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Full-Text Articles in Political Theory
Presidential Accountability And The Rule Of Law: Can The President Claim Immunity If He Shoots Someone On Fifth Avenue?, Claire Oakes Finkelstein, Richard Painter
Presidential Accountability And The Rule Of Law: Can The President Claim Immunity If He Shoots Someone On Fifth Avenue?, Claire Oakes Finkelstein, Richard Painter
All Faculty Scholarship
Can a sitting President be indicted while in office? This critical constitutional question has never been directly answered by any court or legislative body. The prevailing wisdom, however, is that, though he may be investigated, a sitting President is immune from actual prosecution. The concept of presidential immunity, however, has hastened the erosion of checks and balances in the federal government and weakened our ability to rein in renegade Presidents. It has enabled sitting Presidents to impede the enforcement of subpoenas and other tools of investigation by prosecutors, both federal and state, as well as to claim imperviousness to civil …
Slavery's Constitution: Rethinking The Federal Consensus, Maeve Glass
Slavery's Constitution: Rethinking The Federal Consensus, Maeve Glass
Faculty Scholarship
For at least half a century, scholars of the early American Constitution have noted the archival prominence of a doctrine known as the “federal consensus.” This doctrine instructed that Congress had no power to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it existed. Despite its ubiquity in the records, our understanding of how and why this doctrine emerged is hazy at best. Working from a conceptual map of America’s founding that features thirteen local governments coalescing into two feuding sections of North and South, commentators have tended to explain the federal consensus either as a vestige of …
Preemption And Commandeering Without Congress, Jessica Bulman-Pozen
Preemption And Commandeering Without Congress, Jessica Bulman-Pozen
Faculty Scholarship
In a time of polarization, states may introduce salutary pluralism into an executive-dominated regime. With partisan divisions sidelining Congress, states are at once principal implementers and principal opponents of presidential policies. As polarization makes states more central to national policymaking, however, it also poses new threats to their ability to act. This Essay cautions against recent efforts to preempt state control over state officials and to require states to follow other states’ policies, using sanctuary jurisdictions and the pending federal Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act as examples.
Federalism All The Way Up: State Standing And "The New Process Federalism", Jessica Bulman-Pozen
Federalism All The Way Up: State Standing And "The New Process Federalism", Jessica Bulman-Pozen
Faculty Scholarship
This commentary considers what federalism all the way up means for Gerken’s proposed new process federalism. The state-federal integration she documents underscores why judicial policing of “conditions for federal-state bargaining” cannot be limited to state-federal relations in the traditional sense. It must extend to state challenges to the allocation and exercise of authority within the federal government. The new process federalism would therefore do well to address when states will have standing to bring such cases in federal court. After Part I describes contemporary federalism-all-the-way-up litigation, Part II suggests that Gerken’s “Federalism 3.0” complicates both traditional parens patriae and sovereignty …
Partisan Federalism, Jessica Bulman-Pozen
Partisan Federalism, Jessica Bulman-Pozen
Faculty Scholarship
Among the questions that vex the federalism literature are why states check the federal government and whether Americans identify with the states as well as the nation. This Article argues that partisanship supplies the core of an answer to both questions. Competition between today’s ideologically coherent, polarized parties leads state actors to make demands for autonomy, to enact laws rejected by the federal government, and to fight federal programs from within. States thus check the federal government by channeling partisan conflict through federalism’s institutional framework. Partisanship also recasts the longstanding debate about whether Americans identify with the states. Democratic and …
Toward A New Constitutional Anatomy, Victoria Nourse
Toward A New Constitutional Anatomy, Victoria Nourse
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
There is an important sense in which our Constitution's structure is not what it appears to be--a set of activities or functions or geographies, the 'judicial" or the "executive" or the "legislative" power, the "truly local and the truly national. "Indeed, it is only if we put these notions to the side that we can come to grips with the importance of the generative provisions of the Constitution: the provisions that actually create our federal government; that bind citizens, through voting, to a House of Representatives, to a Senate, to a President, and even, indirectly, to a Supreme Court. In …
Prospects For Federalism, Maurice J. Holland
Prospects For Federalism, Maurice J. Holland
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.
Book Review. Pound, Mcilwain, And Nichols, Federalism As A Democratic Process, Jerome Hall
Book Review. Pound, Mcilwain, And Nichols, Federalism As A Democratic Process, Jerome Hall
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.