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Full-Text Articles in Supreme Court of the United States
Overruling Roe V. Wade: Lessons From The Death Penalty, Paul Benjamin Linton
Overruling Roe V. Wade: Lessons From The Death Penalty, Paul Benjamin Linton
Pepperdine Law Review
In Furman v. Georgia (1972), the Supreme Court struck down the Georgia and Texas death penalty statutes, thereby calling into question the validity of every other state death penalty statute. In their concurring opinions, Justices Brennan and Marshall expressed the view that, given society’s gradual abandonment of the death penalty, capital punishment violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.” Justice Powell and three other justices dissented, arguing that the Court had misread the state of the law regarding society’s acceptance of the death penalty. Four years after Furman, in a quintet of cases, the Court held that …
Free Speech, Strict Scrutiny And A Better Way To Handle Speech Restrictions, Aaron Pinsoneault
Free Speech, Strict Scrutiny And A Better Way To Handle Speech Restrictions, Aaron Pinsoneault
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
When it comes to unprotected speech categories, the Roberts Court has taken an amoral and inaccurate approach. When the Court first created unprotected speech categories-- defined categories of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment-- it was unclear what rendered a category of speech unprotected. One school of thought argued that speech was unprotected if it provided little or no value to society. The other school of thought argued that speech was unprotected if it fell into a certain category of speech that was simply categorically unprotected. Then, in 2010, the Court strongly sided with the latter approach, …
From Civil Rights To Blackmail: How The Civil Rights Attorney's Fees Awards Act Of 1976 (42 U.S.C. § 1988) Has Perverted One Of America's Most Historic Civil Rights Statutes, Steven W. Fitschen
From Civil Rights To Blackmail: How The Civil Rights Attorney's Fees Awards Act Of 1976 (42 U.S.C. § 1988) Has Perverted One Of America's Most Historic Civil Rights Statutes, Steven W. Fitschen
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
For fourteen years, members of Congress repeatedly introduced legislation directed at a single subject. A key underpinning for the necessity of the legislation was provided by the opinions of two Supreme Court justices. Yet, for the past nine years, Congress has gone silent on the same topic. This Article argues that it is past time for Congress to reconsider this topic, and that if it will not do so, the Supreme Court can rectify the situation without engaging in judicial legislation.
Perhaps the best view of Congress's efforts can be seen by examining the high-water mark of those efforts, which …
Against Congressional Case Snatching, Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Atticus Deprospro
Against Congressional Case Snatching, Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Atticus Deprospro
William & Mary Law Review
Congress has developed a deeply problematic habit of aggrandizing itself by snatching cases from the Article III courts. One form of contemporary case snatching involves directly legislating the outcome of pending litigation by statute. These laws do not involve generic amendments to existing statutes but rather dictate specific rulings by the Article III courts in particular cases. Another form of congressional case snatching involves rendering ongoing judicial proceedings essentially advisory by unilaterally permitting a disgruntled litigant to transfer a pending case from an Article III court to an executive agency for resolution. Both practices involve Congress reallocating the business of …
Charles Reich, New Dealer, John Q. Barrett
Testa, Crain, And The Constitutional Right To Collateral Relief, Carlos Manuel Vázquez, Stephen I. Vladeck
Testa, Crain, And The Constitutional Right To Collateral Relief, Carlos Manuel Vázquez, Stephen I. Vladeck
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In Montgomery v. Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court held that state prisoners have a constitutional right to relief from continued imprisonment if the prisoner’s conviction or sentence contravenes a new substantive rule of constitutional law. Specifically, the Court held that prisoners with such claims are constitutionally entitled to collateral relief in state court—at least if the state courts are open to other claims for collateral relief on the ground that their continued imprisonment is unlawful. In our article, The Constitutional Right to Collateral Post-Conviction Relief, we argued that, under two lines of Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Supremacy …
Tainted Precedent, Darrell A. H. Miller
Second Amendment Animus, Jacob D. Charles
Second Amendment Animus, Jacob D. Charles
Faculty Scholarship
The Supreme Court’s animus doctrine has proven surprisingly adaptive. The Court has employed the doctrine not just in the typical equal protection context from which it arose, but also to claims that religious conduct or beliefs are the target of legislative hostility. Animus law and scholarship are flourishing after several invocations of the doctrine in the high Court’s recent Terms. Coinciding with these developments, gun-rights advocates and other supporters have increasingly railed against the hostility with which they believe government officials are treating the Second Amendment. This Essay connects these developments, mapping three types of gun-supporter claims that sound in …
Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review
Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review
Seattle University Law Review
Table of Contents and Special Thanks.
