Law Commons^™

Public Offices In Processes Of Constitutional Development, J.G. Allen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

What factors drive constitutional change and sustain positive transformation? How are democratic values recognised, restored, and preserved through constitutional change? How can these questions be answered in a manner that is relevant to most of the world? This collection brings together leading and emerging scholars and practitioners to explore the relationship between democratic consolidation and constitutional endurance through consideration of recent experiences in seven African and Asian states that have undergone an understudied democratising event in the past decade: Ethiopia, The Gambia, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Building on the empirical surveys, seven thematic chapters offer analytical insights …

State Constitutional Rights, State Courts, And The Future Of Substantive Due Process Protections, Jonathan L. Marshfield

UF Law Faculty Publications

By most accounts, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization signaled a broader stagnation (and perhaps retrenchment) of federal substantive due process protections. As a result, there is now great interest in the role that state constitutions and courts might play in protecting and expanding reproductive and privacy rights. This Article aims to place this moment in state constitutional development in broader context. It makes two core claims in this regard. First, although state courts are free to interpret state constitutions as providing broader individual rights protections than those contained in the Federal Constitution, state constitutions …

The Puzzles And Possibilities Of Article V, David E. Pozen, Thomas P. Schmidt

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholars describe Article V of the U.S. Constitution, which sets forth rules for amending the document, as an uncommonly stringent and specific constitutional provision. A unanimous Supreme Court has said that a “mere reading demonstrates” that “Article V is clear in statement and in meaning, contains no ambiguity, and calls for no resort to rules of construction.” Although it is familiar that a small set of amendments, most notably the Reconstruction Amendments, elicited credible challenges to their validity, these episodes are seen as anomalous and unrepresentative. Americans are accustomed to disagreeing over the meaning of the constitutional text, but …

The Shrinking Constitution Of Settlement, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Sanford Levinson has famously distinguished between the "Constitution of Settlement" and the "Constitution of Conversation." The former comprises those aspects of the Constitution that are clear, well established, and resistant to creative interpretation. The latter comprises those aspects that are subject to ongoing litigation and debate. Although Americans tend to fixate on the Constitution of Conversation, Levinson argues that much of what ails our republic is attributable, at least in part, to the grossly undemocratic and "decidedly nonadaptive" Constitution of Settlement.

This Article, prepared for a symposium on Levinson's coauthored book Democracy and Dysfunction, explains that the Constitution of …

Conditionality And Constitutional Change, Felix B. Chang

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The burgeoning field of Critical Romani Studies explores the persistent subjugation of Europe’s largest minority, the Roma. Within this field, it has become fashionable to draw parallels to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Yet the comparisons are often one-sided; lessons tend to flow from Civil Rights to Roma Rights more than the other way around. It is an all-too-common hagiography of Civil Rights, where our history becomes a blueprint for other movements for racial equality.

To correct this trend, this Essay reveals what American scholars can learn from Roma Rights. Specifically, this Essay argues that the European Union’s Roma integration …

Active Judicial Governance, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

Evidence marshaled in a new article by Jonathan Marshfield suggests strongly that unlike judges of U.S. federal courts, judges of American state supreme courts both recognize and embrace their role as active participants in the process of indirect popular self-rule. Consequently, they much more willingly serve as active and self-conscious vectors of governance. This is not to say that state judges lack appropriate judicial humility; it is to say merely that they possess a different and more nuanced understanding of the role of courts in American government than some of their federal counterparts.

How Constitutional Norms Break Down, Josh Chafetz, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

From the moment Donald Trump was elected president, critics have anguished over a breakdown in constitutional norms. History demonstrates, however, that constitutional norms are perpetually in flux. The principal source of instability is not that these unwritten rules can be destroyed by politicians who deny their legitimacy, their validity, or their value. Rather, the principal source of instability is that constitutional norms can be decomposed – dynamically interpreted and applied in ways that are held out as compliant but end up limiting their capacity to constrain the conduct of government officials.

This Article calls attention to that latent instability and, …

“Government By Injunction,” Legal Elites, And The Making Of The Modern Federal Courts, Kristin Collins

Faculty Scholarship

The tendency of legal discourse to obscure the processes by which social and political forces shape the law’s development is well known, but the field of federal courts in American constitutional law may provide a particularly clear example of this phenomenon. According to conventional accounts, Congress’s authority to regulate the lower federal courts’ “jurisdiction”—generally understood to include their power to issue injunctions— has been a durable feature of American constitutional law since the founding. By contrast, the story I tell in this essay is one of change. During the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, many jurists considered the federal …

Practice-Driven Changes To Constitutional Structures Of Governance, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

Among the methods of informal constitutional change, perhaps the least studied or understood is change resulting from alterations in the way governance is practiced. Such changes, typically initiated by political actors in the executive and legislative branches, is probably the most common kind of constitutional change, and is almost certainly the most common source of informal change to structural provisions. In the United States, the best known instances of practice-driven changes to constitutional structure come from the federal level – the rise of a formal party system, for example, or the dramatic twentieth-century expansion of presidential power. Yet by far …

Patriation And Patrimony: The Path To The Charter, John Finnis

Journal Articles

This annotated Coxford Lecture is the first account dedicated to tracing the part played in the 1980-82 patriation of the Canadian Constitution by the British House of Commons, particularly by its Select Committee on Foreign Affairs. This committee, for which author was the adviser, investigated the propriety of the UK Parliament’s acceding to a request for amendment of the British North America Act 1867 (as amended) if the amendment were opposed by a substantial number of Provinces and it would affect their powers. Against the firm opposition of the Canadian government (secretly being assisted by the British government), the Committee …

Fidelity, Change, And The Good Constitution, James E. Fleming

Faculty Scholarship

In thinking about fidelity and change in constitutional interpretation, many have framed the basic choice as being between originalism and living constitutionalism. Consider, for example, Jack M. Balkin’s Living Originalism, Robert W. Bennett and Lawrence B. Solum’s Constitutional Originalism: A Debate, and John O. McGinnis and Michael B. Rappaport’s Originalism and the Good Constitution. I shall argue for the superiority of what Ronald Dworkin called “moral readings of the Constitution” and what what Sotirios A. Barber and I have called a “philosophic approach” to constitutional interpretation. By “moral reading” and “philosophic approach,” I refer to conceptions of the Constitution as …

Book Review, G. Marcus Cole

Journal Articles

G. Marcus Cole provides a thorough review of Towards a Post-Apartheid Future: Political & Economic Relations in Southern Africa by Gavin Maasdorp & Alan Whiteside (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992).

American Civil Liberties And Constitutional Change, Donald P. Kommers

Journal Articles

This essay is an attempt to analyze, for the non-American reader especially, some of the factors that affect the condition of civil liberties in the United States. It deals mainly with the U.S. Supreme Court and its effort to define the limits of personal freedom within the framework of the American constitutional system. This effort has been a main preoccupation of the Supreme Court during the last two decades or so as the social conflicts besetting America have taken the form, as they usually do, of constitutional conflicts that the Court must eventually decide. Most of these questions have represented …