Law Commons^™

Can A Politician Block You On Social Media?, Alan E. Garfield

Alan E Garfield

No abstract provided.

All Things To All People, Part One, Peter J. Aschenbrenner

Peter J. Aschenbrenner

Our Constitutional Logic has identified the fundamental predicate of Government I, which operated, more or less, under Constitution I, the Constutiton of the year One, as a disposable government. See The Standard Model at War, 17 OCL 350. if government asserts, affirmatively, that it is disposable, isn’t it also asserting that it can replicate its systems (= structures political society) at will? OCL builds on its assertion of political society as a three-goaled contrivance. See Why Do Political Societies Exist? 2 OCL 883. Isn’t such a government asserting the primacy of the needs of civil society? By offering to dispose …

Does The Second Amendment Protect Firearms Commerce?, David B. Kopel

David B Kopel

The Second Amendment protects the operation of businesses which provide Second Amendment services, including gun stores. Although lower federal courts have split on the issue, the right of firearms commerce is demonstrated by the original history of the Second Amendment, confirmed by the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller, and consistent with the Court's precedents on other individual rights.

How Do We Know When Political Societies Change?, Peter Aschenbrenner

Peter J. Aschenbrenner

Predicates, features, attributes and properties of a system are liable to change. How does the change get marked down? For this purpose what facet of a system should command our attention? Any system worth the name, Our Constitutional Logic argues, is aware of its own standing in civil society. OCL considers the issues raised.

The Gross Injustices Of Capital Punishment: A Torturous Practice And Justice Thurgood Marshall’S Astute Appraisal Of The Death Penalty’S Cruelty, Discriminatory Use, And Unconstitutionality, John D. Bessler

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Through the centuries, capital punishment and torture have been used by monarchs, authoritarian regimes, and judicial systems around the world. Although torture is now expressly outlawed by international law, capital punishment—questioned by Quakers in the seventeenth century and by the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria and many others in the following century—has been authorized over time by various legislative bodies, including in the United States. It was Beccaria’s book, Dei delitti e delle pene (1764), translated into French and then into English as An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1767), that fueled the still-ongoing international movement to outlaw the death penalty. …

The Court And Capital Punishment On Different Paths: Abolition In Waiting, Carol S. Steiker, Jordan M. Steiker

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

The American death penalty finds itself in an unusual position. On the ground, the practice is weaker than at any other time in our history. Eleven jurisdictions have abandoned the death penalty over the past fifteen years, almost doubling the number of states without the punishment (twenty-three). Executions have declined substantially, totaling twenty-five or fewer a year nationwide for the past six years, compared to an average of seventy-seven a year during the six-year span around the millennium (1997-2002). Most tellingly, death sentences have fallen off a cliff, with fewer the fifty death sentences a year nationwide over the past …

Privacy And Property: Constitutional Concerns Of Dna Dragnet Testing, E. Wyatt Jones

Honors Projects

DNA dragnets have attracted both public and scholarly criticisms that have yet to be resolved by the Courts. This review will introduce a modern understanding of DNA analysis, a complete introduction to past and present Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, and existing suggestions concerning similar issues in legal scholarship. Considering these contexts, this review concludes that a focus on privacy and property at once, with a particular sensitivity to the inseverable relationship between the two interests, is Constitutionally consistent with precedent and the most workable means of answering the question at hand.

Clifford Awarded Ostrom Fellowship, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

A 2L from Indianapolis has been awarded a prestigious graduate fellowship from The Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University.

Nick Clifford will begin a one-year Ostrom Fellowship in Fall 2023.

A Government Of Laws And Not Of Men: Why Justice Brandeis Was Right To Assume Congress Can Restrain The President's Removal Power, Danielle Rosenblum

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

Since the Founding, the extent of the president’s power to remove executive officials from office remains unsettled. While the Appointments Clause in Article II, Section 2 empowers Congress to participate in the hiring of executive officials, the United States Constitution’s text is silent on whether Congress can limit the president’s ability to fire such employees. The debate on the proper scope of the president’s removal power is significant because it serves as a proxy for a larger constitutional question: whether constraints on presidential power advance or sit in tension with democracy. This Article argues that Justice Brandeis was right to …

A Modern-Day 3/5 Compromise: The Case For Finding Prison Gerrymandering Unconstitutional Under The Thirteenth Amendment, Shana Iden

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

Vestiges of slavery and systemic disenfranchisement of people of color persist in the United States. One of these remnants is the practice of prison gerrymandering, which occurs when government officials count incarcerated individuals as part of the population of the prison’s location rather than the individual’s home district. This Article argues that prison gerrymandering functions as a badge of slavery that should be prohibited under the Thirteenth Amendment.

