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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
Stare Decisis And Constitutional Text, Jonathan F. Mitchell
Stare Decisis And Constitutional Text, Jonathan F. Mitchell
Michigan Law Review
Almost everyone acknowledges that stare decisis should play a significant role when the Supreme Court of the United States resolves constitutional cases. Yet the academic and judicial rationales for this practice tend to rely on naked consequentialist considerations, and make only passing efforts to square the Court's stare decisis doctrines with the language of the Constitution. This Article offers a qualified defense of constitutional stare decisis that rests exclusively on constitutional text. It aims to broaden the overlapping consensus of interpretive theories that can support a role for constitutional stare decisis, but to do this it must narrow the circumstances …
Why The Demands Of Formalism Will Prevent New Originalism From Furthering Conservative Political Goals, Daniel Hornal
Why The Demands Of Formalism Will Prevent New Originalism From Furthering Conservative Political Goals, Daniel Hornal
Daniel Hornal
Proponents of New Originalism propose that their modifications solve the indeterminacy and predictability problems inherent in early conceptions of originalism. This paper argues that excluding extrinsic evidence and relying only on the formal implications of the text merely switches one indeterminacy and predictability problem for another. Rules inherently carry implications unknown to rule writers. In the case of open-textured rules such as those in the Constitution, a broad reading can occupy whole fields of law, whereas a narrow reading can have almost no real-world effects. Because they must ignore extrinsic evidence, new originalists are almost unbound in their choice of …
Documentary Disenfranchisement, Jessie Allen
Documentary Disenfranchisement, Jessie Allen
Articles
In the generally accepted picture of criminal disenfranchisement in the United States today, permanent voting bans are rare. Laws on the books in most states now provide that people with criminal convictions regain their voting rights after serving their sentences. This Article argues that the legal reality may be significantly different. Interviews conducted with county election officials in New York suggest that administrative practices sometimes transform temporary voting bans into lifelong disenfranchisement. Such de facto permanent disenfranchisement has significant political, legal, and cultural implications. Politically, it undermines the comforting story that states’ legislative reforms have ameliorated the antidemocratic interaction of …
I Am Textualism, Stephen Durden
I Am Textualism, Stephen Durden
Stephen Durden
This essay, consisting of merely 1100 words, satirizes textualism, particularly as applied to the Constitution. Inspired by the idea of something being all things to all people in order to win converts, the essay demonstrates that because textualism has so many different definitions that it in fact has no meaning other than the meaning given by each textualist. Each textualist embraces his or her own version of textualism. Textualists battle to define true textualism. Given the different versions of textualism, each textualist faces the Textualist Conundrum. As each textualist seeks to embraceor prove a purer form of textualism the textualist …