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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Judicial Safeguards Of Federalism, John C. Yoo
Who's Afraid Of The Eleventh Amendment - The Limited Impact Of The Court's Sovereign Immunity Rulings, Jesse H. Choper, John C. Yoo
Who's Afraid Of The Eleventh Amendment - The Limited Impact Of The Court's Sovereign Immunity Rulings, Jesse H. Choper, John C. Yoo
John C Yoo
No abstract provided.
Clio At War: The Misuse Of History In The War Powers Debate, John C. Yoo
Clio At War: The Misuse Of History In The War Powers Debate, John C. Yoo
John C Yoo
No abstract provided.
Against Foreign Law, Robert J. Delahunty, John Yoo
Against Foreign Law, Robert J. Delahunty, John Yoo
John C Yoo
The article looks at the practice of several U.S. Supreme Court justices who have considered the decisions of foreign and international courts for guidance in interpreting the U.S. constitution. This practice has occurred in several controversial, high profile cases. There are two main reasons to think that use of foreign or international decisions extends beyond mere ornamentation.
Rational Treaties: Article Ii, Congressional-Executive Agreements, And International Bargaining, John C. Yoo
Rational Treaties: Article Ii, Congressional-Executive Agreements, And International Bargaining, John C. Yoo
John C Yoo
This paper examines the continuing difference between the Constitution’s Article II treaty, and the congressional-executive agreement’s statutory process, to make international agreements. Rather than approach the problem from a textual or historical perspective, it employs a rational choice model of dispute resolution between nation-states in conditions of weak to little enforcement by supranational institutions. It argues that the choice of a treaty or congressional-executive agreement can make an important difference in overcoming various difficulties in bargaining that arise from imperfect information and commitment problems.
George Washington And The Executive Power, John C. Yoo
George Washington And The Executive Power, John C. Yoo
John C Yoo
This paper examines current debates over the scope of presidential power through the lens of the Washington administration. We tend to treat Washington’s decisions with an air of inevitability, but the constitutional text left more questions about the executive unanswered than answered. Washington filled these gaps with a number of foundational decisions - several on a par with those made during the writing and ratification of the Constitution itself. He was a republican before he was a Federalist, but ultimately Washington favored an energetic, independent executive, even at the cost of political harmony. He centralized decision-making in his office, so …
Unitary, Executive, Or Both?, John C. Yoo
Unitary, Executive, Or Both?, John C. Yoo
John C Yoo
This essay argues that the “unitary executive” of the American Constitution includes both a procedural component (the President may remove subordinate officers) and a substantive component (the President possesses unenumerated powers through Article II’s vesting of the executive power). It reviews The Unitary Executive, by Professors Steven Calabresi and Christopher Yoo, which maintains that no President has consented to limitations on his authority to direct and remove subordinate officials. It praises their comprehensive effort to examine each presidential administration, but finds that the survey should have focused more attention on moments, such as Franklin Roosevelt’s acceptance of the independence of …
Lincoln And Habeas: Of Merryman, Milligan, And Mccardle, John C. Yoo
Lincoln And Habeas: Of Merryman, Milligan, And Mccardle, John C. Yoo
John C Yoo
This essay examines the costs of judicial intervention in wartime policy through the lens of three Civil War cases - Ex parte Merryman, Ex parte Milligan, and Ex parte McCardle. In Merryman, Chief Justice Taney held that President Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was unconstitutional. In Milligan, the Court held that military commissions had no jurisdiction over civilians in Northern states, where the courts were open and their process unobstructed. Although both opinions provide stirring rhetoric about the vitality of constitutional rights during wartime, they became largely irrelevant. President Lincoln refused to obey the Court and continued …
Administration Of War, John C. Yoo
Administration Of War, John C. Yoo
John C Yoo
This essay asks whether the Constitution’s implicit grant of the removal power to the President provides control over the administrative agencies by examination of civil-military relations under the administration of President George W. Bush. Control over the military is one of the most significant, but also understudied, aspects of administrative law. The U.S. Armed Services are the nation’s first administrative agencies, predating the Constitution itself. The President has greater freedom to remove and command military officers than over the personnel of any civilian agency. Yet, greater constitutional command over the military agencies has not produced greater presidential control. Since the …
Andrew Jackson And Presidential Power, John C. Yoo
Andrew Jackson And Presidential Power, John C. Yoo
John C Yoo
