Constitutional Law Commons^™

It's "Exhausting": Reconciling A Prisoner's Right To Meaningful Remedies For Constitutional Remedies For Constitutional Violations With The Need For Agency Autonomy, Allen E. Honick

University of Baltimore Law Review

This Comment will address the inadequacy and injustice of the PLRA, specifically the “proper exhaustion” rule as expressed in Woodford v. Ngo. “Proper exhaustion” means that “a prisoner must complete the administrative review process in accordance with applicable procedural rules, including deadlines, as a precondition to bringing suit in federal court.” Failure to adhere to even the slightest procedural requirement is sufficient to warrant procedural default, i.e., a dismissal regardless of the merits of the underlying claim. The PLRA seeks to achieve laudable ends, but the means by which it does so leave much to be desired.

Testing Sex, Rachel Rebouché

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Same-Sex Marriage And Due Process Traditionalism, Ronald Turner

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

United States V. Batista, Constantine Loizides

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Effectively Regulating E-Cigarettes And Their Advertising—And The First Amendment, Eric N. Lindblom

O'Neill Institute Papers

If tobacco smoking did not exist in the United States, there would be no reason, from a public health perspective, to allow addictive, nicotine-containing e-cigarettes to be marketed and sold. Because e-cigarette use, by itself, is neither beneficial nor benign to users and nonusers, the only public health justification for allowing e-cigarettes in the existing U.S. market would be if doing so would not sustain or increase existing smoking levels but would help smokers quit completely or provide addicted smokers a less harmful way to obtain the nicotine they crave. Yet e-cigarettes are now pervasive in the U.S. market, being …

The Supreme Court’S 2014-2015 Term: The Year The Administrative State Trembled, Joel Alicea

Scholarly Articles

The opinions of the Supreme Court’s most recent term indicate that the court’s conservative justices are rethinking the scope and power of the administrative state.

In The Beginning There Was None: Supreme Court Review Of State Criminal Prosecutions, Kevin C. Walsh

Scholarly Articles

This Article challenges the unquestioned assumption of all contemporary scholars of federal jurisdiction that section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 authorized Supreme Court appellate review of state criminal prosecutions. Section 25 has long been thought to be one of the most important provisions of the most important jurisdictional statute enacted by Congress. The Judiciary Act of 1789 gave concrete institutional shape to a federal judiciary only incompletely defined by Article III. And section 25 supplied a key piece of the structural relationship between the previously existing state court systems and the new federal court system that Congress constructed …

Constitutional Contraction: Religion And The Roberts Court, Marc O. Degirolami

Scholarly Articles

This Article argues that the most salient feature to emerge in the first decade of the Roberts Court's law and religion jurisprudence is the contraction of the constitutional law of religious freedom. It illustrates that contraction in three ways.

First, contraction of judicial review. Only once has the Roberts Court exercised the power of judicial review to strike down federal, state, or local legislation, policies, or practices on the ground that they violate the Free Exercise or Establishment Clauses. In this constitutional context the Court has been nearly uniformly deferential to government laws and policies. That distinguishes it from its …

Preventing Balkanization Or Facilitating Racial Domination: A Critique Of The New Equal Protection, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court requires that equal protection plaintiffs prove defendants acted with discriminatory intent. The intent rule has insulated from judicial invalidation numerous policies that harmfully impact racial and ethnic minorities. Court doctrine also mandates that state actors generally remain colorblind. The colorblindness doctrine has led to the judicial invalidation of policies designed to ameliorate the conditions of racial inequality. Taken together, these two equality doctrines facilitate racial domination. The Court justifies this outcome on the ground that the Constitution does not protect "group rights. "

Constitutional law theorists have criticized these aspects of equal protection doctrine. Recently, however, some …

Ending The Isolation: An Introduction To The Special Volume On Human Rights And Solitary Confinement, Debra Parkes

All Faculty Publications

Prisoners and their advocates in Canada and around the world have been calling attention to the harms and impact of solitary confinement for some time. What is significant about the current moment is that these calls seem to be achieving some traction, even as the use of solitary confinement grows across jurisdictions. This short piece introduces a special volume of the Canadian Journal of Human Rights which collects the writing of advocates and scholars from a range of disciplines (criminology, law, philosophy) who bring a variety of perspectives and methodologies to bear on the opaque correctional systems that hold human …

