Law Commons^™

Back To The Sources? What’S Clear And Not So Clear About The Original Intent Of The First Amendment, John Witte Jr.

Faculty Articles

This Article peels through these layers of founding documents before exploring the final sixteen words of the First Amendment religion clauses. Part I explores the founding generation’s main teachings on religious freedom, identifying the major principles that they held in common. Part II sets out a few representative state constitutional provisions on religious freedom created from 1776 to 1784. Part III reviews briefly the actions by the Continental Congress on religion and religious freedom issued between 1774 and 1789. Part IV touches on the deprecated place of religious freedom in the drafting of the 1787 United States Constitution. Part V …

Congress's Domain: Appropriations, Time, And Chevron, Matthew B. Lawrence

Faculty Articles

Annual appropriations and permanent appropriations play contradictory roles in the separation of powers. Annual appropriations preserve agencies’ need for congressionally provided funding and enforce a domain of congressional influence over agency action in which the House and the Senate each enforce written unicameral commands through the threat of reduced appropriations in the next annual cycle. Permanent appropriations permit agencies to fund their programs without ongoing congressional support, circumscribing and diluting Congress’s domain.

The unanswered question of Chevron deference for appropriations demonstrates the importance of the distinction between annual appropriations and permanent appropriations. Uncritical application of governing deference tests that emphasize …

Subordination And Separation Of Powers, Matthew B. Lawrence

Faculty Articles

This Article calls for the incorporation of antisubordination into separation-ofpowers analysis. Scholars analyzing separation-of-powers tools—laws and norms that divide power among government actors—consider a long list of values ranging from protecting liberty to promoting efficiency. Absent from this list are questions of equity: questions of racism, sexism, and classism. This Article problematizes this omission and begins to rectify it. For the first time, this Article applies critical-race and feminist theorists’ subordination question—are marginalized groups disproportionately burdened?—to three important separation-of-powers tools: legislative appropriations, executive conditions, and constitutional entrenchment. In doing so, it reveals that each tool entails subordination by creating generalized …

Disappropriation, Matthew B. Lawrence

Faculty Articles

In recent years, Congress has repeatedly failed to appropriate funds necessary to honor legal commitments (or entitlements) that are themselves enacted in permanent law. The Appropriations Clause has forced the government to defy legislative command and break such commitments, with destructive results for recipients and the rule of law. This Article is the first to address this poorly understood phenomenon, which it labels a form of “disappropriation.”

The Article theorizes recent high-profile disappropriations as one probabilistic consequence of Congress’s decision to create permanent legislative payment commitments that the government cannot honor without periodic, temporary appropriations. Such partially temporary programs include …

Shareholders United?, Andrew K. Jennings

Faculty Articles

Securities regulation has a way of crossing into other lanes. What public companies do is substantive regulation. How they govern themselves while doing it-or more importantly, how they disclose it-is securities regulation. So it is no surprise that the perennial concern over regulating money in politics should also become a question of federal securities regulation. The Shareholders United Act (the "Act")-passed by the House of Representatives as part of House Bill 1, an early, major piece of legislation in the 116th Congress-does just that. The Act would require that before engaging in political spending, public companies poll shareholders on how …

The Operational And Administrative Militaries, Mark P. Nevitt

Faculty Articles

This Article offers a new way to think about the military. In doing so, I argue that there are, in fact, two militaries residing within the Department of Defense (DoD): an “operational” and an “administrative” military.

In Part II, I propose this new two-military analytical framework. This Part begins with a brief historical overview of the dual-military state and argues that these two militaries coexisted in some form since the nation’s founding, grew further apart following World War II and the National Security Act, and effectively separated following the passage of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act.

Part III analyzes the Goldwater-Nichols …

A Functional Theory Of Congressional Standing, Jonathan R. Nash

Faculty Articles

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-of-powers 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 …

Term Limits On Original Intent--An Essay On Legal Debate And Historical Understanding, Polly J. Price

Faculty Articles

This Essay is divided into five Parts. Part I sets the stage for the historical debate by evaluating the text of the Qualifications Clauses as well as the limited evidence of what the Framers and the ratifiers thought about these provisions. Part II shows that many states, immediately after the federal Constitution was ratified, behaved as though the Qualifications Clauses did not prevent them from adding qualifications for congressional office-holding. Part III compares this early evidence of state behavior with a debate in Congress after the Civil War concerning the meaning of the Qualifications Clauses. Part IV returns to the …