First, this Article provides background on prison gerrymandering and charts its impact through history, particularly on Black communities. Moreover, this Article analyzes how litigation under the Fourteenth Amendment has not yielded meaningful …

A Constitutional Right To Early Voting, David Schultz

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

Voting is a cost-benefit decision. Individuals are more likely to vote if the benefits of doing so outweigh the disadvantages. With early voting laws eased due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 election demonstrated that turnout increases when elected officials reduce voting costs. Despite all the benefits of early voting, there is no constitutional right, and it remains a privilege that state legislatures can revoke at will.

Since the 2020 election, state legislatures have proposed—and enacted—hundreds of bills to change voting rules. But with the intense partisan disagreement over voting, coupled with political polarization reaching an apex, these acts restricting …

The Looming Threat Of The Independent State Legislature Theory And The Erosion Of The Voting Rights Act: It Is Time To Enshrine The Right To Vote, Javon Davis

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

Over the last decade, the emergence of an imperial United States Supreme Court—currently armed with the largest conservative majority since the 1930s—has radically reshaped federal voting rights protections. During the litigation surrounding the 2020 election, however, an obscure threat reemerged. The fringe independent state legislature (“ISL”) theory is a potentially revolutionary constitutional theory that could lead to widespread voter disenfranchisement. Proponents of the theory, including Supreme Court Justices, posit, in part, that the United States Constitution vests state legislatures with plenary power to construct rules for federal elections—unbound by state constitutions and free from state judicial review.

Once a refuge …

Citizen Enforcement Laws Threaten Democracy, David A. Carrillo, Stephen M. Duvernay

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

No abstract provided.

Rucho In The State: Districting Cases And The Nature Of State Judicial Power, Chad M. Oldfather

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

No abstract provided.

Public School Teachers Who Refuse To Use Preferred Names And Pronouns: A Brief Exploration Of The First Amendment Limitations In K-12 Classrooms, Suzanne Eckes

ConLawNOW

This article focuses on whether a teacher has a First Amendment right under both the free speech and free exercise clauses of the U.S. Constitution when refusing to use a student’s preferred name or pronoun in a public school classroom. The article begins by briefly summarizing a recent case from Kansas and then examines prior precedent involving teachers’ classroom speech and teachers’ rights to freely exercise their religious rights in public schools. It then briefly highlights how these issues have been addressed in previous pronoun cases and concludes with a discussion of related constitutional issues.

Abortion Rights And Federalism: Some Lessons From The Nineteenth Century United States, Kate Masur

ConLawNOW

The Dobbs decision, which gives states complete control over abortion laws, has unleashed conflicts that resemble the battles that arose when enslaved people fled slave states for free states, and enslavers, in turn, mobilized state and federal power to get them back. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has prompted frequent allusions to slavery and the antebellum United States. The history of those struggles reminds us of the corrosive impact of interstate conflict and of the importance of federal protections for freedom and individual rights. The history of the United States in the nineteenth century …

Symposium: The Future Of Reproductive Rights: Reevaluating Regional Law Reform Strategies After Dobbs, Jamie R. Abrams

ConLawNOW

This article studies the triad of 2016 social media campaigns known as “#AskDr.Kasich,” “#askbevinaboutmyvag,” and “#PeriodsforPence” to garner insights to inform the vital work of regional law reform in a post-Dobbs America. While these campaigns, each located in the regional mid-South, were motivated by restrictive state abortion bills, they uniquely positioned menstruation and women’s bodies at the center of their activism—not abortion alone. They leveraged, as a political fault line, the contradiction of these states’ governors’ perceived disgust relating to basic women’s reproductive health, relative to their patriarchal assuredness in regulating and controlling women’s bodies. In so doing, they …

Concerning United States Constitutional War Powers, Marcus Armstrong

St. Mary's Law Journal

The United States faces a future in which the possibility of a conventional, great-power conflict is elevated. This is because of a constitutional interpretation that has altered United States constitutional war powers significantly. Specifically, the interpretation gives the president the authority to initiate and escalate war or hostilities unilaterally. In this Article, I reexamine that specific historical interpretation and find it wanting. I then offer a different historical interpretation, drawing upon other contemporary writers as well as upon historical events in order to give a more complete and nuanced understanding of the context in which the early American leaders developed …

Texas Disaster Act And The Covid-19 Pandemic: The Validity Of School Mask Mandates And How The Texas Supreme Court Engaged In A Legal And Ethical Disaster, Ron Beal

St. Mary's Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Silencing Students: How Courts Have Failed To Protect Professional Students’ First Amendment Speech Rights, Shanelle Doher

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

Over the past two decades, social media has dramatically changed the way people communicate. With the increased popularity of virtual communication, online speech has, in many ways, blurred the boundaries for where and when speech begins and ends. The distinction between on campus and off campus student speech has become particularly murky given the normalization of virtual learning environments as a result of the COVID 19 pandemic. In Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the Supreme Court clarified that students retain their First Amendment rights on campus but that schools may sanction speech that materially and substantially …

