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Full-Text Articles in Law
Why Federal Courts Apply The Law Of Nations Even Though It Is Not The Supreme Law Of The Land, Anthony J. Bellia, Bradford R. Clark
Why Federal Courts Apply The Law Of Nations Even Though It Is Not The Supreme Law Of The Land, Anthony J. Bellia, Bradford R. Clark
Journal Articles
We are grateful to the judges and scholars who participated in this Symposium examining our book, The Law of Nations and the United States Constitution. One of our goals in writing this book was to reinvigorate and advance the debate over the role of customary international law in U.S. courts. The papers in this Symposium advance this debate by deepening understandings of how the Constitution interacts with customary international law. Our goal in this Article is to address two questions raised by this Symposium that go to the heart of the status of the law of nations under the Constitution. …
Justice Scalia, The Nondelegation Doctrine, And Constitutional Argument, William K. Kelley
Justice Scalia, The Nondelegation Doctrine, And Constitutional Argument, William K. Kelley
Journal Articles
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote two major opinions considering the nondelegation doctrine. In Whitman v. American Trucking Associations, he accepted and applied a very broad, indeed virtually unlimited, view of Congress's power to delegate authority to administrative agencies that was consistent with the Court's precedents since the New Deal. In his dissent in Mistretta v. United States, however, he concluded that the constitutional structure formally barred the delegation of naked rulemaking power to an agency that was untethered to other law execution tasks. This essay analyzes Justice Scalia's nondelegation jurisprudence in light of the general jurisprudential commitments he championed throughout his …
The Political Branches And The Law Of Nations, Bradford R. Clark, Anthony J. Bellia
The Political Branches And The Law Of Nations, Bradford R. Clark, Anthony J. Bellia
Journal Articles
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the U.S. Supreme Court went out of its way to follow background rules of the law of nations, particularly the law of state-state relations. As we have recently argued, the Court followed the law of nations because adherence to such law preserved the constitutional prerogatives of the political branches to conduct foreign relations and decide momentous questions of war and peace. Although we focused primarily on the extent to which the Constitution obligated courts to follow the law of nations in the early republic, the explanation we offered rested on an important, …
Judicial Review: Its Influence Abroad, Donald P. Kommers
Judicial Review: Its Influence Abroad, Donald P. Kommers
Journal Articles
The doctrine of judicial review, having been nourished in a legal culture and socio-political environment favorable to its growth, is America’s most distinctive contribution to constitutional government. Judicial review as historically practiced in the United States was duly recorded abroad, with varying degrees of influence and acceptability. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the influence of judicial review was most conspicuous in Latin America, where it was adopted as an articulate principle of numerous national constitutions, while most European nations consciously rejected it as incompatible with the prevailing theory of separation of powers. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, although marginally …
Separation Of Powers In The Australian Constitution, John M. Finnis
Separation Of Powers In The Australian Constitution, John M. Finnis
Journal Articles
Even those who regret it accept that the founders of the Australian Constitution "beyond question" intended the separation of powers now required by the Boilermakers' Case . This article seeks first to show that the arguments advanced to prove the alleged intention are no more probative -than the draftsman's literary arrangement which has prompted the accepted view of constitutional history; and second, to discuss the proper strategy of approach to the historical record on these matters.