Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Semantic Originalism, Moral Kinds, And The Meaning Of The Constitution, Ash Mcmurray

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Brackeen V. Zinke, Bradley E. Tinker

Public Land & Resources Law Review

In 1978, Congress enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act to counter practices of removing Indian children from their homes, and to ensure the continued existence of Indian tribes through their children. The law created a framework establishing how Indian children are adopted as a way to protect those children and their relationship with their tribe. ICWA also established federal standards for Indian children being placed into non-Indian adoptive homes. Brackeen v. Zinke made an important distinction for the placement preferences of the Indian children adopted by non-Indian plaintiffs; rather than viewing the placement preferences in ICWA as based upon Indians’ …

Rwu First Amendment Blog: David Logan's Blog: Recognizing The Free Press In The Crosshairs Across The Globe 12-12-2018, David A. Logan

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Preserving Life By Ranking Rights, John William Draper

Librarian Scholarship at Penn Law

Border walls, abortion, and the death penalty are the current battlegrounds of the right to life. We will visit each topic and more in this paper, as we consider ranking groups of constitutional rights.

The enumerated rights of the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments—life, liberty, and property—merit special treatment. They have a deeper and richer history that involves ranking. Ranking life in lexical priority over liberty and property rights protects life first and maximizes safe liberty and property rights in the absence of a significant risk to life. This is not new law; aspects of it …

Autonomy Isn't Everything: Some Cautionary Notes On Mccoy V. Louisiana, W. Bradley Wendel

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

The Supreme Court’s May 2018 decision in McCoy v. Louisiana has been hailed as a decisive statement of the priority of the value of a criminal defendant’s autonomy over the fairness and reliability interests that also inform both the Sixth Amendment and the ethical obligations of defense counsel. It also appears to be a victory for the vision of client-centered representation and the humanistic value of the inherent dignity of the accused. However, the decision is susceptible to being read too broadly in ways that harm certain categories of defendants. This paper offers a couple of cautionary notes, in response …

The Theory And Practice Of Contestatory Federalism, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

Madisonian theory holds that a federal division of power is necessary to the protection of liberty, but that federalism is a naturally unstable form of government organization that is in constant danger of collapsing into either unitarism or fragmentation. Despite its inherent instability, this condition may be permanently maintained, according to Madison, through a constitutional design that keeps the system in equipoise by institutionalizing a form of perpetual contestation between national and subnational governments. The theory, however, does not specify how that contestation actually occurs, and by what means.

This paper investigates Madison’s hypothesis by documenting the methods actually deployed …

The Theory And Practice Of Contestatory Federalism, James A. Gardner

William & Mary Law Review

Madisonian theory holds that a federal division of power is necessary to the protection of liberty, but that federalism is a naturally unstable form of government organization that is in constant danger of collapsing into either unitarism or fragmentation. Despite its inherent instability, this condition may be permanently maintained, according to Madison, through a constitutional design that keeps the system in equipoise by institutionalizing a form of perpetual contestation between national and subnational governments. The theory, however, does not specify how that contestation actually occurs, and by what means.

This paper investigates Madison’s hypothesis by documenting the methods actually deployed …

We Are All Farkhunda: An Examination Of The Treatment Of Women Within Afghanistan's Formal Legal System, Ashley Lenderman

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

In this paper, I will examine three cases of violence against women that went through the Afghan formal legal system: the case of Farkhunda, the Paghman district gang rape case, and the case of Sahar Gul. In the first Part, I will discuss the formal legal system framework on which the cases are based. In the second Part, I will discuss the cases in detail. In the third Part, I will describe neo-liberal, reformist, and neo-fundamentalist approaches to interpretation of Islamic law, and I will then draw out pieces of the decisions from the three cases that closely match these …

Legislative Committee Systems: A Design Perspective, Chase Stoddard

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

Committees are the defining characteristic of the modern legislature. While the centrality and study of party politics goes back further than committee politics, the focus on committee systems emerged over the course of the twentieth century, and legislatures could not function as we understand them without this mechanism. The United States Congressional committee system is the most studied system, yet virtually every country utilizes a committee system of some sort within its legislature. Despite their ubiquity in and centrality to the operations of legislatures, committees remain insufficiently studied, especially outside of the United States. The existing body of work tends …

Taxonomy Of Minority Governments, Lisa La Fornara

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

A minority government in its most basic form is a government in which the party holding the most parliamentary seats still has fewer than half the seats in parliament and therefore cannot pass legislation or advance policy without support from unaffiliated parties. Because seats in minority parliaments are more evenly distributed amongst multiple parties, opposition parties have greater opportunity to block legislation. A minority government must therefore negotiate with external parties and adjust its policies to garner the majority of votes required to advance its initiatives.

