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Full-Text Articles in Constitutional Law

Social Facts, Legal Fictions, And The Attribution Of Slave Status: The Puzzle Of Prescription, Rebecca J. Scott Dec 2016

Social Facts, Legal Fictions, And The Attribution Of Slave Status: The Puzzle Of Prescription, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

In case after case, prosecutors, judges and juries therefore still struggle to come up with a definition of slavery, looking for some set of criteria or indicia that will enable them to discern whether the phenomenon they are observing constitutes enslavement. In this definitional effort, contemporary jurists may imagine that in the past, surely the question was simpler: someone either was or was not a slave. However, the existence of a set of laws declaring that persons could be owned as property did not, even in the nineteenth century, answer by itself the question of whether a given person was …


Soundings And Silences, Laurence H. Tribe Jan 2016

Soundings And Silences, Laurence H. Tribe

Michigan Law Review Online

My work over the years has included both studying existing constitutions, particularly that of the United States, and assisting others with the drafting of new constitutions—from the Marshall Islands to the Czech Republic to South Africa. Among the things I noticed was that those undertakings, although distinct, were related—and related most significantly in the way that formative decisions about what to say and what not to say in a new constitution have bearing on later decisions about how to interpret what a constitution says or fails to say. My decision to pay special attention to the various roles of silence …


Confessions In An International Age: Re-Examining Admissibility Through The Lens Of Foreign Interrogations, Julie Tanaka Siegel Jan 2016

Confessions In An International Age: Re-Examining Admissibility Through The Lens Of Foreign Interrogations, Julie Tanaka Siegel

Michigan Law Review

In Colorado v. Connelly the Supreme Court held that police misconduct is necessary for an inadmissible confession. Since the Connelly decision, courts and scholars have framed the admissibility of a confession in terms of whether it successfully deters future police misconduct. As a result, the admissibility of a confession turns largely on whether U.S. police acted poorly, and only after overcoming this threshold have courts considered factors pointing to the reliability and voluntariness of the confession. In the international context, this translates into the routine and almost mechanic admission of confessions— even when there is clear indication that the confession …


Building Labor's Constitution, Kate Andrias Jan 2016

Building Labor's Constitution, Kate Andrias

Articles

In the last few years, scholars have sought to revitalize a range of constitutional arguments against mounting economic inequality and in favor of labor rights. They urge contemporary worker movements to lay claim to the Constitution. But worker movements, for the most part, have not done so. This Essay takes seriously that choice. It examines reasons for the absence of constitutional argumentation by contemporary worker movements, particularly the role of courts and legal elites in our constitutional system, and it contends that labor’s ongoing statutory and regulatory reform efforts are essential prerequisites to the development of progressive constitutional labor rights. …


The Past And Future Of Deinstitutionalization Litigation, Samuel R. Bagenstos Feb 2012

The Past And Future Of Deinstitutionalization Litigation, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Law & Economics Working Papers

Two conflicting stories have consumed the academic debate regarding the impact of deinstitutionalization litigation. The first, which has risen almost to the level of conventional wisdom, is that deinstitutionalization was a disaster. The second story does not deny that the results of deinstitutionalization have in many cases been disappointing. But it challenges the suggestion that deinstitutionalization has uniformly been unsuccessful, as well as the causal link critics seek to draw with the growth of the homeless population. This dispute is not simply a matter of historical interest. The Supreme Court’s 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C., which held that unjustified …


Free-Standing Due Process And Criminal Procedure: The Supreme Court's Search For Interpretive Guidelines, Jerold H. Israel Jan 2001

Free-Standing Due Process And Criminal Procedure: The Supreme Court's Search For Interpretive Guidelines, Jerold H. Israel

Articles

When I was first introduced to the constitutional regulation of criminal procedure in the mid-1950s, a single issue dominated the field: To what extent did the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment impose upon states the same constitutional restraints that the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments imposed upon the federal government? While those Bill of Rights provisions, as even then construed, imposed a broad range of constitutional restraints upon the federal criminal justice system, the federal system was (and still is) minuscule as compared to the combined systems of the fifty states. With the Bill of Rights provisions …


The Fourteenth Amendment Reconsidered, The Segregation Question, Alfred H. Kelly Jun 1956

The Fourteenth Amendment Reconsidered, The Segregation Question, Alfred H. Kelly

Michigan Law Review

Some sixty years ago in Plessy v. Ferguson the Supreme Court of the United States adopted the now celebrated "separate but equal" doctrine as a constitutional guidepost for state segregation statutes. Justice Brown's opinion declared that state statutes imposing racial segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, provided only that the statute in question guaranteed equal facilities for the two races. Brown's argument rested on a historical theory of the intent, although he offered no evidence to support it. "The object of the amendment," he said, "was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, …


Social And Economic Interpretation Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Robert Eugene Cushman May 1922

Social And Economic Interpretation Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Robert Eugene Cushman

Michigan Law Review

For those who love precision and definiteness the question of the application of the Fourteenth Amendment to social and economic problems remains an irritating enigma. The judicial construction of due process of law and the equal protection of the law has from the first discouraged systematic analysis and defied synthesis. More than one writer has emerged from the study of the problem with a neat and compact set of fundamental principles, only to have the Supreme Court discourteously ignore them in its next case. But paradoxical as it may seem, those who long for a wise and forward-looking solution of …


Japanese School Incident At San Francisco From The Point Of View Of International And Constitutional Law, Theodore P. Ion. Mar 1907

Japanese School Incident At San Francisco From The Point Of View Of International And Constitutional Law, Theodore P. Ion.

Michigan Law Review

The act of the Board of Education of San Francisco in assigning to Japanese pupils separate school buildings, has been the occasion of a diplomatic incident which, although insignificant in itself, may lead to far reaching consequences both in regard to the internal affairs and the external relations of the country. It is neither the first, nor will it probably be the last sign, of the struggle for equality of the yellow with the white man, which may subsequently be emphasized in a more tangible, if not abrupt manner, resulting in a clash between the two races: the one, trying …