Law Commons^™

The “Catch-22” Of Rule 23(B)(2): Past Purchaser’S Standing To Pursue Injunctive Relief, Margarete Tompkins

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note argues that past purchasers of a product have standing to pursue injunctive relief under Rule 23(b)(2). Part I discusses class actions and the current state of caselaw on false-labeling cases. I.A discusses the history of class actions generally, as well as the differing views on the purpose of Rule 23 throughout its history. I.B then provides background on standing, both generally and in the class action context. I.C explains the existing caselaw on standing for past purchasers, illustrating the looming circuit split on the issue. Part II then begins the argument portion of this Note. II.A argues that …

The Emerging Possibility Of Religious Charter Schools: A Case Study Of Arizona And Massachusetts, Kathleen C. Ryan

Notre Dame Law Review

In July 2022, Arizona became the first state to create a universal school-choice program by passing the Empowerment Scholarship Account Program, an education savings account (ESA) for all students outside the public school system. Over the past thirty years, Arizona has expanded its school choice offerings, which includes one of the largest charter school systems in the nation. Today, students in Arizona have many choices for school, including traditional public schools, charter schools, magnet schools, secular private schools, and religious private schools. In the future, could one of those options be a religious charter school?

Justice Breyer’s dissent in Espinoza …

The Administrative Procedure Act: Failures, Successes, And Danger Ahead, Emily S. Bremer

Notre Dame Law Review

The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) is a profoundly important statute, operating as the superstatute backbone for the modern administrative state. This Essay argues that, although the APA deserves to be held in high regard, its procedural provisions have had more mixed success than is commonly acknowledged. These procedural provisions govern agency adjudication and rulemaking and, in both contexts, were designed to establish minimum procedural requirements that would apply uniformly across administrative agencies. Drawing on the extensive research that informed the APA's drafting, this Essay argues that the APA has failed to achieve its goal in adjudication, but has succeeded spectacularly …

Making Sense Of Absence: Interpreting The Apa’S Failure To Provide For Court Review Of Presidential Administration, Noah A. Rosenblum

Notre Dame Law Review

Federal governance is increasingly characterized by presidential direction of administration. Yet the main statute that governs court review of administrative action, the Administrative Procedure Act, has strikingly little to say about the President.

This Essay seeks to make sense of this absence. It uses a brief survey of historical materials from the new Bremer-Kovacs Collection to sound the depths of the Administrative Procedure Act’s silence on the President. It then seeks to explain this omission by reference to contemporaneous discussions of the place of the president in the administrative state. The Essay hypothesizes that, at the time, the presidency was …

Movement Administrative Procedure, Evan D. Bernick

Notre Dame Law Review

On April 4, 1946, The Potters Herald, a Thursday weekly dedicated to labor and union news, published an editorial warning readers of pending legislation “which may seriously affect labor” despite not containing a “single word about labor” in its text. This legislation would empower “anti-labor judges” to overturn decisions by the National Labor Relations Board. Despite its neutral appearance, it was in reality designed to “kick [labor and the NLRB] in the teeth” and would result in “a field day for the corporation lawyers.”

The complained-of legislation was the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (APA). From today’s vantage point, …

"The Arc Of The Moral Universe": Christian Eschatology And U.S. Constitutionalism, Nathan S. Chapman

Notre Dame Law Review

This Essay first attempts to understand how a contested Christian doctrine found its way into constitutional law. It does so through a reverse genealogy of ideas—an archaeology, perhaps. The Essay begins by sketching how U.S. constitutionalism, in both theory and doctrine, reflects the belief that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It then suggests that underlying this constitutional theme is a merger of two features of American civil religion: the tradition of treating the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as the central texts of a sacred canon and the belief that America …

Severability And Standing Puzzles In The Law Of Removal Power, Jack Ferguson

Notre Dame Law Review

One of the “oldest and most venerable debates in U.S. constitutional law” concerns the President’s ability to fire executive branch officers. That debate shows little sign of subsiding. In recent years, the Supreme Court has decided a number of removal power cases that reflect an increasingly formalist turn. These cases have endorsed a version of the unitary executive theory and blessed the President’s ability to remove nominally independent officials. When it comes to questions of severability and remedy, however, the formalist majorities have fractured. Collins v. Yellen, decided in 2021, provides the most illuminating example. Justices Thomas and Gorsuch concurred …

Christians And/As Liberals?, Steven D. Smith

Notre Dame Law Review

Christianity and liberalism were made to fit each other, like hand and glove. According to some interpretations, anyway. Liberal constitutionalism, with its commitments to freedom and equal human dignity, is the political system that reflects and embodies Christian commitments; and the constitutional legal order that accompanies liberalism, centrally including legally enforced rights of religious freedom, is the mode of government that best permits Christians to live in accordance with their faith in a fallen and deviant world. Thus, a couple of decades ago, Robert Kraynak reported that “[a]lmost all churches and theologians now believe that the form of government most …

