Digital Commons Network^™

Veils, Politics, And Constitutionalism, Jill Goldenziel

Schmooze 'tickets'

No abstract provided.

The Muted Rise Of The Silent Witness Rule In National Security Litigation: The Eastern District Of Virginia's Answer To The Fight Over Classified Information At Trial, Jonathan M. Lamb

Pepperdine Law Review

The state secrets problem is emblematic of a judicial issue which is not confined to the civil cases in which the privilege is asserted - the tension between the government's interest in protecting classified information and society's interest in justice by resolution on the merits. The United States must be allowed to prosecute terrorists, conspirators, and enemies by using classified information as evidence; but how may the government act as a civil defendant without invoking the state secrets privilege to dismiss actions before trial (or pre-discovery)? The answer might be a little known evidentiary doctrine called the silent witness rule. …

Are Bills Of Attainder The New Currency? Challenging The Constitutionality Of Sex Offender Regulations That Inflict Punishment Without The "Safeguard Of A Judicial Trial", Joel A. Sherwin

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

United States V. Klein, Then And Now, Gordon G. Young

Faculty Scholarship

United States v. Klein, decided during Reconstruction, was the first Supreme Court case to invalidate a statutory restriction on federal courts’ jurisdiction. It is the only one to do so by finding a violation of Article III of the Constitution. Klein has been cited in thirty-three United States Supreme Court opinions, and roughly five hundred times each by lower federal courts and law journal articles. Recent commentators have read Klein both too broadly and narrowly. Its central holding is that Congress may not grant federal courts jurisdiction to decide a set of cases on the merits while depriving them …

Saving Their Own Souls: How Rluipa Failed To Deliver On Its Promises, Sarah Gerwig-Moore

Articles

In the summer of 2001, as a graduate student in law and theology, I began work on a master’s thesis that examined the predicament of men of faith on San Quentin’s Condemned Row. I was working in the California Appellate Project—mostly assisting with direct appeals and state habeas petitions on behalf of men under a death sentence—when a colleague guided me into theological conversations with some of our clients. On Condemned Row, they waited—up to five years to be assigned a court-appointed appellate attorney, on judges’ rulings, and to find whether the legal system would ultimately exact the penalty it …

Berghuis V. Thompkins: Retreat From Miranda, Jacquline Grossi

Barry Law Review

No abstract provided.

Judicial Engagement, Written Constitutions, And The Value Of Preservation: The Case Of Individual Rights, Elizabeth Price Foley

Faculty Publications

When judges alter a written constitution because its original meaning is no longer convenient, useful or modern, they engage in judicial activism. They are actively seeking to modify the written social compact to suit their own, or their perception of society’s, current preferences. Judicial activism is a usurpation of the proper judicial role, and it undermines the proper role of We the People. Only the People may amend the written constitution when a sufficiently large number (i.e., a supermajority) believes strongly enough that a formal, written modification of the social charter is necessary. Judicial engagement refers to the need for …

Routine Body Scanning In Airports: A Fourth Amendment Analysis Focused On Health Effects, Rebekka Murphy

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

In the beginning of 2011, the United States Transportation and Security Administration ("TSA") gave notice that it would begin using Advanced Imaging Technology ("AIT") to screen all passengers travelling in airports. While the TSA has an unquestionably important function of detecting on-body explosives and thereby augments flight safety, the use of AIT has been controversial and has raised health concerns. This Note analyzes the special needs doctrine and argues TSA officials must have a reasonable suspicion before scanning passengers so long as AIT health effects are not properly understood. Until independent scientific research can establish that advanced imaging technologies do …

Under The Lens Of The Constitution: The Ndaa's Detainee Provisions And The Fifth Amendment's Guarantee Of Equal Protection, Stephen Consuegra

St. Thomas Law Review

The crux of this article discusses Congress's passage of the unequal detainee provisions under the NDAA and its equal protection issues under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. Part II begins with a discussion on the impetus for congressional passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force ("AUMF") and its development under the laws of war. Next, Part III analyzes United States Supreme Court precedent that previously interpreted the scope of presidential power under the AUMF and explores its implications for purposes of understanding the NDAA's detainee provisions. Part IV follows with a discussion on the NDAA's detainee provisions, …

Requiring The State To Justify Supermax Confinement For Mentally Iii Prisoners: A Disability Discrimination Approach, Brittany Glidden, Laura L. Rovner

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The Eighth Amendment has long served as the traditional legal vehicle for challenging prison conditions, including long-term isolation or “supermax” confinement. As described by Hafemeister and George in their article, The Ninth Circle of Hell: An Eighth Amendment Analysis of Imposing Prolonged Supermax Solitary Confinement on Inmates with a Mental Illness, some prisoners with mental illness have prevailed in Eighth Amendment challenges to prolonged isolation. Yet an equal or greater number of these claims have been unsuccessful. This Essay considers why some of these cases fail, and suggests that one reason is that Eighth Amendment jurisprudence does not contain a …

Forfeitures Revisited: Bringing Principle To Practice In Federal Court, David Pimentel

Articles

No abstract provided.

