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What State Constitutional Law Can Tell Us About The Federal Constitution, Joseph Blocher
What State Constitutional Law Can Tell Us About The Federal Constitution, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
Courts and scholars have long sought to illuminate the relationship between state and federal constitutional law. Yet their attention, like the relationship itself, has largely been one-sided: State courts have consistently adopted federal constitutional law as their own, and scholars have attempted to illuminate why this is, and why it should or should not be so. By contrast, federal courts tend not to look to state constitutional law, even for persuasive authority. Nor have scholars argued at any length that federal courts can or should look to state constitutional law for guidance in answering the many constitutional questions common to …
Reverse Incorporation Of State Constitutional Law, Joseph Blocher
Reverse Incorporation Of State Constitutional Law, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
State supreme courts and the United States Supreme Court are the independent and final arbiters of their respective constitutions, and may therefore take different approaches to analogous state and federal constitutional issues. Such issues arise often, because the documents were modeled on each other and share many of the same guarantees. In answering them, state courts have, as a matter of practice, generally adopted federal constitutional doctrine as their own. Federal courts, by contrast, have largely ignored state constitutional law when interpreting the federal constitution. In McDonald v. Chicago, to take only the most recent example, the Court declined to …
Reasoning About The Irrational: The Roberts Court And The Future Of Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell
Reasoning About The Irrational: The Roberts Court And The Future Of Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell
Faculty Scholarship
Commentary on the future direction of the Roberts Court generally falls along lines that correlate with the commentators' political views on the desirability of the Court's recent decisions. A more informative approach is to look for opinions suggesting changes in the presuppositions with which the Justices approach constitutional decision making. In footnote 27 in his opinion for the Court in the District of Columbia v. Heller Second Amendment decision, Justice Scalia suggested a fundamental revision of the Court's assumptions about the role of judicial doctrine, and the concept of rationality, in constitutional law. Justice Scalia would eliminate the normative aspects …
The Conflicted Assumptions Of Modern Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell
The Conflicted Assumptions Of Modern Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell
Faculty Scholarship
Contribution to Symposium - The Nature of Judicial Authority: A Reflection on Philip Hamburger's Law and Judicial Duty