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Articles 1 - 30 of 42
Full-Text Articles in Law
Lawyers And The Lies They Tell, Bruce A. Green, Rebecca Roiphe
Lawyers And The Lies They Tell, Bruce A. Green, Rebecca Roiphe
Faculty Scholarship
The law holds lawyers to a more demanding standard of conduct than others when it comes to aspects of their fiduciary relationships with courts and clients. For instance, states can sanction lawyers for some speech inside a courtroom that would be protected if uttered by a non-lawyer. This Article explores whether lawyers’ free speech rights should also be different from those of other speakers when lawyers, acting on their own behalf, participate in political discourse. Applying the current First Amendment framework, the authors question the bar’s assumption that, simply because lawyers are subject to rules of professional conduct, courts can …
Are The Federal Rules Of Evidence Unconstitutional?, Ethan J. Leib
Are The Federal Rules Of Evidence Unconstitutional?, Ethan J. Leib
Faculty Scholarship
The Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) rest on an unacceptably shaky constitutional foundation. Unlike other regimes of federal rulemaking—for Civil Procedure, for Criminal Procedure, and for Appellate Procedure—the FRE rulemaking process contemplated by the Rules Enabling Act is both formally and functionally defective because Congress enacted the FRE as a statute first but purports to permit the Supreme Court to revise, repeal, and amend those laws over time, operating as a kind of supercharged administrative agency with the authority to countermand congressional statutes. Formally, this system violates the constitutionally-delineated separation of powers as announced in Chadha, Clinton, and the non-delegation …
Do Local Governments Really Have Too Much Power? Understanding The National League Of Cities' Principles Of Home Rule For The 21st Century, Nestor M. Davidson, Richard Schragger
Do Local Governments Really Have Too Much Power? Understanding The National League Of Cities' Principles Of Home Rule For The 21st Century, Nestor M. Davidson, Richard Schragger
Faculty Scholarship
This Article explains and defends the National League of Cities’ Principles of Home Rule for the 21st Century, which the authors participated in drafting. The Principles project both articulates a vision of state-local relations appropriate to an urban age and, as with previous efforts stretching back to the Progressive Era, includes a model constitutional home rule article designed to serve as the foundation for state-level constitutional law reform. This Article explains the origins of the Principles, outlines the major components of its model constitutional provision, and defends the model against a set of criticisms common to this and past home-rule …
Can The Fourth Amendment Keep People "Secure In Their Persons"?, Bruce A. Green
Can The Fourth Amendment Keep People "Secure In Their Persons"?, Bruce A. Green
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Protecting Against An Unable President: Reforms For Invoking The 25th Amendment And Overseeing Presidential Nuclear Launch Authority, Louis Cholden-Brown, Daisy De Wolff, Marcello Figueroa, Kathleen Mccullough
Protecting Against An Unable President: Reforms For Invoking The 25th Amendment And Overseeing Presidential Nuclear Launch Authority, Louis Cholden-Brown, Daisy De Wolff, Marcello Figueroa, Kathleen Mccullough
Faculty Scholarship
The immense powers of the presidency and the vast array of global threats demand a physically and mentally capable president. To help ensure able presidential leadership, this report advocates reforms related to the 25th Amendment, including proposals for an “other body” to act with the vice president in certain circumstances to declare the president unable and a mechanism for officials to report concerns about the president’s capacity. The report also recommends new checks on the president’s authority to use nuclear weapons, such as procedures for notifying top national security officials when use is contemplated.
