Supreme Court of the United States Commons^™

The Common Law And First Amendment Qualified Right Of Public Access To Foreign Intelligence Law, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For millennia, public access to the law has been the hallmark of rule of law. To be legally and morally binding, rules must be promulgated. Citizens’ knowledge of the law, in turn, serves as the lynchpin for democratic governance. In common law countries, it is more than just the statutory provisions and their execution that matters: how courts rule, and the reasoning behind their determination, proves central. Accordingly, in the United States, both common law and the right to petition incorporated in the First Amendment have long enshrined a presumed right of public right of access to Article III opinions …

Originalism After Dobbs, Bruen, And Kennedy: The Role Of History And Tradition, Randy E. Barnett, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In three recent cases, the constitutional concepts of history and tradition have played important roles in the reasoning of the Supreme Court. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization relied on history and tradition to overrule Roe v. Wade. New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen articulated a history and tradition test for the validity of laws regulating the right to bear arms recognized by the Second Amendment. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District looked to history and tradition in formulating the test for the consistency of state action with the Establishment Clause.

These cases raise important questions about …

Beyond The Watchdog: Using Law To Build Trust In The Press, Erin C. Carroll

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Declining trust in the American press has been longstanding and corrosive—both to our information environment and to democracy. It is tempting to think that if journalists could just repeatedly and brilliantly play their key role—that of watchdog—it might be redemptive. But doubling down on the watchdog function holds risks in our polarized climate. Research shows that some conservatives recoil from watchdog journalism, finding it too cynical and politicized.

This essay argues that a different journalistic function—one that has received far less attention and adulation from judges and legal scholars—should be encouraged and amplified. This is the press’s role as a …

Jazz Improvisation And The Law: Constrained Choice, Sequence, And Strategic Movement Within Rules, William W. Buzbee

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article argues that a richer understanding of the nature of law is possible through comparative, analogical examination of legal work and the art of jazz improvisation. This exploration illuminates a middle ground between rule of law aspirations emphasizing stability and determinate meanings and contrasting claims that the untenable alternative is pervasive discretionary or politicized law. In both the law and jazz improvisation settings, the work involves constraining rules, others’ unpredictable actions, and strategic choosing with attention to where a collective creation is going. One expects change and creativity in improvisation, but the many analogous characteristics of law illuminate why …

The Shape Of Citizenship: Extraordinary Common Meaning And Constitutional Legitimacy, David N. Mcneill, Emily Tucker

CPT Papers & Reports

The United States, it is widely believed, is at a moment of constitutional crisis. At no time since the Civil War era has it seemed more likely that what James Madison called the “experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people”—the experiment in democratic constitutional self-governance—will fail. This article argues that one reason for this state of affairs is that the ‘people’ sense that they are no longer active participants in the experiment. While the historical etiology of this crisis is complex, and the forces involved not confined to the US, this article focuses on the crisis in the …

Confrontation, The Legacy Of Crawford, And Important Unanswered Questions, Paul F. Rothstein, Ronald J. Coleman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is a short piece for the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform as part of its 2024 Symposium on “Crawford at 20: Reforming the Confrontation Clause.” The piece's purpose is to highlight certain important questions left unanswered by Crawford v. Washington and subsequent confrontation cases.

The Common Law As Statutory Backdrop, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Amidst the whirl of commentary about how the U.S. Supreme Court has become increasingly textualist and what precise shape modern textualism should take, the Court’s continued reliance on one decidedly atextual interpretive tool has gone largely unnoticed — the common law. Indeed, the common law has played an underappreciated, often dispositive, gap-filling role in statutory interpretation for decades, even as the textualist revolution has sidelined other non-text-focused interpretive tools. But despite the persistent role that the common law has played in statutory interpretation cases, the use of common law rules and definitions as an interpretive resource is surprisingly understudied and …

Deep-State Constitutionalism, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this review, I explain how "Common Good Constitutionalism" taps into a deficiency of the conservative legal movement: namely, its exclusive focus on the law "as it is" at the expense of the underlying abstract normative principles that justify the positive law of our written Constitution. Due to this deficiency, the conservative legal movement gives short shrift to the Declaration of Independence and the Ninth Amendment and the natural rights to which both refer. This deficiency is in need of correction. But any such correction does not justify the jettisoning of originalism as Vermeule proposes. Nor does Vermeule defend his …

Random Justice, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As recent Senate confirmation practices suggest, the Supreme Court is best understood as the head of a political branch of government, whose Justices are chosen in a process that makes their ideological views dispositive. Throughout the nation’s history, the Supreme Court has exercised its governing political ideology in ways that sacrifice the interests of nonwhites in order to advance the interests of Whites. In the present moment of heightened cultural sensitivity to structural discrimination and implicit bias, it would make sense to use affirmative action to help remedy the racially disparate distribution of societal resources that has been produced by …

House Rules: Congress And The Attorney-Client Privilege, David Rapallo

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In 2020, the Supreme Court rendered a landmark decision in Trump v. Mazars establishing four factors for determining the validity of congressional subpoenas for a sitting president’s personal papers. In an unanticipated move, Chief Justice John Roberts added that recipients of congressional subpoenas have “long been understood” to retain not only constitutional privileges, but common law privileges developed by judges, including the attorney-client privilege. This was particularly surprising since Trump was not relying on the attorney-client privilege and the Court had never treated this common law privilege as overriding Congress’s Article I power to set its own procedures for conducting …

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 …

Bivens And The Ancien Régime, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In its most recent decision narrowly construing Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Supreme Court derided Bivens as the product of an “‘ancien regime,’ ... [in which] the Court assumed it to be a proper judicial function to ‘provide such remedies as are necessary to make effective’ a statute’s purpose.” This Essay considers the relevance for Bivens claims of the Court’s shift to a nouveau régime to address the implication of private rights of action under statutes. It first describes and assesses the Court’s reasons for shifting to the nouveau r …

