Jurisprudence Commons^™

Intratextual And Intradoctrinal Dimensions Of The Constitutional Home, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

The home has been lifted to a special pantheon of rights and protections in American constitutional law. Until recently, a conception of special protections for the home in the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause was under-addressed by scholars. However, a contemporary and robust academic treatment of a home-centric takings doctrine merits a different approach to construction and interpretation: the intratextual and intradoctrinal implications of a coherent set of homebound protections across the Bill of Rights, including the Takings Clause.

Intratextualism and intradoctrinalism are interpretive methods of juxtaposing non-adjoining and adjoining clauses in the Constitution and Supreme Court doctrines to find patterns …

The Supreme Court’S Two Constitutions: A First Look At The “Reverse Polarity” Cases, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

In the traditional approach to ideological classification, “liberal” judicial decisions are those that support civil liberties claims; “conservative” decisions are those that reject them. That view – particularly associated with the Warren Court era – is reflected in numerous academic writings and even an article by a prominent liberal judge. Today, however, there is mounting evidence that the traditional assumptions about the liberal-conservative divide are incorrect or at best incomplete. In at least some areas of constitutional law, the traditional characterizations have been reversed. Across a wide variety of constitutional issues, support for claims under the Bill of Rights or …

Evolving Standards Of Domination: Abandoning A Flawed Legal Standard And Approaching A New Era In Penal Reform, Spearit

Articles

This Article critiques the evolving standards of decency doctrine as a form of Social Darwinism. It argues that evolving standards of decency provided a system of review that was tailor-made for Civil Rights opponents to scale back racial progress. Although as a doctrinal matter, evolving standards sought to tie punishment practices to social mores, prison sentencing became subject to political agendas that determined the course of punishment more than the benevolence of a maturing society. Indeed, rather than the fierce competition that is supposed to guide social development, the criminal justice system was consciously deployed as a means of social …

Light On A Darkling Plain: Intercircuit Conflicts In The Perspective Of Time And Experience, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

The time has long passed when the Supreme Court resolved every intercircuit conflict properly brought before it in a petition for certiorari. Is that a problem we should be concerned about? Three decades ago, Congress asked the Federal Judicial Center, the research arm of the federal judiciary, to conduct a study to ascertain “the number and frequency of conflicts among the judicial circuits … that remain unresolved because they are not heard by the Supreme Court.” Congress further requested that the Center determine the extent to which the unresolved conflicts are “intolerable.” The Center asked me to design and conduct …

Legal Problems Of Dividing A State Between Federal Judicial Circuits, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

At recent hearings on proposals to restructure the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, two witnesses (a Ninth Circuit judge and a law professor) expressed some support for a realignment that would divide the state of California between two judicial circuits. This article explores the legal problems that might arise if such a reorganization were to be enacted, and it considers how those problems might be dealt with. It concludes that the problems are far from intractable and that they can be addressed through use or adaptation of familiar mechanisms for avoiding or resolving conflicts between decisions of different courts.

Almost …