Free Speech And Democracy: A Primer For Twenty-First Century Reformers, Toni M. Massaro, Helen Norton
Free Speech And Democracy: A Primer For Twenty-First Century Reformers, Toni M. Massaro, Helen Norton
Publications
Left unfettered, the twenty-first-century speech environment threatens to undermine critical pieces of the democratic project. Speech operates today in ways unimaginable not only to the First Amendment’s eighteenth-century writers but also to its twentieth-century champions. Key among these changes is that speech is cheaper and more abundant than ever before, and can be exploited — by both government and powerful private actors alike — as a tool for controlling others’ speech and frustrating meaningful public discourse and democratic outcomes.
The Court’s longstanding First Amendment doctrine rests on a model of how speech works that is no longer accurate. This invites …
Bostock Was Bogus: Textualism, Pluralism, And Title Vii, Mitchell N. Berman, Guha Krishnamurthi
Bostock Was Bogus: Textualism, Pluralism, And Title Vii, Mitchell N. Berman, Guha Krishnamurthi
All Faculty Scholarship
In Bostock v. Clayton County, one of the blockbuster cases from its 2019 Term, the Supreme Court held that federal antidiscrimination law prohibits employment discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity. Unsurprisingly, the result won wide acclaim in the mainstream legal and popular media. Results aside, however, the reaction to Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion, which purported to ground the outcome in a textualist approach to statutory interpretation, was more mixed. The great majority of commentators, both liberal and conservative, praised Gorsuch for what they deemed a careful and sophisticated—even “magnificent” and “exemplary”—application of textualist principles, while …
Does Due Process Have An Age Limit? Why The Law Concerning The Parental Right To Freedom Of Intimate Association In The Relationship With An Adult Child Is A Mischaracterization Of A Circuit Split, Bryan Schenkman
Touro Law Review
No abstract provided.
Comparative Judicialism, Popular Sovereignty, And The Rule Of Law: The Us And Uk Supreme Courts, Lissa Griffin, Thomas Kidney
Comparative Judicialism, Popular Sovereignty, And The Rule Of Law: The Us And Uk Supreme Courts, Lissa Griffin, Thomas Kidney
Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications
What does the future hold for the US and UK Supreme Courts? Both courts face an uncertain future in which their roles in their constitutional systems will come under intense scrutiny and pressure. The tension between the rule of law, often seen as the preserve of the judicial branches of government, and the sovereignty of the elected branches is palpable. In a time of the “strong man,” allegedly “populist leaders” who seemingly are pushing the limits of the rule of law, the breakdown of collaboration and debate, and the ever-present influence of social media, this tension will only become more …
Protecting The Supreme Court: Why Safeguarding The Judiciary’S Independence Is Crucial To Maintaining Its Legitimacy, Isabella Abelite, Evelyn Michalos, John Rogue
Protecting The Supreme Court: Why Safeguarding The Judiciary’S Independence Is Crucial To Maintaining Its Legitimacy, Isabella Abelite, Evelyn Michalos, John Rogue
Faculty Scholarship
The stability of the Supreme Court’s size and procedures is a critical source of legitimacy, but reforms might protect the Court’s independence from politics. Perceptions among members of the public that justices are political actors harms the rule of law. This report discusses reforms to ensure that each president receives the same number of appointments to the Supreme Court. The report also considers how to guarantee each nominee a Senate hearing and reforms to the retirement stage of justices’ tenures.
Supreme Court Precedent And The Politics Of Repudiation, Robert L. Tsai
Supreme Court Precedent And The Politics Of Repudiation, Robert L. Tsai
Faculty Scholarship
This is an invited essay that will appear in a book titled "Law's Infamy," edited by Austin Sarat as part of the Amherst Series on Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought. Every legal order that aspires to be called just is held together by not only principles of justice but also archetypes of morally reprehensible outcomes, and villains as well as heroes. Chief Justice Roger Taney, who believed himself to be a hero solving the great moral question of slavery in the Dred Scott case, is today detested for trying to impose a racist, slaveholding vision of the Constitution upon America. …
John Marshall Harlan And Constitutional Adjudication: An Anniversary Rehearing, H. Jefferson Powell
John Marshall Harlan And Constitutional Adjudication: An Anniversary Rehearing, H. Jefferson Powell
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.