Law Commons^™

Ten Years Of Takings, Gregory S. Alexander

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No area of property law has been more controversial in the past decade than takings. No aspect of constitutional law more sharply poses the dilemma about the legitimate powers of the regulatory state than the just compensation question. No question concerning constitutional property is more intractable than what sorts of government regulatory actions constitute uncompensated "takings" of private property.

Limitations of space, not to mention my own ambivalence about many of the issues, prevent me from developing a complete normative theory of the proper scope of the Takings Clause. My aim here is vastly more modest: to outline the basic …

The Constitution And Racial Preference In Law School Admissions, Robert A. Sedler

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

The Failure Of The Religious Freedom Restoration Act Under Section 5 Of The Fourteenth Amendment, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Should Students Have Constitutional Rights? Keeping Order In The Public Schools, Anne Proffitt Dupre

Scholarly Works

This Article focuses on how the Supreme Court's conception of the public school as either an institution of social reproduction or reconstruction, a conflict Professor Dupre maintains is deeply rooted in intellectual history, has affected the power that public schools have been afforded in matters of discipline and order. Professor Dupre argues that the Court -- by allowing the reconstruction model to influence its opinion for almost thirty years -- paved the way for the decline in school order and educational quality. Although Professor Dupre contends that the Court's recent repudiation of the reconstruction model in Vernonia School District 47J …

Section 8: Federalism, Institute Of Bill Of Rights Law, William & Mary Law School

Supreme Court Preview

No abstract provided.

Copyright And Free Speech Rights, L. Ray Patterson, Stanley F. Birch, Jr.

Scholarly Works

By letter of 1 March 1993, the Copyright Compliance Office of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) informed a copyshop that it had “without prior permission, made multiple copies of excerpts of copyrighted works for distribution to students in course anthologies.” Stating that this copying was an infringement of copyright, the letter requested the copyshop to sign an enclosed agreement stating it would not commit such acts again and to pay a penalty of “$2,500 to help defray the costs of the AAP's copyright enforcement program in this matter and to impress on your business the need to operate in …

Native American Life Stories And "Authorship": Legal And Ethical Issues, Lenora P. Ledwon

Faculty Articles

Juridical discourse concerning life stories has been primarily concerned with property and contract issues, and categories such as "ownership" and "authorship." Such legal discourse generally fails to acknowledge the unique nature of Native American life stories, particularly when such stories are written in collaboration with a non-Native editor or transcriber. This essay focuses on one fundamental question with overlapping legal and ethical aspects: how does a non-Native collaborator avoid a colonizing relationship to Native American texts? In suggesting possible answers to this vexing question, I always have on the horizon of my mind's eye two figures-Emmanuel Levinas, the philosopher, and …

Under Fire: The New Consensus On The Second Amendment, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Until the early 1980s the Second Amendment had received little attention or interest from legal scholars. In 1981 Northwestern University law professor Daniel D. Polsby ridiculed the individual rights view of the Amendment as "a lot of horsedung."

Research conducted through the 1980s has led legal scholars and historians to conclude, sometimes reluctantly, but with virtual unanimity, that there is no tenable textual or historical argument against a broad individual right view of the Second Amendment.

According to the broad individual right view, the right of the people to keep and bear arms is to be treated the same as …

Innocence, Privacy, And Targeting In Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence, Sherry F. Colb

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Administrative Rulemaking (Testimony), David Schoenbrod

Other Publications

This post originally appeared on https://www.cato.org/publications/congressional-testimony/administrative-rulemaking

Courting Disrespect, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals

The Illiberal Court, David F. Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Justice Scalia casts up a dire warning that not only has the Supreme Court in many ways removed the Constitution from the Framers, it is also removing the democratic process from the people and their representatives.

The Standard Of Review For The Voluntariness Of A Confession On Direct Appeal In Federal Court, Peter B. Rutledge

Scholarly Works

Section I of this Comment reviews the Supreme Court's jurisprudence on confessions, provides a close reading of Miller v. Finton, 474 U.S. 104 (1985), and reviews the division among the federal circuits over the standard of review for voluntariness determinations on direct appeal. Section II analyzes the literature on standards of review and focuses on two vexing problems in this field-the application of law to fact (hereinafter "mixed questions") and the constitutional fact doctrine. These two issues frame the analysis of voluntariness determinations. Section III analyzes these determinations and defends the application of de novo review in cases on …

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 …

A Feminist Revisit To The First-Year Curriculum, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Commerce Clause Restraints On State Business Development Incentives, Walter Hellerstein, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

In this Article, we explore the ill-defined distinction between the constitutional carrot and the unconstitutional stick in state tax, subsidy, and related cases. Part I examines the restraints that the Commerce Clause imposes on state tax incentives. It canvasses the general principles limiting discriminatory state taxation, explores the Court's decisions addressing state tax incentives, and proposes a framework of analysis for adjudicating the validity of such incentives. Part I concludes by considering the constitutionality of a variety of state tax incentives within our suggested framework and also under alternative approaches that courts might utilize. Part II examines the restraints that …

The Slavery Of Emancipation, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

