Law Commons^™

Congressional Authority To Interpret The Thirteenth Amendment: A Response To Professor Tsesis, Jennifer Mason Mcaward

Journal Articles

This essay explores the proper scope of Congress’s power to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition on slavery and involuntary servitude. It reviews the historical context surrounding the drafting of the Thirteenth Amendment enforcement power, and it points to structural constitutional considerations relevant to the understanding of that power. It concludes by suggesting some related topics that deserve further exploration.

White Cartels, The Civil Rights Act Of 1866, And The History Of Jones V. Alfred H. Mayer Co., Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

In 2008, Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. turned forty. In Jones, the U.S. Supreme Court held for the first time that Congress can use its enforcement power under the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, to prohibit private racial discrimination in the sale of property. Jones temporarily awoke the Thirteenth Amendment and its enforcement legislation--the Civil Rights Act of 1866--from a century-long slumber. Moreover, it recognized an economic reality: racial discrimination by private actors can be as debilitating as racial discrimination by public actors. In doing so, Jones veered away from three decades of civil rights doctrine--a doctrine that had …

Congress's Power To Enforce Fourteenth Amendment Rights: Lessons From Federal Remedies The Framers Enacted , Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Robert Kaczorowski argues for an expansive originalist interpretation of Congressional power under the Fourteenth Amendment. Before the Civil War Congress actually exercised, and the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld plenary Congressional power to enforce the constitutional rights of slaveholders. After the Civil War, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment copied the antebellum statutes and exercised plenary power to enforce the constitutional rights of all American citizens when they enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and then incorporated the Act into the Fourteenth Amendment. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment thereby exercised the plenary power the Rehnquist Court claims the …

Chase Court And Fundamental Rights: A Watershed In American Constitutionalism, The , Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

Three weeks before he died in May 1873, the frail and ailing Salmon P. Chase joined three of his brethren in dissent in one of the most important cases ever decided by the United States Supreme Court, the Slaughter-House Cases.1 This decision was a watershed in United States constitutional history for several reasons. Doctrinally, it represented a rejection of the virtually unanimous decisions of the lower federal courts upholding the constitutionality of revolutionary federal civil rights laws enacted in the aftermath of the Civil War. Institutionally, it was an example of extraordinary judicial activism in overriding the legislative will of …

The Importance Of Section 1981, Theodore Eisenberg, Stewart J. Schwab

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Enforcement Provisions Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1866: A Legislative History In Light Of Runyon V. Mccrary, The Review Essay And Comments: Reconstructing Reconstruction, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this Comment is to examine the history of the enactment and early enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 from the perspective of the remedies Congress sought to provide to meet the problems that necessitated the legislation. Its main foci are the statute's enforcement provisions and their early implementation, an aspect of the history of the statute that has not been fully considered in relation to section one, the provision that has received the most scholarly attention. The occasion of this study is the Supreme Court's reconsideration of Runyon v. McCrary' in Patterson v. McLean Credit …

Revolutionary Constitutionalism In The Era Of The Civil War And Reconstruction , Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

The meaning and scope of the fourteenth amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 remain among the most controversial issues in American constitutional law. Professor Kaczorowski contends that the issues have generated more controversy than they warrant, in part because scholars analyzing the legislative history of the amendment and statute have approached their task with preconceptions reflecting twentieth century legal concerns. He argues that the most important question for the framers was whether national or state governments possessed primary authority to determine and secure the status and rights of American citizens. Relying on records of the congressional debates as …