Law Commons^™

The New Constitution Of The United States: Do We Need One And How Would We Get One?, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Government in the United States has some serious problems. At the federal level, is the problem of gridlock. The United States Congress seems unable or unwilling to do anything about anything (although it must have done something to run up more than $16 trillion in debts). Forget about addressing problems such as global warming, income inequality, failing schools, economic stimulus or you name it. How bad is it, really? Has the United States become ungovernable, and is the Constitution to blame? In my view, it’s a mixed bag. Some aspects of the United States government work very well, others are …

Reason, Morality, And Constitutional Compliance, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

The central claim of Abner Greene’s Against Obligation appears to be that the federal government should allow exemptions from some restrictive laws in order to accommodate religious and other such commitments of its subjects. Professor Greene says that the law should be seen as a source of normative authority on a par with independent sources of authority (such as ordinary subjects’ religious convictions), and the government should loosen its own commitment to the Constitution accordingly.

Muscogee Constitutional Jurisprudence: Vhakv Em Pvtakv (The Carpet Under The Law), Sarah Deer, Cecilia Knapp

Faculty Scholarship

In 1974, a group of Mvskoke citizens from Oklahoma sued the federal government in federal court. Hanging in the balance was the future of Mvskoke self-determination. The plaintiffs insisted that their 1867 Constitution remained in full effect, and that they still governed themselves pursuant to it. The United States argued that the constitution had been nullified by federal law passed in the early 1900s.

To find in favor of the plaintiffs, the court would have to rule that the United States had been ignoring the most basic civil rights of Mvskoke citizens and flouting the law for over seventy years. …

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

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

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 …

Constitutional Uncertainty And The Design Of Social Insurance: Reflections On The Aca Case, Michael J. Graetz, Jerry L. Mashaw

Faculty Scholarship

The Health Care Case is best understood as a legal attack on the means but not the goals of the health care legislation. This emphasis on means rather than ends and on state over federal powers potentially poses significant risks for the complex institutional arrangements for social insurance that now exist and may imply harmful constraints on how Congress can restructure these programs to better meet the needs of the American people in the twenty-first-century economy. Not coincidentally, the new constitutional framework announced in the ACA decision favors those who want to dismantle rather than strengthen the nation’s social insurance …

Ip Injury And The Institutions Of Patent Law, Paul Gugliuzza

Faculty Scholarship

This paper reviews Creation Without Restraint: Promoting Liberty and Rivalry in Innovation, the pathbreaking book by Christina Bohannan and Herbert Hovenkamp (Oxford Univ. Press 2012). The Review begins by summarizing the book’s descriptive insights and analyzing one of its important normative proposals: the adoption of an IP injury requirement. This requirement would demand that infringement plaintiffs prove -- before obtaining damages or an injunction -- an injury to the incentive to innovate. After explaining how this requirement is easy to justify under governing law and is largely consistent with recent Supreme Court decisions in the field of patent law, the …

The Missing Due Process Argument, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

The argument that eventually persuaded five members of the Supreme Court to conclude that the individual mandate exceeded Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce is one most observers originally considered frivolous. In that respect, it is similar to another potential argument against the mandate — that forcing someone to pay for insurance violates the liberty interests guaranteed by the Constitution’s Due Process Clause. The Commerce Clause argument was the centerpiece of the challenge to the mandate; the due process argument was not meaningfully advanced at all. This chapter suggests reasons why.