review statutes and other government acts for their constitutionality. The historical evidence, however, reveals another paradigm, that of judicial duty. From this point of view, presented in my book Law and Judicial Duty, a judge has an office or duty, in all decisions, to exercise judgment in accord with the law of the land. On this understanding, there is no distinct power to review acts for their constitutionality, and what is called "judicial review" …

2009 Survey Of Juvenile Law, Michael J. Dale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The President’S Question Time: Power, Information, And The Executive Credibility Gap, Sudha Setty

Faculty Scholarship

The rule of law depends on a working separation of powers and transparency and accountability in government. If information is power, the ability of one branch of government to control information represents the ability to control federal legislation, policy, and decision-making. The Framers of the United States Constitution developed the Madisonian model of separated powers and functions, and a system of checks and balances to maintain those separations, with this in mind. History has shown a progressive shift of the power to control information toward the executive branch and away from the Legislature. Particularly when unified, one-party government precludes effective …

The Right To Health And The Nevirapine Case In South Africa, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Thanks to activists in South Africa, the right to health as a human right has returned to the international stage, just as it was being displaced by economists who see health through the prism of a globalized economy and by politicians who see it as an issue of national security or charity. The current post-apartheid debate in South Africa is not about race but about health, and in this context, the court victory by AIDS activists in the nevirapine case has been termed not only, as stated in one British newspaper, “the greatest defeat for [President Thabo] Mbeki's government” but …

Alternative Dispute Resolution And The Occupational Safety And Health Review Commission: Settlement Judges And Simplified Proceedings, Morell E. Mullins Sr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Financial Liberalization, International Monetary Dis/Order, And The Neoliberal State, Timothy A. Canova

Faculty Scholarship

This article started as a plenary paper that was presented to the annual International Economic Law conference of the American Society of International Law. The conference itself posed the question of whether the new international economic order was leading to greater peace, stability, fairness and justice. At a time when American post-Cold War triumphalism was perhaps at its zenith, Canova answered with an unequivocal indictment of the global order for failing to deliver peace or justice. The first part of the article critiques the international monetary system, and argues that the primary negative consequence of capital liberalization is the undermining …

Open Texture And The Possibility Of Legal Interpretation, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

This essay concerns the possibility of interpreting law. It is always possible to interpret law in the weak sense, which assigns meaning it is not assumed the law previously possessed. My concern here is interpretation in the strong sense, which, if successful, reveals meaning that lies hidden in the law. Theories of legal interpretation have recently received much theoretical attention. The received theory of law's open texture suggests that this interest is misplaced.

Partial-Birth Abortion, Congress, And The Constitution, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The political debate over abortion during the past 25 years has shifted among various dichotomous views of the world: life versus choice, fetus versus woman, fetus versus baby, constitutional right versus states' rights, government versus physician, physician and patient versus state legislature. Hundreds of statutes and almost two dozen Supreme Court decisions on abortion later, the core aspects of Roe v. Wade, 1 the most controversial health-related decision by the Court ever, remain substantially the same as they were in 1973. Attempts to overturn Roe in both the courtroom and the legislature have failed. Pregnant women still have a constitutional …

State And Local Government Fiscal Responsibility: An Integrated Approach, Charles W. Goldner Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Interest Group Politics And Judicial Behavior: Macey's Public Choice, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

The economic theory of government has lately gained the acceptance in legal circles that it has long enjoyed in political science and economics. The economic theory, also known as "public choice," analyzes and explains government action and private political activity according to the basic assumption of economics, that individuals respond to economic incentives in their environments in a self-interested manner. The economic theory is thus useful descriptively, to explain diverse political phenomena, and prescriptively, to help formulate reform strategy.

The Creeping Eruption Of Mt. Healthy, Morell E. Mullins Sr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.