"It Is Tash Whom He Serves": Deneen And Vermeule On Liberalism, Andrew Koppelman

Notre Dame Law Review

I worry that some recent Christian criticisms of liberalism are the kind of fantasy that Murdoch warned about, caricaturing what they purport to oppose. They are also ominously vague about what would replace it. Both writers echo earlier Christian flirtations with Marxism: philosophical errors lead idealists to gullibly embrace authoritarian kleptocrats who do not give a damn about the people the idealists are trying to help.

I will focus on the work of Patrick Deneen, with some reference to the more abbreviated but similar critiques of liberalism by Adrian Vermeule. Both claim that liberalism’s relentless logic tends to destroy communities …

Catholic Liberalism And The Liberal Tradition, Kathleen A. Brady

Notre Dame Law Review

Criticisms of liberalism are nothing new. All political traditions have their detractors, and as in the past, today’s critics of liberalism include those on the left and right as well as religious believers and those without religious affiliations. However, in very recent years, far-reaching and deepening critiques have been emerging from an unlikely source. Throughout American history, the nation’s religious communities have been among the strongest defenders of religious freedom as well as other fundamental liberal values such as limited government, democratic institutions, civic equality, and other civil freedoms. Conservative Christians have been no exception. With other Americans, they have …

Religious Political Arguments, Accessibility, And Democratic Deliberation, Paul Billingham

Notre Dame Law Review

Christian critics of liberalism, and especially of contemporary public-reason liberalism, often argue that it objectionably excludes religious voices form the public square, by requiring citizens to bracket their religious convictions when they engage in democratic deliberation. In response, liberals often deny that their views have this implication. Many public-reason liberal theorists are “inclusivists,” who permit religious contributions to deliberation.

Yet even inclusivists provide little reason to think that religious political arguments can be persuasive or fruitful. After all, they tend to see religious reasons as inaccessible to others, due to relying on beliefs, values, and methods of reasoning that others …

Natural Law, Parental Rights, And The Defense Of "Liberal" Limits On Government: An Analysis Of The Mortara Case And Its Contemporary Parallels, Melissa Moschella

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article explores parallels between integralists’ defense of the Mortara case (in which Pius IX removed a child from his parents’ care in order to provide him with a Catholic education) and contemporary progressive arguments for overriding the authority of parents who do not want their gender-dysphoric children to undergo social or medical gender transition. In Part I, I offer an overview of the natural law case for limited government, then in Part II I turn more specifically to a natural law defense of parental rights as an essential aspect of limited government. In the following Part, I return to …

Contingency And Contestation In Christianity And Liberalism, Michael P. Moreland

Notre Dame Law Review

What is the relationship of Christianity to liberalism? Answers include: Liberalism is a product of the moral legacy of Christianity, such as the dignity of individual human persons, equality, rights, perhaps even some forms of democratic institutionalism. Or liberalism is a hostile reaction against Christianity by way of an autonomous individualism set against divinely ordained creatureliness and dependence, democracy against authority, egalitarianism against hierarchy. Or liberalism is in a modus vivendi relationship with Christianity and vice versa. Or perhaps there is something true about each of these answers.

Critiques of liberalism in law and politics come in waves. The liberal-communitarian …

Whose Liberalism, Which Christianity?, Jonathan Chaplin

Notre Dame Law Review

The papers in this intriguing Symposium all face the perplexing challenge of negotiating a way through the thicket of divergent definitions of both “liberalism” and “Christianity.” At a time when “Christianity” is thought to be, for some, fundamentally at odds with “liberalism,” or for others, liberalism’s enthusiastic cheerleader, we cannot avoid delving into the finer grain of these complex traditions. The clarificatory challenge in regard to “liberalism” has been lent greater urgency of late because of the comprehensive nature of assaults on “liberalism” by, especially, Catholic integralism. Christians who seek at least partially to defend liberalism against such assaults (as …

Procedure At The Intersection Of Law And Equity: Veil Piercing And The Seventh Amendment, Samuel Haward

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note addresses the multicircuit split that veil piercing’s “vexing” nature has created. The First, Second and Fifth Circuits, on varying theories, have found that there exists a federal right to a jury trial on veil-piercing issues. Conversely, the Sixth and Seventh Circuits have disagreed, holding that veil piercing is an action sounding primarily in equity outside the scope of the Seventh Amendment. Part I will briefly discuss the Supreme Court’s Seventh Amendment jurisprudence and explain how veil piercing falls into the Court’s awkward demarcation of law and equity. Part II will explore the legal and equitable history of veil-piercing …

