Jurisprudence Commons^™

Grabbing The Bullcoming By The Horns: How The Supreme Court Could Have Used Bullcoming V. New Mexico To Clarify Confrontation Clause Requirements For Csi-Type Reports, Paul F. Rothstein, Ronald J. Coleman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the pilot episode of the hit television show CSI, Grissom says to Warrick: "Concentrate on what cannot lie. The evidence." Although Grissom is a beloved figure in U.S. popular culture, the U.S. is currently unwilling to accept that evidence never lies. In stark contrast to Grissom's statement, the common law has a long history of allowing criminal defendants to cross-examine and question witnesses providing evidence against them. The right to confront an accusatory witness is reflected in the historical legal documents of Great Britain, in Shakespearean writing, and even in the Bible. In the United States, the right to …

Rights, Harms, And Duties: A Response To Justice For Hedgehogs, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author responds to the three jurisprudential positions that Ronald Dworkin discusses in his book--albeit briefly--so as to integrate them into his hedgehoggian program. The first is that we should think of rights as political trumps, such that the individual liberty protected by the right, and hence the behavior protected by the right, trumps in importance and in effect, both in law and in popular imaginings, the various collective goals with which the right might be in conflict. Second, we should think about our collective life, and the principles that should guide it, through the lens of the rights of …

The Roberts Court Vs. Free Speech, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Disparate Impact, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There has been a lot of talk about post-racialism since the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the first black President of the United States. Some have argued that the Obama election illustrates the evolution of the United States from its unfortunate racist past to a more admirable post-racial present in which the problem of invidious racial discrimination has largely been overcome. Others have argued that the Obama election illustrates only that an extraordinarily gifted, mixed-race, multiple Ivy League graduate, Harvard Law Review President was able to overcome the persistent discriminatory racial practices that continue to disadvantage the bulk of …

“To Remand, Or Not To Remand”: Ventura’S Ordinary Remand Rule And The Evolving Jurisprudence Of Futility, Patrick J. Glen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is a foundational principle of administrative law that a reviewing court should not dispose of a petition for review or appeal on grounds not relied upon by the agency, and should not reach issues in the first instance not addressed administratively. In such circumstances, there is a strong presumption that the reviewing court should remand the case to the agency for further proceedings rather than reach out to decide the disputed issues. The United States Supreme Court explicitly extended operation of the “ordinary remand rule” to the immigration context in its 2002 decision in INS v. Ventura. Notwithstanding subsequent …

Ronald Dworkin’S Justice For Hedgehogs And Partnership Conception Of Democracy (With A Comment To Jeremy Waldron’S 'A Majority In The Lifeboat'), Imer Flores

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this article the author focuses mainly in the last part of Ronald Dworkin´s Justice for Hedgehogs and in his argument for a partnership conception of democracy. For that purpose, first, he recalls some of the main features that Dworkin had advanced in previous but intrinsically related works, about political morality, equality and democracy; second, he reassess the arguments for a partnership conception of democracy; third, he reconsiders the resistance produced by Jeremy Waldron in his “A Majority in the Lifeboat” and the response provided by Dworkin, but since it may appear insufficient, he intends to present an alternative—or complementary—riposte …

The Missing Jurisprudence Of The Legislated Constitution, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Does the fourteenth Amendment and its Equal Protection Clause — the promise that "no state shall deny equal protection of the laws" — have any relevance to the progressive project of reducing economic inequality in various spheres of life or, more modestly, of ameliorating the multiple vulnerabilities of this country's poor people? The short answer, I believe, is, it depends. It will depend, in 2020, just as it depends now, on what we mean by the Constitution we are expounding: the Constitution as read and interpreted by courts — the adjudicated Constitution — or what I propose to call the …

District Of Columbia V. Heller And Originalism, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

On June 26, 2008, the United States Supreme Court handed down its 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, striking a District of Columbia statute that prohibits the possession of useable handguns in the home on the ground that it violated the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Justice Scalia's majority opinion drew dissents from Justice Stevens and Justice Breyer. Collectively, the opinions in Heller represent the most important and extensive debate on the role of original meaning in constitutional interpretation among the members of the contemporary Supreme Court.

