Law Commons^™

The Ada Amendments Act Of 2008, Chai R. Feldblum, Kevin Barry, Emily A. Benfer

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The goal of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was to create a civil rights law protecting people with disabilities from discrimination on the basis of their disabilities. Disability rights advocates in 1990 were victorious in their efforts to open doors for people with disabilities and to change the country's outlook and acceptance of people with disabilities. These advocates believed that the terms of the ADA, based as they were on Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, combined with the legislative history of the ADA, would provide clear instructions to the courts that the ADA was intended to provide broad …

Unconstitutional Courses, Frederic M. Bloom

Publications

By now, we almost expect Congress to fail. Nearly every time the federal courts announce a controversial decision, Congress issues a call to rein in "runaway" federal judges. And nearly every time Congress makes a "jurisdiction-stripping" threat, it comes to nothing.

But if Congress's threats possess little fire, we have still been distracted by their smoke. This Article argues that Congress's noisy calls have obscured another potent threat to the "judicial Power": the Supreme Court itself. On occasion, this Article asserts, the Court reshapes and abuses the "judicial Power"--not through bold pronouncements or obvious doctrinal revisions, but through something more …

Canons Of Construction And The Elusive Quest For Neutral Reasoning, James J. Brudney, Corey Distlear

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past 15 years, the canons of construction have experienced a remarkable revival in the courts and the legal academy. While the role of this interpretive resource has been heavily theorized, it has until now been under-explored from an empirical standpoint. This article adopts a novel combination of empirical and doctrinal analysis to uncover the Supreme Court's complex patterns of reliance on the canons over a 34-year period. We focus on whether the canons are favored across different time periods, in particular subject matter areas, by individual justices, and in close cases. Our approach - identifying ten different interpretive …

Revenge Of Mullaney V. Wilbur: United States V. Booker And The Reassertion Of Judicial Limits On Legislative Power To Define Crimes, The, Ian Weinstein

Faculty Scholarship

This article offers a historically grounded account of the twists and turns in the Supreme Court's sentencing jurisprudence from the end of World War II to the Court's stunning rejection of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. The doctrinal shifts that have roiled this area of the law can best be understood as the Court's effort to respond to the changing political and social landscape of crime in America. In the mid 1970's, legislative activity in the criminal law was largely focused on Model Penal Code influenced recodification. In that era, the Supreme Court took power from an ascendant judiciary and gave …

Irresponsible Legislating: Reeling In The Aftermath Of Kelo, Patricia E. Salkin

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Judicial Review Before Marbury, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

While scholars have long probed the original understanding of judicial review and the early judicial review case law, this article presents a study of the judicial review case law in the United States before Marbury v. Madison that is dramatically more complete than prior work and that challenges previous scholarship on the original understanding of judicial review on the two most critical dimensions: how well judicial review was established at the time of the Founding and when it was exercised. Where prior work argues that judicial review was rarely exercised before Marbury (or that it was created in Marbury), …

Are Title Vi's Disparate Impact Regulations Valid?, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Essay, however, contends that section 602 disparate impact regulations in Tide VI are valid because Congress has implicitly sanctioned their creation, and explicitly approved them in subsequent related statutes.

Part II of this Essay discusses the legislative history of Tide VI, which suggests that Congress intended to give administrative agencies discretion to define "discrimination" in their Tide VI regulations as prohibiting either intentional conduct or actions having disparate impacts against racial minorities as long as the President approved such rules.

Part III illustrates that five different Congresses have enacted four subsequent related statutes that explicitly incorporate Tide VI disparate …

Should State Corporate Law Define Successor Liability - The Demise Of Cercla's Federal Common Law, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

During the 1980s and early 1990s, a series of decisions broadly interpreting the liability provisions of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCIA) appeared destined to transform corporate law practice. CERCIA does not directly address successor liability, but the statute's complex and contradictory legislative history arguably implies that Congress wanted federal courts to apply broad liability principles to achieve the statute's fundamental remedial goal of making polluters and their successors pay for cleaning up hazardous substances.