Tender And Taint: Money And Complicity In Entanglement Jurisprudence, Amy J. Sepinwall

Notre Dame Law Review

Because liberalism is concerned with individual freedom, it finds that one person is responsible for the conduct of another only under very narrow circumstances. To a large extent, the law reflects this narrow conception of complicity. There is however one glaring exception to the law’s general resistance to complicity claims: where one actor becomes connected to another’s act through a pecuniary contribution, the law’s liberalism falls away. Money forges a cognizable association no matter how tenuous the causal connection and no matter the subsidizer’s attitudes toward the subsidized act. For example, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court recognized …

Liberalism And Orthodoxy: A Search For Mutual Apprehension, Brandon Paradise, Fr. Sergey Trostyanskiy

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article seeks to evaluate and contextualize recently intensifying Christian critiques of liberalism’s intellectual and moral claims. Much of this recent critique has been from Catholic and Protestant quarters. Christianity’s third major branch—Orthodox Christianity—has not played a prominent role in current critiques of liberalism. This Article seeks to help fill this void in the literature. In helping to fill this void, it contributes to understanding how liberalism fits with one of the world’s most ancient Christian traditions.

The Article begins by disambiguating the terms Orthodoxy and liberalism. After identifying each body of thought’s foundational commitments, it notes that Orthodoxy endorses …

A Third Category For Rideshare Drivers: Untying Employment Statutes From Agency Law, Nathaniel Reyes

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note does not take a stance on the issue of whether rideshare drivers should be classified as “employees” under either employment statutes or the doctrine of respondeat superior. It argues, rather, that if the protection of employment statutes is to be extended to rideshare drivers, this should be done by Congress’s creation of new worker categories in the statutes, rather than by squeezing rideshare drivers into the existing “employee” category. The use of the same binary distinction between employee and independent contractor in both employment statutes and respondeat-superior cases is a practice which should ultimately be abandoned, and recognizing …

The Primacy Of Free Exercise In Public-Employee Religious Speech, Nicholas J. Grandpre

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note addresses the question left open by the Court and highlighted by Justice Thomas: under what standard of review should courts review public-employee religious expression protected by both the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses? This Note begins by introducing the doctrine of government-employee speech. Then, this Note surveys proposals within existing scholarship that address how courts ought to treat public-employee religious expression. In doing so, this Note evaluates the following proposals: (1) applying Pickering balancing as is; (2) applying a modified version of Pickering balancing; (3) replacing Pickering balancing with intermediate scrutiny; (4) the Holmesian approach: deeming public-employee …

Battlegrounds For Banned Books: The First Amendment And Public School Libraries, Jensen Rehn

Notre Dame Law Review

Embedded in each conversation about banning books are arguments that use legal terminology. A brief conversation about banned books with a librarian will likely lead to a discussion of the “Library Bill of Rights” published by the ALA. No one is bound by the ALA’s Bill of Rights, which lacks a method of enforcement. Thus, the question remains: what is the legal landscape of banning books? Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has not provided a clear precedent about banning books from public school libraries. In fact, the Supreme Court has only taken cases about libraries on three occasions, each of which …

The Limits Of Church Autonomy, Lael Weinberger

Notre Dame Law Review

American courts apply “church autonomy doctrine” to protect the self-governance of religious institutions, based on both of the First Amendment’s religion clauses. Church autonomy’s defenders have sometimes described the doctrine as establishing distinct spheres of sovereignty for church and state. But critics have argued that church autonomy puts religious institutions above the law. They contend that church autonomy doctrine lacks limiting principles and worry that the “sphere sovereignty” theory of church and state leaves no room for accountability for wrongdoing in religious institutions. The courts, for their part, have recognized that church autonomy must have limits but have struggled to …

The Limitations Of Privacy Rights, Daniel J. Solove

Notre Dame Law Review

Individual privacy rights are often at the heart of information privacy and data protection laws. The most comprehensive set of rights, from the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), includes the right to access, right to rectification (correction), right to erasure (deletion), right to restriction, right to data portability, right to object, and right to not be subject to automated decisions. Privacy laws around the world include many of these rights in various forms.

In this Article, I contend that although rights are an important component of privacy regulation, rights are often asked to do far more work than …

A Prophylactic Approach To Compact Constitutionality, Katherine Mims Crocker

Notre Dame Law Review

From COVID-19 to climate change, immigration to health insurance, firearms control to electoral reform: state politicians have sought to address all these hot-button issues by joining forces with other states. The U.S. Constitution, however, forbids states to “enter into any Agreement or Compact” with each other “without the Consent of Congress,” a requirement that proponents of much interstate action, especially around controversial topics, would hope to circumvent.

