Law Commons^™

Constitutional Rights Before Realism, Jud Campbell

Law Faculty Publications

This Essay excavates a forgotten way of thinking about the relationship between state and federal constitutional rights that was prevalent from the Founding through the early twentieth century. Prior to the ascendancy of legal realism, American jurists understood most fundamental rights as a species of general law that applied across jurisdictional lines, regardless of whether these rights were constitutionally enumerated. And like other forms of general law, state and federal courts shared responsibility for interpreting and enforcing these rights. Nor did the Fourteenth Amendment initially disrupt this paradigm in ways that we might expect. Rather than viewing rights secured by …

Mcculloch V. Madison: John Marshall's Effort To Bury Madisonian Federalism, Kurt T. Lash

Law Faculty Publications

"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 …

Conceptualizing Appealability: Resisting The Supreme Court's Categorical Imperative, Richard L. Heppner Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

This paper draws on insights from cognitive psychology to understand how courts conceive of categories of orders. Cognitive psychologists have shown that people understand the world using not only "classical categories" based on logical definitions, but also "conceptual categories" based on fuzzier, intuitive concepts of similarity and typicality. This paper approaches appealability as a two-step process-first, categorizing the order and, second, applying the appropriate doctrine. Previous interventions have focused on whether different doctrines use rules or standards at the second step. This paper focuses on the initial categorization step.

This paper makes two contributions to the study of federal appealability. …

Ai Report: Humanity Is Doomed. Send Lawyers, Guns, And Money!, Ashley M. London

Law Faculty Publications

AI systems are powerful technologies being built and implemented by private corporations motivated by profit, not altruism. Change makers, such as attorneys and law students, must therefore be educated on the benefits, detriments, and pitfalls of the rapid spread, and often secret implementation of this technology. The implementation is secret because private corporations place proprietary AI systems inside of black boxes to conceal what is inside. If they did not, the popular myth that AI systems are unbiased machines crunching inherently objective data would be revealed as a falsehood. Algorithms created to run AI systems reflect the inherent human categorization …