This article investigates the relationship between originalist constitutional …

Process Theory, Majoritarianism, And The Original Understanding, William Michael Treanor

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In Radicals in Robes, Cass Sunstein posits that there are four primary approaches to constitutional interpretation: perfectionism, majoritarianism, minimalism, and fundamentalism.' The purpose of his eloquent and compelling book is twofold: Sunstein argues for minimalism, an approach that he contends makes most sense for America today; and with even greater force, Sunstein argues against fundamentalism, which he finds "wrong, dangerous, radical, and occasionally hypocritical."' The "Radicals in Robes" who are the targets of Sunstein's book are judges who embrace fundamentalism, which, in his view, embodies "the views of the extreme wing of [the] Republican Party."'

In Securing Constitutional Democracy: The …

Constitutional Culture Or Ordinary Politics: A Reply To Reva Siegel, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Reva Siegel's lecture, ‘Constitutional Culture, Social Movement Conflict and Constitutional Change: The Case of the de Facto ERA,’ explores the interaction between the courts and social movements in creating constitutional meaning. In the primary part of this response I focus my comments on Siegel's three major contributions: First, the historical explanation of the source of the Court's authority in the development of the so-called de facto ERA; second, the articulation of a general, jurisprudential thesis regarding social contestation as a source of constitutional authority apart from text, history, and principle; and third, the quasi-sociological descriptive account of the form social …

The Supreme Court In Bondage: Constitutional Stare Decisis, Legal Formalism, And The Future Of Unenumerated Rights, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay advances a formalist conception of constitutional stare decisis. The author argues that instrumentalist accounts of precedent are inherently unsatisfying and that the Supreme Court should abandon adherence to the doctrine that it is free to overrule its own prior decisions. These moves are embedded in a larger theoretical framework--a revival of formalist ideas in legal theory that he calls "neoformalism" to distinguish his view from the so-called "formalism" caricatured by the legal realists (and from some other views that are called "formalist").

In Part II, The Critique of Unenumerated Constitutional Rights, the author sets the stage by …

Pluralism And Public Legal Reason, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What role does and should religion play in the legal sphere of a modern liberal democracy? Does religion threaten to create divisions that would undermine the stability of the constitutional order? Or is religious disagreement itself a force that works to create consensus on some of the core commitments of constitutionalism--liberty of conscience, toleration, limited government, and the rule of law? This essay explores these questions from the perspectives of contemporary political philosophy and constitutional theory. The thesis of the essay is that pluralism--the diversity of religious and secular conceptions of the good--can and should work as a force for …

Weak-Form Judicial Review And "Core" Civil Liberties, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this Essay, I want to unearth some subordinated strands in the Rehnquist Court's free speech jurisprudence. For example, the Rehnquist Court allowed Congress to regulate campaign finance in ways subject to credible First Amendment objections, and to impose obligations on cable television systems that would almost certainly be unconstitutional were they imposed on newspapers. These decisions, I suggest, do not rest simply on the kind of deference to legislative judgment that fits comfortably into a system of strong-form review. Rather, they represent what I call a managerial model of the First Amendment, which accords legislatures a large role in …

The "Constitution Restoration Act" And Judicial Independence: Some Observations, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Essay uses the proposed Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 as the vehicle for exploring some aspects of contemporary concerns about judicial independence and the mechanisms available to control what might be perceived as abuses of judicial authority . . . I doubt that the Act has a serious chance of enactment, but its introduction provides an opportunity to examine some difficulties associated with congressional control of judicial decision-making. I begin by treating the Constitution Restoration Act as a real statute, asking what its substantive terms mean. I argue that there is substantial tension between what the Act says and …

"Meet The New Boss": The New Judicial Center, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A document entitled ‘Guidelines on Constitutional Litigation’ published in 1988 by the Reagan era Department of Justice is the springboard for Professor Tushnet's discussion of the Supreme Court's "new center. " The Guidelines urged Department of Justice litigators to foster a nearly exclusive reliance on original understanding in constitutional interpretation and to resort to legislative history only as a last resort. The Guidelines also advised Department of Justice litigators to seek substantive legal changes including more restrictive standing requirements, an end to the creation of unenumerated individual rights, greater constitutional protection of property rights, and greater limits on congressional power. …

Constitutionalization, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Students of constitutional law tend to suspect pretty early on that the Constitution simply means whatever the Supreme Court says that it means. Rather than fight that intuition, I think it is best to treat the student insight as one of the basic starting assumptions when teaching a course in Constitutional Law. The goal then becomes to help students figure out how best to maneuver and feel comfortable in a legal universe where the Constitution has only contingent meaning.

