Legal History Commons^™

An Appeal To Books, Amir H. Ali

Michigan Law Review

This feels a fit, even urgent, moment to celebrate our books and the role they play vis-à-vis the law, the courts, and the truth.

As this issue goes to print, our nation’s highest court faces forceful criticism that some of its most significant decisions have been detached from objective fact. In recent Terms, the Supreme Court’s majority has doubled down on deciding major constitutional questions based on “history and tradition”—that is, the majority’s understanding of what the nation was like centuries ago. Just as quickly as these justices praised the objectivity of their fealty to history, they met widespread rebuke …

Translating The Constitution, Jack M. Balkin

Michigan Law Review

Review of Lawrence Lessig's Fidelity and Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution.

What Corporate Veil?, Joshua C. Macey

Michigan Law Review

Review of Adam Winkler's We the Corporations: How American Business Won Their Civil Rights.

Sex And Religion: Unholy Bedfellows, Mary-Rose Papandrea

Michigan Law Review

A review of Geoffrey R. Stone, Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century.

Why The Burger Court Mattered, David A. Strauss

Michigan Law Review

A review of Michael J. Graetz and Linda Greenhouse, The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right.

Williams V. Lee And The Debate Over Indian Equality, Bethany R. Berger

Michigan Law Review

Williams v. Lee (1959) created a bridge between century-old affirmations of the immunity of Indian territories from state jurisdiction and the tribal self-determination policy of the twentieth century. It has been called the first case in the modern era of federal Indian law. Although no one has written a history of the case, it is generally assumed to be the product of a timeless and unquestioning struggle of Indian peoples for sovereignty. This Article, based on interviews with the still-living participants in the case and on examination of the congressional records, Navajo council minutes, and Supreme Court transcripts, records, and …

Framing The Fourth, Tracey Maclin, Julia Mirabella

Michigan Law Review

Our knowledge of the Fourth Amendment's history was fundamentally transformed when William Cuddihy completed his Ph.D. dissertation in 1990. Cuddihy's study was the most comprehensive and detailed examination of the history of search and seizure law and essential reading for anyone interested in the amendment's history. At first, Cuddihy's work was little known: only a few people noticed when the highly regarded constitutional historian Leonard W. Levy stated that "Cuddihy is the best authority on the origins of the Fourth Amendment." Cuddihy finished his dissertation in 1990 and it remained unedited, unpublished, and largely unknown for several years-until Justice O'Connor …

But How Will The People Know? Public Opinion As A Meager Influence In Shaping Contemporary Supreme Court Decision Making, Tom Goldstein, Amy Howe

Michigan Law Review

Chief Justice John Roberts famously described the ideal Supreme Court Justice as analogous to a baseball umpire, who simply "applies" the rules, rather than making them. Roberts promised to "remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat." At her own recent confirmation hearings, Elena Kagan demurred, opining that Roberts's metaphor might erroneously suggest that "everything is clear-cut, and that there's no judgment in the process." Based on his 2009 book, The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution, Barry Friedman …

An "Unintended Consequence": Dred Scott Reinterpreted, Sam Erman

Michigan Law Review

Austin Allen's monograph marks the 150th anniversary of the decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford with a revisionist interpretation of that oft-examined case. Many scholars have portrayed the case as a proslavery decision that fanned sectional fires. After all, the Court held that blacks were not U.S. citizens and that Congress was impotent to bar slavery in U.S. territories. Allen, by contrast, understands the case primarily as a judicial attempt to rationalize federal commerce and slavery jurisprudences. Part I argues that this ambitious reinterpretation enriches, but does not topple, existing Dred Scott historiography. In the case of the Court's citizenship …

Judicial Compensation And The Definition Of Judicial Power In The Early Republic, James E. Pfander

Michigan Law Review

Article III's provision for the compensation of federal judges has been much celebrated for the no-diminution provision that forecloses judicial pay cuts. But other features of Article Ill's compensation provision have largely escaped notice. In particular, little attention has been paid to the framers' apparent expectation that Congress would compensate federal judges with salaries alone, payable from the treasury at stated times. Article III's presumption in favor of salary-based compensation may rule out fee-based compensation, which was a common form of judicial compensation in England and the colonies but had grown controversial by the time of the framing. Among other …

Looking Backward: Richard Epstein Ponders The "Progressive" Peril, Michael Allan Wolf

Michigan Law Review

In the 1888 novel Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy dreamed up a twentieth century America that was a socialist utopia, a vision invoked four years later by the conservative Justice David J. Brewer as a warning against government regulation. In How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution, Richard Epstein, looking back at the twentieth century through an interpretive lens much more similar to Brewer's than Bellamy's, sees and bemoans the growth of a dominant big government of which the novelist could only dream. Epstein pulls no punches in his attack on those he deems responsible for the shift in the American …

Sexual Orientation And The Paradox Of Heightened Scrutiny, Nan D. Hunter

Michigan Law Review

In Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court performed a double move, creating a dramatic discursive moment: it both decriminalized consensual homosexual relations between adults, and, simultaneously, authorized a new regime of heightened regulation of homosexuality. How that happened and what we can expect next are the subjects of this essay. The obvious point of departure for an analysis of Lawrence is its decriminalization of much sexual conduct. Justice Scalia began this project with his dire warning that "[s]tate laws against bigamy, samesex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are . . . sustainable only in …

