Law Commons^™

The Resilience Of Substantive Rights And The False Hope Of Procedural Rights: The Case Of The Second Amendment And The Seventh Amendment, Renée Lettow Lerner

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

At first glance, there seem to be strong affinities between the Second Amendment and the Seventh Amendment. Both the right to keep and bear arms and the right to civil jury trial potentially empower ordinary citizens. Both could check elites.

But there are crucial differences between these rights. I focus on two of them here. The first is relatively straightforward; it concerns individual accountability—or the lack thereof—and the ability to understand responsibilities. Gun owners and users generally have individual responsibility for their actions, and the ability to understand their responsibilities. In contrast, by design civil jurors lack individual responsibility. And …

In Search Of The Presumption Of Regularity, Aram A. Gavoor, Steven Platt

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The presumption of regularity is an imprecise quasi-deference principle that federal courts apply in varying ways to presume federal officers and employees lawfully and consistently discharge their official duties. The presumption gained national significance during the Trump Administration in several key cases in which it was implicated, but never described by the Supreme Court. While the literature and judicial opinions have invoked the presumption, there has been sparse scholarly accounting for its contours, value, and legitimacy. This Article is the first to trace the contemporary domain of the presumption and its applications from its pre-Founding Era source and normatively-recognized 1926 …