Legal History Commons^™

...A Rendezvous With Kreplach: Putting The New Deal Court In Context, Richard D. Friedman

Reviews

The Supreme Court of the New Deal era continues to captivate lawyers and historians. Constitutional jurisprudence changed rapidly during the period. Moreover, some of the most significant changes seemed--whatever the reality--to result from pressure imposed in 1937 by President Franklin Roosevelt's plan to pack the Court. The structure of constitutional law that emerged within a few years of Roosevelt's death remains intact in significant respects today.

Free-Standing Due Process And Criminal Procedure: The Supreme Court's Search For Interpretive Guidelines, Jerold H. Israel

Articles

When I was first introduced to the constitutional regulation of criminal procedure in the mid-1950s, a single issue dominated the field: To what extent did the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment impose upon states the same constitutional restraints that the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments imposed upon the federal government? While those Bill of Rights provisions, as even then construed, imposed a broad range of constitutional restraints upon the federal criminal justice system, the federal system was (and still is) minuscule as compared to the combined systems of the fifty states. With the Bill of Rights provisions …

The Boundaries Of Private Property, Michael A. Heller

Articles

If your house and fields are worth more separately, divide them; if you want to leave a ring to your child now and grandchild later, split the ownership in a trust. The American law of property encourages owners to subdivide resources freely. Hidden within the law, however, is a boundary principle that limits the right to subdivide private property into wasteful fragments. While people often create wealth when they break up and recombine property in novel ways, owners may make mistakes, or their self-interest may clash with social welfare. Property law responds with diverse doctrines that prevent and abolish excessive …

Beyond The Hero Judge: Institutional Reform Litigation As Litigation, Margo Schlanger

Reviews

In 1955, in its second decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court suggested that federal courts might be called upon to engage in long-term oversight of once-segregated schools. Through the 1960s, southern resistance pushed federal district and appellate judges to turn that possibility into a reality. The impact of this saga on litigation practice extended beyond school desegregation, and even beyond the struggle for African-American equality; through implementation of Brown, the nation’s litigants, lawyers, and judges grew accustomed both to issuance of permanent injunctions against state and local public institutions, and to extended court oversight of compliance. …

How To Constitutionalize International Law And Foreign Policy For The Benefit Of Civil Society?, Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann

Michigan Journal of International Law

All societies have adopted rules in order to reconcile conflicts among the short-term interests of their citizens with their common long-term interests. All societies have learned that rule-making and rule-enforcement require government powers, as well as "checks and balances" against abuses of such powers. Constitutionalism has emerged as the most important human invention for protecting equal rights of the citizens against such abuses. It rests on the rationality of Ulysses who, when approaching the island of the sirens and knowing of their dangers, ordered his companions to bind him to the mast and not to release him under any circumstances.' …

Theorists' Belief: A Comment On The Moral Tradition Of American Constitutionalism, Jospeh Vining

Articles

The Moral Tradition of American Constitutionalism is one of those rare works that leads us to face, at the center of law and legal thought, the largest questions about human life and human purpose. There is a special reader's shudder, a certain gestural shift in the chair, reserved for that moment of realizing where one is being led-not to the edge, but to the center, so that the questions become insistent, and whatever we and others say and do in the face of them becomes our response to them.

History's Stories, Stephan Landsman

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Stories of Scottsboro by James Goodman

Rehabilitating Federalism, Erwin Chemerinsky

Michigan Law Review

A Review of To Make a Nation: The Rediscovery of American Federalism by Samuel H. Beer

Taking The Fifth: Reconsidering The Origins Of The Constitutional Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, Eben Moglen

Michigan Law Review

The purpose of this essay is to cast doubt on two basic elements of the received historical wisdom concerning the privilege as it applies to British North America and the early United States. First, early American criminal procedure reflected less tenderness toward the silence of the criminal accused than the received wisdom has claimed. The system could more reasonably be said to have depended on self-incrimination than to have eschewed it, and this dependence increased rather than decreased during the provincial period for reasons intimately connected with the economic and social context of the criminal trial in colonial America.

Second, …

The Meaning Of "Under Color Of" Law, Steven L. Winter

Michigan Law Review

The argument proceeds as follows. In Part I, I examine why the conceptual problem of who or what is "the State" is so intractable. In Part II, I present the historical evidence that establishes beyond doubt the pedigree and meaning of the phrase under color of law. I explain why Frankfurter would have indulged in such an obvious historical error to take the position he did. I suggest that, as was the case with the invention of modem standing doctrine, Frankfurter was here engaged in a stealthy, anachronistic campaign against the jurisprudence of the Lochner era - attempting to …

The Supreme Court As Constitutional Interpreter: Chronology Without History, Herbert Hovenkamp

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Constitution in the Supreme Court: The Second Century, 1888-1986 by David P. Currie

Zero-Sum Madison, Thomas W. Merrill

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism by Jennifer Nedelsky

Abstract Democracy: A Review Of Ackerman's We The People, Terrance Sandalow

Reviews

We the People: Foundations is an ambitious book, the first of three volumes in which Professor Ackerman proposes to recast conventional understanding of and contemporary debate about American constitutional law. Unfortunately, the book's rhetoricinflated, self-important, and self-congratulatory-impedes the effort to come to terms with its argument. How, for example, does one respond to a book that opens by asking whether the reader will have "the strength" to accept its thesis? Or that announces the author's intention of "engaging" two of the most influential works of intellectual history of the past several decades-and then discusses one in two and one-half pages …

