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Full-Text Articles in Law
Back To The Sources? What’S Clear And Not So Clear About The Original Intent Of The First Amendment, John Witte Jr.
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 …
White Supremacy, Police Brutality, And Family Separation: Preventing Crimes Against Humanity Within The United States, Elena Baylis
White Supremacy, Police Brutality, And Family Separation: Preventing Crimes Against Humanity Within The United States, Elena Baylis
Articles
Although the United States tends to treat crimes against humanity as a danger that exists only in authoritarian or war-torn states, in fact, there is a real risk of crimes against humanity occurring within the United States, as illustrated by events such as systemic police brutality against Black Americans, the federal government’s family separation policy that took thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the southern border, and the dramatic escalation of White supremacist and extremist violence culminating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In spite of this risk, the United States does not have …
Congress's Domain: Appropriations, Time, And Chevron, Matthew B. Lawrence
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
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 …
Law Library Blog (September 2020): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Law Library Blog (September 2020): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law
Law Library Newsletters/Blog
No abstract provided.
Disappropriation, Matthew B. Lawrence
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 …
Delegating Or Divesting?, Philip A. Hamburger
Delegating Or Divesting?, Philip A. Hamburger
Faculty Scholarship
A gratifying feature of recent scholarship on administrative power is the resurgence of interest in the Founding. Even the defenders of administrative power hark back to the Constitution’s early history – most frequently to justify delegations of legislative power. But the past offers cold comfort for such delegation.
A case in point is Delegation at the Founding by Professors Julian Davis Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley. Not content to defend the Supreme Court’s current nondelegation doctrine, the article employs history to challenge the doctrine – arguing that the Constitution does not limit Congress’s delegation of legislative power. But the article’s most …
Shareholders United?, Andrew K. Jennings
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
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 …
Rights And Retrenchment In The Trump Era, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang
Rights And Retrenchment In The Trump Era, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang
All Faculty Scholarship
Our aim in this essay is to leverage archival research, data and theoretical perspectives presented in our book, Rights and Retrenchment: The Counterrevolution against Federal Litigation, as a means to illuminate the prospects for retrenchment in the current political landscape. We follow the scheme of the book by separately considering the prospects for federal litigation retrenchment in three lawmaking sites: Congress, federal court rulemaking under the Rules Enabling Act, and the Supreme Court. Although pertinent data on current retrenchment initiatives are limited, our historical data and comparative institutional perspectives should afford a basis for informed prediction. Of course, little in …
Constitutional Barriers To Congressional Reform, John M. Greabe
Constitutional Barriers To Congressional Reform, John M. Greabe
Law Faculty Scholarship
Americans celebrate our Constitution as a beacon that can guide us through difficult situations. And justly so. But at times, the Constitution also has stood as a barrier to necessary reform.
Sexual Misconduct And Congressional Self-Governance, John M. Greabe
Sexual Misconduct And Congressional Self-Governance, John M. Greabe
Law Faculty Scholarship
[Excerpt] "Over the past year, a number of prominent politicians (including President Donald Trump) have been publicly accused of serious sexual misconduct and abuse of power. The question therefore has arisen: Can these politicians either be barred from taking office or removed from office on the basis of these accusations?
There is only way to remove a sitting president: impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by the Senate. But the topic of impeaching and removing a president warrants its own column. This column will instead focus on what Congress may do when its members and members-elect face charges …
Agenda-Setting In The Regulatory State: Theory And Evidence, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters
Agenda-Setting In The Regulatory State: Theory And Evidence, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters
All Faculty Scholarship
Government officials who run administrative agencies must make countless decisions every day about what issues and work to prioritize. These agenda-setting decisions hold enormous implications for the shape of law and public policy, but they have received remarkably little attention by either administrative law scholars or social scientists who study the bureaucracy. Existing research offers few insights about the institutions, norms, and inputs that shape and constrain agency discretion over their agendas or about the strategies that officials employ in choosing to elevate certain issues while putting others on the back burner. In this article, we advance the study of …
Strategic Behavior And Variation In The Supreme Court’S Caseload Over Time, Kenneth W. Moffett, Forrest Maltzman, Karen Miranda, Charles R. Shipan
Strategic Behavior And Variation In The Supreme Court’S Caseload Over Time, Kenneth W. Moffett, Forrest Maltzman, Karen Miranda, Charles R. Shipan
SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity
Over the past sixty years, the size of the Supreme Court’s docket has varied tremendously, growing at some points in time and shrinking at others. What accounts for this variation in the size of the docket? We focus on two key strategic factors – the predictability of outcomes within the Court, and whether justices consider the potential actions of other political institutions – and assess whether these factors help to explain the variation in docket size over time. We discover that uncertainty and institutional constraints prevent the Court from choosing cases with complete freedom, even after accounting for other potential …
A Functional Theory Of Congressional Standing, Jonathan R. Nash
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 …
Procedure, Politics And Power: The Role Of Congress, Stephen B. Burbank
Procedure, Politics And Power: The Role Of Congress, Stephen B. Burbank
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Term Limits On Original Intent--An Essay On Legal Debate And Historical Understanding, Polly J. Price
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 …
Bonding, Structure And The Stability Of Political Parties: Party Government In The House, Gary W. Cox, Mathew D. Mccubbins
Bonding, Structure And The Stability Of Political Parties: Party Government In The House, Gary W. Cox, Mathew D. Mccubbins
Faculty Scholarship
The public policy benefits that parties-deliver are allocated by democratic procedures that devolve ultimately to majority rule. Majority-rule decision making, however, does not lead to consistent policy choices; it is "unstable." In this paper, we argue that institutions - and thereby policy coalitions -- can be stabilized by extra-legislative organization. The rules of the Democratic Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives dictate that a requirement for continued membership is support on the floor of Caucus decisions for a variety of key structural matters. Because membership in the majority party’s caucus is valuable, it constitutes a bond, the posting of …