Law Commons^™

Presidential Power And What The First Congress Did Not Do, Michael D. Ramsey

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

Scholars, advocates, and judges have long debated the scope of the President’s “executive Power” under Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution. New articles by, among others, Professors Jean Galbraith, Julian Mortenson, Jed Shugerman, and Ilan Wurman have sharply rekindled those contentions, particularly with regard to the President’s power to remove executive officers and to conduct the foreign affairs of the United States. This Essay takes a close look at one piece of the executive power puzzle: what the First Congress did and did not do in 1789 regarding the powers of the President. Unlike prior accounts, which have devoted …

Does The Discourse On 303 Creative Portend A Standing Realignment?, Richard M. Re

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

Perhaps the most surprising feature of the last Supreme Court Term was the extraordinary public discourse on 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. According to many commentators, the Court decided what was really a “fake” or “made-up” case brought by someone who asserted standing merely because “she worries.” As a doctrinal matter, these criticisms are unfounded. But what makes this episode interesting is that the criticisms came from the legal Left, which has long been associated with expansive principles of standing. Doubts about standing in 303 Creative may therefore portend a broader standing realignment, in which liberal Justices become jurisdictionally hawkish. …

Did The Court In Sffa Overrule Grutter?, Bill Watson

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA), the Supreme Court held that affirmative action programs designed to comply with the precedent set in Grutter v. Bollinger were unlawful. Yet the Court nowhere said that it was overruling Grutter and, in fact, relied on Grutter as authority. Neither the Justices themselves nor subsequent commentators have been able to agree on what, if anything, remains of Grutter today. Did SFFA overrule Grutter or not? This Essay analyzes that question and its normative fallout. The Essay concludes that SFFA at least partially overruled Grutter and that …

Qualified Immunity As Gun Control, Guha Krishnamurthi, Peter N. Salib

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

The Supreme Court’s ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen threw the political project of gun regulation into question. Before Bruen, states could enact new kinds of gun restrictions if they passed a relatively stringent means-ends test. That is, if laws meaningfully reduced danger, while not too heavily burdening the right to self-defense, they were allowed. After Bruen, only gun controls actually in force in the Founding Era, and their close analogues, are permissible. Many fewer regulations will now pass the constitutional test.

Here, we suggest an unlikely source of continuing power, after Bruen, for states …

A Non-Categorical Approach To Free Exercise Rights, Elizabeth A. Clark

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

The unconstitutional conditions doctrine, which holds that “the government may not deny a benefit to a person because [that person] exercises a constitutional right,” has been applied inconsistently to matters within the Free Exercise Clause and without, including entitlements to unemployment benefits, licenses to proselyte, educational benefits, and the right to run for public office.

In this Essay, I use the way the Supreme Court has applied the unconstitutional conditions doctrine and other anomalous cases, history, and comparative law to reconstruct a more nuanced Free Exercise regime, one that in many ways more closely parallels U.S. protections for speech and …

A Textualist Defense Of A New Collateral Order Doctrine, Adam Reed Moore

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

As a general rule, federal appellate courts have jurisdiction over “final decisions.” Though the rule seems simple enough, the Court’s current approach to interpreting “final decisions,” the collateral order doctrine, is anything but straight­forward. That is because the Court has left the statutory text by the wayside. The collateral order doctrine is divorced from statutory text and is instead based on policy considerations.

Commentators (and, at times, the Court) have offered an alternative reading of “final decisions”: the final-judgment rule. This rule would allow appeals from final judgments only. But this alternative is not the product of close textual analysis. …

Congressional Power To Institute A Wealth Tax, Will Clark

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

Over the last few years, several high-profile politicians have pushed to impose a federal “wealth tax.” For example, a recent bill introduced in the Senate would create a two percent tax on the value of assets between fifty million and one billion dollars, plus a higher percentage on wealth valued over one billion dollars. The proponents of the tax argue that it would reduce the growing wealth inequality in the United States, while opponents say that it would disincentivize investment in the American economy.

Policy arguments, however, are only relevant if the federal government has the authority to institute such …

Religious Liberty For Religious Child-Welfare Organizations: Promises And Perils, Asma T. Uddin

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

In the 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court held that states cannot deny same-sex couples access to marriage and its accompanying benefits. Some religious communities with traditional beliefs about marriage and sexuality responded to the ruling with strong concerns about its potential impact on their religious exercise.