This report was researched and written …
Liberalism And The Distinctiveness Of Religious Belief, Abner S. Greene
Liberalism And The Distinctiveness Of Religious Belief, Abner S. Greene
Faculty Scholarship
Finding the appropriate sweet spot for religion’s role in the state and how state action may affect the lives of religious people continues to be elusive. Cécile Laborde’s ambitious book Liberalism’s Religion comes down firmly on the side of seeing religion as not distinctive, even in a liberal democracy. To the extent that nonestablishment and free exercise norms should prevail, they should prevail insofar as we can disaggregate religion into components that it shares with nonreligious belief and practice. In this review essay, I advance a position on which Laborde spends little time in her book — religion is distinctive …
Why The House Of Representatives Must Be Expanded And How Today’S Congress Can Make It Happen, Caroline Kane, Gianni Mascioli, Michael Mcgarry, Meira Nagel
Why The House Of Representatives Must Be Expanded And How Today’S Congress Can Make It Happen, Caroline Kane, Gianni Mascioli, Michael Mcgarry, Meira Nagel
Faculty Scholarship
The House of Representatives was designed to expand alongside the country’s population—yet its membership stopped growing a century ago. Larger and, in some cases, unequal sized congressional districts have left Americans with worse representation, including in the Electoral College, which allocates electors partially on the size of states’ House delegations. This report recommends tying the House’s size to the cube root of the nation’s population, which would lead to 141 more seats. It also calls for an approach to drawing districts that would eliminate gerrymandering.
This report was researched and written during the 2018-2019 academic year by students in Fordham …
Toward An Independent Administration Of Justice: Proposals To Insulate The Department Of Justice From Improper Political Interference, Rebecca Cho, Louis Cholden-Brown, Marcello Figueroa
Toward An Independent Administration Of Justice: Proposals To Insulate The Department Of Justice From Improper Political Interference, Rebecca Cho, Louis Cholden-Brown, Marcello Figueroa
Faculty Scholarship
The rule of law is undermined when political and personal interests motivate criminal prosecutions. This report advances proposals for ensuring that the federal criminal justice system is administered uniformly based on the facts and the law. It recommends a law preventing the president from interfering in specific prosecutions, another law establishing responsibilities for prosecutors who receive improper orders, and new conflict of interest regulations for Department of Justice officials.
This report was researched and written during the 2018-2019 academic year by students in Fordham Law School’s Democracy and the Constitution Clinic, which is focused on developing non-partisan recommendations to strengthen …
Presidents Must Be Elected Popularly: Examining Proposals And Identifying The Natural Endpoint Of Electoral College Reform, Gianni Mascioli, Caroline Kane, Meira Nagel, Michael Mcgarry, Ezra Medina, Jenny Brejt, Siobhan D'Angelo
Presidents Must Be Elected Popularly: Examining Proposals And Identifying The Natural Endpoint Of Electoral College Reform, Gianni Mascioli, Caroline Kane, Meira Nagel, Michael Mcgarry, Ezra Medina, Jenny Brejt, Siobhan D'Angelo
Faculty Scholarship
The Electoral College effectively disenfranchises voters who live outside the few states that decide presidential elections. This report endorses a change in the way electoral votes are allocated to ensure that Americans’ votes receive the same weight. States should sign on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to allocate their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Ranked choice voting should also be employed to ensure that candidates receive majority support.
This report was researched and written during the 2018-2019 academic year by students in Fordham Law School’s Democracy and the Constitution …
Enforcing The Intent Of The Constitution’S Foreign And Domestic Emoluments Clauses, James Auchincloss, Megha Dharia, Krysia Lenzo
Enforcing The Intent Of The Constitution’S Foreign And Domestic Emoluments Clauses, James Auchincloss, Megha Dharia, Krysia Lenzo
Faculty Scholarship
The Constitution’s Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses are meant to prevent corruption and conflicts of interest. The Foreign Emoluments Clause prohibits some federal officials, including the president, from receiving payments or other benefits from foreign governments, while the Domestic Emoluments Clause bans the president from receiving payments other than the office’s salary from the federal and state governments. To enforce the clauses, this report recommends requiring the president to divest from business interests and increasing powers to investigate and punish violations of the clauses.
