Digital Commons Network^™

Unburdening The Undue Burden Standard: Orienting Casey In Constitutional Jurisprudence, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

"Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt." With these words in the 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court ushered in a new era of abortion regulation. Speaking through a joint opinion authored by Justices O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter, the Court indicated that from this point forth abortion regulations would be judged by an "undue burden" standard. According to this standard, an abortion regulation is unconstitutional if it "has the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion" of a nonviable fetus.

The Justices who wrote …

Taking Subsidiarity Seriously: Federalism In The European Community And The United States, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

For a principle that has dominated discussions of European federalism for over five years, subsidiarity has received surprisingly poor academic mention. Subsidiarity has been criticized as "inelegant . . .Eurospeak," "the epitome of confusion," and simple "gobbledegook." It has been described by some as nothing new and by others as quite novel and actually quite dangerous. The President of the Commission of the European Communities, said to be an enthusiast of subsidiarity, finds it used at times as an "alibi," and more specifically as "a fig leaf ... to conceal [an] unwillingness to honour the commitments which have already been …

Fear And Loathing In The Siting Of Hazardous And Radioactive Waste Facilities: A Comprehensive Approach To A Misperceived Crisis, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Few laws have failed so completely as the federal and state statutes designed to create new facilities for the disposal of hazardous and radioactive waste. Despite scores of siting attempts and the expenditure of several billion dollars since the mid-1970s, only one radioactive waste disposal facility, only one hazardous waste landfill (in the aptly named Last Chance, Colorado), and merely a handful of hazardous waste treatment and incineration units are operating on new sites in the United States today.

In 1981, a leading member of Congress, relying on data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), predicted that by 1985 …

The Concept Of Property In The Early Common Law, David J. Seipp

Faculty Scholarship

“There is nothing,” wrote William Blackstone, “which so generally strikes the imagination and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property.” Property continues to occupy a place of enormous importance in American legal thought. More than just a staple of the first-year law school curriculum, the concept of property guides the application of constitutional doctrines of due process and eminent domain. A grand division between “property rules” and “liability rules” classifies our common law entitlements. Property is a concept of such longstanding importance in our law, of such great inertial momentum, that it has expanded to include nonphysical …

Mandated Access: Commensurability And The Right To Say "No", Wendy J. Gordon, Anne E. Gowen

Faculty Scholarship

Here is the problem as Congress saw it: A distributor of television programming (a cable television operator or a distributor of television programming via other media) cannot thrive unless it can supply viewers with top-rated programming. Few customers want to subscribe to a service that lacks NBC's Seinfeld, the latest episodes of General Hospital, or even PBS educational documentaries. Special provisions in the 1976 Copyright Act gave cable operators some liberty to retransmit broadcast programming. However, that Act created no such liberties for programming originating from within cable companies. Because the national market for programming is dominated by …

Choice Of Language In Bilateral Treaties: Fifty Years Of Changing State Practice, John King Gamble, Charlotte Ku

Faculty Scholarship

The language in which treaties are written affects how widely and deeply treaty obligations are understood and, hence, followed.

Of course, many problems arise when the treaty does not have the same meaning in different languages.

The focus of this article is a different aspect of language in treaties--the choice of language or languages as official text or texts of bilateral treaties. Some research has addressed the broader issue of multiple use of languages in international organizations and multilateral treaties, but bilateral treaties have received scant attention. This inattention likely stems from the difficulty of examining the treaty practice of …

A Comparative Look At Refugee Status Based On Persecution Due To Membership In A Particular Social Group, Maryellen Fullerton

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Will A New Restatement Help Settle Troubled Waters: Reflections, Aaron Twerski, J. A. Henderson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Eclipse Of Reason: A Rhetorical Reading Of Bowers V. Hardwick, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

In a careful and compelling reading of the text of the Supreme Court's opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, Janet Halley provides a meticulous map of the misprisions by which the Hardwick Court "exploit[s] confusion about what sodomy is in ways that create opportunities for the [judicial] exercise of homophobic power." According to Professor Halley, the duplicitous mechanisms the Hardwick Court marshals in reasoning about sodomy entail a mobilization of two "incommensurable articulations": the idea of the sodomitical act, on the one hand, and that of personal identity, on the other.

Professor Halley rightly insists that an anti-homophobic critique …

Twelve Letters From Arthur L. Corbin To Robert Braucher Annotated, Joseph Perillo

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Judicial Opinions As Binding Law And As Explanations For Judgments, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

To what extent does the executive branch have autonomous powers of legal interpretation? The issue is often broadly framed in terms of two disparate understandings of the allocation of interpretative power: "judicial supremacy" and "departmentalism." In this paper, I shall speak of two different understandings of judicial opinions: the idea that judicial opinions (or at least the "holdings" of opinions) are legally binding on actors in the executive branch, and the idea that opinions are, from the perspective of executive actors, merely explanations for judicial judgments. I adopt this locution because it focuses more precisely on the core of the …

Enslaved To Judicial Supremacy?, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Cunning Stunts: From Hegemony To Desire A Review Of Madonna's Sex, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

What is sex? Is it an accidental or contingent property that every person can be said to have? I am brunette and female, but the Pope is bald and male. Or, is sex more constitutive, that is, an essential part of who we are? In this respect, the claim is often made that women experience the world ditfierently than men. Or, is sex something we do?

