Law Commons^™

The Tea Party And The Constitution, Christopher W. Schmidt

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article considers the Tea Party as a constitutional movement. I explore the Tea Party’s ambitious effort to transform the role of the Constitution in American life, examining both the substance of the Tea Party’s constitutional claims and the tactics movement leaders have embraced for advancing these claims. No major social movement in modern American history has so explicitly tied its reform agenda to the Constitution. From the time when the Tea Party burst onto the American political scene in early 2009, its supporters claimed in no uncertain terms that much recent federal government action overstepped constitutionally defined limitations. A …

Law, History, And Feminism, Tracy A. Thomas

Akron Law Faculty Publications

This is the introduction to the book, Feminist Legal History. This edited collection offers new visions of American legal history that reveal women’s engagement with the law over the past two centuries. It integrates the stories of women into the dominant history of the law in what has been called “engendering legal history,” (Batlan 2005) and then seeks to reconstruct the assumed contours of history. The introduction provides the context necessary to appreciate the diverse essays in the book. It starts with an overview of the existing state of women’s legal history, tracing the core events over the past two …

Plus Or Minus One: The Thirteenth And Fourteenth Amendments, Mark A. Graber

Faculty Scholarship

The consensus that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Thirteenth Amendment has come under sharp criticism in recent years. Several new works suggest that the Thirteenth Amendment, properly interpreted, protects some substantive rights not protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Some of this scholarship is undoubtedly motivated by an effort to avoid hostile Supreme Court precedents. Nevertheless, more seems to be going on than mere litigation strategy. Scholars detected different rights and regime principles in the Thirteenth Amendment than they find in the Fourteenth Amendment. The 2011 Maryland Constitutional Law Schoomze, to which this is an introduction, provided an opportunity for law …

Sacrifice And Sacred Honor: Why The Constitution Is A "Suicide Pact", Peter Brandon Bayer

Scholarly Works

Most legal scholars and elected officials embrace the popular clich6 that "the Constitution is not a suicide pact." Typically, those commentators extol the "Constitution of necessity," the supposition that Government, essentially the Executive, may take any action-may abridge or deny any fundamental right-to alleviate a sufficiently serious national security threat. The "Constitution of necessity" is wrong. This Article explains that strict devotion to the "fundamental fairness" principles of the Constitution's Due Process Clauses is America's utmost legal and moral duty, surpassing all other considerations, even safety, security and survival.

The analysis begins with the most basic premises: the definition of …