This paper examines Andrew Jackson's role in establishing the foundations of the Presidency. He is generally considered by historians to have been one of the nation’s most vigorous and powerful chief executives. He advanced a new vision of the President as the direct representative of the people. Jackson put theory into practice with the vigorous exercise of his executive powers—interpreting the Constitution and enforcing the law independently, wielding the veto power for policy as well as constitutional reasons, and re-establishing control over the executive branch. In the first of two great political conflicts of his time, the Bank War, Jackson …
Jefferson And Executive Power, John C. Yoo
Jefferson And Executive Power, John C. Yoo
John C Yoo
This paper argues that Thomas Jefferson was not the opponent of presidential power commonly assumed today. Jefferson is often thought to be a sharp critic of executive authority because he favored a national government of limited powers and because of his opposition to the Washington and Adams administrations. But as President, Jefferson expanded executive authority by resisting the courts, buying Louisiana, conducting foreign affairs, and managing legislation through Congress. Jefferson's actions as President did not contradict his positions in the opposition, as claimed most famously by Henry Adams, but were instead consistent with his earlier views on executive power. In …
Making War, John C. Yoo, Robert Delahunty
Making War, John C. Yoo, Robert Delahunty
John C Yoo
We respond here to Unleashing the Dogs of War by Sai Prakash, which represents the latest originalist argument that war cannot be started by the executive without congressional authorization. First, we argue that Prakash's interpretive approach imposes an unexplained burden of proof that places little to no importance on the starting point for constitutional interpretation: the text. The best reading of the text rejects Prakash's claim about Congress's power to declare war. We supplement our textualist reading by exploring constitutional structure, which should not tolerate the redundancies created by Prakash's approach. The key point here is that the constitutional structure …
Wartime Process: A Dialogue On Congressional Power To Remove Issues From The Federal Courts, John C. Yoo, Jesse Choper
Wartime Process: A Dialogue On Congressional Power To Remove Issues From The Federal Courts, John C. Yoo, Jesse Choper
John C Yoo
Many have long debated whether Congress may strip the federal courts completely of jurisdiction over certain classes of cases. Until the last few years, these debates met the very definition of academic. Aside from two statutes, Congress had never engaged in clear removal of cases from the Supreme Court or the lower federal courts. That changed with the Court's decision in Rasul v. Bush, which extended the federal writ of habeas corpus to alien enemy combatants detained at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba Naval Station. In response to Rasul, Congress enacted the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA), which forbade any …
Challenges To Civilian Control Of The Military: A Rational Choice Approach To The War On Terror, John C. Yoo
Challenges To Civilian Control Of The Military: A Rational Choice Approach To The War On Terror, John C. Yoo
John C Yoo
An overlooked gap in the legal study of national security decisionmaking is civil-military relations. Civilian control of the military remains one of the fundamental norms of our constitutional system, and it appears regularly in the day-to-day functioning of our national security institutions. The War on Terror has exacerbated growing tensions between the civilian leadership and the American military, particularly with the Judge Advocate General's Corps. We propose a rational choice framework to understand and better address challenges to civilian-military relations.
Executive Power V. International Law, John C. Yoo, Robert J. Delahunty
Executive Power V. International Law, John C. Yoo, Robert J. Delahunty
John C Yoo
Critics of the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have made the claim that the President cannot order conduct that is inconsistent with international law. Not only is the argument under-theorized, it runs counter to the best reading of the constitutional text, structure, and the history of American practice. A careful examination of the constitutional text, for example, shows that international law that does not take the form of a treaty or other authoritative adoption by the political branches will not enjoy supremacy effect. If international law cannot claim the status …
Hamdan V. Rumsfeld: The Functional Case For Foreign Affairs Deference To The Executive Branch, John C. Yoo, Julian Ku
Hamdan V. Rumsfeld: The Functional Case For Foreign Affairs Deference To The Executive Branch, John C. Yoo, Julian Ku
John C Yoo
The Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld represents a radical new judicial approach to the interpretation of laws relating to foreign affairs. Not only did the Hamdan Court fail to defer to the executive's reasonable interpretations of the relevant statutes, treaties, and customary international law of war relating to military commissions, but it did not even justify its failure to depart from longstanding formal doctrines requiring such deference. In this Essay, we offer a functional defense of the doctrines requiring judicial deference to executive interpretations of laws affecting foreign affairs in wartime; doctrines that the Hamdan Court largely ignored. …
Who's So Afraid Of The Eleventh Amendment, John C. Yoo, Jesse Choper
Who's So Afraid Of The Eleventh Amendment, John C. Yoo, Jesse Choper
John C Yoo