A Functional Theory Of Congressional Standing, Jonathan Remy Nash

Michigan Law Review

The Supreme Court has offered scarce and inconsistent guidance on congressional standing—that is, when houses of Congress or members of Congress have Article III standing. The Court’s most recent foray into congressional standing has prompted lower courts to infuse analysis with separation-ofpowers concerns in order to erect a high standard for congressional standing. It has also invited the Department of Justice to argue that Congress lacks standing to enforce subpoenas against executive branch actors. Injury to congressional litigants should be defined by reference to Congress’s constitutional functions. Those functions include gathering relevant information, casting votes, and (even when no vote …

Emergency Takings, Brian Angelo Lee

Michigan Law Review

Takings law has long contained a puzzle. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires the government to pay “just compensation” to owners of private property that the government “takes.” In ordinary circumstances, this requirement applies equally whether the property is confiscated or destroyed, and it also applies to property confiscated in emergencies. Remarkably, however, courts have repeatedly held that if the government destroys property to address an emergency, then a “necessity exception” relieves the government of any obligation to compensate the owner of the property that was sacrificed for the public good. Although the roots of this startling principle …

Due Process For Cash Civil Forfeitures In Structuring Cases, Timothy J. Ford

Michigan Law Review

On January 22, 2013, Tarik “Terry” Dehko sat down to pay the bills for his small Michigan grocery store when a federal agent entered his office. The agent told Dehko that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had executed a seizure warrant and taken the market’s entire bank account—more than $35,000. When Dehko asked how he could run his business without its bank account, the agent replied, “I don’t care.” The government did not charge Dehko with a crime that day. In fact, Dehko had never been charged with any crime in his life. Instead, the government waited until July 19 …

The Derivative Nature Of Corporate Constitutional Rights, Margaret M. Blair

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article engages the two hundred year history of corporate constitutional rights jurisprudence to show that the Supreme Court has long accorded rights to corporations based on the rationale that corporations represent associations of people from whom such rights are derived. The Article draws on the history of business corporations in America to argue that the Court’s characterization of corporations as associations made sense throughout most of the nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, however, when the Court was deciding several key cases involving corporate rights, this associational view was already becoming a poor fit for some corporations. The …

The Normalization Of Foreign Relations Law, Ganesh Sitaraman, Ingrid Wuerth

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The defining feature of foreign relations law is that it is distinct from domestic law. Courts have recognized that foreign affairs are political by their nature and thus unsuited to adjudication, that state and local involvement is inappropriate in foreign affairs, and that the President has the lead role in foreign policymaking. In other words, they have said that foreign relations are exceptional. But foreign relations exceptionalism, "the belief that legal issues arising from foreign relations are functionally, doctrinally, and even methodologically distinct from those arising in domestic policy,” was not always the prevailing view. In the early twentieth century, …

Behavioral War Powers, Ganesh Sitaraman, David Zionts

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A decade of war has meant a decade of writing on war powers. From the authority to start a war, to restrictions on fighting wars, to the authority to end a war, constitutional lawyers and scholars have explored the classic issues (war initiation, prosecution, and termination) through the classic prisms (text, history, and function) for a new generation of national security challenges. Despite the volume of writing on war powers and the urgency of the debates in the context of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, war powers debates are widely seen as stagnant. We introduce a new set of perspectives …

Extralegal Supreme Court Policy Making, Joelle A. Moreno

Faculty Publications

The Colbert Report aired its final episode on December 18, 2014. Nine years earlier, on the first episode, Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness.” Truthiness satirized contemporary disinterest in empirical information in a country increasingly "divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.” Truthiness was not just the Merriam-Webster word of the year. Over the past decade, it has been the unspoken mantra of reporters who give equal time to climate science denialists, faith healers, and vaccine refusers. When Justices of the Supreme Court decide questions of scientific or empirical fact — such …

Hair’S The Thing: Trait Discrimination And Forced Performance Of Race Through Racially Conscious Public School Hairstyle Prohibitions, Anna-Lisa F. Macon

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law

No abstract provided.

The Emerging Use Of A Balancing Approach In Casey'S Undue Burden Analysis, Karen A. Jordan

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law

No abstract provided.

Iq Intelligence Tests, "Ethnic Adjustments" And Atkins, Robert M. Sanger

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.