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Legal History

Faculty Scholarship

Constitutional law

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Full-Text Articles in Courts

Owning Heller, Darrell A. H. Miller Jan 2019

Owning Heller, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

Recent historical research using big-data techniques casts doubt on whether District of Columbia v. Heller was rightly decided according to originalist methods. These new discoveries put originalists in a bind. Do they embrace “faint hearted” originalism: the idea that as between the need for stability in prior decision making, settled expectations, and the coherence of the law, some adulterated decisions must remain enforced for the greater good? Or do they follow Justice Thomas’s reasoning in Gamble v. United States, remain stout-hearted, and reject any prior decision that cannot be supported by the common linguistic usage of the founding era – …


“Government By Injunction,” Legal Elites, And The Making Of The Modern Federal Courts, Kristin Collins Nov 2016

“Government By Injunction,” Legal Elites, And The Making Of The Modern Federal Courts, Kristin Collins

Faculty Scholarship

The tendency of legal discourse to obscure the processes by which social and political forces shape the law’s development is well known, but the field of federal courts in American constitutional law may provide a particularly clear example of this phenomenon. According to conventional accounts, Congress’s authority to regulate the lower federal courts’ “jurisdiction”—generally understood to include their power to issue injunctions— has been a durable feature of American constitutional law since the founding. By contrast, the story I tell in this essay is one of change. During the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, many jurists considered the federal …


Second Amendment Traditionalism And Desuetude, Darrell A. H. Miller Jan 2016

Second Amendment Traditionalism And Desuetude, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Practice And Precedent In Historical Gloss Games, Joseph Blocher, Margaret H. Lemos Jan 2016

Practice And Precedent In Historical Gloss Games, Joseph Blocher, Margaret H. Lemos

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Agora: Reflections On Zivotofsky V. Kerry : Historical Gloss, The Recognition Power, And Judicial Review, Curtis A. Bradley Jan 2015

Agora: Reflections On Zivotofsky V. Kerry : Historical Gloss, The Recognition Power, And Judicial Review, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


The Conflicted Assumptions Of Modern Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell Jan 2011

The Conflicted Assumptions Of Modern Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

Contribution to Symposium - The Nature of Judicial Authority: A Reflection on Philip Hamburger's Law and Judicial Duty