Notably, a number of courts rejected state corporate law principles that usually limit the liability of successor corporations and instead …

Preemption & Human Rights: Local Options After Crosby V. Nftc, Robert Stumberg

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In June 2000, the Supreme Court held in Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) that federal sanctions against Burma preempted the Massachusetts Burma law. With its "Burma Law," Massachusetts sought to replicate the anti-Apartheid boycott, one of the most successful human rights campaigns in history. Massachusetts' Burma law authorized state agencies to exercise a strong purchasing preference in favor of companies that do not conduct business in Burma unless the preference would impair essential purchases or result in inadequate competition.

In Crosby, the Court held that Congress preempted the Massachusetts Burma law when it adopted federal sanctions on …

The Reconceptualization Of Legislative History In The Supreme Court, Charles Tiefer

All Faculty Scholarship

In 1995, the Supreme Court began to embrace a approach to interpreting Congressional intent. From that year forward, the Breyers-Stevens model of legislative history, or "institutional legislative history," has seen significant success, emerging in the shadows of the success Justice Scalia's enjoyed while promoting his brand of textualism in the early 1990s. In developing a new way to view Congressional intent, Justices Breyers and Stevens synthesize information gathered from congressional report details, preferably attached to bill drafting choices, thereby renouncing Scalia's reliance on the purposes espoused by the Congressional majority. This new approach, the author contends, rejuvenated the court's approach …

Understanding Mahon In Historical Context, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Despite its enormous influence on constitutional law, Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon is just such an opinion; the primary purpose of the author’s article Jam for Justice Holmes: Reassessing the Significance of Mahon is to clarify Holmes's intent by placing the opinion in historical context and in the context of Holmes's other opinions. While other scholars have also sought to place Mahon in context, his account differs in large part because of its recognition, as part of the background of Mahon, of a separate line of cases involving businesses affected with a public interest.

The author argues that at …

Jam For Justice Holmes: Reassessing The Significance Of Mahon, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

When courts and commentators discuss Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, they use the same word with remarkable regularity: famous. Mahon has achieved this fame in part because it was the occasion for conflict between judicial giants, and because the result seems ironic. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.--the great Lochner dissenter and a jurist generally considered a champion of judicial deference to legislatures in the sphere of economic decision-making--wrote the opinion striking down a Pennsylvania statute barring coal mining that could cause the surface to cave-in. Sharply dissenting from Holmes's opinion was his consistent ally on the Court, Justice Louis …

Textualism's Selective Canons Of Statutory Construction: Reinvigorating Individual Liberties, Legislative Authority, And Deference To Executive Agencies, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article demonstrates that textualist Judges, most notably Justices Scalia, Thomas, and, to a lesser extent, Kennedy, have applied some canons too aggressively, and slighted others. Textualist Judges have overused clear-statement rules that narrow statutory meaning, especially as a means to promote federalism and states' rights. On the other hand, textualists have neglected canons that promote individual liberty or executive authority Because canons must be applied on a case-by-case basis and different canons can conflict, it is impossible to formulate one rule for how they should be applied. Nevertheless, the common textualist approach of selectively favoring some canons at the …

Toward A "Due Foundation" For The Separation Of Powers: The Federalist Papers As Political Narrative, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

During the past quarter century, lawyers have become strangely comfortable with descriptions of our government's structure that would, to an untutored ear, speak contradiction. We are quite satisfied to say that governmental powers are separate and shared, departments distinct and overlapping, functions autonomous and interdependent. We have settled into these contradictions as we would a roomy chair: talking this way is no longer controversial but taken for granted, uttered with a knowing wink, perceived as the starting point of sophisticated analysis. A not "entirely separate," but "entirely free," set of departments is the only way we can think about the …

Is A Textualist Approach To Statutory Interpretation Pro-Environmentalist?: Why Pragmatic Agency Decisionmaking Is Better Than Judicial Literalism, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article provides both anecdotal evidence and a more theoretical argument for why textualist statutory interpretation is not the best approach to address environmental. issues.

Tragic Irony Of American Federalism: National Sovereignty Versus State Sovereignty In Slavery And In Freedom, The Federalism In The 21st Century: Historical Perspectives, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

A plurality on the Supreme Court seeks to establish a state-sovereignty based theory of federalism that imposes sharp limitations on Congress's legislative powers. Using history as authority, they admonish a return to the constitutional "first principles" of the Founders. These "first principles," in their view, attribute all governmental authority to "the consent of the people of each individual state, not the consent of the undifferentiated people of the Nation as a whole." Because the people of each state are the source of all governmental power, they maintain, "where the Constitution is silent about the exercise of a particular power-that is, …

Abdication Can Be Fun, Join The Orgy, Everyone: A Simpleton’S Perspective On Abdication Of Federal Land Management Responsibilities, George Cameron Coggins

Challenging Federal Ownership and Management: Public Lands and Public Benefits (October 11-13)

14 pages.

