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Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Defeat Fascism, Transform Democracy: Mapping Academic Resources, Reframing The Fundamentals, And Organizing For Collective Actions, Francisco Valdes Jan 2024

Defeat Fascism, Transform Democracy: Mapping Academic Resources, Reframing The Fundamentals, And Organizing For Collective Actions, Francisco Valdes

Seattle University Law Review

The information we gathered during 2021–2023 shows that critical faculty and other academic resources are present throughout most of U.S. legal academia. Counting only full-time faculty, our limited research identified 778 contacts in 200 schools equating to nearly four contacts on average per school. But no organized critical “core” had coalesced within legal academia or, more broadly, throughout higher education expressly dedicated to defending and advancing critical knowledge and its production up to now. And yet, as the 2021–2022 formation of the Critical (Legal) Collective (“CLC”) outlined below demonstrates, many academics sense or acknowledge the need for greater cohesion among …


Court-Packing In 2021: Pathways To Democratic Legitimacy, Richard Mailey Oct 2020

Court-Packing In 2021: Pathways To Democratic Legitimacy, Richard Mailey

Seattle University Law Review

This Article asks whether the openness to court-packing expressed by a number of Democratic presidential candidates (e.g., Pete Buttigieg) is democratically defensible. More specifically, it asks whether it is possible to break the apparent link between demagogic populism and court-packing, and it examines three possible ways of doing this via Bruce Ackerman’s dualist theory of constitutional moments—a theory which offers the possibility of legitimating problematic pathways to constitutional change on democratic but non-populist grounds. In the end, the Article suggests that an Ackermanian perspective offers just one, extremely limited pathway to democratically legitimate court-packing in 2021: namely, where a Democratic …


The Republic In Long-Term Perspective, Richard Primus Aug 2018

The Republic In Long-Term Perspective, Richard Primus

Michigan Law Review Online

Every system of government eventually passes away. That's a feature of the human condition. The United States has been an unusually stable polity by the standards of world civilizations, and for that stability Americans should be deeply grateful. But no nation is exempt from the basic forces of history. It is not reasonable to think that the constitutional republic we know will last forever. The question is when it will meet its end-in our lifetimes, or in our grandchildren's, or centuries later. Given the stable conditions that living Americans were socialized to expect, the dominant intuition is probably something like …


The Resilient Foundation Of Democracy: The Legal Deconstruction Of The Washington Posts's Condemnation Of Edward Snowden, Hanna Kim Apr 2018

The Resilient Foundation Of Democracy: The Legal Deconstruction Of The Washington Posts's Condemnation Of Edward Snowden, Hanna Kim

Indiana Law Journal

On September 17, 2016, The Washington Post (“the Post”) made history by being the first paper to ever call for the criminal prosecution of its own source —Edward Snowden. Yet, two years prior to this editorial, the Post accepted the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for its “revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency”—an honor which would not have been bestowed had Snowden not leaked the documents through this news outlet. The other three major media outlets that received and published Snowden’s documents and findings—The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Intercept—all have taken the …


The Democratic First Amendment, Ashutosh Bhagwat Oct 2016

The Democratic First Amendment, Ashutosh Bhagwat

Northwestern University Law Review

Over the past several decades, the Supreme Court and most First Amendment scholars have taken the position that the primary reason why the First Amendment protects freedom of speech is to advance democratic self-governance. In this Article, I will argue that this position, while surely correct insofar as it goes, is also radically incomplete. The fundamental problem is that the Court and, until recently, scholars have focused exclusively on the Religion Clauses and the Free Speech Clause. The rest of the First Amendment—the Press, Assembly, and Petition Clauses—might as well not exist. The topic of this Article is the five …


Death By A Thousand Signatures: The Rise Of Restrictive Ballot Access Laws And The Decline Of Electoral Competition In The United States, Oliver Hall Jan 2005

Death By A Thousand Signatures: The Rise Of Restrictive Ballot Access Laws And The Decline Of Electoral Competition In The United States, Oliver Hall

Seattle University Law Review

This Article explores one instance of the countermajoritarian problem in American democracy: how to protect the rights of minor parties and independent candidates participating in an electoral system dominated by two major parties. In particular, this Article focuses on the effect of modern ballot access laws on candidates' rights, arguing that courts ought to treat these laws as a presumptively impermissible form of "collusion in restraint of democracy." Although the article borrows the language of antitrust law, this argument is rooted in core constitutional principles and rights guaranteed under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Nevertheless, the analogy to antitrust law …


The Draw And Drawbacks Of Religious Enclaves In A Constitutional Democracy: Hasidic Public Schools In Kiryas Joel, Judith Lynn Failer Apr 1997

The Draw And Drawbacks Of Religious Enclaves In A Constitutional Democracy: Hasidic Public Schools In Kiryas Joel, Judith Lynn Failer

Indiana Law Journal

Symposium: Law and Civil Society


Dietze: America's Political Dilemma, Paul G. Kauper Dec 1968

Dietze: America's Political Dilemma, Paul G. Kauper

Michigan Law Review

A Review of America's Political Dilemma by Gottfried Dietze


Governmental Powers, State And National, Under Our Constitutional System, Orie Leon Phillips May 1938

Governmental Powers, State And National, Under Our Constitutional System, Orie Leon Phillips

Michigan Law Review

We are living in a day when democracy is receding and the totalitarian state is advancing on many fronts. Three great nations have accepted as their governmental system authoritarian collectivism. Under the totalitarian systems, the right of the individual to think freely, to engage in free enterprise, to enjoy personal liberty, and to work out his own destiny is taken away. Instead, there is a regimentation of human beings, where everyone's thought, everyone's time, everyone's labor, and at last everyone's life, are at the disposal of a supreme authority. Of course, such a system means the vesting of tremendous powers …