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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Common Law And First Amendment Qualified Right Of Public Access To Foreign Intelligence Law, Laura K. Donohue
The Common Law And First Amendment Qualified Right Of Public Access To Foreign Intelligence Law, Laura K. Donohue
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
For millennia, public access to the law has been the hallmark of rule of law. To be legally and morally binding, rules must be promulgated. Citizens’ knowledge of the law, in turn, serves as the lynchpin for democratic governance. In common law countries, it is more than just the statutory provisions and their execution that matters: how courts rule, and the reasoning behind their determination, proves central. Accordingly, in the United States, both common law and the right to petition incorporated in the First Amendment have long enshrined a presumed right of public right of access to Article III opinions …
Foreword: New Supreme Court Cases: Duquesne Law Faculty Explains, Wilson Huhn
Foreword: New Supreme Court Cases: Duquesne Law Faculty Explains, Wilson Huhn
Law Faculty Publications
On September 30, 2022, several members of the faculty of the Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University presented a Continuing Legal Education program, New Supreme Court Cases: Duquesne Law Faculty Explains, reviewing these developments. Duquesne Law Review graciously invited the faculty panel to contribute their analysis of these cases from the Supreme Court's 2021- 2022 term for inclusion in this symposium issue of the Law Review.
The Court And The Private Plaintiff, Elizabeth Beske
The Court And The Private Plaintiff, Elizabeth Beske
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
Two seemingly irreconcilable story arcs have emerged from the Supreme Court over the past decade. First, the Court has definitively taken itself out of the business of creating private rights of action under statutes and the Constitution, decrying such moves as relics of an “ancient regime.” Thus, the Supreme Court has slammed the door on its own ability to craft rights of action under federal statutes and put Bivens, which recognized implied constitutional remedies, into an ever-smaller box. The Court has justified these moves as necessary to keep judges from overstepping their bounds and wading into the province of the …
No Sense Of Decency, Kathryn E. Miller
No Sense Of Decency, Kathryn E. Miller
Faculty Articles
For nearly seventy years, the Court has assessed Eighth Amendment claims by evaluating “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” In this Article, I examine the evolving standards of decency test, which has long been a punching bag for critics on both the right and the left. Criticism of the doctrine has been fierce, but largely academic until recent years. Some fault the test for being too majoritarian, while others argue that it provides few constraints on the Justices’ discretion, permitting their personal predilections to rule the day. For many, the test is seen …
"The Arc Of The Moral Universe": Christian Eschatology And U.S. Constitutionalism, Nathan Chapman
"The Arc Of The Moral Universe": Christian Eschatology And U.S. Constitutionalism, Nathan Chapman
Scholarly Works
At the heart of American constitutionalism is an irony. The United States is constitutionally committed to religious neutrality; the government may not take sides in religious disputes. Yet many features of constitutional law are inexplicable without their intellectual and cultural origins in religious beliefs, practices, and movements. The process of constitutionalization has been one of secularization. The most obvious example is perhaps also the most ideal of liberty of conscience that fueled religious disestablishment, free exercise, and equality was born of a Protestant view of the individual’s responsibility before God.
This Essay explores another overlooked instance of constitutional secularization. Many …
American Religious Liberty Without (Much) Theory: A Review Of Religion And The American Constitutional Experiment, 5th Edition, Nathan S. Chapman
American Religious Liberty Without (Much) Theory: A Review Of Religion And The American Constitutional Experiment, 5th Edition, Nathan S. Chapman
Scholarly Works
Book review of Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, 5th ed. By John Witte Jr., Joel A. Nichols, and Richard W. Garnett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 464. $150.00 (cloth); $39.95 (paper); $26.99 (digital). ISBN: 9780197587614.
No Balancing For Anticonstitutional Government Conduct, Bruce Ledewitz
No Balancing For Anticonstitutional Government Conduct, Bruce Ledewitz
Law Faculty Publications
Noted Supreme Court critic Eric Segall has been criticizing the majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n v. Bruen for its failure to engage in any kind of means-end balancing in striking down a New York gun control measure--balancing that he argues the Court has engaged in since the Reconstruction era. Segall is hardly the only American law professor to level this charge. But the lack of balancing in Bruen is neither unprecedented nor methodologically innovative. It certainly does not reflect a victory of originalism. Instead, the Bruen decision stands firmly in the tradition that courts do …
Confrontation, The Legacy Of Crawford, And Important Unanswered Questions, Paul F. Rothstein, Ronald J. Coleman
Confrontation, The Legacy Of Crawford, And Important Unanswered Questions, Paul F. Rothstein, Ronald J. Coleman
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This is a short piece for the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform as part of its 2024 Symposium on “Crawford at 20: Reforming the Confrontation Clause.” The piece's purpose is to highlight certain important questions left unanswered by Crawford v. Washington and subsequent confrontation cases.
Presuming Trustworthiness, Ronnell Anderson Jones, Sonja R. West
Presuming Trustworthiness, Ronnell Anderson Jones, Sonja R. West
Scholarly Works
A half-century ago, the U.S. Supreme Court often praised speakers performing the press function. While the Justices acknowledged that press reports are sometimes inaccurate and that media motivations are at times less than public-serving, their laudatory statements nonetheless embraced a baseline presumption of the value and trustworthiness of press speech in general. Speech in the exercise of the press function, they told us, is vitally important to public discourse in a democracy and therefore worthy of protection even when it falls short of the ideal in a given instance. Those days are over. Our study of every reference to the …
Mysterizing Religion, Marc O. Degirolami
Mysterizing Religion, Marc O. Degirolami
Faculty Publications
(Excerpt)
A mystery of faith is a truth of religion that escapes human understanding. The mysteries of religion are not truths that human beings happen not to know, or truths that they could know with sufficient study and application, but instead truths that they cannot know in the nature of things. In the Letter to the Colossians, St. Paul writes that as a Christian apostle, his holy office is to “bring to completion for you the word of God, the mystery hidden from ages and from generations past.” Note that Paul does not say that his task is to make …
A Vague, Overconfident, And Malleable Approach To Constitutional Law, Michael L. Smith
A Vague, Overconfident, And Malleable Approach To Constitutional Law, Michael L. Smith
Faculty Articles
In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, the Supreme Court overturned a century-old firearms licensing scheme that required people seeking concealed carry permits to demonstrate that they had a special need for self-defense. The Court did so by applying a “historical tradition” approach to determine the scope of Second Amendment protection. Under this approach, where the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, a law restricting that conduct must be consistent with “the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” At first glance, the historical tradition approach may seem objective and easier than an empirical analysis …