Courts Commons^™

Forum Fights And Fundamental Rights: Amenability’S Distorted Frame, James P. George

Faculty Scholarship

Framing—the subtle use of context to suggest a conclusion—is a dubious alternative to direct argumentation. Both the brilliance and the bane of marketing, framing also creeps into supposedly objective analysis. Law offers several examples, but a lesser known one is International Shoe’s two-part jurisdictional test. The framing occurs in the underscoring of defendant’s due process rights contrasted with plaintiff’s “interests” which are often dependent on governmental interests. This equation ignores, both rhetorically and analytically, the injured party’s centuries-old rights to—not interests in—a remedy in an open and adequate forum.

Even within the biased frame, the test generally works, if not …

Standing, Equity, And Injury In Fact, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

This contribution to the Notre Dame Law Review's annual Federal Courts symposium on "The Nature of the Federal Equity Power" asks what the traditions of equity can tell us about Article III standing. I take as my point of departure the observation by Professors Sam Bray and Paul Miller, in their contribution to the symposium, that equity does not have causes of action as such--or at least not in the same way as actions at law. This is potentially important for standing, as many academic critiques of the Supreme Court's standing jurisprudence have argued that standing should turn on whether …

Courts In Conversation, Thomas P. Schmidt

Faculty Scholarship

Ralph Waldo Emerson once suggested that we read not for instruction but for provocation. By that standard, in The Words That Made Us, Akhil Reed Amar has written a characteristically great book. This is not to deny that there is abundant instruction in its many pages: Amar offers a synoptic and yet still nuanced description of the great constitutional conversation that engulfed American political life in the eighty or so years around the founding. One of the chief values of the book, though, is that it will provoke a whole new set of additions to the constitutional conversation that …

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

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 …

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

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Inherent National Sovereignty Constitutionalism: An Original Understanding Of The U.S. Constitution, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The New Public, Sarah Seo

Faculty Scholarship

By exploring the intertwined histories of the automobile, policing, criminal procedure, and the administrative state in the twentieth-century United States, this Essay argues that the growth of the police’s discretionary authority had its roots in the governance of an automotive society. To tell this history and the proliferation of procedural rights that developed as a solution to abuses of police discretion, this Essay examines the life and oeuvre of Charles Reich, an administrative-law expert in the 1960s who wrote about his own encounters with the police, particularly in his car. The Essay concludes that, in light of this regulatory history …

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

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"So Help Me?": Religious Expression And Artifacts In The Oath Of Office And The Courtroom Oath, Frederick B. Jonassen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The National Security State: The End Of Separation Of Powers, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Faithful Agency Versus Ordinary Meaning Advocacy, James J. Brudney

Faculty Scholarship

This Article contends that ordinary meaning analysis based on dictionaries and language canons cannot be reconciled with the faithful agent model. Fidelity to Congress as a principal entails fidelity to its lawmaking enterprise, not to words or sentences divorced from that enterprise. Congress has indicated that it does not value dictionaries as part of its lawmaking process, and it ascribes at most limited weight to language canons in that process. Further, Justices advocating ordinary meaning analysis too often use dictionary definitions, and language canons such as the rule against surplusage, the whole act rule, and ejusdem generis, in ways that …

Oasis Or Mirage: The Supreme Court's Thirst For Dictionaries In The Rehnquist And Roberts Eras, James J. Brudney, Lawrence Baum

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s use of dictionaries, virtually non-existent before 1987, has dramatically increased during the Rehnquist and Roberts Court eras to the point where as many as one-third of statutory decisions invoke dictionary definitions. The increase is linked to the rise of textualism and its intense focus on ordinary meaning. This Article explores the Court’s new dictionary culture in depth from empirical and doctrinal perspectives. We find that while textualist justices are heavy dictionary users, purposivist justices invoke dictionary definitions with comparable frequency. Further, dictionary use overall is strikingly ad hoc and subjective. We demonstrate how the Court’s patterns of …

No History, No Certainty, No Legitimacy . . . No Problem: Originalism And The Limits Of Legal Theory, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Martin H. Redish is on the warpath. Like General Sherman marching toward Atlanta (or Justin Tuck marching toward Tom Brady), Professor Redish, together with Matthew Arnould,1 lays waste to every constitutional theory that he encounters. Originalism, with its “belief that constitutional interpretation should be characterized exclusively by an effort to determine the Constitution’s meaning by means of some form of historical inquiry,”2 generates “an often contrived and opaque veil of historical inquiry”3 that provides “an ideal smokescreen behind which judges may pursue their personal[,] moral, political[,] or economic goals with relative impunity.”4 Nontextual theories, for their part, “permit[] selective …

The Pragmatic Court: Reinterpreting The Supreme People’S Court Of China, Taisu Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the institutional motivations that underlie several major developments in the Supreme People's Court of China's recent policy-making. Since 2007, the SPC has sent off a collection of policy signals that escapes sweeping ideological labeling: it has publically embraced a populist view of legal reform by encouraging the use of mediation in dispute resolution and popular participation in judicial policy-making, while continuing to advocate legal professionalization as a long-term policy objective. It has also eagerly attempted to enhance its own institutional competence by promoting judicial efficiency, simplifying key areas of civil law, and expanding its control over lower …

Introduction, Paul Finkelman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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

Administering The Second Amendment: Law, Politics, And Taxonomy , Nicholas J. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

This article anticipates the post-McDonald landscape by assessing the right to arms in the context of several state regulations and the arguments that might be employed as challenges to them unfold. So far, the core test for determining the scope of the individual right to arms is the common use standard articulated in District of Columbia v. Heller. Measured against that, standard firearm regulations fit into three categories. The first category contains laws that are easily administered under the common use standard. The second category – and the primary focus of this article – consists of laws that can be …

