Law Commons^™

Deconstructing Nondelegation, Cynthia R. Farina

Cynthia R. Farina

This Essay (part of the panel on "The Administrative State and the Constitution" at the 2009 Federalist Society Student Symposium) suggests that the persistence of debates over delegation to agencies cannot persuasively be explained as a determination finally to get constitutional law “right,” for nondelegation doctrine—at least as traditionally stated—does not rest on a particularly sound legal foundation. Rather, these debates continue because nondelegation provides a vehicle for pursuing a number of different concerns about the modern regulatory state. Whether or not one shares these concerns, they are not trivial, and we should voice and engage them directly rather than …

Multiplicity In Federalism And The Separation Of Powers, Josh Chafetz

Josh Chafetz

By highlighting multiplicity in the federalism context, Alison LaCroix’s new book does constitutional scholarship a great service. Her tracing of the federal idea in the 1760s and 1770s, as well as her tracing of jurisdictional ideas in the early Republic, is thorough and insightful. But it is unclear why her focus suddenly narrows from the federal idea—the idea that multiplicity in levels of government was a virtue rather than a vice—to federal jurisdiction. Certainly, as this Review has endeavored to show, her claim that federalism discourse after 1787 reduced entirely (or even primarily) to jurisdictional debates cannot stand. And this …

Executive Privilege: The Clinton Administration In The Courts, Neil Kinkopf

Neil J. Kinkopf

Exploring the role of the judicial branch of the federal government in Clinton-era executive privilege claims, Neil Kinkopf suggests that courts have misunderstood executive privilege. Professor Kinkopf points out that federal courts have given different treatment to executive privilege claims asserted in judicial and congressional arenas, protecting the Judiciary from encroachment by the executive branch, while avoiding becoming involved in controversies among the political branches. He argues that the judicial confusion about executive privilege stems from the fact that courts have interpreted cases such as Clinton v. Jones to be about the separation of powers between the executive and judicial …

How To Make Sense Of Supreme Court Standing Cases— – A Plea For The Right Kind Of Realism, Richard H. Fallon Jr.

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

Does The Supreme Court Ignore Standing Problems To Reach The Merits? Evidence (Or Lack Thereof) From The Roberts Court, Heather Elliott

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

Standing And The Role Of Federal Courts: Triple Error Decisions In Clapper V. Amnesty International Usa And City Of Los Angeles V. Lyons, Vicki C. Jackson

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

Governmental Sovereignty Actions, Ann Woolhandler

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

Section 2: Congress & The Obama White House, Institute Of Bill Of Rights Law, William & Mary Law School

Supreme Court Preview

No abstract provided.

The Road Most Travel: Is The Executive’S Growing Preeminence Making America More Like The Authoritarian Regimes It Fights So Hard Against?, Ryan T. Williams

Ryan T. Williams

Standing Outside Article Iii, Tara Leigh Grove

Faculty Publications

The U.S. Supreme Court has insisted that standing doctrine is a “bedrock” requirement only of Article III. Accordingly, both jurists and scholars have assumed that the standing of the executive branch and the legislature, like that of other parties, depends solely on Article III. But I argue that these commentators have overlooked a basic constitutional principle: federal institutions must have affirmative authority for their actions, including the power to bring suit or appeal in federal court. Article III defines the federal “judicial Power” and does not purport to confer any authority on the executive branch or the legislature. Executive and …

Blackstone's Curse: The Fall Of The Criminal, Civil, And Grand Juries And The Rise Of The Executive, The Legislature, The Judiciary, And The States, Suja A. Thomas

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Fourth Zone Of Presidential Power: Analyzing The Debt-Ceiling Standoff Through The Prism Of Youngstown Steel, Chad Deveaux

Chad DeVeaux

In this Article, I use the Youngstown Steel Seizure Case to assess the reoccurring debt-ceiling standoffs between Congress and the White House. If the Treasury reaches the debt limit and Congress fails to act, the president will be forced to choose between three options: (1) cancel programs, (2) borrow funds in excess of the debt limit, or (3) raise taxes. Each of these options violates a direct statutory command. In Youngstown, Justice Jackson asserted that “[p]residential powers are not fixed but fluctuate, depending upon their disjunction or conjunction with those of Congress.” He offered his famous three-zone template which evaluates …

Seek Justice, Not Just Deportation: How To Improve Prosecutorial Discretion In Immigration Law, Erin B. Corcoran

Law Faculty Scholarship

Bipartisan politics has prevented meaningful reform to a system in dire need of solutions: Immigration. Meanwhile there are eleven million noncitizens with no valid immigration status who currently reside in the United States and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not have the necessary resources to effect their removal. DHS does have the authority through prosecutorial discretion to prioritize these cases and provide relief to individuals with compelling circumstances that warrant humanitarian consideration; nonetheless, DHS’s exercise of prosecutorial discretion is underutilized, inconsistently applied and lacks transparency. This Article suggests a remedy – that the immigration prosecutor’s role should redefined …

Extraterritoriality And Comparative Institutional Analysis: A Response To Professor Meyer, Zachary D. Clopton, P. Bartholomew Quintans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In the last few years, the Supreme Court has applied the presumption against extraterritoriality to narrow the reach of U.S. securities law in Morrison v. National Australia Bank and international-law tort claims in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum. By their terms, these decisions are limited to the interpretation of ambiguous federal statutes and claims under the Alien Tort Statute. A potential unintended consequence of these decisions, therefore, is that future plaintiffs will turn to common-law causes of action derived from state and foreign law, potentially filing such suits in state courts. These causes of action may include “human rights claims …

Identifying Congressional Overrides Should Not Be This Hard, Deborah Widiss

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This paper is an invited response to Professor William N. Eskridge, Jr., and Mr. Matthew R. Christiansen’s recently-published study (92 Texas L. Rev. 1317 (2014)) identifying and analyzing Congressional overrides of Supreme Court statutory interpretation decisions since 1967. Christiansen and Eskridge provide a new taxonomy for overrides that distinguishes between "restorative" overrides, which denounce a judicial interpretation as misrepresenting prior Congressional intent, and overrides that simply update or clarify policy. Although political science and legal scholarship has focused on the interbranch struggle implicit in restorative overrides, Christiansen and Eskridge classify only about 20% of the overrides in their total dataset …

Retroactivity And Prospectivity Of Judgments In American Law, Richard Kay

Richard Kay

In every American jurisdiction, new rules of law announced by a court are presumed to have retrospective effect—that is, they are presumed to apply to events occurring before the date of judgment. There are, however, exceptions in certain cases where a court believes that such application of the new rule will upset serious and reasonable reliance on the prior state of the law. This essay, a substantially abridged version of the United States Report on the subject, submitted at the Nineteenth International Congress of Comparative Law, summarizes these exceptional cases. It shows that the proper occasions for issuing exclusively or …

Burden Of Decision: Judging Presidential Disability Under The Twenty-Fifth Amendment, Daniel J.T. Schuker

Daniel Schuker

This Article offers a new approach to understanding, classifying, and assessing cases of presidential disability. In constitutional terms, “presidential disability” refers to any condition that renders the President of the United States “unable to discharge the powers and duties” of the office. Remarkably, the existing legal infrastructure under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment provides no guidance for determining when a President has become constitutionally disabled. Nor does it explain when the President (under Section 3) should initiate the succession process, and when the Vice President and other senior officials (under Section 4) should take the lead instead. During crises of presidential disability, …