Law Commons^™

Dangerous People Or Dangerous Weapons: Access To Firearms For Persons With Mental Illness, Lawrence O. Gostin, Katherine L. Record

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The recent attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has once again focused the nation’s attention on the danger of the wide availability of firearms. The Supreme Court has ruled that gun restrictions may only be imposed on those deemed “prohibited persons” under the Gun Control Act of 1968. Although some are easily identifiable (e.g., children, convicted felons), one widely inclusive group is not – the mentally ill.

The current system designed to bar the mentally ill from purchasing or possessing firearms is ineffectual due to a lack of reporting and the existence of loopholes. What’s more, no state has developed …

What Will We Lose If The Trial Vanishes?, Robert P. Burns

Faculty Working Papers

The number of trials continues to decline andfederal civil trials have almost completely disappeared. This essay attempts to address the significance of this loss, to answer the obvious question, "So what?" It argues against taking a resigned or complacent attitude toward an important problem for our public culture. It presents a short description of the trial's internal structure, recounts different sorts of explanations, and offers an inventory of the kinds of wounds this development would inflict.

Cracks In The Wall, A Bulge Under The Carpet: The Singular Story Of Religion, Evolution, And The U.S. Constitution, Susan Haack

Articles

No abstract provided.

Documentary Disenfranchisement, Jessie Allen

Articles

In the generally accepted picture of criminal disenfranchisement in the United States today, permanent voting bans are rare. Laws on the books in most states now provide that people with criminal convictions regain their voting rights after serving their sentences. This Article argues that the legal reality may be significantly different. Interviews conducted with county election officials in New York suggest that administrative practices sometimes transform temporary voting bans into lifelong disenfranchisement. Such de facto permanent disenfranchisement has significant political, legal, and cultural implications. Politically, it undermines the comforting story that states’ legislative reforms have ameliorated the antidemocratic interaction of …

Affirmative Action As Government Speech, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

This article seeks to transform how we think about “affirmative action.” The Supreme Court’s affirmative action jurisprudence appears to be a seamless whole, but closer examination reveals important differences. Government race-consciousness sometimes grants a benefit to members of a minority group for remedial or diversifying purposes. But the government may also undertake remedial or diversifying race-conscious action without it resulting in unequal treatment or disadvantage to non-minorities. Under the Court’s current equal protection doctrine, both categories of cases are treated as presumptively unconstitutional. Race-consciousness itself has become a constitutional harm, regardless of tangible effects.

Prior scholarship has suggested that the …

The Rule Of Law As A Law Of Standards, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Justice Antonin Scalia titled his 1989 Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture at Harvard Law School The Rule of Law as a Law of Rules. The lecture posed the sort of dichotomy that has become a familiar feature of Justice Scalia's jurisprudence and of his general approach to judging. On one hand are judges who recognize that the only legitimate means by which they may adjudicate cases in a democracy is to seek to do so through rules of general application. On the other hand are those judges who generally prefer to adopt an all-things considered balancing approach to adjudication. This latter …