The Thirteenth Amendment abolishes the institution of slavery rather than freeing individual slaves. Yet it quickly came to stand for little more than granting universal rights to make labor contracts and to leave service. This article develops a distinction between abolishing an institution and reclassifying individuals within it. Drawing on the comparative history of slavery, it shows that the institution of slavery has generally included mechanisms for the manumission of slaves and their passage into a liminal status combining self-ownership with social subordination and relative isolation. A critical account of the Antelope litigation shows that proponents of mass manumission still …

The Law Of Patronage At A Crossroads, Cynthia Grant Bowman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

At Loggerheads: The Supreme Court And Racial Equality In Public School Education After Missouri V. Jenkins, Roberta M. Harding

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

June 12th of 1995 marked a somber occasion in the annals of school desegregation litigation. On that day, the United States Supreme Court sent disturbing messages in its opinion in Missouri v. Jenkins. The Court's decision hinders achievement of the objective of school desegregation litigation—providing equal educational opportunities for African-American public school children—and detrimentally impacts other substantive areas of civil rights litigation. This article examines what I believe are several important general consequences of Jenkins's the impairment of a trial judge's discretionary equitable remedial powers; the Court's establishment of a new agenda that sacrifices the interests of African-American …

Incidental Burdens On Fundamental Rights, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Windfall Analysis: A New Look At Uncharged Conduct Evidence, David J. Achtenberg

Faculty Works

In criminal cases, the prosecution frequently offers evidence of uncharged conduct (usually prior criminal activity), claiming that it will tend to prove the mens rea element of the charged offense. When such an offer is made, Rule 404(b) of the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) creates a dilemma for the trial court. On the one hand, the rule forbids the introduction of uncharged conduct evidence (UCE) for one purpose: proof of a person's character in order to show that the person acted in conformity with that character trait on a particular occasion. On the other hand, it permits the introduction …

Consistently Inconsistent: The Supreme Court And The Confusion Surrounding Proportionality In Non-Capital Sentencing, Steven P. Grossman

All Faculty Scholarship

(Adapted by permission from 84 Ky. L. J. 107 (1995)) This article examines the Supreme Court's treatment of the Eighth Amendment with respect to claims of excessiveness regarding prison sentences. Specifically, it addresses the issue of whether and to what degree the Eighth Amendment requires that a punishment not be disproportional to the crime punished. In analyzing all of the modern holdings of the Court in this area, one finds significant fault with each. The result of this series of flawed opinions from the Supreme Court is that the state of the law with respect to proportionality in sentencing is …

Turning Congress Into An Agency: The Propriety Of Requiring Legislative Findings, Harold J. Krent

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Toward A "Due Foundation" For The Separation Of Powers: The Federalist Papers As Political Narrative, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

During the past quarter century, lawyers have become strangely comfortable with descriptions of our government's structure that would, to an untutored ear, speak contradiction. We are quite satisfied to say that governmental powers are separate and shared, departments distinct and overlapping, functions autonomous and interdependent. We have settled into these contradictions as we would a roomy chair: talking this way is no longer controversial but taken for granted, uttered with a knowing wink, perceived as the starting point of sophisticated analysis. A not "entirely separate," but "entirely free," set of departments is the only way we can think about the …

A Championship Season For The First Amendment, Joel Gora

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Congressional-Executive Information Access Disputes: A Modest Proposal - Do Nothing, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Is A Textualist Approach To Statutory Interpretation Pro-Environmentalist?: Why Pragmatic Agency Decisionmaking Is Better Than Judicial Literalism, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article provides both anecdotal evidence and a more theoretical argument for why textualist statutory interpretation is not the best approach to address environmental. issues.

Supplementing The Assumed Definitions: A Commentary On Professor Brownstein's Analysis Of Abortion Protest Restrictions, Leslie Gielow Jacobs

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Nonviolent Abortion Clinic Protests: Reevaluating Some Current Assumptions About The Proper Scope Of Government Regulations, Leslie Gielow Jacobs

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

Regulation of nonviolent political-protest activities outside abortion clinics must balance the constitutional rights to free speech and to choose abortion, and the social value of nonviolent political protest. This Article examines and questions two current assumptions about the proper scope of government regulations. The first assumption is that, absent a constitutional obstacle under prevailing free speech jurisprudence, it is appropriate to enjoin or statutorily enhance sanctions for any variety of nonviolent political-protest activities that block access to clinics or constitute illegal trespasses. This Article argues that for a particular type of nonviolent political protest-conduct that is equivalent to speech on …

Toward A Religious Minority Voice: A Look At Free Exercise Law Through A Religious Minority Perspective, Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

Legal scholars have recently advanced theories emphasizing the importance of perspectives in the law. Perspective scholarship recognizes that laws are necessarily shaped by society's dominant forces, including its biases and preconceptions. Perspective scholars attempt to understand how these forces have shaped our laws, and they suggest changes to accommodate those affected by society's biases. In this Article, Professor Levine introduces the concept of a religious minority perspective. He develops the concept of a religious minority perspective in the context of several, prominent Free Exercise cases. Professor Levine discusses these cases in his presentation of the central themes of a religious …