One area of concern involved religious child-welfare organizations that work with the state to provide these services. In all states, there are two options for prospective parents seeking to adopt children. In the private system, birth parents voluntarily place their child up for adoption through a private organization. In …

Is Tax Law Different? Unconstitutional Conditions, Religious Organizations, And Taxation, Lloyd H. Mayer

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

In common with other charities, religious organizations enjoy significant benefits under federal tax law, including exemptions from income tax and the ability of donors to deduct their contributions for income, gift, and estate tax purposes. A subset of religious organizations consisting of “churches,” which include houses of worship for all sects, and certain church-related entities also enjoy unique and significant procedural advantages. These include not having to apply to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for recognition of tax exemption, not having to file annual information returns with the IRS, and being subject to IRS inquiries and examinations only if the …

Free Exercise Renewal And Conditions On Government Benefits, Thomas C. Berg

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

When the government puts a condition on funding or other benefits that it provides, can it impose that condition on a recipient (organization or individual) whose religious character or tenets conflict with the condition? That question arises in some of today’s most prominent religious-freedom controversies, actual and potential. Conditions accompanying certain federal contracts and funding programs prohibit discrimination based on religion or sexual orientation; those conditions may prevent a recipient organization from requiring that its leaders or employees affirm or live consistently with its religious tenets. Even the highly uncertain prospect that the federal government might someday strip tax exemptions …

Germaneness And Religious Liberty, Michael P. Moreland

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

One problem posed by a symposium on the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions and religious liberty is that it turns out there is not much actual doctrine in the area. The leading law and religion casebook contains only three references—each a passing mention—to unconstitutional conditions, characterizing Sherbert v. Verner as an unconstitutional conditions case and noting the relevance of unconstitutional conditions to the recent Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer to Carson v. Makin line of funding cases. And so while the issue of unconstitutional conditions has been a topic in constitutional law more generally and is widely regarded …

There Are No Unconstitutional Conditions On Free Exercise, Michael A. Helfand

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

Maybe no passage about the unconstitutional conditions doctrine is quite as memorable as the judgment rendered by Adam Cox and Adam Samaha: “You can easily question the judgment of anyone who writes a paper, even an essay, with ‘unconstitutional conditions’ in the title. The topic is very 1980s and scholars lost their enthusiasm for it not long after the Go-Go’s broke up.”

And yet, recent court decisions—and the government response to them—have thrust the doctrine back onto the scholarly agenda. At the center of this renewed interest is a series of recent Supreme Court cases prohibiting exclusion of religion and …

Assisted Suicide, Forced Cooperation, And Coercion: Reflections On A Brewing Storm, Lucia A. Silecchia

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

Because government funds to institutions and individuals finance a significant amount of medical care in the United States, the prospect of conditions or “strings” attached to that funding is an ever-present specter. Furthermore, the fact that institutions and individuals require licenses to provide medical care also raises these possibilities as the brave new world of medicine poses far more moral dilemmas than anticipated even a brief time ago.

This has led many institutions and individuals to refrain from various activities, believing that to do so would constitute direct or material cooperation in an evil activity. Their ability to avoid participation …

Mysterizing Religion, Marc O. Degirolami

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

A mystery of faith is a truth of religion that escapes human understanding. The mysteries of religion are not truths that human beings happen not to know, or truths that they could know with sufficient study and application, but instead truths that they cannot know in the nature of things. In the Letter to the Colossians, St. Paul writes that as a Christian apostle, his holy office is to “bring to completion for you the word of God, the mystery hidden from ages and from generations past.” Note that Paul does not say that his task is to make everybody …

What's Originalism After Transunion?: Picking An Originalist Approach That Gets Standing Back On Track, Julian Gregorio

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

This Note argues that not only is standing fascinating and contested, but it is so important that the Court should reconsider standing doctrine in appropriate future cases. While the TransUnion case came and went without much kerfuffle outside of legal circles, standing does not find itself sailing smoothly. As noted, perhaps the Court’s most reliable originalist just dissented from a case that largely restates the current law on standing. And Justice Kagan, perhaps the Court’s most influential liberal, wrote that after TransUnion, standing jurisprudence “needs a rewrite.” Given the current makeup of the Court, any reconsideration of standing doctrine …

The Scope Of Compelling Government Interests, R. George Wright

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

In constitutional cases, any relevant government interest may be said to vary in its breadth or scope. Government interests can be characterized narrowly or broadly. The narrowness or breadth of how courts choose to formulate a government interest may well affect that interest’s overall weight or legal significance. For example, a public interest in safety and security, broadly conceived, may seem compelling. But the public interest in merely some modest upgrading of a safety and security regulation may seem less than compelling. A court might adopt either description. A court’s choice to characterize the government interest at stake as either …

Living Recipes . . . And Constitutions, John Vlahoplus

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

Professor Gary Lawson and Zachary Pohlman assert that we can only follow recipes and by analogy the Constitution by complying with the original public or authorial meaning of the instructions in their texts. Absent an instruction in the recipe’s text authorizing changes, any departure from historical meaning amends the recipe rather than follows it.

This response uses the works of renowned chefs to sketch a competing theory. Following a recipe requires a cook to consider many of the same factors as pluralist and living constitution theories of law including text, history, purpose, current circumstances, personal experience, and individual judgment. Even …