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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Executive Power Of Constitutional Interpretation, Gary S. Lawson, Christopher D. Moore
The Executive Power Of Constitutional Interpretation, Gary S. Lawson, Christopher D. Moore
Faculty Scholarship
It is emphatically the province and duty of the President to say what the law is, including the law embodied in the Federal Constitution. In the mid-1980s, a claim of this sort would have been received by the legal intelligentsia with some combination of bemusement and outrage. One would have heard, loudly and often, that it is the special province of the federal courts to declare the meaning of the Constitution, -Lnd that any attempt to question the judiciary's supreme interpretative role, especially in favor of an interpretative role for the President, was an attack on the rule of law …
We The Exceptional American People, James E. Fleming
We The Exceptional American People, James E. Fleming
Faculty Scholarship
I. INTRODUCTION: "AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM" There is an academic movement afoot-one with a long historical pedigree-to attribute the vitality of the American constitutional order to "American exceptionalism." The most prominent representative of this school of thought is Bruce Ackerman, whose We the People opens with a jeremiad against the "Europeanization" of American constitutional theory and urges us as Americans to "look inward" to rediscover our distinctive patterns, practices, and ideals.2 He maps the terrain of theory as being divided into monists ("Anglophiles"), rights foundationalists ("Germanophiles"), and dualists (red-blooded Americans).3 Only dualists have the "strength" to declare our American independence from British …
An Interpretivist Agenda, Gary S. Lawson
An Interpretivist Agenda, Gary S. Lawson
Faculty Scholarship
As I write these words, bevies of law clerks assigned to cases involving the Bill of Rights are dutifully editing their bench memos for publication in the national reporter system. Once printed, these bench memos will be solemnly treated by lawyers, scholars, other law clerks, and the occasional judge who runs across them as legally significant, or even binding, interpretations of the Constitution. Two features of this burgeoning mass of otherwise unpublishable law review comments bear mention. First, most of them are tedious, tendentious, pretentious, and badly reasoned when reasoned at all, just as one would expect from authors who …
A Preface To Constitutional Theory, David B. Lyons
A Preface To Constitutional Theory, David B. Lyons
Faculty Scholarship
We have a plethora of theories about judicial review, including theories about theories, but their foundations require stricter scrutiny. This Essay presents some aspects of the problem through an examination of two important and familiar ideas about judicial review.
The controversy over "noninterpretive" review concerns the propriety of courts' deciding constitutional cases by using extraconstitutional norms. But the theoretical framework has not been well developed and appears to raise the wrong questions about judicial review. Thayer's doctrine of extreme judicial deference to the legislature has received much attention, but his reasoning has been given less careful notice. Thayer's rule rests …
The Intellectual Development Of The American Doctrine Of Judicial Review, Pnina Lahav
The Intellectual Development Of The American Doctrine Of Judicial Review, Pnina Lahav
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
A Critique Of John Hart Ely's Quest For The Ultimate Constitutional Interpretivism Of Representative Democracy, James E. Fleming
A Critique Of John Hart Ely's Quest For The Ultimate Constitutional Interpretivism Of Representative Democracy, James E. Fleming
Faculty Scholarship
Contemporary constitutional theory, John Hart Ely argues in Democracy and Distrust, is dominated by a false dichotomy between "clause-bound interpretivism" and "noninterpretivism." Clausebound interpretivists, such as the late Justice Hugo Black, believe that "judges deciding constitutional issues should confine themselves to enforcing norms that are stated or clearly implicit in the written Constitution" (p. 1). Noninterpretivists, such as the Supreme Court that produced the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade,2 contend that "courts should go beyond that set of references and enforce [substantive] norms that cannot be discovered within the four comers of the document" (p. 1). The genius of …