The Unknown Past Of Lawrence V. Texas, Dale Carpenter

Michigan Law Review

On the night of September 17, 1998, someone called the police to report that a man was going crazy with a gun inside a Houston apartment. When Harris County sheriff's deputies entered the apartment they found no person with a gun but did witness John Lawrence and Tyron Gamer having anal sex. This violated the Texas Homosexual Conduct law, and the deputies hauled them off to jail for the night. Lawyers took the men's case to the Supreme Court and won a huge victory for gay rights. So goes the legend of Lawrence v. Texas. Do not believe it. …

Surviving Lawrence V. Texas, Marc Spindelman

Michigan Law Review

The lesbian and gay communities have reacted to the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas - striking down state sodomy laws on Due Process grounds - with unbridled enthusiasm. Lawrence has variously been praised as an unmitigated victory for lesbian and gay rights, a turning point in our community's history, and the moment when we have gone from second-class political outcasts to constitutional persons with first-class rights. Obviously, something remarkable happened in Lawrence. In an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court declared that John Geddes Lawrence and Tyrone Gamer, who had been convicted under Texas's sodomy …

Lawrence V. Texas And Judicial Hubris, Nelson Lund, John O. Mcginnis

Michigan Law Review

The republic will no doubt survive the Supreme Court's decision, in Lawrence v. Texas, to invalidate laws against private, consensual sodomy, including those limited to homosexual behavior. Such laws are almost never enforced, and the rare prosecutions for such acts are necessarily capricious. So the principal direct effect of the Court's decision is likely to be extremely limited, and largely salutary: a few individuals will be spared the bad luck of getting a criminal conviction for violating laws that are manifestly out of step with prevailing sexual mores. Nor are we likely to see anything like the intense political …

The Journey From Brown V. Board Of Education To Grutter V. Bollinger: From Racial Assimilation To Diversity, Harry T. Edwards

Michigan Law Review

Fifty years ago, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court confronted a precise and straightforward question: "Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other 'tangible' factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?" The Court's answer was precise and straightforward: "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs ... are, by reason of the segregation complained of, …

First Amendment Equal Protection: On Discretion, Inequality, And Participation, Daniel P. Tokaji

Michigan Law Review

The tension between equality and discretion lies at the heart of some of the most vexing questions of constitutional law. The considerable discretion that many official decisionmakers wield raises the spectre that violations of equality norms will sometimes escape detection. This is true in a variety of settings, whether discretion lies over speakers' access to public fora, implementation of the death penalty, or the recounting of votes. Is the First Amendment violated, for example, when a city ordinance gives local officials broad discretion to determine the conditions under which political demonstrations may take place? Is equal protection denied where the …

The Serpentine Wall Of Separation, John Witte Jr.

Michigan Law Review

The task of separating the secular from the religious in education is one of magnitude, intricacy, and delicacy, Justice Jackson wrote, concurring in McCollum v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court's first religion in public schools case. "To lay down a sweeping constitutional doctrine" of absolute separation of church and state "is to decree a uniform . . . unchanging standard for countless school boards representing and serving highly localized groups which not only differ from each other but which themselves from time to time change attitudes." If we persist in this experiment, Justice Jackson warned his brethren, "we are …

Lochner'S Feminist Legacy, David E. Bernstein

Michigan Law Review

Professor Julie Novkov's Constituting Workers, Protecting Women examines the so-called Lochner era of American constitutional jurisprudence through the lens of the struggle over the constitutionality of "protective" labor legislation, such as maximum hours and minimum wage laws. Many of these laws applied only to women, and Novkov argues that the debate over the constitutionality of protective laws for women - laws that some women's rights advocates saw as discriminatory legislation against women - ultimately had more important implications for the constitutionality of protective labor legislation more generally. Liberally defined, the Lochner era lasted from the Slaughter-House Cases in 1873 - …

Foreign Affairs: Presidential Initiative And Congressional Control, David P. Currie

Michigan Law Review

Jefferson Powell is one of our foremost scholars of constitutional history. He is particularly adept at bringing extrajudicial sources to bear on constitutional issues. Owing perhaps in part to his extensive service in the Department of Justice, he has a special facility for the use of executive materials; he is surely our leading academic expert on executive interpretation of the Constitution. In his latest book Professor Powell applies his enviable skills to the recurring, fundamental, and controversial question of the division of authority between the President and Congress in the realm of foreign affairs. As is always the case when …

Formalism, Pragmatism, And The Conservative Critique Of The Eleventh Amendment, Michael E. Solimine

Michigan Law Review

For many years the Second Amendment to the constitution was construed by most authorities to grant a communal right to bear arms, through state militias and the like. Some years ago Sanford Levinson labeled this interpretation "embarrassing" to liberal scholars. That characterization was deserved, Levinson argued, since liberal academics had been eager to defend expansive interpretations of other rights-granting provisions of the Constitution. But they failed to do so when it came to language in the Second Amendment, which could be plausibly construed to grant an individual right to bear arms. The failure might be attributed, in part, to the …