Internally Displaced Persons: Ordeals And Analyses Of The Possible Regimes Of Legal Protection Frameworks, Olawale Ogunmodimu

St. Mary's Law Journal

This present global community is complicated because of anxiety and uncertainty. It is thoroughly interconnected yet intricately partitioned. Pivotally, one could argue that the centrality to this global anxiety is identity and belonging. People want to identify with and belong to a political system, territory, and culture. It seems that there is a present world that mirrors the political emergence of the interwar period that had nationalism on the rise. There is hostility to non-citizens globally, whether as refugees, internally displaced peoples (IDPs), or immigrants seeking to join new political communities. This Article explains the difficulties that ensue from being …

Endnotes

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Using Federal Public Lands To Model A New Energy Future: Why The Biden Administration Should Prioritize Renewable Energy Development On Public Lands, Meghen Sullivan

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

Oil and gas extraction on public lands and waters is responsible for twenty percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. If American public lands were their own country, they would be the fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world. As of 2020, only twenty percent of total U.S. electricity generation came from renewable energy sources. While renewable energy development on public lands has increased, most renewable energy comes from private lands. However, public lands contain immense renewable energy potential; for example, it is estimated that half of this country’s geothermal resources are found on public lands. Despite underutilized renewable energy potential …

Crumbling Crown Jewels: Addressing The Impact Of Recreational Overuse In America's National Parks, Ellen Spicer

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

National Parks are the “crown jewels” of America. However, in recent years they have become subjected to rampant overcrowding and overuse, so much so that they are being loved to death. The 1916 National Park Service (“NPS”) Organic Act calls for the conservation of “the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life . . . and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave [park sites] unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” Due to increased visitation, one of the mandates of the NPS is being …

Pedal Into The Future, Elliot Wiley

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

Congress severely weakened the Electric Bicycle Incentive Kickstart for the Environment Act (E-Bike Act) when the bill was absorbed into the Build Back Better Bill. Electricity is the future, yet Congress has defanged a bill that could create significant progress in making bicycling a more accessible option for commuters.

Making Room For The Past In The Future: Managing Urban Development With Cultural Heritage Preservation, Kubra Guzin Babaturk

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

Few would disagree that art and architecture are indispensable aspects of the collective human experiences. But can there be “too much” of it? How much is “too much?” Could art and cultural heritage be a hindrance to progress, urbanization, and sustainability? Which art is worth saving? A growing question is how to balance and reconcile expanding urban needs with efforts to preserve cultural heritage. Many cities across the global face this fresh moral dilemma. Cities like Istanbul, Rome, and Cairo––heirs to great empires, with history and art cursing through every alley, are still modern-day metropolises, with ever-burgeoning populations and social …

Toward A Utah Intentionally Created Surplus Program, Devin Stelter

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

The Colorado River Basin continues to face a now two decade-long drought sparked by the drastic effects of climate change on the region. Climate forecasting predicts that the adverse effects of climate change will only increase in severity in years to come. These effects have led federal, state, tribal, and private actors operating in the basin to search for innovative and effective solutions to the significant water scarcity problems that will persist into the future. A closely linked threat stemming from Colorado River water scarcity is the prospect of a “Compact call” on Upper Basin water by the Lower Basin …

About Sdlp, Sdlp

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

The Sustainable Development Law & Policy Brief (ISSN 1552-3721) is a student-run initiative at American University Washington College of Law that is published twice each academic year. The Brief embraces an interdisciplinary focus to provide a broad view of current legal, political, and social developments. It was founded to provide a forum for those interested in promoting sustainable economic development, conservation, environmental justice, and biodiversity throughout the world.

Editor's Note, Juliette Jackson, Bailey Nickoloff

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

The Sustainable Development Law and Policy Brief (“SDLP”) is celebrating twenty-two years of legal scholarship on issues related to environmental, energy, natural resources, and international development law. SDLP continues to provide cutting-edge solutions to these legal issues in the face of the global COVID-19 Pandemic, while also transitioning back into a “new normal.” This issue is no different, as we published articles challenging our lawmakers and policy heads to address the impending needs of our communities to develop more sustainable infrastructure—needs that are only exacerbated by man-made climate change. We are proud of the work published, and we are forever …

Symposium: The Future Of Reproductive Rights: Dobbs And Unenumerated Parental Custody Rights And Interests, Jeffrey A. Parness

ConLawNOW

This article addresses issues involving custodial parents after Dobbs. It first briefly describes the federal constitutional right to an interest in custodial parentage under pre-Dobbs U.S. Supreme Court precedents. It finds few precedents on defining parents at birth and no precedents on defining parentage arising from post-birth acts. The paper then reviews Dobbs, particularly its varying takes on unenumerated constitutional rights. Finally, it explores how Dobbs should influence future precedents on federal constitutional custodial parentage that arises either at birth or after birth. It urges federal courts to expand custodial parentage in light of societal changes in …