Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Law
The Tea Party And The Constitution, Christopher W. Schmidt
The Tea Party And The Constitution, Christopher W. Schmidt
Christopher W. Schmidt
This Article considers the Tea Party as a constitutional movement. I explore the Tea Party’s ambitious effort to transform the role of the Constitution in American life, examining both the substance of the Tea Party’s constitutional claims and the tactics movement leaders have embraced for advancing these claims. No major social movement in modern American history has so explicitly tied its reform agenda to the Constitution. From the time when the Tea Party burst onto the American political scene in early 2009, its supporters claimed in no uncertain terms that much recent federal government action overstepped constitutionally defined limitations. A …
The Sit-Ins And The State Action Doctrine, Christopher W. Schmidt
The Sit-Ins And The State Action Doctrine, Christopher W. Schmidt
Christopher W. Schmidt
By taking their seats at “whites only” lunch counters across the South in the spring of 1960, African American students not only launched a dramatic new stage in the civil rights movement, they also sparked a national reconsideration of the scope of the constitutional equal protection requirement. The critical constitutional question raised by the sit-in movement was whether the Fourteenth Amendment, which after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) prohibited racial segregation in schools and other state-operated facilities, applied to privately owned accommodations open to the general public. From the perspective of the student protesters, the lunch counter operators, and …