If we consider sex as an adjective, can we or should we be able to manipulate it like a new hair style? Or does the notion of sexual malleability trivialize the significance …

Feminism And Disciplinarity: The Curl Of The Petals, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

In this Symposium, feminism has been invited to take a place alongside such well-established disciplines as history, philosophy, and economics in a consolidated exploration of interdisciplinary approaches to law. While sincerely extended – the feminist entry is not the only one that women are writing – and generously unbounded as to scope, ... the invitation raises what for many is a prior question: Is feminism a discipline at all?

As the feminist delegate to this interdisciplinary Symposium, I have therefore taken as my initial task consideration of the issue implicit in the invitation: feminism's credentials as a discipline. I explore …

Where Have You Gone, Karl Llewellyn - Should Congress Turn Its Lonely Eyes To You, Stephen F. Ross

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this paper is to explore what, if anything, Congress should do about the canons of statutory construction to prevent judges who are more conservative (or perhaps, in a future era, more progressive) than the majority of the legislature from employing those canons to distort or frustrate legislative policy preferences.

Beyond The Privacy Principle, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

In Bowers v. Hardwick, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to ad-dress the constitutionality of a Georgia criminal statute prohibiting certain private sexual practices by consenting adults. The Georgia citizens who brought the suit sought a judgment regarding the constitutionality of the statute on its face, but the Court resolutely avoided consideration of that issue. The Court took the view that the only federal question properly before it was the constitutional validity of the law as applied to private, sexual activity by consenting adults of the same gender, or what it called "homosexual sodomy." Having thus limited the scope …

Law As Discourse, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Legal theory has traditionally taken the use of sanctions to be a characteristic feature of any legal order. Positivists like John Austin take the notion of commands backed by threats to be the essence of law. Yet even those who scorn positivism, like Immanuel Kant, are equally committed to the view that the sovereign must enforce positive legal rules by punishing those who violate them.

This emphasis on sanctions has always struck me as a bit curious. It is not irrelevant to the understanding of legal phenomena, but it does seem to have been exaggerated in philosophical efforts to understand …

You Can Take Them To Water But You Can’T Make Them Drink: Black Legal Scholarship And White Legal Scholars, Jerome Mccristal Culp Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Survival Of Civil Law In North America: The Case Of Louisiana, Thomas E. Carbonneau

Faculty Scholarship

There are legitimate historical reasons for speaking seriously about a civil law heritage in Louisiana. French and Spanish civilian influences permeated the Louisiana Civil Code when it was first enacted in 1808. The current status of the civil law in Louisiana, however, is problematic; the American common law methodology has made significant inroads into the operation of the current legal system. Separated from its parenting source by geography, time, and culture, Louisiana civil law has become an ill-defined civilian entity that, in reality, is more of a common law process with civil law trappings. The civil law nonetheless has a …

Searching For The Rule Of Law In The Wake Of Communism, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Of all the dreams that drive men and women into the streets, the "rule of law" is the most curious. We have a pretty good idea of what we mean by "free markets" and "democratic elections." But legality and the "rule of law" are ideals that are opaque even to legal philosophers. Thus, we have reason to puzzle whether political changes in Eastern Europe represent a renewed commitment to the rule of law. What constitutes living under the rule of law after Communism? What would count as achieving "a-state-based-on-law" – to use an expression popular in the last days of …

Rouge Et Noir Reread: A Popular Constitutional History Of The Angelo Herndon Case, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

In 1932, Eugene Angelo Braxton Hemdon, a young Afro-American member of the Communist Party, U.S.A., was arrested in Atlanta and charged with an attempt to incite insurrection against that state's lawful authority. Some five years later, in Herndon v. Lowry, Herndon filed a writ of habeas corpus asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the constitutionality of the Georgia statute under which he had been convicted. Two weeks before his twenty-fourth birthday, the Court, voting 5-4, declared the use of the Georgia political-crimes statute against him unconstitutional on the grounds that it deprived Herndon of his rights to freedom …

Rorty, Radicalism, Romanticism: The Politics Of The Gaze, Joan C. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Proving The Law, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Interpretative theory has become a major growth industry over the past two decades. Legal academics in particular have invested heavily in the enterprise, producing a burgeoning literature that addresses many of the most important problems of legal interpretation.1 The discussion to date, however, has largely neglected one critical aspect of interpretative theory: the selection of appropriate standards of proof for legal propositions. That neglect will not bother or surprise interpretative skeptics who doubt the utility of searching for "true" or "better" meanings of texts, but it ought to prove troubling to any theorist who wants to make absolute or comparative …

Reconciling Individual Rights And Government Interests: Madisonian Principles Versus Supreme Court Practice, David L. Faigman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Violence Of Privacy, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Teaching Students How To Think Like Lawyers: Integrating Socratic Method With The Writing Process, Mary Kate Kearney, Mary Beth Beazley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Feminist Jurisprudence - The 1990 Myra Bradwell Day Panel, Elizabeth M. Schneider, Lucinda Finley, Carin Clauss, Joan Bertin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Section 20(D) Of The Securities Exchange Act: Congress, The Supreme Court, The Sec And The Process Of Defining Insider Trading, Steve Thel

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Note, Sex(Ual Orientation) And Title Vii, I. Bennett Capers

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Is Subjectivity Possible - The Post-Modern Subject In Legal Theory, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

This article puts forward a thesis and then attempts to prove (or at least to develop) that thesis in two related areas. The thesis is that legal theory in general, and critical legal theory in particular, has concentrated too much on critiques of objectivity, wrongly assuming that "subjectivity" was an unproblematic term. Subjectivity, like mortality, has seemed not only attainable but inevitable. It is objectivity which is presumed to be the problematic goal of our theories and our attempts at doctrinal interpretation. This article reverses the focus, concentrating on the construction of subjectivity in law and social theory... Having pointed …