Cleansing Moments And Retrospective Justice, Margaret M. Russell

Michigan Law Review

We live in an era of questioning and requestioning long-held assumptions about the role of race in law, both in criminal prosecutions specifically and in the legal process generally. Certainly, the foundational framework is not new; for decades, both legal literature and jurisprudence have explored in great detail the realities of racism in the legal system. Even among those who might prefer to ignore the role of race discrimination in more than two centuries of American law, denial is no longer a viable or intellectually defensible option. Rather, debate now centers upon whether or not the extensive history of American …

The Principle And Practice Of Women's "Full Citizenship": A Case Study Of Sex-Segregated Public Education, Jill Elaine Hasday

Michigan Law Review

For more than a quarter century, the Supreme Court has repeatedly declared that sex-based state action is subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause. But the Court has always been much less clear about what that standard allows and what it prohibits. For this reason, it is especially noteworthy that one of the Court's most recent sex discrimination opinions, United States v. Virginia, purports to provide more coherent guidance. Virginia suggests that the constitutionality of sex-based state action turns on whether the practice at issue denies women "full citizenship stature" or "create[s) or perpetuate[s) the legal, social, …

Some Effects Of Identity-Based Social Movements On Constitutional Law In The Twentieth Century, William N. Eskridge Jr.

Michigan Law Review

What motivated big changes in constitutional law doctrine during the twentieth century? Rarely did important constitutional doctrine or theory change because of formal amendments to the document's text, and rarer still because scholars or judges "discovered" new information about the Constitution's original meaning. Precedent and common law reasoning were the mechanisms by which changes occurred rather than their driving force. My thesis is that most twentieth century changes in the constitutional protection of individual rights were driven by or in response to the great identity-based social movements ("IBSMs") of the twentieth century. Race, sex, and sexual orientation were markers of …

The Electrical Deregulation Fiasco: Looking To Regulatory Federalism To Promote A Balance Between Markets And The Provision Of Public Goods, Jim Rossi

Michigan Law Review

Over the last thirty years, regulators have deregulated just about every regulated industry. In no industry has deregulation raised as much fear and concern as in electric power markets. Even before the Enron debacle, a crisis that is more about the failures of corporate than regulatory law, it was clear that something had gone seriously wrong in the turn towards deregulation of electric power. Recent events in California are illustrative. In early 2000, consumers in California, the first state to deregulate retail power markets on a mass scale, saw repeated months of power interruptions. Many utility customers experienced a risk …

The Contested Right To Vote, Richard Briffault

Michigan Law Review

For those who believe the United States is a representative democracy with a government elected by the people, the events of late 2000 must have been more than a little disconcerting. In the election for our most important public office - our only truly national office - the candidate who received the most popular votes was declared the loser while his second place opponent, who had received some 540,000 fewer votes, was the winner. This result turned on the outcome in Florida, where approximately 150,000 ballots cast were found not to contain valid votes. Further, due to flaws in ballot …

Contract Rights And Civil Rights, Davison M. Douglas

Michigan Law Review

Have African Americans fared better under a scheme of freedom of contract or of government regulation of private employment relationships? Have court decisions striking down regulation of employment contracts on liberty of contract grounds aided black interests? Many contemporary observers, although with some notable dissenters, would respond that government regulation of freedom of contract, particularly the antidiscrimination provisions of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, has benefited African Americans because it has restrained discriminatory conduct by private employers. Professor David E. Bernstein challenges the view that abrogation of freedom of contract has consistently benefited African Americans by …

Marriage And Belonging, Ann Laquer Estin

Michigan Law Review

Marriage is a quintessentially private institution. Justice Douglas put the point this way in 1965, writing for the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut: "We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights - older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association …

A Political History Of The Establishment Clause, John C. Jeffries Jr., James E. Ryan

Michigan Law Review

Now pending before the Supreme Court is the most important church-state issue of our time: whether publicly funded vouchers may be used at private, religious schools without violating the Establishment Clause. The last time the Court considered school aid, it overruled precedent and upheld a government program providing computers and other instructional materials to parochial schools. In a plurality opinion defending that result, Justice Thomas dismissed as irrelevant the fact that some aid recipients were "pervasively sectarian." That label, said Thomas, had a "shameful pedigree." He traced it to the Blaine Amendment, proposed in 1875, which would have altered the …

When Constitutional Worlds Colide: Resurrecting The Framers' Bill Of Rights And Criminal Procedure, George C. Thomas Iii

Michigan Law Review

For two hundred years, the Supreme Court has been interpreting the Bill of Rights. Imagine Chief Justice John Marshall sitting in the dim, narrow Supreme Court chambers, pondering the interpretation of the Sixth Amendment right to compulsory process in United States v. Burr. Aaron Burr was charged with treason for planning to invade the Louisiana Territory and create a separate government there. To help prepare his defense, Burr wanted to see a letter written by General James Wilkinson to President Jefferson. In ruling on Burr's motion to compel disclosure, Marshall departed from the literal language of the Sixth Amendment - …