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Full-Text Articles in Law

The New Gender Panic In Sport: Why State Laws Banning Transgender Athletes Are Unconstitutional, Deborah Brake Jan 2024

The New Gender Panic In Sport: Why State Laws Banning Transgender Athletes Are Unconstitutional, Deborah Brake

Articles

The scope and pace of legislative activity targeting transgender individuals is nothing short of a gender panic. From restrictions on medical care to the regulation of library books and the use of pronouns in schools, attacks on the transgender community have reached crisis proportions. A growing number of families with transgender children are being forced to leave their states of residence to keep their children healthy and their families safe and intact. The breadth and pace of these developments is striking. Although the anti-transgender backlash now extends broadly into health and family governance, sport was one of the first settings—the …


For Richer Or Poorer: The Warren Court's Relationship To Socioeconomic Class, Nicole Jonassen Jan 2024

For Richer Or Poorer: The Warren Court's Relationship To Socioeconomic Class, Nicole Jonassen

CMC Senior Theses

The U.S. Constitution does not enshrine socioeconomic rights. Why does this matter? Many argue that socioeconomic rights have value in and of themselves because they secure certain minimum conditions of human dignity, but socioeconomic rights also have instrumental value because abject material deprivation often makes traditional political and civil rights meaningless. In this thesis, I explore the relationship between U.S. constitutional law and socioeconomic rights through an analysis of the Warren Court’s decisions regarding socioeconomic class. In Chapter 1, I present existing literature on socioeconomic rights, socioeconomic rights in the American context, and what many scholars see as the Warren …


Deities’ Rights?, Deepa Das Acevedo Jan 2023

Deities’ Rights?, Deepa Das Acevedo

Faculty Articles

A brief commotion arose during the hearings for one of twenty-first-century India’s most widely discussed legal disputes, when a dynamic young attorney suggested that deities, too, had constitutional rights. The suggestion was not absurd. Like a human being or a corporation, Hindu temple deities can participate in litigation, incur financial obligations, and own property. There was nothing to suggest, said the attorney, that the same deity who enjoyed many of the rights and obligations accorded to human persons could not also lay claim to some of their constitutional freedoms. The lone justice to consider this claim blandly and briefly observed …


American Religious Liberty Without (Much) Theory: A Review Of Religion And The American Constitutional Experiment, 5th Edition, Nathan S. Chapman Jan 2023

American Religious Liberty Without (Much) Theory: A Review Of Religion And The American Constitutional Experiment, 5th Edition, Nathan S. Chapman

Scholarly Works

Book review of Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, 5th ed. By John Witte Jr., Joel A. Nichols, and Richard W. Garnett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 464. $150.00 (cloth); $39.95 (paper); $26.99 (digital). ISBN: 9780197587614.


Keeping Our Distinctions Straight: A Response To “Originalism: Standard And Procedure”, Mitchell N. Berman Jan 2022

Keeping Our Distinctions Straight: A Response To “Originalism: Standard And Procedure”, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

For half a century, moral philosophers have distinguished between a “standard” that makes acts right and a “decision procedure” by which agents can determine whether any given contemplated act is right, which is to say whether it satisfies the standard. In “Originalism: Standard and Procedure,” Stephen Sachs argues that the same distinction applies to the constitutional domain and that clear grasp of the difference strengthens the case for originalism because theorists who emphasize the infirmities of originalism as a decision procedure frequently but mistakenly infer that those flaws also cast doubt on originalism as a standard. This invited response agrees …


The Runaway Presidential Power Over Diplomacy, Jean Galbraith Jan 2022

The Runaway Presidential Power Over Diplomacy, Jean Galbraith

All Faculty Scholarship

The President claims exclusive control over diplomacy within our constitutional system. Relying on this claim, executive branch lawyers repeatedly reject congressional mandates regarding international engagement. In their view, Congress cannot specify what the policy of the United States is with respect to foreign corruption, cannot bar a technology-focused agency from communicating with China, cannot impose notice requirements for withdrawal from a treaty with Russia, cannot instruct Treasury officials how to vote in the World Bank, and cannot require the disclosure of a trade-related report. And these are just a few of many examples from recent years. The President’s assertedly exclusive …


Charles Reich, New Dealer, John Q. Barrett Jan 2021

Charles Reich, New Dealer, John Q. Barrett

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.


