Law Commons^™

Unraveling Judicial Restraint: Guns, Abortion, And The Faux Conservatism Of J. Harvie Wilkinson, Iii, Nelson Lund, David B. Kopel

David B Kopel

Writing in the Virginia Law Review, a distinguished federal judge maintains that true conservatives are required to substitute principles of judicial restraint for an inquiry into the original meaning of the Constitution. Accordingly, argues J. Harvie Wilkinson, III, the Supreme Court's Second Amendment decision in District of Columbia v. Heller is an activist decision just like Roe v. Wade: "[B]oth cases found judicially enforceable substantive rights only ambiguously rooted in the Constitution's text." In this response, we challenge his critique.

Part I shows that Judge Wilkinson's analogy between Roe and Heller is untenable. The right of the people to keep …

A Darwinist View Of The Living Constitution, Scott Dodson

Scott Dodson

The metaphor of a “living" Constitution imports terms from biology into law and, in the process, relies on biology for its meaning. A proper understanding of biology is therefore central to understanding living constitutionalism. Yet despite its rampant use by both opponents and proponents of living constitutionalism, and despite the current fervent debate over whether biology can be useful to the law, no one has evaluated the metaphor from a biological perspective.

This Essay begins that inquiry in an interdisciplinary study of law, science, and philology. The Essay first evaluates the metaphor as it is currently used and concludes that …

Thick And Thin: Interdisciplinary Conversations On Populism, Law, Political Science, And Constitutional Change, Mark A. Graber

Mark Graber

No abstract provided.

Bush V. Boumediene: The Court Is Back, Jay Dratler

Jay Dratler

This short article is a follow-up to a piece I wrote two years ago on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, SSRN No. 913822. While applauding the result in Hamdan, I critiqued the Supreme Court for missing a “teachable moment” and obscuring the great issues at stake in prolixity and mind-numbing technical detail.In this article, I applaud the Boumediene v. Bush Court not only for its result—that the Constitution’s Suspension Clause can require habeas corpus for aliens held abroad under certain circumstances—but for its reasoning and style as well. This time, the majority of five did not miss its “teachable moment,” but placed …

Less Than Fundamental: The Myth Of Voter Fraudand The Coming Of The Second Great Disenfranchisement, David A. Schultz

David A Schultz

This article examines the issue of voter fraud and efforts to regulate it through new photo identification requirements. The overall thesis is that voting fraud is a pretext for a broader agenda to disenfranchise Americans and rig elections. However, the more specific focus of this article is both to examine the evidence of fraud and the litigation around voter IDs thus far, and what supporters of voting rights can learn from both as they move forward and challenge these laws in the future. The Article will argue that the evidence being offered for the photo IDs does not justify the …