Law Commons^™

Precedent And Speech, Randy J. Kozel

Journal Articles

The U.S. Supreme Court has shown a notable willingness to reconsider its First Amendment precedents. In recent years the Court has departed from its prior statements regarding the constitutional value of false speech. It has revamped its process for identifying categorical exceptions to First Amendment protection. It has changed its position on corporate electioneering and aggregate campaign contributions. In short, it has revised the ground rules of expressive freedom in ways both large and small.

The Court generally describes its past decisions as enjoying a presumption of validity through the doctrine of stare decisis. This Article contends that within the …

The Highest Court: A Dialogue Between Justice Louis Brandeis And Justice Antonin Scalia On Stare Decisis, P. Thomas Distanislao, Iii

Law Student Publications

The scene is the main reading room in the Supreme Court library. It is 12:01 AM on a Thursday night, and a hapless law clerk' named Madison Nomos' is working on a draft of a dissenting opinion for his Justice. Specifically, Nomos is researching whether an earlier Supreme Court case- one with which his Justice vehemently disagrees- should play a significant role in the Court's analysis of an issue that has gripped the nation. Nomos's Justice was recently confirmed, and this will be her first opportunity to firmly state her views on stare decisis in the Supreme Court. She has …

The Disparate Impact Canon, Michael T. Morley

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Crafting Precedent, Richard C. Chen

Faculty Publications

(with the Hon. Paul J. Watford & Marco Basile)

How does the law of judicial precedent work in practice? That is the question at the heart of The Law of Judicial Precedent, a recent treatise by Bryan Garner and twelve distinguished appellate judges. The treatise sets aside more theoretical and familiar questions about whether and why earlier decisions (especially wrong ones) should bind courts in new cases. Instead, it offers an exhaustive how-to guide for practicing lawyers and judges: how to identify relevant precedents, how to weigh them, and how to interpret them. This Review takes up the treatise on …

Justice Scalia, The Nondelegation Doctrine, And Constitutional Argument, William K. Kelley

Journal Articles

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote two major opinions considering the nondelegation doctrine. In Whitman v. American Trucking Associations, he accepted and applied a very broad, indeed virtually unlimited, view of Congress's power to delegate authority to administrative agencies that was consistent with the Court's precedents since the New Deal. In his dissent in Mistretta v. United States, however, he concluded that the constitutional structure formally barred the delegation of naked rulemaking power to an agency that was untethered to other law execution tasks. This essay analyzes Justice Scalia's nondelegation jurisprudence in light of the general jurisprudential commitments he championed throughout his …

After The Override: An Empirical Analysis Of Shadow Precedent, Deborah A. Widiss, Brian J. Broughman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Congressional overrides of prior judicial interpretations of statutory language are typically de­fined as equivalent to judicial overrulings, and they are presumed to play a central role in maintaining legislative supremacy. Our study is the first to empirically test these assumptions. Using a differences-in-differences research design, we find that citation levels decrease far less after legislative overrides than after judicial overrulings. This pattern holds true even when controlling for depth of the superseding event or considering only the specific proposition that was superseded. Moreover, contrary to what one might expect, citation levels decrease more quickly after restorative overrides—in which Congress repudiates …