Lin-Manuel Miranda And The Future Of Originalism, Richard A. Primus Oct 2020

Lin-Manuel Miranda And The Future Of Originalism, Richard A. Primus

Book Chapters

This chapter discusses how Lin Manuel Miranda's Hamilton: An American Musical is changing the future of originalism. Originalism in constitutional law has recently had a generally conservative valence not because the Founders were an eighteenth-century version of the Federalist Society, but because readings of Founding era sources that favored right-leaning causes were generally predominant in the community of constitutional lawyers. Since 2015, however, the millions of Americans who have listened obsessively to Hamilton's cast album or packed theaters to see the show in person have been absorbing a new vision of the Founding. The blockbuster musical narrative has retold America's …


Burying Mcculloch?, David S. Schwartz Sep 2020

Burying Mcculloch?, David S. Schwartz

Arkansas Law Review

Kurt Lash is a superb constitutional historian trapped inside the body of an originalist. He is one of the few originalists bold enough to acknowledge that McCulloch v. Maryland needs to be ejected from the (conservative) originalist canon of great constitutional cases. While he attributes to me an intention “not to praise the mythological McCulloch, but to bury it,” it is Lash who seeks to bury McCulloch, which he views as a fraudulent “story of our constitutional origins.”


Mcculloch V. Madison: John Marshall's Effort To Bury Madisonian Federalism, Kurt Lash Sep 2020

Mcculloch V. Madison: John Marshall's Effort To Bury Madisonian Federalism, Kurt Lash

Arkansas Law Review

In his engaging and provocative new book, The Spirit of the Constitution: John Marshall and the 200-Year Odyssey of McCulloch v. Maryland, David S. Schwartz challenges McCulloch’s canonical status as a foundation stone in the building of American constitutional law. According to Schwartz, the fortunes of McCulloch ebbed and flowed depending on the politics of the day and the ideological commitments of Supreme Court justices. Judicial reliance on the case might disappear for a generation only to suddenly reappear in the next. If McCulloch v. Maryland enjoys pride of place in contemporary courses on constitutional law, Schwartz argues, then this …


Does Importance Equal Greatness? Reflections On John Marshall And Mcculloch V. Maryland, Sanford Levinson Sep 2020

Does Importance Equal Greatness? Reflections On John Marshall And Mcculloch V. Maryland, Sanford Levinson

Arkansas Law Review

David S. Schwartz’s The Spirit of the Constitution: John Marshall and the 200-Year Odyssey of McCulloch v. Maryland, is a truly excellent book, for which I was happy to contribute the following blurb appearing on the back jacket: "David Schwartz has written an indispensable study of thesingle most important Supreme Court case in the canon. As such, he delineates not only the meaning and importance of the case in 1819, but also the use made of it over the next two centuries as it became a central myth and symbol of the very meaning of American constitutionalism.”


The Poverty Law Education Of Charles Reich, Felicia Kornbluh, Karen Tani Jan 2020

The Poverty Law Education Of Charles Reich, Felicia Kornbluh, Karen Tani

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay, written for a symposium on the life and legacy of Charles Reich, explores how Reich came to be interested in the field of poverty law and, specifically, the constitutional rights of welfare recipients. The essay emphasizes the influence of two older women in Reich’s life: Justine Wise Polier, the famous New York City family court judge and the mother of one of Reich’s childhood friends, and Elizabeth Wickenden, a contemporary of Polier’s who was a prominent voice in social welfare policymaking and a confidante of high-level federal social welfare administrators. Together, Polier and Wickenden helped educate Reich about …


Our Administered Constitution: Administrative Constitutionalism From The Founding To The Present, Sophia Z. Lee Jun 2019

Our Administered Constitution: Administrative Constitutionalism From The Founding To The Present, Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that administrative agencies have been primary interpreters and implementers of the federal Constitution throughout the history of the United States, although the scale and scope of this "administrative constitutionalism" has changed significantly over time as the balance of opportunities and constraints has shifted. Courts have nonetheless cast an increasingly long shadow over the administered Constitution. In part, this is because of the well-known expansion of judicial review in the 20th century. But the shift has as much to do with changes in the legal profession, legal theory, and lawyers’ roles in agency administration. The result is that …


Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, Dorothy E. Roberts Jan 2019

Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Foreword, I make the case for an abolition constitutionalism that attends to the theorizing of prison abolitionists. In Part I, I provide a summary of prison abolition theory and highlight its foundational tenets that engage with the institution of slavery and its eradication. I discuss how abolition theorists view the current prison industrial complex as originating in, though distinct from, racialized chattel slavery and the racial capitalist regime that relied on and sustained it, and their movement as completing the “unfinished liberation” sought by slavery abolitionists in the past. Part II considers whether the U.S. Constitution is an …


James Wilson As The Architect Of The American Presidency, Christopher S. Yoo Jan 2019

James Wilson As The Architect Of The American Presidency, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

