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The Supreme Court In Bondage: Constitutional Stare Decisis, Legal Formalism, And The Future Of Unenumerated Rights, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay advances a formalist conception of constitutional stare decisis. The author argues that instrumentalist accounts of precedent are inherently unsatisfying and that the Supreme Court should abandon adherence to the doctrine that it is free to overrule its own prior decisions. These moves are embedded in a larger theoretical framework--a revival of formalist ideas in legal theory that he calls "neoformalism" to distinguish his view from the so-called "formalism" caricatured by the legal realists (and from some other views that are called "formalist").

In Part II, The Critique of Unenumerated Constitutional Rights, the author sets the stage by …

Natural Justice, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Justice is a natural virtue. Well-functioning humans are just, as are well-ordered human societies. Roughly, this means that in a well-ordered society, just humans internalize the laws and social norms (the nomoi)--they internalize lawfulness as a disposition that guides the way they relate to other humans. In societies that are mostly well-ordered, with isolated zones of substantial dysfunction, the nomoi are limited to those norms that are not clearly inconsistent with the function of law--to create the conditions for human flourishing. In a radically dysfunctional society, humans are thrown back on their own resources--doing the best they can in …

Desperately Seeking A Moralist, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In a recent issue of “Unbound”, Janet Halley reviews my book “Caring for Justice”, criticizing it for exhibiting a broad range of the problems she sees in all forms of "identitarian" legal writing, and therefore worthy of detailed critique. Halley begins her review by listing the representative missteps she finds in both my book and in identitarian politics generally, including, although certainly not limited to, an identification of the site of the subordinated group's injuries-for women, reproduction and sexuality with the site of its ethical lives and insights; a tendency to differentiate and present the interests of subordinate and dominant …

Someplace Between Philosophy And Economics: Legitimacy And Good Corporate Lawyering, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay deals with the demands of responsible lawyering when one's client is a corporate or other business entity. I suspect that to most business clients, many of the laws they encounter are mundane and, worse, suspicious in their origins. We would be naive to think that laws always do more good than harm, or even that they are intended to do so. Too often, law in economic and commercial settings is the product of special interest haggling, political grandstanding, or bureaucratic sloth. In its totality, the bulk of commercial and regulatory law probably is mediocre at best. If this …

The Measure Of A Justice: Justice Scalia And The Faltering Of The Property Rights Movement Within The U.S. Supreme Court, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The purpose of this Article is to take the measure of Justice Scalia's ability to produce significant opinions for the Court, rather than just for himself, by focusing on the Court's property rights cases during the past several decades. Much of the analysis will rely on the Blackmun Papers, because they provide a virtual treasure trove of information revealing the Court's deliberative process while Blackmun was on the Court from 1971 to 1994. Almost all of this information, including Justice Blackmun's handwritten notes on what each Justice said at the Court's private deliberations and initial voting on the cases at …

The "Constitution Restoration Act" And Judicial Independence: Some Observations, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Essay uses the proposed Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 as the vehicle for exploring some aspects of contemporary concerns about judicial independence and the mechanisms available to control what might be perceived as abuses of judicial authority . . . I doubt that the Act has a serious chance of enactment, but its introduction provides an opportunity to examine some difficulties associated with congressional control of judicial decision-making. I begin by treating the Constitution Restoration Act as a real statute, asking what its substantive terms mean. I argue that there is substantial tension between what the Act says and …

Weak-Form Judicial Review And "Core" Civil Liberties, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this Essay, I want to unearth some subordinated strands in the Rehnquist Court's free speech jurisprudence. For example, the Rehnquist Court allowed Congress to regulate campaign finance in ways subject to credible First Amendment objections, and to impose obligations on cable television systems that would almost certainly be unconstitutional were they imposed on newspapers. These decisions, I suggest, do not rest simply on the kind of deference to legislative judgment that fits comfortably into a system of strong-form review. Rather, they represent what I call a managerial model of the First Amendment, which accords legislatures a large role in …

Constitutional Culture Or Ordinary Politics: A Reply To Reva Siegel, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Reva Siegel's lecture, ‘Constitutional Culture, Social Movement Conflict and Constitutional Change: The Case of the de Facto ERA,’ explores the interaction between the courts and social movements in creating constitutional meaning. In the primary part of this response I focus my comments on Siegel's three major contributions: First, the historical explanation of the source of the Court's authority in the development of the so-called de facto ERA; second, the articulation of a general, jurisprudential thesis regarding social contestation as a source of constitutional authority apart from text, history, and principle; and third, the quasi-sociological descriptive account of the form social …

Introduction: The Jurisprudence Of Justice Stevens Symposium, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Fordham Law School opened its doors on September 28, 1905, a school with ten students and six faculty members. That day marked a great beginning, and on September 28, 2005, we began a year-long celebration of Fordham Law's history and the law school community's remarkable achievements over 100 years. The heart of any great academic institution is, of course, academics, and, as part of the centennial celebration, we are hosting an extraordinary series of conferences. This issue of the Fordham Law Review presents the papers produced by the first of the year's conferences, the Symposium on the jurisprudence of Justice …

Pluralism And Public Legal Reason, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What role does and should religion play in the legal sphere of a modern liberal democracy? Does religion threaten to create divisions that would undermine the stability of the constitutional order? Or is religious disagreement itself a force that works to create consensus on some of the core commitments of constitutionalism--liberty of conscience, toleration, limited government, and the rule of law? This essay explores these questions from the perspectives of contemporary political philosophy and constitutional theory. The thesis of the essay is that pluralism--the diversity of religious and secular conceptions of the good--can and should work as a force for …

Public Legal Reason, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay develops an ideal of public legal reason--a normative theory of legal reasons that is appropriate for a society characterized by religious and moral pluralism. One of the implications of this theory is that normative theorizing about public and private law should eschew reliance on the deep premises of deontology or consequentialism and should instead rely on what the author calls public values--values that can be affirmed without relying on the deep and controversial premises of particular comprehensive moral doctrines.

The ideal of public legal reason is then applied to a particular question--whether welfarism (a particular form of normative …