This report was researched and written during the 2018-2019 academic year by students in Fordham Law …
Motives And Fiduciary Loyalty, Stephen R. Galoob, Ethan J. Leib
Motives And Fiduciary Loyalty, Stephen R. Galoob, Ethan J. Leib
Faculty Scholarship
How, if at all, do motives matter to loyalty? We have argued that loyalty (and the duty of loyalty in fiduciary law) has a cognitive dimension. This kind of “cognitivist” account invites the counterargument that, because most commercial fiduciary relationships involve financial considerations, purity of motive cannot be central to loyalty in the fiduciary context. We contend that this counterargument depends on a flawed understanding of the significance of motive to loyalty. We defend a view of the importance of motivation to loyalty that we call the compatibility account. On this view, A acts loyally toward B only if …
The New State Preemption, The Future Of Home Rule, And The Illinois Experience, Nestor M. Davidson, Laurie Reynolds
The New State Preemption, The Future Of Home Rule, And The Illinois Experience, Nestor M. Davidson, Laurie Reynolds
Faculty Scholarship
This article examines the rise of new forms of state preemption of local government legal authority in states across the nation, a trend that is prompting scholars, advocates, and officials to re-examine the underlying nature of home rule. The article lays out core components of a new approach to home rule that might remedy contemporary shortcomings in the doctrine, then reflects on lessons for reforming home rule from the Illinois experience.
Fiduciary Constitutionalism: Implications For Self- Pardons And Non-Delegation, Ethan J. Leib, Jed H. Shugerman
Fiduciary Constitutionalism: Implications For Self- Pardons And Non-Delegation, Ethan J. Leib, Jed H. Shugerman
Faculty Scholarship
The idea that public servants hold their offices in trust for subject-beneficia-ries and that a sovereign’s exercise of its political power must be constrained by fiduciary standards—like the duties of loyalty and care—is not new. But scholars are collecting more and more evidence that the framers of the U.S. Constitution may have sought to constrain public power in ways that we would today call fiduciary. In this article, we explore some important legal conclu-sions that follow from fiduciary constitutionalism.
After developing some historical links between private fiduciary instruments and state and federal constitutions, we opine on what a fiduciary constitution …
Deconstitutionalizing Dewey, Aaron J. Saiger
Deconstitutionalizing Dewey, Aaron J. Saiger
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Hardball Vs. Beanball: Identifying Fundamentally Antidemocratic Tactics, Jed H. Shugerman
Hardball Vs. Beanball: Identifying Fundamentally Antidemocratic Tactics, Jed H. Shugerman
Faculty Scholarship
The “constitutional hardball” metaphor used by legal scholars and political scientists illuminates an important phenomenon in American politics, but it obscures a crisis in American democracy. In baseball, hardball encompasses legitimate tactics: pitching inside to brush a batter back but not injure, hard slides, hard tags. Baseball fans celebrate hardball. Many of the constitutional hardball maneuvers previously identified by scholars have been legitimate, if aggressive, constitutional political moves. But the label “hardball” has been interpreted too broadly to include illegitimate, fundamentally undemocratic tactics. I suggest a different baseball metaphor for such tactics: beanball, pitches meant to injure and knock out …
Faithful Execution And Article Ii, Andrew Kent, Ethan J. Leib, Jed Shugerman
Faithful Execution And Article Ii, Andrew Kent, Ethan J. Leib, Jed Shugerman
Faculty Scholarship
Article II of the U.S. Constitution twice imposes a duty of faithful execution on the President, who must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” and take an oath or affirmation to “faithfully execute the Office of President.” These Faithful Execution Clauses are cited often, but their background and original meaning have never been fully explored. Courts, the executive branch, and many scholars rely on one or both clauses as support for expansive views of presidential power, for example, to go beyond standing law to defend the nation in emergencies; to withhold documents from Congress or the courts; or …
Federal Courts' Supervisory Authority In Federal Criminal Cases: The Warren Court Revolution That Might Have Been, Bruce A. Green
Federal Courts' Supervisory Authority In Federal Criminal Cases: The Warren Court Revolution That Might Have Been, Bruce A. Green
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Past Reform Recommendations On Presidential Succession, John Rogan
Past Reform Recommendations On Presidential Succession, John Rogan
Reports
Summary of reports on presidential succession with hyperlinks. These reports all follow the passage and implementation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.
