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Articles 1 - 16 of 16

Full-Text Articles in Legal History

A New Report Of Entick V. Carrington (1765), Christian Burset, T. T. Arvind Jan 2022

A New Report Of Entick V. Carrington (1765), Christian Burset, T. T. Arvind

Journal Articles

The Supreme Court has described Entick v. Carrington (1765) as “the true and ultimate expression of constitutional law” for the Founding generation. For more than 250 years, judges and commentators have read that case for guidance about the rule of law, executive authority, and the original meaning of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. But we have been reading a flawed version. This Article publishes, for the first time, a previously unknown manuscript report of Entick v. Carrington. We explain why this version is more reliable than other reports of the case, and how this new discovery challenges prevailing assumptions about …


Court-Packing And Compromise, Barry Cushman Jan 2013

Court-Packing And Compromise, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1937 Court-packing bill would have permitted him to appoint six additional justices to the Supreme Court, thereby expanding its membership to fifteen immediately. Throughout the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to enact the measure, Roosevelt was presented with numerous opportunities to compromise for a measure authorizing the appointment of fewer additional justices. The President rejected each of these proposals, and his refusal to compromise often has been attributed to stubbornness, overconfidence, or hubris. Yet an examination of the papers of Attorney General Homer S. Cummings reveals why FDR and his advisors believed that he required no fewer than …


Procedural Common Law, Amy Coney Barrett Jan 2008

Procedural Common Law, Amy Coney Barrett

Journal Articles

Debates about the common lawmaking power of the federal courts focus exclusively on substantive common law. But federal common law is not limited to matters of substance; it reaches matters of procedure as well. Federal law includes a robust body of what might be called procedural common law - common law primarily concerned with the regulation of internal court processes rather than substantive rights and obligations. This body of law includes many doctrines that are fixtures in the law of procedure and federal courts. For example, abstention, forum non conveniens, remittitur, stare decisis, and preclusion can all fairly be characterized …


Lochner, Liquor, And Longshoremen: A Puzzle In Progressive Era Federalism, Barry Cushman Jan 2001

Lochner, Liquor, And Longshoremen: A Puzzle In Progressive Era Federalism, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

In 1890, the Supreme Court shocked and thrilled the civilized world with the announcement that dry states could not prohibit the sale of liquor shipped in from outside the state. So long as the out-of-state goods remained in their "original packages," the Court held they retained their character as interstate commerce subject only to federal regulation. The consequences for the cause of local sobriety were, predictably, catastrophic. The proliferation in temperance territory of "original package saloons," at which one could purchase liquor free from the superintendence of local liquor authorities, was appalling to dry eyes. Members of Congress immediately proposed …


Lost Fidelities, Barry Cushman Jan 1999

Lost Fidelities, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

Owen Roberts was accused of a variety of things in 1937, but “fidelity” was not among them. Justice Harlan Fiske Stone and Professor Felix Frankfurter were among many who accused Roberts of performing, as Frankfurter put it, a jurisprudential “somersault” “incapable of being attributed to a single factor relevant to the professed judicial process.” To Frankfurter, it was “all painful beyond words,” and gave him “a sickening feeling which is aroused when moral standards are adulterated in a convent.” Yet when Roberts announced his retirement from the Court eight years later, Chief Justice Stone, along with now-Justices Frankfurter and Robert …


The Constitutional Theory Of The Fourth Amendment, Gerard V. Bradley Jan 1989

The Constitutional Theory Of The Fourth Amendment, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

This Article will, in large part, present its thesis regarding fourth amendment doctrine by employing, as an illustration, a recent application of the current approach by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. In United States v. Torres, the Seventh Circuit held video surveillance constitutional and further found that the judiciary had the authority to issue warrants for such a technique. Although welcomed by prosecutors and law enforcement officials, this decision highlights the absurdity of the current interpretation of the reasonableness clause. Moreover, Torres provides a vehicle through which this Article's historical interpretation can be brought into focus under the cold …


Law And The Experience Of Politics In Late Eighteenth-Century North Carolina: North Carolina Considers The Constitution, Walter F. Pratt Jan 1987

Law And The Experience Of Politics In Late Eighteenth-Century North Carolina: North Carolina Considers The Constitution, Walter F. Pratt

Journal Articles

In 1788, delegates assembled in North Carolina to decide whether to ratify the Constitution. A debate erupted between Federalists and Anti-federalists regarding each Article of the then-drafted Constitution. This Article analyzes the debate, and proposes that the key difference was the function of the role of the law.


