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Full-Text Articles in Constitutional Law
Withdrawal: The Roberts Court And The Retreat From Election Law, Ellen D. Katz
Withdrawal: The Roberts Court And The Retreat From Election Law, Ellen D. Katz
Articles
Last Term the Supreme Court handed down four decisions that upheld diverse efforts by state governments to regulate the electoral process. The Court turned back challenges to New York’s method for nominating judicial candidates, Washington’s modified blanket primary system, Indiana’s voter identification requirement, and Alabama’s use of gubernatorial appointment to fill county commission vacancies in Mobile County. Unlike other recent election decisions, these were not close cases. All nine Justices supported the New York holding, while supermajorities voted in favor of the result in the others. This consensus, moreover, emerged even as the Court voted to reverse unanimous decisions by …
Against Textualism, William Michael Treanor
Against Textualism, William Michael Treanor
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Modern textualists have assumed that careful attention to constitutional text is the key to the recovery of the Constitution's original public meaning. This article challenges that assumption by showing the importance of nontextual factors in early constitutional interpretation. The Founding generation consistently relied on structural concerns, policy, ratifiers' and drafters' intent, and broad principles of government. To exclude such nontextual factors from constitutional interpretation is to depart from original public meaning because the Founders gave these factors great weight in ascertaining meaning. Moreover, for a modern judge seeking to apply original public meaning, the threshold question is not simply; "How …
Legislative Supremacy In The United States?: Rethinking The Enrolled Bill Doctrine, Ittai Bar-Siman-Tov
Legislative Supremacy In The United States?: Rethinking The Enrolled Bill Doctrine, Ittai Bar-Siman-Tov
Dr. Ittai Bar-Siman-Tov
This Article revisits the “enrolled bill” doctrine which requires courts to accept the signatures of the Speaker of the House and President of the Senate on the “enrolled bill” as unimpeachable evidence that a bill has been constitutionally enacted. It argues that this time-honored doctrine has far-reaching ramifications that were largely overlooked in existing discussions. In addition to reexamining the soundness of this doctrine’s main rationales, the Article introduces two major novel arguments against the doctrine. First, it argues that the doctrine amounts to an impermissible delegation of both judicial and lawmaking powers to the legislative officers of Congress. Second, …