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Hollow Hopes And Exaggerated Fears: The Canon/Anticanon In Context, Mark A. Graber
Hollow Hopes And Exaggerated Fears: The Canon/Anticanon In Context, Mark A. Graber
Faculty Scholarship
Students of American constitutionalism should add constitutional decisions made by elected officials to the constitutional canon and the constitutional anticanon. Neither the canonical nor the anticanonical constitutional decisions by the Supreme Court have produced the wonderful results or horrible evils sometimes attributed to them. In many cases, elected officials made contemporaneous constitutional decisions that had as much influence as the celebrated or condemned judicial rulings. More often than not, judicial rulings matter more as a result of changing the political dynamics than by directly changing public policy. Law students and others interested in constitutional change, for these reasons, need to …
Aryans, Gender, And American Politics, Robert L. Tsai
Aryans, Gender, And American Politics, Robert L. Tsai
Faculty Scholarship
This short essay discusses some of the ways in which the Aryan movement in America activates gendered beliefs for the goal of legal, political, and cultural transformation. In recent years, the community has moved from common law theories of white sovereignty to more robust forms of racial constitutionalism. The piece is drawn from "America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community" (forthcoming Harvard University Press, 2014).
Plus Or Minus One: The Thirteenth And Fourteenth Amendments, Mark A. Graber
Plus Or Minus One: The Thirteenth And Fourteenth Amendments, Mark A. Graber
Faculty Scholarship
The consensus that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Thirteenth Amendment has come under sharp criticism in recent years. Several new works suggest that the Thirteenth Amendment, properly interpreted, protects some substantive rights not protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Some of this scholarship is undoubtedly motivated by an effort to avoid hostile Supreme Court precedents. Nevertheless, more seems to be going on than mere litigation strategy. Scholars detected different rights and regime principles in the Thirteenth Amendment than they find in the Fourteenth Amendment. The 2011 Maryland Constitutional Law Schoomze, to which this is an introduction, provided an opportunity for law …
The Regrettable Clause: United States V. Comstock And The Powers Of Congress, H. Jefferson Powell
The Regrettable Clause: United States V. Comstock And The Powers Of Congress, H. Jefferson Powell
Faculty Scholarship
In this Article, Powell argues that in Comstock, the Court encountered one of the oldest and most basic constitutional issues about the scope of congressional power-whether there are justiciable limits to the range of legitimate ends Congress may pursue. The Justices, without fully recognizing the fact, were taking sides in an ancient debate, and in doing so, they inadvertently reopened an issue that ought to be deemed long settled. Part II of the Article first addresses the question before the Court in Comstock, which was limited to a pure question of Article I law: is a specific provision of a …
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 …