Navigating The Second Amendment Crossfire: The Third Circuit Triggers Working Methodology In United States V. Marzzarella And United States V. Barton, Katherine L. Judkins

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

United States V. White: Further Unbalancing The Judicial Analysis Of Forcible Medication Of Defendants Found Incompetent To Stand Trial, Cynthia Polasko

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Gps Tracking And The Fourth Amendment: The New Frontier In Counterterrorism Efforts, German Rozencranc

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Mission Creep In National Security Law, Fletcher N. Baldwin Jr., Daniel R. Koslosky

UF Law Faculty Publications

Many anti-terrorism measures are enacted with broad public support. There is often a general willingness on the part of the public to accept greater civil liberties deprivations in the face of a specific threat, or otherwise in times of general crisis, than would otherwise be the case. Sweeping anti-terrorism legislation is frequently crafted in reaction to the presence, or perceived presence, of immense, imminent danger. The medium and long-term consequences of the legislation may not fully be comprehended when political leaders and policymakers take swift action in the face strong public pressure in light of a recent terrorist attack or …

Expectations Of Privacy In Social Media, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

This article, which largely tracks my remarks at Mississippi College’s Social Media Symposium, examines expectations of privacy in social media such as weblogs (blogs), Facebook pages, and Twitter tweets. Social media is diverse and ever-diversifying, and while I address some of that complexity, I focus on the core functionality, which provides the groundwork for further conversation as the technology and related social norms develop. As one would expect, just as with our offline communications and other online communications, in some we have an expectation of privacy that is recognized by current law, in some we have an expectation of privacy …

Resuscitating Roberts - How Courts Should Construe The Emergency Exception To The Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause, Sloan A. Heffron

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

This paper argues that in the wake of Crawford, Davis, and Bryant, trial courts need a workable definition of "ongoing emergency," as well as a test that can be applied in assessing the admissibility of statements made under such circumstances. The paper first offers a definition for "ongoing emergency". It then offers a totality-of-the-circumstances test that can be applied in determining if a declarant's statement occurs during the course of an ongoing emergency.

Insecure Refugees: The Narrowing Of Asylum-Seeker Rights To Freedom Of Movement And Claims Determination Post-9/11 In Canada, Constance Macintosh

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This chapter has a modest goal: to track some legislative changes since 9/11 which impact on two rights of asylum-seekers where those changes are linked to or justified by security concerns. These are the rights of asylum-seekers to have their claim determined, and to not be detained. This article identifies how legislation restricting these key rights of asylum-seekers has largely been promoted as necessary for Canada to be able to protect its public from criminality and security threats. The article thus queries whether measures, especially those introduced under Bill C-11, The Balanced Refugee Reform Act and those proposed under Bill …

Who Said The Crawford Revolution Would Be Easy?, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

One of the central protections of our system of criminal justice is the right of the accused in all criminal prosecutions "to be confronted with the witnesses against him." It provides assurance that prosecution witnesses will give their testimony in the way demanded for centuries by Anglo-American courts-in the presence of the accused, subject to cross-examination- rather than in any other way. Witnesses may not, for example, testify by speaking privately to governmental agents in a police station or in their living rooms. Since shortly after it was adopted, however, the confrontation right became obscured by the ascendance of a …

Funding Port-Related Infrastructure And Development: The Current Debate And Proposed Reform, Christopher T. Cook

Fordham Urban Law Journal

Given the lack of consensus and certainty in how funding should best be generated to meet critical infrastructure and development needs, this Note proposes an amendment to the Shipping Act to provide port authorities with the express power to impose fees for the construction, operation, and maintenance of qualifying port-related infrastructure and development initiatives. The amendment would effectively spread the costs specific to qualifying initiatives over the useful life of the project. Part I discusses the relevant provisions and judicial standards associated with the Tonnage Clause and Shipping Act. Part II addresses the efforts by both Congress and port authorities …

Herding Katz: Gps Tracking And Society's Expectations Of Privacy In The 21st Century, Zachary Gray

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

For nearly forty-four years, the Supreme Court has adhered to the same test for its Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, first announced in Justice Harlan's concurrence in Katz v. United States. Despite the judiciary's steadfast use of the test since its enunciation, the decisions since Katz have been anything but consistent.