What the Supreme Court does when it clothes its political policy preferences in the garb of constitutional law can be described …

Sunsetting Judicial Opinions, Neal K. Katyal

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Contemporary constitutional law, in its quest for judicial restraint, has primarily focused on "the how" of judging - what interpretive methods will constrain the decisionmaker? This Article, by contrast, focuses on the "when"- if there are reasons to think that today's judicial decisions might later prove to be problematic, then are there methods that alter the timing of those decisions' impact to produce better outcomes? This Article outlines one new method for judicial decisionmaking in the post-9/11 world. Informed by pervasive legislative practices, I contend that the Supreme Court should prospectively declare that some of its national security opinions will …

Response To State Action And A New Birth Of Freedom, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I have just a few comments. The first comment is a contribution to the ''analytic" question posed by Professor Black's work and made explicit by Professors Peller and Tushnet's paper. To make the case for the constitutional status of welfare rights, I do not think it is sufficient-although it may well be necessary-to show that the "state action" problem is merely a pseudo-problem, whatever the reason for finding it not to be a problem. I do not agree with one of the claims put forward by Peller and Tushnet,' that Black's perceptive analysis of the state action problem in his …

The Aretaic Turn In Constitutional Theory, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author argues that the aretaic turn in constitutional theory is an institutional approach to theories of constitutional interpretation ought to be supplemented by explicit focus on the virtues and vices of constitutional adjudicators. Part I, The Most Dysfunctional Branch, advances the speculative hypothesis that politicization of the judiciary has led the political branches to exclude consideration of virtue from the nomination and confirmation of Supreme Court Justices and to select Justices on the basis of the strength of their commitment to particular positions on particular issues and the fervor of their ideological passions.

Part II, Institutionalism and Constitutional …

The Secret Life Of The Political Question Doctrine, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

"Questions, in their nature political, or which are, by the constitution and laws, submitted to the executive, can never be made in this court."

The irony, of course, is that Marbury v. Madison, itself, "made" a political question, and the answer the Court gave was deeply political as well. As everyone reading this essay knows, the case arose out of a bitter political controversy, and the opinion for the Court was a carefully crafted political document - "a masterwork of indirection," according to Robert McCloskey's well-known characterization, "a brilliant example of Chief Justice Marshall's capacity to sidestep danger while seeming …

Constitutional Legitimacy, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The problem of constitutional legitimacy is to establish why anyone should obey the command of a constitutionally-valid law. A lawmaking system is legitimate if there is a prima facie duty to obey the laws it makes. Neither "consent of the governed" nor "benefits received" justifies obedience. Rather, a prima facie duty of obedience exists either (a) if there is actual unanimous consent to the jurisdiction of the lawmaker or, in the absence of consent, (b) f laws are made by procedures which assure that they are not unjust. In the absence of unanimous consent, a written constitution should be assessed …

The Effect Of The Supreme Court's Eleventh Amendment Jurisprudence On Environmental Citizen Suits: Gotcha!, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The current Supreme Court has substantially expanded the scope of protection from lawsuits accorded to states by the Eleventh Amendment and narrowed the exceptions to its application. As a result, many people are finding they are unable to vindicate federal rights in any court when the defendant is a state or a state agency. The most recent example of this is the Court's decision in South Carolina State Ports Authority v. Federal Maritime Commission, in which the Court extended the reach of the Eleventh Amendment to private administrative enforcement actions against states, thus forsaking completely any connection to the …