Imagining The Past And Remembering The Future: The Supreme Court's History Of The Establishment Clause, Gerard V. Bradley Jan 1986

Imagining The Past And Remembering The Future: The Supreme Court's History Of The Establishment Clause, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

Our Framers through the Establishment Clause sought to prevent the government from preferring one religious sect to another. However, the Supreme Court in Everson v. Board of Education abandoned that meaning of nonestablishment and created a general prohibition on all nondiscriminatory aid to religion, a decision later reinforced in Lemon v. Kurtzman. This Article discusses the Founder’s worldview and looks at other Establishment Clause cases to illustrate that the historical evidence is inconsistent with Everson. Rather, the founders intended to assure that religion would be aided only on a nondiscriminatory, or sect-neutral, basis and does not stand for …


Professor Kurland, The Supreme Court And Political Science, Donald P. Kommers Jan 1966

Professor Kurland, The Supreme Court And Political Science, Donald P. Kommers

Journal Articles

IN A SYMPOSIUM held at the Notre Dame Law School on February 29, 1964, on several constitutional amendments designed to limit the power of the Supreme Court, Professor Philip B. Kurland of the University of Chicago Law School read a terse and delightfully witty paper in which he compared the Supreme Court to Caesar, sieged on the one side by the modem forces of Brutus, and championed on the other side by the contemporary Mark Antonys. There was no doubt in Professor Kurland's mind that the efforts of conspirators like the Council of State Governments, not to mention its less …


Founding Fathers And The Natural Law: A Study Of The Source Of Our Legal Institutions, The, Clarence Emmett Manion Jan 1949

Founding Fathers And The Natural Law: A Study Of The Source Of Our Legal Institutions, The, Clarence Emmett Manion

Journal Articles

Where did the Founding Fathers get the principles upon which they established our government? What was the source of their faith? The bedrock of their convictions? What was the political evolution of our Constitution? The legal philosophy of our Bill of Rights? The discussion of these questions by Dean Manion is timely for it is necessary now to make soundings and take bearings if the Ship of State is to continue on its true course. Whereas the Revolution of 1688 brought the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty to England, the American colonists resisted that doctrine and adhered to the true natural …


Administrative Boards And Delegation Power, William Burns Lawless Jan 1943

Administrative Boards And Delegation Power, William Burns Lawless

Journal Articles

With the growth of American federalism and the passing of the doctrines of laissez faire as axioms of economic and political legal theory, the Congressional function magnified. Throughout the last decade the multiphased problems of Congress has necessitated the creation of administrative commissions to perform-the policies of the legislature. Congress continues to declare the law and determine the legal principle to control in given cases. In the same breath of legal creation it goes farther and provides for an administrator or commission to vitiate the doctrine set-out. The transfusion of power from the national legislature to the administrator promotes sensitive …


The Constitutionality Of New Deal Measures, Clarence Emmett Manion Jan 1934

The Constitutionality Of New Deal Measures, Clarence Emmett Manion

Journal Articles

In this article, Clarence Manion warns that to honor the Constitution's form but not its substance is to essentially destroy the document. He opines that "Regulation of persons and things is never justified nor justifiable as an end in itself. Regulation for the sake of regulation is paternalism; but regulation as the only means for individual protection is a bulwark of our traditional American liberty. Regulation finds its only justification in the proof of the fact that it is a necessary means for adequate protection of the citizen's rights.


What Will Become Of Prohibition, Clarence Emmett Manion Jan 1931

What Will Become Of Prohibition, Clarence Emmett Manion

Journal Articles

Because of the substantial minority support for Prohibition and the Eighteenth Amendment, this article suggests that it would difficult, if not impossible, to repeal the amendment despite the fact that 3 in 5 Americans would support its repeal. The article looks at potential options of lessening the impact of the Eighteenth Amendment, including removing penalties for it, repealing State enforcement acts, and forbidding nullification of search warrant requirements. Finally, it looks at the quality of liquor as a solution to an "unusually interesting" and "ultimately worthwhile" problem.


Proximate Sources Of The Constitution, Clarence Emmett Manion Jan 1929

Proximate Sources Of The Constitution, Clarence Emmett Manion

Journal Articles

The average American who thinks of our Federal Document only in terms of the Philadelphia Convention may not have fully appreciated the fact that before the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, every American State had already achieved its constitutional independence and had established its own organic law, by which it should not only remain free from the foreign dominion of Great Britain, but should also remain an indestructible unit in The American Federal System. He must remember that the "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union" which leagued the alleged sovereign and independent States, were in force at the time of …


Liberty And The Police Power, Clarence Emmett Manion Jan 1928

Liberty And The Police Power, Clarence Emmett Manion

Journal Articles

The American citizen now has practically no rights of person or property that neither Congress nor the State legislature may not impair by legislation. The adoption of the Articles of Confederation and the Federal Constitution served merely to transfer to the Federal government certain powers formerly exercised by the individual States. When all individuals were protected in the exercise of their respective rights it was never supposed that the rights of the individual were to be protected or approached through the avenues of legislation dictated by majority opinions as to what is now and again for the "general good". The …


Shrinking Bill Of Rights, Clarence Emmett Manion Jan 1926

Shrinking Bill Of Rights, Clarence Emmett Manion

Journal Articles

The assertion of intrinsic, God given rights correlated with the decline of monarchical power. The United States’ understanding that all men and women are endowed with unalienable rights was a long and hard-fought conclusion. However, this article argues that the Bill of Rights has gradually changed from being the bold guardian of individual liberty originally envisioned. Ironically, this change can be attributed to the courts and the legislature.