Most recently, this nation's federal courts were confronted with questions about the legitimacy of using GPS tracking devices. In its attempt to resolve the issue, the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Jones strayed from applying Katz and instead relied on the common-law trespass doctrine.

In an attempt to determine …

Getting Back To The Fourth Amendment: Warrantless Cell Phone Searches, Mireille Dee

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Factions For The Rest Of Us, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

This essay responds to essays by Professors Ashutosh Bhagwat, Susan Appleton, and Robert Vischer on my book Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly. The essays were presented at a March 2012 discussion hosted by Washington University School of Law that included additional presentations from Gregory Magarian, Bernadette Meyler, Ian MacMullen, and Neil Richards.

I had three objectives in writing Liberty’s Refuge, one diagnostic, one historical, and one normative. The diagnosis highlights difficulties with the current doctrine of intimate and expressive association. The history excavates the prominent role that the right of assembly occupies in our constitutional and popular past. …

On Overreaching, Or Why Rick Perry May Save The Voting Rights Act But Destroy Affirmative Action, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

The State of Texas is presently staking out two positions that are not typically pursued by a single litigant. On the one hand, Texas is seeking the invalidation of the Voting Rights Act, and, on the other, the State is now defending the validity of the expansive race-based affirmative action policy it uses at its flagship university. This Essay presses the claim that Texas has increased the chance it will lose in bothTexas v. Holder andFisher v. University of Texas because it has opted to stake out markedly extreme positions in each. I argue that Texas would be more likely …

Why Crime Severity Analysis Is Not Reasonable: A Comment, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Jeffrey Bellin’s article, Crime Severity Distinctions and the Fourth Amendment: Reassessing Reasonableness in a Changing World, argues that the severity of the crime under investigation ought to be taken into account in assessing both the reasonableness of searches and whether a government action is a search in the first place. In pursuit of this objective, his article provides the best attempt to date at dealing with the difficult issue of separating serious from not-so serious crimes (he ends up with three categories—grave, serious and minor. He then makes the enticing argument that calibrating the degree of Fourth Amendment protection according …

Incitement To Riot In The Age Of Flash Mobs, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

As people increasingly use social media to organize both protests and robberies, government will try to regulate these calls to action. With an eye to this intensifying dynamic, this Article reviews First Amendment jurisprudence on incitement and applies it to existing statutes on incitement to riot at a common law, state, and federal level. The article suggests that First Amendment jurisprudence has a particularly tortuous relationship with regulating speech directed to crowds. It examines current crowd psychology to suggest which crowd behavior, if any, should as a matter of policy be subject to regulation. It concludes that many existing incitement-to-riot …

Recovering The Assembly Clause, Timothy Zick

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Religious Neutrality In The Early Republic, Jud Campbell

Law Faculty Publications

Governmental neutrality is the heart of the modern Free Exercise Clause. Mindful of this core principle, which prevents the government from treating individuals differently because of their religious convictions, the Supreme Court held in Employment Division v. Smith that a neutral law can be constitutionally applied despite any incidental burdens it might impose on an individual’s exercise of religion. Conscientious objectors such as Quakers, for instance, do not have a constitutional right to be exempt from a military draft. Thus, neutrality now forms both the core and the outer limit of constitutionally guaranteed religious freedom. Judged according to founding-era views, …

States’ Rights, Southern Hypocrisy, And The Crisis Of The Union, Paul Finkelman

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the arguments used by southern secessionists to explain why they left the Union. The article demonstrates that support for "states' rights" was not the main reason for secession, and that on the contrary, most of the slave states left the Union because the free states were exercising their states' rights in opposing slavery. The main reason for secession, as this essay shows, was the desire to protect slavery and to create a new nation, self-consciously based on slavery and white supremacy. This article began as part of an AALS legal history section program in 2010 and is …

The Limits Of Government Regulation Of Science, John D. Kraemer, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The recent controversy over the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity’s (NSABB) request that Science and Nature redact key parts of two papers on transmissible avian (H5N1) influenza reveal a troubled relationship between science and security. While NSABB’s request does not violate the First Amendment, efforts to censor the scientific press by force of law would usually be an unconstitutional prior restraint of the press absent a compelling state interest. The constitutional validity of conditions on grant funding to require pre-publication review of unclassified research is unclear but also arguably unconstitutional.

The clearest case where government may restrict publication is …