The Supreme Court lets them do just that. By interpreting “any Agreement or Compact” so narrowly that it is difficult to see what besides otherwise unlawful coordination qualifies, the Court has essentially read …

Specific Performance: On Freedom And Commitment In Contract Law, Hanoch Dagan, Michael Heller

Notre Dame Law Review

When should specific performance be available for breach of contract? This question—at the core of contract—divides common-law and civil-law jurisdictions and it has bedeviled generations of comparativists, along with legal economists, historians, and philosophers. Yet none of these disciplines has provided a persuasive answer. This Article provides a normatively attractive and conceptually coherent account, one grounded in respect for the autonomy of the promisor’s future self. Properly understood, autonomy explains why expectation damages should be the ordinary remedy for contract breach. This same normative commitment justifies the “uniqueness exception,” where specific performance is typically awarded, and the personal services exclusion, …

The Structure Of Criminal Federalism, Erin C. Blondel

Notre Dame Law Review

Scholars and courts have long assumed that a limited federal government should stick to genuinely “federal” crimes and leave “local” crimes to the states. By that measure, criminal federalism has failed; federal criminal law largely overlaps with state crime, and federal prosecutors regularly do seemingly “local” cases. Despite nearly unlimited paper jurisdiction, however, the federal enforcement footprint has remained tiny and virtually static for a century. Something is strongly limiting the federal system, just not differences in substantive coverage.

The answer is different enforcement responsibilities. The police power means states alone provide basic public safety and criminal justice. Rather than …

Congressional Power, Public Rights, And Non-Article Iii Adjudication, John M. Golden, Thomas H. Lee

Notre Dame Law Review

When can Congress vest in administrative agencies or other non–Article III federal courts the power to adjudicate any of the nine types of “Cases” or “Controversies” listed in Article III of the United States Constitution? The core doctrine holds that Congress may employ non–Article III adjudicators in territorial courts, in military courts, and for decision of matters of public right. Scholars have criticized this so-called “public rights” doctrine as incoherent but have struggled to offer a more cogent answer.

This Article provides a new, overarching explanation of when and why Congress may use non–Article III federal officials to adjudicate matters …

The Stewardship Model Of Necessity, Joseph Graziano

Notre Dame Law Review

The current understanding of the necessity defense to trespass to property in American law stems from a simple—or perhaps simplistic—balancing of rights. Based in the individualistic understanding of property as a right against the world that creates an obligation for others, necessity pits the interloper’s right to life, liberty, or property against the property owner’s right. Although feasible in the extremes, dueling rights leads to an unwieldy judicial task, discouraging advocates from alleging the privilege and discouraging judges from recognizing the privilege. Overall, the right to exclude has become more and more the libertarian vision of a right to be …

The Constitutional Law Of Interpretation, Anthony J. Bellia Jr., Bradford R. Clark

Notre Dame Law Review

The current debate over constitutional interpretation often proceeds on the assumption that the Constitution does not provide rules for its own interpretation. Accordingly, several scholars have attempted to identify applicable rules by consulting external sources that governed analogous legal texts (such as statutes, treaties, contracts, etc.). The distinctive function of the Constitution—often forgotten or overlooked—renders these analogies largely unnecessary. The Constitution was an instrument used by the people of the several States to transfer a fixed set of sovereign rights and powers from one group of sovereigns (the States) to another sovereign (the federal government), while maintaining the “States” as …

On The Rightful Deprivation Of Rights, Frederick Schauer

Notre Dame Law Review

When people are deprived of their property rights so that the state can build a highway, a school, or a hospital, they are typically compensated through what is commonly referred to as “takings” doctrine. But when people are deprived of their free speech rights because of a clear and present danger, or deprived of their equal protection, due process, or free exercise rights because of a “compelling” governmental interest, they typically get nothing. Why this is so, and whether it should be so, is the puzzle that motivates this Article. Drawing on the philosophical literature on conflicts of rights and …

Debs And The Federal Equity Jurisdiction, Aditya Bamzai, Samuel L. Bray

Notre Dame Law Review

The United States can sue for equitable relief without statutory authorization. The leading case on this question is In re Debs, and how to understand that case is of both historical and contemporary importance. Debs was a monumental opinion that prompted responses in the political platforms of major parties, presidential addresses, and enormous academic commentary. In the early twentieth century, Congress enacted several pieces of labor legislation that reduced Debs’s importance in the specific context of strikes. But in other contexts, the question whether the United States can bring suit in equity remains disputed to this day. The …