This Article argues that critics have exaggerated the impact and importance of the Eleventh Amendment cases. This is not to deny that revived judicial security for states' rights has become the signature issue of the Rehnquist Court. We examine whether the subject deserves the enormous importance that many, including a number of commentators and several Justices, have given it. We conclude that it does not. A series of doctrines, both internal and external to the Eleventh Amendment, allow the federal government to achieve its policy objectives. Preventing private plaintiffs from suing states for retrospective money damages poses at most a …
Rational War And Constitutional Design, John C. Yoo, Jide Nzelibe
Rational War And Constitutional Design, John C. Yoo, Jide Nzelibe
John C Yoo
Contemporary accounts of the allocation of war powers authority often focus on textual or historical debates as to whether the President or Congress holds the power to initiate military hostilities. In this Essay, we move beyond such debates and instead pursue a purely functional or comparative institutional analysis of the relationship between Congress and the President on war powers. More specifically, we focus on the following question: Which war powers system would best enhance the effectiveness of the United States in making decisions on war and peace? Our answer draws on one of the few facts considered to be close …
Thinking About Presidents, John C. Yoo, Robert Delahunty
Thinking About Presidents, John C. Yoo, Robert Delahunty
John C Yoo
Why are some Presidents great and others not? Does their attitude toward the Constitution have anything to do with it? What do legal scholars have to contribute to presidential studies? This paper reviews and uses data from the book "Presidential Leadership" to suggest possible relationships between presidential success and their approach to constitutional interpretation. It argues that the formalist versus functionalist debate over the separation of powers has reached a stalemate, and that constitutional law can gain by study of political science approaches to the Presidency. It also suggests that presidential studies, which views reliance on a president's constitutional powers …
War, Responsibility, And The Age Of Terrorism, John C. Yoo
War, Responsibility, And The Age Of Terrorism, John C. Yoo
John C Yoo
This Article questions the widely-held view, expressed most clearly by John Hart Ely's War and Responsibility, that Congress must provide ex ante approval for all uses of force. It critiques Ely's approach, both his method of constitutional interpretation and his substantive goals for the war-making process. It proposes a different vision for war powers that provides more flexibility to the political branches. It then argues that a Congress-first process does not produce its desired substantive outcomes, and questions whether the costs and benefits of different war-making processes are sufficiently clear to cement one into place as a matter of constitutional …
Laws As Treaties? The Constitutionality Of The Congressional-Executive Agreement, John C. Yoo
Laws As Treaties? The Constitutionality Of The Congressional-Executive Agreement, John C. Yoo
John C Yoo
This article develops a theory explaining the constitutionality of the congressional-executive agreement, an alternatve to treaties. The puzzle is that our nation continues to use treaties at all, since congressional-executive agreements need only recieve simple legislative majorities for their approval. This article argues that in order to maintain the Constitution's balance between executive and legislative powers, congressional-executive agreements have been used in areas of Congress's Article I, Section powers, and that treaties continue to be used in areas where cooperation between the executive and legislative branches is necessary, or where the subject lies outside of Congress's enumerated powers.
Globalism And The Constitution: Treaties, Non-Self-Execution, And The Original Understanding, John C. Yoo
Globalism And The Constitution: Treaties, Non-Self-Execution, And The Original Understanding, John C. Yoo
John C Yoo
As the globalization of society and the economy accelerates, treaties will come to assume a significant role in the regulation of domestic affairs. This Article considers whether the Constitution, as originally understood, permits treaties to directly regulate the conduct of private parties without legislative implementation. It examines the relationship between the treaty power and the legislative power during the colonial, revolutionary, Framing, and early national periods to reconstruct the Framers’ understandings. It concludes that the Framers believed that treaties could not exercise domestic legislative power without the consent of Congress, because of the Constitution’s creation of a national legislature that …
Treaties And Public Lawmaking: A Textual And Structural Defense Of Non-Self-Execution, John C. Yoo
Treaties And Public Lawmaking: A Textual And Structural Defense Of Non-Self-Execution, John C. Yoo
John C Yoo
This Rejoinder responds to Professors Flaherty and Vazquez by advancing textual and structural constitutional arguments in defense of the doctrine of non-self-executing treaties. It first responds by raising several historical and contextual problems with Professor Flaherty’s Response. It then argues that requiring congressional implementation of treaties that regulate matters within Congress’s Article I, Section 8 powers respects the Constitution’s basic separation of the legislative and executive powers. This approach also ensures that treaties, which are asserted to be free from the Constitution’s federalism and the separation of powers limitations, will not assume an unbounded legislative power, and it promotes the …