This paper serves as a taxonomy of minority governments in recent history and proceeds …

Replacing The Flawed Chevron Standard, Brian G. Slocum

William & Mary Law Review

Judicial review of agency statutory interpretations depends heavily on the linguistic concept of ambiguity. Most significantly, under Chevron, judicial deference to an agency’s interpretation hinges on whether the court determines the statute to be ambiguous. Despite its importance, the ambiguity concept has been poorly developed by courts and deviates in important respects from how linguists approach ambiguity. For instance, courts conflate ambiguity identification and disambiguation and treat ambiguity as an umbrella concept that encompasses distinct forms of linguistic indeterminacy such as vagueness and generality. The resulting ambiguity standard is unpredictable and does not adequately perform its function of mediating between …

An Examination Of The Need For Campaign Fianance Reform Through The Lens Of The United States Treaty Clause And Environmental Protection Treaties, Jordan Smith

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

The United States’ federal election system is constantly the focus of debate, including components from voting mechanisms, to candidate selection, and to the candidates themselves. Unsurprisingly, campaign finance has also been the source of much debate. For decades, scholars, politicians, lawyers, and laypersons have debated the merits and shortcomings of the campaign finance system enumerated in the United States Code. The landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (“FEC”) decision in 2010, in which the United States Supreme Court equated corporate speech to human speech, merely added fuel to the fire. The considerable volume of scholarship based upon campaign finance …

Rights And Retrenchment In The Trump Era, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

All Faculty Scholarship

Our aim in this essay is to leverage archival research, data and theoretical perspectives presented in our book, Rights and Retrenchment: The Counterrevolution against Federal Litigation, as a means to illuminate the prospects for retrenchment in the current political landscape. We follow the scheme of the book by separately considering the prospects for federal litigation retrenchment in three lawmaking sites: Congress, federal court rulemaking under the Rules Enabling Act, and the Supreme Court. Although pertinent data on current retrenchment initiatives are limited, our historical data and comparative institutional perspectives should afford a basis for informed prediction. Of course, little in …

Originalist Theory And Precedent: A Public Meaning Approach, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Much ink has already been spilled on the relationship of constitutional originalism to precedent (or, more specifically, the doctrine of stare decisis). The debate includes contributions from Randy Barnett, Steven Calabresi, Kurt Lash, Gary Lawson, John McGinnis with Michael Rappaport, Michael Paulsen, and Lee Strang, not to mention Justice Antonin Scalia—all representing originalism in some form. Living constitutionalism has also been represented both implicitly and explicitly, with important contributions from Phillip Bobbitt, Ronald Dworkin, Michael Gerhardt, Randy Kozel, and David Strauss. Some writers are more difficult to classify; Akhil Amar comes to mind. And there are many other contributions to …

The Seventeenth Amendment: The United States Senate And The Transformation From Legislative Selection To Direct Popular Election, John Joseph Janora

History Theses

The passage of the Seventeenth Amendment helped to democratize the United States Senate and tied the legislative branch closer to the people, but it undermined the links between the state and the federal systems. Any thoughtful discussion on the Progressive Era will generally lead towards the idea of increased involvement of both the government, at all levels, in the lives of the general population, and the increased involvement of the general population in the functioning of the government at large. One seemingly obvious decision made in the early part of the 20^th century was the implementation of the Seventeenth …

Righting A Wrong: Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, And The Espionage Act Prosecutions, David Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This is a story of excess and reparation. It is a chronicle of one President from the elite intellectual classes of the East, and another from a county seat in the heartland. Woodrow Wilson was the college president whose contribution to the art of government lay in the principle of expertise and efficiency. When he went to war, he turned the machinery of government into a comprehensive and highly effective instrument for victory. For Wilson, it followed that there could be little tolerance for those who impeded the success of American arms by their anti-war propaganda, draft resistance, or ideological …

Deference To Deference: Examining The Relationship Between The Courts And The Political Branches Through Judicial Deference And The Chevron Doctrine, Christopher Yao

Honors Theses

Judicial review of agency rulemaking sits atop a nexus between all three branches of American government, the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Chevron v. NRDC (1984), a landmark case in administrative law, and its resulting doctrine of strong judicial deference to agencies in their interpretations of statute, are paradoxical in their creation. Although Chevron was decided at the height of Reagan-era deregulation, it greatly enhanced the power of administrative agencies, allowing them to reinterpret the meaning of their statutory directives as needed to justify changes to regulations with less scrutiny from the courts. It is only in recent years …

Election Administration Within The Sphere Of Politics: How Bureaucracy Can Facilitate Democracy With Policy Decisions, Nicholas S. Martinez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Public bureaucracy finds itself in a strange place at the intersection of political science and public administration. Political science finds that, within representative democracy, discretion granted to bureaucrats threatens the nature of democracy by subverting politicians who represent the will of the people – bureaucracy vs democracy. At the same time, public administration holds that, in the interest of promoting democracy, bureaucracy should be objective in its implementation of policy in a way that eliminates the influence of politics from decision-making – politics vs bureaucracy. Those positions are seemingly contradictory in nature. From one perspective, bureaucracy is undemocratic because it …

