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Supreme Court

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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence

Deep Tracks: Album Cuts That Help Define The Essential Scalia, Gary S. Lawson Jan 2021

Deep Tracks: Album Cuts That Help Define The Essential Scalia, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Jeff Sutton and Ed Whelan have collected some of Justice Scalia’s “greatest hits” in a volume entitled The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law. The book is an excellent introduction to the jurisprudential thought and literary style of one of the most influential legal thinkers—and legal writers—in modern times. As with any “greatest hits” compilation, however, there are inevitably going to be key “album cuts” for which there will not be space. This essay seeks to supplement Sutton and Whelan’s invaluable efforts by surveying three of those “deep tracks” that shed particular light on …


Checks And Balances: Congress And The Federal Court, Paul D. Carrington Jan 2006

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 …


Congress's Power To Enforce Fourteenth Amendment Rights: Lessons From Federal Remedies The Framers Enacted , Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 2005

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 …


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 Jan 1996

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, …


By Reason Of Their Sex: Feminist Theory Postmodernism And Justice , Tracy E. Higgins Jan 1994

By Reason Of Their Sex: Feminist Theory Postmodernism And Justice , Tracy E. Higgins

Faculty Scholarship

Both the Supreme Court's jurisprudence of gender and feminist legal theory have generally assumed that some identifiable and describable category of woman exists prior to the construction of legal categories. For the Court, this woman-whose characteristics admittedly have changed over time-serves as the standard against which gendered legal classifications are measured. For feminism, her existence has served a different but equally important purpose as the subject for whom political goals are pursued. To the extent that the definitions of the category diverge, the differences among definitions are played out in feminist critiques of the Court's gender jurisprudence, and, occasionally, in …