Gerrymandering Justiciability, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As illustrated by its 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court has gerrymandered its justiciability doctrines in a way that protects the political power of white voters. Comparing the Court’s willingness to find racial gerrymanders justiciable with its refusal to find partisan gerrymanders justiciable reveals a lack of doctrinal constraint. That gives the Court the discretionary power to uphold or strike down particular gerrymanders by deeming them racial or partisan in nature. Such discretion is problematic because, when the Supreme Court has exercised discretion in a racial context, it has historically done so to protect the …

The Genius Of Hamilton And The Birth Of The Modern Theory Of The Judiciary, William M. Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In late May 1788, with the essays of the Federalist on the Congress (Article I) and the Executive (Article II) completed, Alexander Hamilton turned, finally, to Article III and the judiciary. The Federalist’s essays 78 to 83 – the essays on the judiciary - had limited effect on ratification. No newspaper outside New York reprinted them, and they appeared very late in the ratification process – after eight states had ratified. But, if these essays had little immediate impact – essentially limited to the ratification debates in New York and, perhaps, Virginia – they were a stunning intellectual achievement. Modern …

Rucho Is Right – But For The Wrong Reasons, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court ended its long struggle to formulate constitutional standards to regulate political gerrymandering by declaring that it was not up to the job. The Court held that it could come up with no manageable standards governing the controversy and that it therefore posed a nonjusticiable political question.

In this brief comment, I attempt defend this outcome. The task is not easy, and I hope that the reader will at least give me some points for degree of difficulty. There is no denying that partisan gerrymandering is a very serious evil and there …

Aedpa As Forum Allocation: The Textual And Structural Case For Overruling Williams V. Taylor, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Williams v. Taylor, the Supreme Court read a section of the Anti- Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) to change the long-prevailing de novo standard of review of federal habeas petitions by state prisoners. In holding that Congress had denied the lower federal courts the power to grant habeas relief to prisoners in custody pursuant to wrong but reasonable state court decisions, the Court departed from the provision’s text and relied instead on its perception of a generalized congressional purpose to cut back on habeas relief and on the non-redundancy canon of statutory construction. On both scores, …

Functional Equivalence And Residual Rights Post-Carpenter: Framing A Test Consistent With Precedent And Original Meaning, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Carpenter Court held that warrantless access to seven or more days of cell site location information (CSLI) constitutes a violation of the reasonable expectation of privacy that individuals have in the whole of their physical movements. But the grounds on which the Court drew a line characterize all sorts of digital records—including those at issue in Miller and Smith, belying the majority’s claim that the decision leaves third-party doctrine intact. Instead of avoiding Katz’s pitfalls, moreover, the Court emphasized voluntary assumption of risk, doubling down on the subjective nature of judicial determination. The decision will likely lead to …

Habeas As Forum Allocation: A New Synthesis, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The scope of habeas relief for state prisoners, especially during the decades before the Supreme Court’s 1953 decision in Brown v. Allen, is a famously disputed question – one of recognized significance for contemporary debates about the proper scope of habeas review. This Essay provides a new answer. It argues that, until the enactment of AEDPA in 1996, state prisoners were always entitled to de novo review of the legal and mixed law/fact questions decided against them by the state courts. Until 1916, such review was provided by the Supreme Court; after 1953, such review was provided by the lower …

Rethinking Legal Conservatism, Neal K. Katyal

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is the time for us to think through whether an entity as august as the Federalist Society should embrace a move toward a constitutional conservatism. It strikes me as dangerous in terms of the underlying issues, but more importantly, as a step away from the fundamental insight that the Federalist Society had, which was that judges should be restrained because they lack the democratic pedigree of the political branches. There should be an impulse of judicial restraint, and, unless something is clearly unconstitutional, courts should not be mucking around with legislation and declaring it unconstitutional, no matter how novel …

The Warren Court And The Concept Of A Right, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Warren Court is dead. None of its Justices remain on the benchindeed, only Justice White survives-and the recent history of the Supreme Court has been in large part a history of repudiating controversial Warren Court doctrines. Public opinion likewise repudiates Warren-style judicial activism, and constitutional scholarship-which as recently as the mid- 1980s consisted in considerable measure of theoretical defenses for Warren Court-inspired methods of interpreting the Bill of Rights-has grown increasingly skeptical of expansive interpretive strategies. It is quite possible that future constitutional historians will regard the Warren era as an aberration. The Warren Court, after all, was not …

Deconstructing The Legislative Veto, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

On June 23, 1983, the Supreme Court invalidated more federal statutes in a single day than it had in all of its prior history. In so doing, the Court also dramatically altered the allocation of governmental power between Congress and the President. At least that is how the press viewed the significance of INS v. Chadha, the decision invalidating the legislative veto device on which Congress had come to rely as an expedient method of controlling the exercise of executive discretion. Whether or not the hyperbole proves to have been warranted, the decision does possess a certain intrigue-it is not …

Spinning The Legislative Veto, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I am delighted to have been given the opportunity to comment on Judge Breyer's proposal for a fast-track substitute to the legislative veto. Although the Supreme Court invalidated the legislative veto device in INS v. Chadha, Judge Breyer's proposal demonstrates that innovative thinking may well permit those with enough determination to circumvent the apparent effect of the Court's decision. Even more important, the proposal illustrates why such circumvention is possible.

As a doctrinal matter, the legislative veto poses a real dilemma--one that is rooted in fundamental uncertainty about the proper relationship between the Supreme Court and the elected branches of …