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Full-Text Articles in Law
Windsor Products: Equal Protection From Animus, Dale Carpenter
Windsor Products: Equal Protection From Animus, Dale Carpenter
Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters
The Supreme Court's opinion in United States v. Windsor has puzzled commentators, who have tended to overlook or dismiss its ultimate conclusion that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional because it arose from animus. What we have in Justice Kennedy’s opinion is Windsor Products — an outpouring of decades of constitutional development whose fountainhead is Carolene Products and whose tributaries are the gay-rights and federalism streams. This paper presents the constitutional anti-animus principle, including what constitutes animus, why it offends the Constitution, and how the Supreme Court determines it is present. The paper also discusses why the Court was …
Unanimously Wrong, Dale Carpenter
Unanimously Wrong, Dale Carpenter
Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters
The Supreme Court was unanimously wrong in Rumsfeld v. FAIR. Though rare, it's not the first time the Court has been unanimously wrong. Its most notorious such decisions have come, like FAIR, in cases where the Court conspicuously failed even to appreciate the importance of the constitutional freedoms under attack from legislative majorities. In these cases, the Court's very rhetoric exposed its myopic vision in ways that now seem embarrassing. Does FAIR, so obviously correct to so many people right now, await the same ignominy decades away? FAIR was wrong in tone, a dismissive vox populi, adopted by a Court …