Mass Incarceration: Slavery Renamed, Samantha Pereira

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

This paper aims to analyze the connections between slavery and mass incarceration. It begins by giving background information regarding the topic and setting the framework to argue that slavery was never abolished, but was instead continued using mass incarceration. The paper then goes on to further explain this concept by examining the constitutional and judicial laws in the United States, slave plantations and prisons, with regard to geographical, architectural, and operational design, and finally, the role of society in both systems. The framework for continuing slavery was set with the passing of the 13th Amendment and has since been expanded …

Radical Social Ecology As Deep Pragmatism: A Call To The Abolition Of Systemic Dissonance And The Minimization Of Entropic Chaos, Arielle Brender

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper aims to shed light on the dissonance caused by the superimposition of Dominant Human Systems on Natural Systems. I highlight the synthetic nature of Dominant Human Systems as egoic and linguistic phenomenon manufactured by a mere portion of the human population, which renders them inherently oppressive unto peoples and landscapes whose wisdom were barred from the design process. In pursuing a radical pragmatic approach to mending the simultaneous oppression and destruction of the human being and the earth, I highlight the necessity of minimizing entropic chaos caused by excess energy expenditure, an essential feature of systems that aim …

An Illiberal Union, Sonu Bedi

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

This Article breaks new ground by applying the philosophical framework of liberal neutrality (most famously articulated by John Rawls) to the United States Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on marriage. At first blush, the Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges—the culmination of marriage rights—seems to affirm a central principle of liberalism, namely equal access to marriage regardless of sexual orientation. Gays and lesbians can finally take part in an institution that celebrates the union of two committed individuals. But perversely, in its attempt to expand access to marriage, the Court has simultaneously entrenched values that are antithetical to the basic tenants …

Law Association Of Zambia V. The Attorney General (Appeal No. 8/2014) [2016] Zmsc 243, Muna B. Ndulo, Samuel Ndungu

SAIPAR Case Review

No abstract provided.

Attorney General V Mutuna And Others (Appeal No. 088/2012) [2013] Zmsc 38, Muna B. Ndulo

SAIPAR Case Review

No abstract provided.

Milford Maambo And Others V The People 2016/Cc/R001 [2017], O'Brien Kaaba

SAIPAR Case Review

No abstract provided.

A Martin Luther King Jr. Amendment To The U.S. Constitution: Toward The Abolition Of Poverty, Theodore Walker

Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. prescribed that we add an economic bill of rights to the U.S. Constitution. A King-Inspired bill of rights should include a constitutional amendment that enumerates a natural human right to be free from economic poverty, and appropriate enforcement legislation.

For the sake of abolishing slavery, the Thirteenth Amendment says:

(Section 1) Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

(Section 2) Congress shall have power to enforce this article by …

Raila Amolo Odinga And Another V Independent Electoral And Boundaries Commission And Others Presidential Petition No. 1 Of 2017, O'Brien Kaaba

SAIPAR Case Review

No abstract provided.

United Democratic Movement V Speaker Of The National Assembly And Others (Cct89/17) [2017] Zacc 21, Tinenenji Banda

SAIPAR Case Review

No abstract provided.

How To Think Constitutionally About Prerogative: A Study Of Early American Usage, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

This Article challenges the view of “prerogative” as a discretionary authority to act outside the law. For seventy years, political scientists, lawyers and judges have drawn on John Locke’s account of prerogative in the Second Treatise, using it to read foundational texts in American constitutional law. American writings on prerogative produced between 1760 and 1788 are rarely discussed (excepting The Federalist), though these materials exist in abundance. Based on a study of over 700 of these texts, including pamphlets, broadsides, letters, essays, newspaper items, state papers, and legislative debates, this Article argues that early Americans almost never used “prerogative” as …

We’Ve Come A Long Way (Baby)! Or Have We? Evolving Intellectual Freedom Issues In The Us And Florida, L. Bryan Cooper, A.D. Beman-Cavallaro

Works of the FIU Libraries

This paper analyzes a shifting landscape of intellectual freedom (IF) in and outside Florida for children, adolescents, teens and adults. National ideals stand in tension with local and state developments, as new threats are visible in historical, legal, and technological context. Examples include doctrinal shifts, legislative bills, electronic surveillance and recent attempts to censor books, classroom texts, and reading lists.

Privacy rights for minors in Florida are increasingly unstable. New assertions of parental rights are part of a larger conservative animus. Proponents of IF can identify a lessening of ideals and standards that began after doctrinal fruition in the 1960s …

The Two Foundings Thesis, Sonu Bedi, Elvin T. Lim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Constitutional interpretation generates intense debates over rights and powers. Countless U.S. Supreme Court decisions, articles, and books discuss these debates. With regard to powers, these debates often center around a nationalistic view of the U.S. Constitution, where the U.S. Congress has broad and expansive powers, or a states’ rights view of the document, where Congress has narrow and limited powers.1 With regards to rights, these debates often center around an emphasis on a moral reading of various clauses2 versus an emphasis on originalism