Originalism As Thin Description: An Interdisciplinary Critique, Saul Cornell
Originalism As Thin Description: An Interdisciplinary Critique, Saul Cornell
Res Gestae
My essay was intended as a critique of originalism from the perspective of intellectual history. I pointed out that originalism lacked a rigorous empirical method for analyzing what texts meant in the past. I suppose in some sense it is flattering that Solum has devoted much of his recent article to an attack on my earlier essay. Of course, flattery aside, it would have been more useful if Solum had stated my thesis correctly. For purposes of clarity, I have juxtaposed Solum’s description of my argument with what my essay actually said. Readers will be able to judge for themselves …
State (Un)Separated Powers And Commandeering, Aaron P. Brecher
State (Un)Separated Powers And Commandeering, Aaron P. Brecher
Res Gestae
This Essay argues that the Court’s line between state judges and other state officials is not as clean as the case law suggests. Specifically, early state constitutions, as well as the British constitutional order prevailing before the U.S. Constitution was enacted—which did not separate powers as rigidly as the U.S. Constitution—combine to undermine the distinction. Taking this line of analysis seriously is not to deny that commandeering state executive or legislative officials raises federalism concerns. But paying more careful attention to early state conceptions of the separation of powers furthers federalist goals in another way: it engenders respect for the …
The Public’S Constitutional Thinking And The Fate Of Health Care Reform: Ppaca As Case Study, Bruce G. Peabody, Peter J. Woolley
The Public’S Constitutional Thinking And The Fate Of Health Care Reform: Ppaca As Case Study, Bruce G. Peabody, Peter J. Woolley
Res Gestae
No abstract provided.
Popular Constitutional Values: The Links Between Public Opinion And The Supreme Court's 2011 Term, Peter J. Woolley, Bruce G. Peabody
Popular Constitutional Values: The Links Between Public Opinion And The Supreme Court's 2011 Term, Peter J. Woolley, Bruce G. Peabody
Res Gestae
No abstract provided.
Judicial Review For Enemy Fighters: The Court’S Fateful Turn In Ex Parte Quirin, The Nazi Saboteur Case, Andrew Kent
Judicial Review For Enemy Fighters: The Court’S Fateful Turn In Ex Parte Quirin, The Nazi Saboteur Case, Andrew Kent
Faculty Scholarship
The emerging conventional wisdom in the legal academy is that individual rights under the U.S. Constitution should be extended to noncitizens outside the United States. This claim - called globalism in my article - has been advanced with increasing vigor in recent years, most notably in response to legal positions taken by the Bush administration during the war on terror. Against a Global Constitution challenges the textual and historical grounds advanced to support the globalist conventional wisdom and demonstrates that they have remarkably little support. At the same time, the article adduces textual and historical evidence that noncitizens were among …
Religion And Theistic Faith: On Koppelman, Leiter, Secular Purpose, And Accomodations, Abner S. Greene
Religion And Theistic Faith: On Koppelman, Leiter, Secular Purpose, And Accomodations, Abner S. Greene
Faculty Scholarship
What makes religion distinctive, and how does answering that question help us answer questions regarding religious freedom in a liberal democracy? In their books on religion in the United States under our Constitution, Andrew Koppelman (DefendingAmerican Religious Neutrality) and Brian Leiter (Why Tolerate Religion?) offer sharply different answers to this set of questions. This review essay first explores why we might treat religion distinctively, suggesting that in our constitutional order, it makes sense to focus on theism (or any roughly similar analogue) as the hallmark of religious belief and practice. Neither Koppelman nor Leiter focuses on this, in part because …
A Fiduciary Theory Of Judging, Ethan J. Leib, David L. Ponet, Michael Serota
A Fiduciary Theory Of Judging, Ethan J. Leib, David L. Ponet, Michael Serota
Faculty Scholarship
For centuries, legal theorists and political philosophers have unsuccessfully sought a unified theory of judging able to account for the diverse, and oftentimes conflicting, responsibilities judges possess. This paper reveals how the law governing fiduciary relationships sheds new light on this age-old pursuit, and therefore, on the very nature of the judicial office itself. The paper first explores the routinely overlooked, yet deeply embedded historical provenance of our judges-as-fiduciaries framework in American political thought and in the framing of the U.S. Constitution. It then explains why a fiduciary theory of judging offers important insights into what it means to be …
