Law Commons^™

American Constitutionalism: Volume Ii: Rights & Liberties, Howard Gillman, Mark Graber, Keith Whittington

Mark Graber

Constitutionalism in the United States is not determined solely by decisions made by the Supreme Court. Moving beyond traditional casebooks, renowned scholars Howard Gillman, Mark A. Graber, and Keith E. Whittington take a refreshingly innovative approach in American Constitutionalism. Organized according to the standard two-semester sequence--in which Volume I covers Structures of Government and Volume II covers Rights and Liberties--this text is unique in that it presents the material in a historical organization within each volume, as opposed to the typical issues-based organization.

Bush V. Gore: The Worst (Or At Least Second-To-The-Worst) Supreme Court Decision Ever, Mark S. Brodin

Mark S. Brodin

In the stiff competition for worst Supreme Court decision ever, two candidates stand heads above the others for the simple reason that they precipitated actual fighting wars in their times. By holding that slaves, as mere chattels, could not sue in court and could never be American citizens, and further invalidating the Missouri Compromise, which had prohibited slavery in new territories, Dred Scott v. Sanford charted the course to secession and Civil War four years later. By disenfranchising Florida voters and thereby appointing popular-vote loser George W. Bush as President, Bush v. Gore set in motion events which would lead …

Federalist Or Friends Of Adams: The Marshall Court And Party Politics, Mark A. Graber

Mark Graber

No abstract provided.

Theorizing American Freedom (Reviewing Aziz Rana, The Two Faces Of American Freedom (2010)), Anthony O'Rourke

Book Reviews

This is a review essay of The Two Faces of American Freedom, by Aziz Rana. The book presents a new and provocative account of the relationship between ideas of freedom and the constitutional structure of American power. Through the nineteenth century, Rana argues, America’s constitutional structure was shaped by a racially exclusionary, yet economically robust, concept that he calls “settler freedom.” Drawing on the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of settler colonial studies, as well as on the vast historical literature on civic republicanism, Rana contends that the concept of settler freedom necessitated a constitutional framework that enabled rapid territorial expansion and …

American Constitutionalism: Volume I: Structures Of Government, Howard Gillman, Mark Graber, Keith Whittington

Mark Graber

Constitutionalism in the United States is not determined solely by decisions made by the Supreme Court. Moving beyond traditional casebooks, renowned scholars Howard Gillman, Mark A. Graber, and Keith E. Whittington take a refreshingly innovative approach in American Constitutionalism. Organized according to the standard two-semester sequence--in which Volume I covers institutions and Volume II covers Rights and Liberties-- this text is unique in that it presents the material in a historical organization within each volume, as opposed to the typical issues-based organization.

Hollow Hopes And Exaggerated Fears: The Canon/Anticanon In Context, Mark A. Graber

Mark Graber

Students of American constitutionalism should add constitutional decisions made by elected officials to the constitutional canon and the constitutional anticanon. Neither the canonical nor the anticanonical constitutional decisions by the Supreme Court have produced the wonderful results or horrible evils sometimes attributed to them. In many cases, elected officials made contemporaneous constitutional decisions that had as much influence as the celebrated or condemned judicial rulings. More often than not, judicial rulings matter more as a result of changing the political dynamics than by directly changing public policy. Law students and others interested in constitutional change, for these reasons, need to …

Plus Or Minus One: The Thirteenth And Fourteenth Amendments, Mark A. Graber

Mark Graber

The consensus that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Thirteenth Amendment has come under sharp criticism in recent years. Several new works suggest that the Thirteenth Amendment, properly interpreted, protects some substantive rights not protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Some of this scholarship is undoubtedly motivated by an effort to avoid hostile Supreme Court precedents. Nevertheless, more seems to be going on than mere litigation strategy. Scholars detected different rights and regime principles in the Thirteenth Amendment than they find in the Fourteenth Amendment. The 2011 Maryland Constitutional Law Schoomze, to which this is an introduction, provided an opportunity for law …

The Founders’ Hermeneutic: The Real Original Understanding Of Original Intent, Robert G. Natelson

Robert G. Natelson

This Article addresses whether the American Founders expected evidence of their own subjective views to guide future interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. The Article considers a range of evidence largely overlooked or misunderstood in earlier studies, such as contemporaneous rules of legal interpretation, judicial use of legislative history, early American public debate, and pronouncements by state ratifying conventions. Based on this evidence, the Article concludes that the Founders were “original-understanding originalists.” This means that they anticipated that constitutional interpretation would be guided by the subjective understanding of the ratifiers when such understanding was coherent and recoverable and, otherwise, by the …

A Republic, Not A Democracy? Initiative, Referendum, And The Constitution's Guarantee Clause, Robert G. Natelson

Robert G. Natelson

This article debunks the myth, first arising in the 1840s, that the Founders sharply distinguished between a "republic" and a "democracy." It explains that by a "republic," most of the Founders meant a government controlled by the citizenry, following the rule of law, and without a king. Accordingly, state provisions for initiative and referendum are fully consistent with the Constitution's requirement that each state have a republican form of government; in fact, most of the governments the Founders called "republics" had featured analogous forms of direct democracy.

Paper Money And The Original Understanding Of The Coinage Clause, Robert G. Natelson

Robert G. Natelson

Over a century ago, the Supreme Court decided the Legal Tender Cases, holding that Congress could authorize legal tender paper money in addition to metallic coin. In recent years, some commentators have argued that this holding was incorrect as a matter of original understanding or original meaning, but that any other holding would be absolutely inconsistent with modern needs. They further argue that the impracticality of functioning without paper money demonstrates that originalism is not a workable method of constitutional interpretation. Those who rely on the Legal Tender Cases to discredit originalism are, however, in error. This Article shows that …

How The British Gun Control Program Precipitated The American Revolution, David B. Kopel

David B Kopel

Abstract: This Article chronologically reviews the British gun control which precipitated the American Revolution: the 1774 import ban on firearms and gun powder; the 1774-75 confiscations of firearms and gun powder, from individuals and from local governments; and the use of violence to effectuate the confiscations. It was these events which changed a situation of rising political tension into a shooting war. Each of these British abuses provides insights into the scope of the modern Second Amendment.

From the events of 1774-75, we can discern that import restrictions or bans on firearms or ammunition are constitutionally suspect — at least …

The Great Gun Control War Of The Twentieth Century--And Its Lessons For Gun Laws Today, David B. Kopel

David B Kopel

A movement to ban handguns began in the 1920s in the Northeast, led by the conservative business establishment. In response, the National Rifle Association began to get involved in politics, and was able to defeat handgun prohibition. Gun control and gun rights became the subjects of intense political, social, and cultural battles for much of the rest of the 20th century, and into the 21st.

Often, the battles were a clash of absolutes: One side contended that there was absolutely no right to arms, that defensive gun ownership must be prohibited, and that gun ownership for sporting purposes could be, …

Bad News For John Marshall, David B. Kopel, Gary Lawson

David B Kopel

In Bad News for Professor Koppelman: The Incidental Unconstitutionality of the Individual Mandate, we demonstrated that the individual mandate’s forced participation in commercial transactions cannot be justified under the Necessary and Proper Clause as the Clause was interpreted in McCulloch v. Maryland. Professor Andrew Koppelman’s response, Bad News for Everybody, wrongly conflates that argument with a wide range of interpretative and substantive positions that are not logically entailed by taking seriously the requirement that laws enacted under the Necessary and Proper Clause must be incidental to an enumerated power. His response is thus largely unresponsive to our actual arguments.