Alternative Forms Of Judicial Review, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The invention in the late twentieth century of what I call weak-form systems of judicial review provides us with the chance to see in a new light some traditional debates within U.S. constitutional law and theory, which are predicated on the fact that the United States has strong-form judicial review. Strong- and weak-form systems operate on the level of constitutional design, in the sense that their characteristics are specified in constitutional documents or in deep-rooted constitutional traditions. After sketching the differences between strong- and weak-form systems, I turn to design features that operate at the next lower level. Here legislatures …

Tradition, Principle And Self-Sovereignty: Competing Conceptions Of Liberty In The United States Constitution, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The “liberty” protected by the United States Constitution has been variously interpreted as the “liberty” of thinking persons to speak, worship and associate with others, unimpeded by onerous state law; the liberty of consumers and producers to make individual market choices, including the choice to sell one’s labour at any price one sees fit, free of redistributive or paternalistic legislation that might restrict it; and the liberty of all of us in the domestic sphere to make choices regarding reproductive and family life, free of state law that might restrict it on grounds relating to public morals. Although the United …

Law's Constitution: A Relational Critique, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is a simple fact: we begin from others. Without others we, quite literally, could not live, feel, be born. Every mother, every mother's partner, every father, every child, knows this. But law sees these relations as something lesser, as foreign. Mention the word "relationship" to the average lawyer and she will likely assume that you are talking about sex, dating, or perhaps marriage. She may even wonder what "relationship" has to do with the law at all.

In this paper, the author wonders whether it is possible to flip that equation, to think of the relational as central, rather …

A Subversive Strand Of The Warren Court, Gary Peller

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The choice between "de jure" and "de facto" standards of review arises whenever a legal standard is needed to identify violations of specific constitutional rights or norms in particular cases. The issue is methodological in the sense that the question is faced regardless of the particular right or norm at issue (although it is not really true that the choice between these methodologies would have no influence on the choice of rights or norms to apply). A de Jure approach limits the imposition of constitutional norms to cases in which the state has affirmatively acted to help create a particular …

Treaties And The Eleventh Amendment, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court's recent invigoration of federalism doctrine has revived a question that had long lain dormant in constitutional law: whether and to what extent federalism limits apply to exercises of the Treaty Power. In the days before the famous switch in time that saved nine, the Court in Missouri v. Holland upheld a statute passed by Congress to implement a treaty even though it assumed that the statute would exceed Congress's legislative power under Article I in the absence of the treaty. The significance of this holding abated considerably when the Court embraced a broader interpretation of the Commerce …

Cook V. Gralike: Easy Cases And Structural Reasoning, Vicki C. Jackson

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Cook v Gralike, the Court - unanimous as to result - struck down a Missouri initiative amending the state constitution to require that the failure of candidates for U.S. Congress to support a particular term-limits amendment to the United States Constitution be noted on the ballot. In an opinion joined by seven Justices, the Court held that the Missouri law exceeded the scope of states' powers to regulate the "time, place and manner" of holding congressional elections . . . The opinions are analyzed preliminarily in Part I. Part II below suggests that even if there were no Elections …

"Shut Up He Explained", Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Part I of this Commentary examines the conversational model of politics. I argue that the virtues Bennett finds in the conversational model exist only when, and to the extent that, participants in civil and political society can engage in undominated conversation. The requirement that conversation be undominated generates a substantial set of social prerequisites, mostly dealing with equality. And yet, determining what social arrangements actually satisfy those prerequisites is itself a matter of constitutional controversy. Resolving such controversies through politics is no solution, because the political arena is where we seek to ensure that nondomination prevails in civil society, and, …

Escaping The Expression-Equality Conundrum: Toward Anti-Orthodoxy And Inclusion, Nan D. Hunter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this article, Professor Hunter questions the naturalness and inevitability of the dichotomy in constitutional law between freedom of expression and the right to equality. She places the origin of this doctrinal divergence in the history of American social protest movements in the first half of the twentieth century, which began with ideologically-based claims and shifted to a primary emphasis on identity-based equality claims. During the interim period between World War I and World War I, the wave of seminal First Amendment cases was ebbing and the wave of equality claims was beginning to swell. Close examination of the constitutional …