For decades, James Wilson has been something of a “forgotten founder.” The area where commentators generally recognize Wilson’s influence at the Convention is with respect to Article II, which establishes the executive and defines its powers. Most scholars characterize him as a resolute advocate of an independent, energetic, and unitary presidency, and a particularly successful one at that. In this regard, some scholars have generally characterized Wilson’s thinking as overly rigid. Yet a close examination of the Convention reveals Wilson to be more flexible than sometimes characterized. With respect to many aspects of the presidency, including the appointment power, the …


Reconsidering Judicial Independence: Forty-Five Years In The Trenches And In The Tower, Stephen B. Burbank Jan 2019

Reconsidering Judicial Independence: Forty-Five Years In The Trenches And In The Tower, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

Trusting in the integrity of our institutions when they are not under stress, we focus attention on them both when they are under stress or when we need them to protect us against other institutions. In the case of the federal judiciary, the two conditions often coincide. In this essay, I use personal experience to provide practical context for some of the important lessons about judicial independence to be learned from the periods of stress for the federal judiciary I have observed as a lawyer and concerned citizen, and to provide theoretical context for lessons I have deemed significant as …


Book (Oup) Introduction And Overview: A Cosmopolitan Legal Order: Kant, Constitutional Justice, And The European Convention On Human Rights, Alec Stone Sweet Apr 2018

Book (Oup) Introduction And Overview: A Cosmopolitan Legal Order: Kant, Constitutional Justice, And The European Convention On Human Rights, Alec Stone Sweet

Alec Stone Sweet

No abstract provided.


The Loving Story: Using A Documentary To Reconsider The Status Of An Iconic Interracial Married Couple, Regina Austin Jan 2018

The Loving Story: Using A Documentary To Reconsider The Status Of An Iconic Interracial Married Couple, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

The Loving Story (Augusta Films 2011), directed by Nancy Buirski, tells the backstory of the groundbreaking U.S. Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, that overturned state laws barring interracial marriage. The article looks to the documentary to explain why the Lovings should be considered icons of racial and ethnic civil rights, however much they might be associated with marriage equality today. The film shows the Lovings to be ordinary people who took their nearly decade long struggle against white supremacy to the nation’s highest court out of a genuine commitment to each other and a determination to live in …


The Tragedy Of Justice Scalia, Mitchell N. Berman Jan 2017

The Tragedy Of Justice Scalia, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

Justice Antonin Scalia was, by the time of his death last February, the Supreme Court’s best known and most influential member. He was also its most polarizing, a jurist whom most students of American law either love or hate. This essay, styled as a twenty-year retrospective on A Matter of Interpretation, Scalia’s Tanner lectures on statutory and constitutional interpretation, aims to prod partisans on both sides of our central legal and political divisions to better appreciate at least some of what their opponents see—the other side of Scalia’s legacy. Along the way, it critically assesses Scalia’s particular brand of …


Intersectionality And The Constitution Of Family Status, Serena Mayeri Jan 2017

Intersectionality And The Constitution Of Family Status, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

Marital supremacy—the legal privileging of marriage—is, and always has been, deeply intertwined with inequalities of race, class, gender, and region. Many if not most of the plaintiffs who challenged legal discrimination based on family status in the 1960s and 1970s were impoverished women, men, and children of color who made constitutional equality claims. Yet the constitutional law of the family is largely silent about the status-based impact of laws that prefer marriage and disadvantage non-marital families. While some lower courts engaged with race-, sex-, and wealth-based discrimination arguments in family status cases, the Supreme Court largely avoided recognizing, much less …


Finding The Sovereign In Sovereign Immunity: Lessons From Bodin, Hobbes, And Rousseau, David Schraub Dec 2016

Finding The Sovereign In Sovereign Immunity: Lessons From Bodin, Hobbes, And Rousseau, David Schraub

David Schraub

The doctrine of “sovereign immunity” holds that the U.S. government cannot be sued without its consent. This is not found in the Constitution’s text; it is justified on philosophical grounds as inherent to being a sovereign state: a sovereign must be able to issue commands free from constraint. The sources of this understanding of sovereignty—Hobbes, Bodin, and others—are, in turn, condemned by opponents of sovereign immunity as absolutists whose doctrines are incompatible with limited, constitutional government. This debate, and thus the usual conception of sovereign immunity, rests on a fundamental mistake. Hobbes and his peers were careful to avoid the …


Marriage (In)Equality And The Historical Legacies Of Feminism, Serena Mayeri Nov 2015

Marriage (In)Equality And The Historical Legacies Of Feminism, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, I measure the majority’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges against two legacies of second-wave feminist legal advocacy: the largely successful campaign to make civil marriage formally gender-neutral; and the lesser-known struggle against laws and practices that penalized women who lived their lives outside of marriage. Obergefell obliquely acknowledges marriage equality’s debt to the first legacy without explicitly adopting sex equality arguments against same-sex marriage bans. The legacy of feminist campaigns for nonmarital equality, by contrast, is absent from Obergefell’s reasoning and belied by rhetoric that both glorifies marriage and implicitly disparages nonmarriage. Even so, the history …