The Four Doctrines Of Self-Executing Treaties, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A distinction has become entrenched in United States law between treaties that are "self-executing" and those that are not. The precise nature of this distinction--indeed, its very existence--is a matter of some controversy and much confusion. More than one lower federal court has pronounced the distinction to be the "most confounding" in the United States law of treaties. A tremendous amount of scholarship has sought to clarify this distinction, but the honest observer cannot but agree with John Jackson's observation that " [t]he substantial volume of scholarly writing on this issue has not yet resolved the confusion" surrounding it. The …

Management Approaches To Addressing Takings Issues: Endangered Species Protection, I. Michael Heyman

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

15 pages.

Contains footnotes.

Mining Regulation(S) And Takings, Lawrence G. Mcbride

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

12 pages.

Contains footnotes.

Mining Regulation And Takings, L. Thomas Galloway

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

15 pages.

The Endangered Species Act And Constitutional Takings, Robert Meltz

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

18 pages.

Contains references.

Takings And Retroactivity, Jan G. Laitos

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

25 pages.

Contains references.

Background Principles Of Wetlands Law: The Early History, Fred P. Bosselman

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

15 pages.

Contains 3 pages of references.

Regulatory Takings And Resources: What Are The Constitutional Limits?, Virginia S. Albrecht

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits? (Summer Conference, June 13-15)

52 pages.

Contains footnotes.

The Case Of The Prisoners And The Origins Of Judicial Review, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For over one hundred years, scholars have closely studied the handful of cases in which state courts, in the years before the Federal Constitutional Convention, confronted the question whether they had the power to declare laws invalid. Interest in these early cases began in the late nineteenth century as one aspect of the larger debate about the legitimacy of judicial review, a debate triggered by the increasing frequency with which the Supreme Court and state courts were invalidating economic and social legislation. The lawyers, political scientists, and historians who initially unearthed the case law from the 1770s and 1780s used …

Prospective Overruling And The Revival Of ‘Unconstitutional' Statutes, William Michael Treanor, Gene B. Sperling

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court's decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey reshaped the law of abortion in this country. The Court overturned two of its previous decisions invalidating state restrictions on abortions, Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, and it abandoned the trimester analytic framework established in Roe v. Wade. At the time Casey was handed down, twenty states had restrictive abortion statutes on the books that were in conflict with Akron or Thornburgh and which were unenforced. In six of these states, courts had held the statutes unconstitutional. Almost …

The Aspirational Constitution, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Firmly embedded in every theory of judicial decisionmaking lies an important set of assumptions about the way government is supposed to work. Sometimes these theories about government are made explicit. More often they are not. Moreover, deeply embedded in every theory of government is a theory of human nature. Although these assumptions about human nature generally remain latent within the larger theory, because they provide the underpinnings for our ideas about the way government is supposed to work, they drive our notions about judicial decisionmaking. For example, the theory of government reflected in the United States Constitution reveals what one …

A ‘Non-Power’ Looks At Separation Of Powers, Alan B. Morrison

Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture

On April 6, 1989, Dean, Alan B. Morrison of George Washington Law, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s ninth Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: "A ‘Non-Power’ Looks at Separation of Powers."

Dean Morrison is the Lerner Family Associate Dean for Public Interest & Public Service at GW Law. He is responsible for creating pro bono opportunities for students, bringing a wide range of public interest programs to the law school, encouraging students to seek positions in the non-profit and government sectors, and assisting students find ways to fund their legal education to make it possible for them to pursue careers …

Taking The Framers Seriously, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article reviews Taking the Constitution Seriously by Walter Berns (1987).

This review focuses on three of the key historical points that Walter Berns makes: his arguments that the Declaration of Independence is a Lockean document; that the Constitution encapsulates the political philosophy of the Declaration; and that the framers viewed the commercialization of society as a salutary development and were unambivalent champions of the right to property. Examination of these issues suggests that the ideological universe of the framers was far more complex than Berns indicates. While the revolutionary era witnessed a new concern with individual rights and a …