Truth, Deterrence, And The Impeachment Exception , James L. Kainen

Faculty Scholarship

James v. Illinois permits illegally-obtained evidence to impeach defendants, but not defense witnesses. Thus far, all courts have construed James to allow impeachment of defendants' hearsay declarations. This article argues against allowing illegally-obtained evidence to impeach defendants' hearsay declarations because doing so unduly diminishes the exclusionary rule's deterrent effect. The distinction between impeaching defendants and defense witnesses disappears when courts allow prosecutors to impeach defendants' hearsay declarations. Because defense witnesses report exculpatory conduct of a defendant who always has a substantial interest in disguising his criminality, their testimony routinely incorporates defendant hearsay. Defense witness testimony thus routinely paves the way …

From St. Ives To Cyberspace: The Modern Distortion Of The Medieval ‘Law Merchant’, Stephen E. Sachs

Faculty Scholarship

Modern advocates of corporate self-regulation have drawn unlikely inspiration from the Middle Ages. On the traditional view of history, medieval merchants who wandered from fair to fair were not governed by domestic laws, but by their own lex mercatoria, or "law merchant. " This law, which uniformly regulated commerce across Europe, was supposedly produced by an autonomous merchant class, interpreted in private courts, and enforced through private sanctions rather than state coercion. Contemporary writers have treated global corporations as descendants of these itinerant traders, urging them to replace conflicting national laws with a transnational law of their own creation. The …

Checks And Balances: Congress And The Federal Court, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

This essay was published as a chapter in Reforming the Supreme Court: Term Limits for Justices (Paul D. Carrington & Roger Cramton eds, Carolina Academic Press 2006). Its point is that Congress has long neglected its duty implicit in the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers to constrain the tendency of the Court, the academy and the legal profession to inflate the Court's status and power. The term "life tenure" is a significant source of a sense of royal status having not only the adverse cultural effects noted by Nagel, but also doleful effects on the administration and enforcement of …

Florida's Request For Admission Rule: 150 Years On The Road To Inconsistency, Ineffectiveness And Appellate Nullification, Mitchell J. Frank

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Congress's Power To Enforce Fourteenth Amendment Rights: Lessons From Federal Remedies The Framers Enacted , Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Robert Kaczorowski argues for an expansive originalist interpretation of Congressional power under the Fourteenth Amendment. Before the Civil War Congress actually exercised, and the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld plenary Congressional power to enforce the constitutional rights of slaveholders. After the Civil War, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment copied the antebellum statutes and exercised plenary power to enforce the constitutional rights of all American citizens when they enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and then incorporated the Act into the Fourteenth Amendment. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment thereby exercised the plenary power the Rehnquist Court claims the …

Marbury And Judicial Deference: The Shadow Of Whittington V. Polk And The Maryland Judiciary Battle, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

On the 200th anniversary of Whittington and approaching the 200th anniversary of Marbury, this article revisits these two decisions and challenges legal scholars' assumptions that they were such strong precedents for judicial review.⁵ When one takes into account the broader contexts, both decisions were in fact judicial capitulations to aggressive legislatures and executives. The Maryland General Court asserted its judicial supremacy only in dicta, and the court failed to enforce judicial supremacy when it was legally justified. This article picks apart the court's reasoning step by step, using Whittington to illuminate Marbury and Marbury to illuminate Whittington. …

The Unhappy History Of Civil Rights Legislation, Fifty Years Later, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Seldom, if ever, have the power and the purposes of legislation been rendered so impotent.... All that is left today are afew scattered remnants of a once grandiose scheme to nationalize the fundamental rights of the individual.

These words were written fifty years ago by Eugene Gressman, now William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina School of Law, as a description of what the courts, primarily the Supreme Court of the United States, had done with the civil rights legislation passed by Congress in the wake of the Civil War. Professor Gressman's article, The Unhappy History of …

The Arkansas Supreme Court And The Civil War, L. Scott Stafford

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Courts And The Congress: Should Judges Disdain Political History?, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

In an earlier article in these pages, Professor John Manning argued that the use of legislative materials by courts in effect permits Congress to engage in delegation of its authority to subunits of the legislature, in violation of the separation of powers. Professor Strauss, acknowledging that the previous generation of courts may have excessively credited the minutiae of legislative history, responds that judicial attention to the political history of legislation is required, not forbidden, by considerations of constitutional structure. Only awareness of that history will promote interpretation reflective of the context and political moment of Congress's action. Our history of …

Lessons From The Past: Revenge Yesterday And Today Symposium, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Seipp's Paper transports us to the Middle Ages to discover a society that views crime and tort quite differently from the way we view these categories today. Yet our discovery of that society offers a perspective about our own. In Professor Seipp's world the victim of a wrong had a choice: demand revenge by determining how the wrongdoer would be punished, or demand monetary compensation. These two entitlements were mutually exclusive. The victim could choose either one, but to some extent, especially in earlier times, the right of revenge was considered a higher right that the victim was expected …

Tragic Irony Of American Federalism: National Sovereignty Versus State Sovereignty In Slavery And In Freedom, The Federalism In The 21st Century: Historical Perspectives, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

A plurality on the Supreme Court seeks to establish a state-sovereignty based theory of federalism that imposes sharp limitations on Congress's legislative powers. Using history as authority, they admonish a return to the constitutional "first principles" of the Founders. These "first principles," in their view, attribute all governmental authority to "the consent of the people of each individual state, not the consent of the undifferentiated people of the Nation as a whole." Because the people of each state are the source of all governmental power, they maintain, "where the Constitution is silent about the exercise of a particular power-that is, …