Law's Religion: Rendering Culture, Benjamin L. Berger Sep 2015

Law's Religion: Rendering Culture, Benjamin L. Berger

Benjamin L. Berger

This article argues that constitutional law's inability to deal with religion in a satisfying way flows, in part, from its failure to understand religion as, in a robust sense, culture. Once one begins to understand the Canadian constitutional rule of law itself as a cultural form, it becomes apparent that law renders religion in a very particular fashion, and that this rendering is a product of law's symbolic categories and interpretive horizons. This article draws out the elements of Canadian constitutionalism's unique rendering of religion and argues that, although Canadian constitutionalism claims to understand religion as a culture, this is …


The President's Wartime Detention Authority : What History Teaches Us, Anirudh Sivaram May 2015

The President's Wartime Detention Authority : What History Teaches Us, Anirudh Sivaram

Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award

This thesis examines the extent of the President’s wartime detention authority over citizens (in particular, detention authority pursuant to Article II of the U.S. Constitution) through a legal-historical lens. Some Presidents (Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, George W. Bush) have historically relied on Article II authority for detention, while others (Ulysses Grant, Barack Obama) have disclaimed the notion that such authority exists. Clarifying the scope and source of the Presidential detention authority over citizens bears both theoretical and real-world relevance. Theoretically, it lies at the confluence of two central American constitutional traditions – the separation of powers, and the protection of …


Judge Posner’S Simple Law, Mitchell N. Berman Jan 2015

Judge Posner’S Simple Law, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

The world is complex, Richard Posner observes in his most recent book, Reflections on Judging. It follows that, to resolve real-world disputes sensibly, judges must be astute students of the world’s complexity. The problem, he says, is that, thanks to disposition, training, and professional incentives, they aren’t. Worse than that, the legal system generates its own complexity precisely to enable judges “to avoid rather than meet and overcome the challenge of complexity” that the world delivers. Reflections concerns how judges needlessly complexify inherently simple law, and how this complexification can be corrected.

Posner’s diagnoses and prescriptions range widely—from the Bluebook …


A Revolution At War With Itself? Preserving Employment Preferences From Weber To Ricci, Sophia Z. Lee Jun 2014

A Revolution At War With Itself? Preserving Employment Preferences From Weber To Ricci, Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Two aspects of the constitutional transformation Bruce Ackerman describes in The Civil Rights Revolution were on a collision course, one whose trajectory has implications for Ackerman’s account and for his broader theory of constitutional change. Ackerman makes a compelling case that what he terms “reverse state action” (the targeting of private actors) and “government by numbers” (the use of statistics to identify and remedy violations of civil rights laws) defined the civil rights revolution. Together they “requir[ed] private actors, as well as state officials, to . . . realize the principles of constitutional equality” and allowed the federal government to …


America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions Of Power And Community, Robert Tsai Mar 2014

America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions Of Power And Community, Robert Tsai

Robert L Tsai

The U.S. Constitution opens by proclaiming the sovereignty of all citizens: "We the People." Robert Tsai's gripping history of alternative constitutions invites readers into the circle of those who have rejected this ringing assertion--the defiant groups that refused to accept the Constitution's definition of who "the people" are and how their authority should be exercised. America's Forgotten Constitutions is the story of America as told by dissenters: squatters, Native Americans, abolitionists, socialists, internationalists, and racial nationalists. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Tsai chronicles eight episodes in which discontented citizens took the extraordinary step of drafting a new constitution. He examines …


Keynote Address: Untying The Moral Knot Of Abortion, Caitlin E. Borgmann Mar 2014

Keynote Address: Untying The Moral Knot Of Abortion, Caitlin E. Borgmann

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.


Innocent Burdens, James Edwin Mahon Mar 2014

Innocent Burdens, James Edwin Mahon

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.


The Origins And Meaning Of “Vacancies That May Happen During The Recess” In The Constitution’S Recess Appointments Clause, Robert G. Natelson Jan 2014

The Origins And Meaning Of “Vacancies That May Happen During The Recess” In The Constitution’S Recess Appointments Clause, Robert G. Natelson

Robert G. Natelson

There has been longstanding uncertainty about the meaning of “the Recess” and “Vacancies that may happen” in the Constitution’s Recess Appointments Clause. This Article finds that both “the Recess” and close variants of “Vacancies that may happen” were standard terms in Founding-Era legislative practice, and appear copiously in legislative records. Those records inform us that “the Recess” means only the intersession recess and that a vacancy “happens” only when it first arises.