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Cross, Crucifix, Culture: An Approach To The Constitutional Meaning Of Confessional Symbols, Frederick Mark Gedicks, Pasquale Annicchino
Cross, Crucifix, Culture: An Approach To The Constitutional Meaning Of Confessional Symbols, Frederick Mark Gedicks, Pasquale Annicchino
Frederick Mark Gedicks
In the United States and Europe the constitutionality of government displays of confessional symbols depends on whether the symbols also have nonconfessional secular meaning (in the U.S.) or whether the confessional meaning is somehow absent (in Europe). Yet both the United States Supreme Court (USSCt) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) lack a workable approach to determining whether secular meaning is present or confessional meaning absent. The problem is that the government can nearly always articulate a possible secular meaning for the confessional symbols that it uses, or argue that the confessional meaning is passive and ineffective. What …
Establishment Clause Incorporation: A Logical, Textual, And Historical Defense, Frederick Mark Gedicks
Establishment Clause Incorporation: A Logical, Textual, And Historical Defense, Frederick Mark Gedicks
Frederick Mark Gedicks
Incorporation of the Establishment Clause against the states is logically and textually impossible—so say most academics, many lower-court judges, and a Supreme Court justice. They maintain that because the Clause was originally understood as a mere structural protection of state power, it cannot coherently restrain state power or protect a personal due process liberty. Anti-incorporationists also seem to think that the purported incoherence and textual inconsistency of Establishment Clause incorporation excuse serious engagement of Reconstruction history, since they mostly ignore it except for the Blaine Amendment defeated as the Reconstruction era ended. If anti-incorporation critics are right, the entire body …
An Originalist Defense Of Substantive Due Process: Magna Carta, Higher-Law Constitutionalism, And The Fifth Amendment, Frederick Mark Gedicks
An Originalist Defense Of Substantive Due Process: Magna Carta, Higher-Law Constitutionalism, And The Fifth Amendment, Frederick Mark Gedicks
Frederick Mark Gedicks
A longstanding scholarly consensus holds that the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment protects only rights to legal process. Both this consensus and the occasional challenges to it have generally overlooked the interpretive significance of the classical natural law tradition that made substantive due process textually coherent, and the emergence of public-meaning originalism as the dominant approach to constitutional interpretation. This Article fills those gaps. One widely shared understanding of the Due Process Clause in the late eighteenth century encompassed judicial recognition of unenumerated substantive rights as a limit on congressional power. This concept of “substantive” due process originated …