Moral Foundations Of Constitutional Thought: Current Problems, Augustinian Prospects, Arthur J. Burke

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Moral Foundations of Constitutional Thought: Current Problems, Augustinian Prospects by Graham Walker

The Law's Conscience: Equitable Constitutionalism In America, Neil A. Riemann

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Law's Conscience: Equitable Constitutionalism in America by Peter Charles Hoffer

Stories Of Origin And Constitutional Possibilities, Milner S. Ball

Michigan Law Review

Robert Cover once observed how "[n]o set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning. For every constitution there is an epic, for each decalogue a scripture." Stories of origin locate law, invest it with legitimacy, and so lend it stability. As Cover went on to note, however, the narratives that legitimate a legal order also retain revolutionary force, for a return to the originating acts recounted in the narratives is always possible. A polity begun in revolution remains subject to revolution.

There is an American story of origins. It is …

The Believer And The Powers That Are, Elizabeth Ferguson

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Believer and the Powers That Are by John T. Noonan, Jr.

The Enduring Constitution: A Bicentennial Perspective, Robert F. Drinan

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Enduring Constitution: A Bicentennial Perspective by Jethro K. Lieberman

Constitutional Opinions: Aspects Of The Bill Of Rights, Kenneth F. Sparks

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Constitutional Opinions: Aspects of the Bill of Rights by Leonard W. Levy

Reconstituting "Original Intent": A Constitutional Law Encyclopedia For The Next Century, David M. Skover

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Encyclopedia of the American Constitution by Leonard Levy, Kenneth Karst and Dennis Mahoney

No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment And The Bill Of Rights, Mark A. Grannis

Michigan Law Review

A Review of No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights by Michael Kent Curtis

Constructing A Constitution: 'Orginal Intention' In The Slave Cases, James Boyd White

Other Publications

The question how our Constitution is to be interpreted is a living one for us today, both in the scholarly and in the political domains. Professors argue about "interpretivism" and "originalism" in law journals, they study hermeneutics and deconstruction to determine whether or not interpretation is possible at all, and if so on what premises, and they struggle to create theories that will tell us both what we do in fact and what we ought to do. Politicians and public figures (including Attorney General Edwin Meese) talk in the newspapers and elsewhere about the authority of the "original intention of …

The Rise Of The Supreme Court Reporter: An Institutional Perspective On Marshall Court Ascendancy, Craig Joyce

Michigan Law Review

This Article will first explore the antecedents to, and beginnings of, the reporter system under Alexander J. Dallas and William Cranch. Next, the Article will examine the transformation of the system under the Court's first official Reporter, the scholarly Henry Wheaton. Finally, the Article will recount the struggle between Wheaton and his more practical successor, Richard Peters, Jr., that culminated in 1834 in the Court's declaration that its decisions are the property of the people of the United States, and not of the Court's Reporters.

Consequences Of Supreme Court Decisions Upholding Individual Constitutional Rights, Jesse H. Choper

Michigan Law Review

The thrust of this Article is to attempt to ascertain just what differences the Court's judgments upholding individual constitutional rights have made for those who fall within the ambit of their protection. It seeks to address such questions as: What were the conditions that existed before the Court's ruling? How many people were subject to the regime that was invalidated by the Justices? Was the Court's mandate successfully implemented? What were the consequences for those affected? At a subjective level, were the repercussions perceived as salutary by those (or at least most of those) who were the beneficiaries of the …

Habeas Corpus: Its History And Its Future, Charles Alan Wright

Michigan Law Review

A Review of A Constitutional History of Habeas Corpus by William F. Duker

Empty History, Erwin Chermerinsky

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Politics and the Constitution in the History of the United States, Volume 3: The Political Background of the Federal Convention by William Winslow Crosskey and William Jeffrey, Jr.

The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology And The Making Of The State Constitutions In The Revolutionary Era, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era by Willi Paul Adams

A Dissent From The Miranda Dissents: Some Comments On The 'New' Fifth Amendment And The Old 'Voluntariness' Test, Yale Kamisar

Book Chapters

If the several conferences and workshops (and many lunch conversations) on police interrogation and confessions in which I have participated this past summer are any indication, Miranda v. Arizona has evoked much anger and spread much sorrow among judges, lawyers and professors. In the months and years ahead, such reaction is likely to be translated into microscopic analyses and relentless, probing criticism of the majority opinion. During this period of agonizing appraisal and reappraisal, I think it important that various assumptions and assertions in the dissenting opinions do not escape attention.

Constitutional Interpretation, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

"[We] must never forget," Chief Justice Marshall admonished us in a statement pregnant with more than one meaning, "that it is a constitution we are expounding."' Marshall meant that the Constitution should be read as a document "intended to endure for ages.to come, and, consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs."'2 But he meant also that the construction placed upon the document must have regard for its "great outlines" and "important objects."'3 Limits are implied by the very nature of the task. There is not the same freedom in construing the Constitution as in constructing a …

The Role Of Ideas In Legal History, Jay M. Feinman

Michigan Law Review

A review of Patterns of American Legal Thought by G. Edward White