Law Commons^™

Original Understanding And The Whether, Why, And How Of Judicial Review, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For more than one hundred years, legal scholars have endlessly and heatedly debated whether judicial review of federal legislation was part of the original understanding of the Constitution. The stakes of the debate are high. If judicial review was part of the original understanding, then there is a strong argument that the practice is grounded in the majority’s will, just as the Founders’ Constitution is. But if it is not—if, as Alexander Bickel and others have claimed, judicial review was a sleight-of-hand creation of Chief Justice Marshall in Marbury v. Madison—then judicial review is either counter-majoritarian or else must …

Taking Text Too Seriously: Modern Textualism, Original Meaning, And The Case Of Amar's Bill Of Rights, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Championed on the Supreme Court by Justices Scalia and Thomas and championed in academia most prominently by Professor Akhil Amar, textualism has in the past twenty years emerged as a leading school of constitutional interpretation. Textualists argue that the Constitution should be interpreted in accordance with its original public meaning and, in seeking that meaning, they closely parse the Constitution's words and grammar and the placement of clauses in the document. They have assumed that this close parsing recaptures original meaning, but, perhaps because it seems obviously correct, that assumption has neither been defended nor challenged. This article uses Professor …

Legislative Compromise And Tax Transition Policy, Michael Doran

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The extensive literature on legal transitions has formed a general position in favor of establishing a governmental transition policy; the primary debate concerns whether the policy should be one of systematically mitigating or not mitigating transition losses. Arguments on both sides generally have assumed a sharp dichotomy between a substantive legal change and the transition treatment associated with the substantive change. Focusing on federal tax legislation, this article challenges that assumption and the normative conclusions that it supports.

Specifically, this article identifies compromise as an important component of the tax legislative process and argues that the ability to provide or …