Ensuring The Stability Of Presidential Succession In The Modern Era: Report Of The Fordham University School Of Law Clinic On Presidential Succession, Fordham Law School Clinic On Presidential Succession
Ensuring The Stability Of Presidential Succession In The Modern Era: Report Of The Fordham University School Of Law Clinic On Presidential Succession, Fordham Law School Clinic On Presidential Succession
Reports
This Report outlines the recommendations of Fordham Law's first Presidential Succession Clinic, whose nine students conducted their work during the 2010-2011 academic year under the guidance of Dean John D. Feerick and Adjunct Professors Dora Galacatos and Nicole A. Gordon. Their recommendations for resolving the gaps and weaknesses in the presidential succession system include: (1) statutes and executive branch actions to account for the absence of procedures for declaring the Vice President unable; (2) removing legislators from the line of succession and resolving ambiguities regarding the line of the succession; and (3) reforms for addressing the death or resignation of …
Habeas Corpus, Protection, And Extraterritorial Constitutional Rights, Andrew Kent
Habeas Corpus, Protection, And Extraterritorial Constitutional Rights, Andrew Kent
Faculty Scholarship
This short essay is an exchange with Professor Steve Vladeck's about my Article entitled: Boumediene, Munaf, and the Supreme Court’s Misreading of the Insular Cases, 97 Iowa Law Review 101 (2011). My Article showed that the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Boumediene v. Bush relied on a demonstrably incorrect understanding of key precedents known as the Insular Cases, which arose from actions of the United States military and the new civil governments of the islands acquired by the United States at the turn of the twentieth century — Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, and for a time Cuba. This reply …
Boumediene, Munaf, And The Supreme Court's Misreading Of The Insular Cases , Andrew Kent
Boumediene, Munaf, And The Supreme Court's Misreading Of The Insular Cases , Andrew Kent
Faculty Scholarship
In 2008, the Supreme Court embraced both global constitutionalism - the view that the Constitution provides judicially enforceable rights to non-citizens outside the sovereign territory of the United States - and what I call human-rights universalism - the view that the Constitution protects military enemies during armed conflict. Boumediene v. Bush found a constitutional right to habeas corpus for non-citizens detained as enemy combatants at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, while Munaf v. Geren - decided the same day as Boumediene and involving U.S. citizens detained in Iraq during the war there - hinted that the Due Process …
Constitution And The Laws Of War During The Civil War, The Federal Courts, Practice & Procedure, Andrew Kent
Constitution And The Laws Of War During The Civil War, The Federal Courts, Practice & Procedure, Andrew Kent
Faculty Scholarship
This Article uncovers the forgotten complex of relationships between the U.S. Constitution, citizenship and the laws of war. The Supreme Court today believes that both noncitizens and citizens who are military enemies in a congressionally-authorized war are entitled to judicially-enforceable rights under the Constitution. The older view was that the U.S. government’s military actions against noncitizen enemies were not limited by the Constitution, but only by the international laws of war. On the other hand, in the antebellum period, the prevailing view was U.S. citizenship should carry with it protection from ever being treated as a military enemy under the …
Civil War In The U.S. Foreign Relations Law: A Dress Rehearsal For Modern Transformations, The The Use And Misuse Of History In U.S. Foreign Relations Law, Thomas H. Lee
Faculty Scholarship
The first of the four U.S. foreign relations law insights of the Prize Cases that this Article will discuss is the notion that international law provides a basis for the President's exercise of military force in a manner neither specifically enumerated in the Constitution nor preauthorized by congressional enactments. The specific military action was the proclamation of a naval blockade that applied not only to active Confederate belligerents but also to loyal U.S. citizens residing in seceding or soon-to-secede states and to foreign neutral citizens. The second insight is the notion that federal constitutional law protections for U.S. citizens, such …