Constitutional Law Commons^™

11th Marine Law Symposium: Legal Strategies For Climate Adaptation In Coastal New England 2018, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Marine Affairs Institute Conferences, Lectures, and Events

No abstract provided.

Book Review: 51 Imperfect Solutions: States And The Making Of American Constitutional Law, By Hon. Jeffrey S. Sutton, Steven H. Steinglass

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The Hon. Jeffrey S. Sutton, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, has written an excellent book on the importance of state constitutions as bulwarks against state abuse and the source of protections of individual rights. The book, 51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law, argues that individual rights are more secure when both federal and state constitutional protections are strong. And our system of federalism and the quality of state and federal judicial decisions are improved when there are state constitutional safeguards.

We’Ve Come A Long Way (Baby)! Or Have We? Evolving Intellectual Freedom Issues In The Us And Florida, L. Bryan Cooper, A.D. Beman-Cavallaro

Works of the FIU Libraries

This paper analyzes a shifting landscape of intellectual freedom (IF) in and outside Florida for children, adolescents, teens and adults. National ideals stand in tension with local and state developments, as new threats are visible in historical, legal, and technological context. Examples include doctrinal shifts, legislative bills, electronic surveillance and recent attempts to censor books, classroom texts, and reading lists.

Privacy rights for minors in Florida are increasingly unstable. New assertions of parental rights are part of a larger conservative animus. Proponents of IF can identify a lessening of ideals and standards that began after doctrinal fruition in the 1960s …

The Office Of The Crown, J.G. Allen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

A troubling veil of mystery still shrouds the central institution of the British Constitution – the Crown. In this paper, I examine the modern utility of five historical doctrines: the doctrine of the “King's two bodies”; the doctrine that the Crown is a “corporation sole”; the doctrine that the King can “do no wrong”; the doctrine that (high) public offices are “emanations” of the Crown; and the doctrine that the Crown is “one and indivisible”. Using some insights from social ontology, the history of office in the Western legal tradition, and the sociology of role and status, I argue that …

Qualified Immunity At Trial, Alexander A. Reinert

Faculty Articles

Qualified immunity doctrine is complex and important, and for many years it was assumed to have an outsize impact on civil rights cases by imposing significant barriers to success for plaintiffs. Recent empirical work has cast that assumption into doubt, at least as to the impact qualified immunity has at pretrial stages of litigation. This Essay adds to this empirical work by evaluating the impact of qualified immunity at trial, a subject that to date has not been empirically tested. The results reported here suggest that juries are rarely asked to answer questions that bear on the qualified immunity defense. …

A Study In Sovereignty: Federalism, Political Culture, And The Future Of Conservatism, Clint Hamilton

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis confronts symptoms of an issue which is eroding at the principles of conservative advocacy, specifically those dealing with federalism. It contrasts modern definitions of federalism with those which existed in the late 1700s, and then attempts to determine the cause of the change. Concluding that the change was caused by a shift in American political identity, the author argues that the conservative movement must begin a conversation on how best to adapt to the change to prevent further drifting away from conservative principles.

State Constitutions And The Protection Of Rights, John M. Greabe

Law Faculty Scholarship

This article, using a recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling on partisan gerrymandering, explores how state constitutions can be significantly more protective of rights than the federal constitution.

A New Guard At The Courthouse Door: Corporate Personal Jurisdiction In Complex Litigation After The Supreme Court’S Decision Quartet, David W. Ichel

Faculty Scholarship

In a quartet of recent decisions, the Supreme Court substantially reshaped the analysis of due process limits for a state's exercise of personal jurisdiction over corporations for the first time since its groundbreaking 1945 decision in International Shoe Co. v. Washington. The Court's decision quartet recasts the International Shoe continuum of corporate contacts for which it would be "reasonable" for the state to exercise jurisdiction based on "traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice" into a more rigid bright-line dichotomy between "general" and "specific" jurisdiction: for a state to exercise general (or all-purpose) jurisdiction over any suit, regardless of …

State Public-Law Litigation In An Age Of Polarization, Margaret H. Lemos, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

Public-law litigation by state governments plays an increasingly prominent role in American governance. Although public lawsuits by state governments designed to challenge the validity or shape the content of national policy are not new, such suits have increased in number and salience over the last few decades — especially since the tobacco litigation of the late 1990s. Under the Obama and Trump Administrations, such suits have taken on a particularly partisan cast; “red” states have challenged the Affordable Care Act and President Obama’s immigration orders, for example, and “blue” states have challenged President Trump’s travel bans and attempts to roll …

Artis V. District Of Columbia—What Did The Court Actually Say?, Doron M. Kalir

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

On January 22, 2018, the Supreme Court issued Artis v. District of Columbia. A true "clash of the titans," this 5-4 decision featured colorful comments on both sides, claims of "absurdities," uncited use of Alice in Wonderland vocabulary ("curiouser," anyone?), and an especially harsh accusation by the dissent that "we’ve wandered so far from the idea of a federal government of limited and enumerated powers that we’ve begun to lose sight of what it looked like in the first place."

One might assume that the issue in question was a complex constitutional provision, or a dense, technical federal code …

Still Living After Fifty Years: A Census Of Judicial Review Under The Pennsylvania Constitution Of 1968, Seth F. Kreimer

All Faculty Scholarship

The year 2018 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1968. The time seems ripe, therefore, to explore the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s exercise of judicial review under the 1968 Pennsylvania Constitution. This Article constitutes the first such comprehensive exploration.

The Article begins with an historical overview of the evolution of the Pennsylvania Constitution, culminating in the Constitution of 1968. It then presents a census of the 372 cases in which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has vindicated distinctive Pennsylvania Constitutional rights under the Constitution of 1968.

Analysis of these cases leads to three conclusions:

1. Exercise of independent constitutional …

The Challenge Of The New Preemption, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The past decade has witnessed the emergence and rapid spread of a new and aggressive form of state preemption of local government action across a wide range of subjects, including among others firearms, workplace conditions, sanctuary cities, antidiscrimination laws, and environmental and public health regulation. Particularly striking are punitive measures that do not just preempt local measures but also hit local officials or governments with criminal or civil fines, state aid cutoffs, or liability for damages, as well as broad preemption proposals that would virtually end local initiative over a wide range of subjects. The rise of the new preemption …

Property Musings At The U.S.-Mexico Border, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

President Donald J. Trump issued an Executive Order calling for “a physical wall on the southern border” of the United States in January, 2017. In his address before Congress, the President stated, “[W]e will soon begin the construction of a great wall along our southern border.” The political response to the Executive Order has been swift. Representative Lamar Smith of Texas views the Executive Order as a testament to the President “honoring his commitment” to immigration enforcement. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin favorably compares the border mandates in Israel and Egypt as successful examples of how to mitigate illegal immigration. …

Reconstructing An Administrative Republic, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

Journal Articles

The book Constitutional Coup, by Professor Jon D. Michaels, offers a learned, lucid, and important argument about the relationship between privatization, constitutional structure, and public values in administrative governance. In particular, Michaels argues that the press toward privatization in this domain poses a serious threat to the United States' separation of powers and the public interest. This review essay introduces readers to Michaels' argument and then raises two questions: First, it asks whether Michaels’ method of constitutional interpretation and doctrinal analysis accelerate the trend toward privatization and consolidation of power in agency heads, the very evils he seeks to avoid. …