Law Commons^™

Covid-19 And Lgbt Rights, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Even in the best of times, LGBT individuals have legal vulnerabilities in employment, housing, healthcare and other domains resulting from a combination of persistent bias and uneven protection against discrimination. In this time of COVID-19, these vulnerabilities combine to amplify both the legal and health risks that LGBT people face.

This essay focuses on several risks that are particularly linked to being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, with the recognition that these vulnerabilities are often intensified by discrimination based on race, ethnicity, age, disability, immigration status and other aspects of identity. Topics include: 1) federal withdrawal of antidiscrimination protections; 2) …

Beholding Law: Amadeo On The Argentine Constitution, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus, Erin F. Delaney

Faculty Scholarship

This essay introduces an online edition of Santos P. Amadeo’s Argentine Constitutional Law to be published by the Academia Puertorriqueña de Jurisprudencia y Legislación. Tracing the book to its origins in a paper Amadeo wrote for a seminar in comparative constitutional law at Columbia Law School in the 1930s, we discuss the intellectual context that gave rise to the book and assess its author’s methodological choices. We then examine one particular substantive choice: Whereas the paper specifically draws attention to the importance of understanding every form of political subdivision in a federalist system – identifying Argentina’s as the provinces, the …

Fixing America's Founding, Maeve Glass

Faculty Scholarship

The forty-fifth presidency of the United States has sent lawyers reaching once more for the Founders’ dictionaries and legal treatises. In courtrooms, law schools, and media outlets across the country, the original meanings of the words etched into the U.S. Constitution in 1787 have become the staging ground for debates ranging from the power of a president to trademark his name in China to the rights of a legal permanent resident facing deportation. And yet, in this age when big data promises to solve potential challenges of interpretation and judges have for the most part agreed that original meaning should …

The Shrinking Constitution Of Settlement, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Sanford Levinson has famously distinguished between the "Constitution of Settlement" and the "Constitution of Conversation." The former comprises those aspects of the Constitution that are clear, well established, and resistant to creative interpretation. The latter comprises those aspects that are subject to ongoing litigation and debate. Although Americans tend to fixate on the Constitution of Conversation, Levinson argues that much of what ails our republic is attributable, at least in part, to the grossly undemocratic and "decidedly nonadaptive" Constitution of Settlement.

This Article, prepared for a symposium on Levinson's coauthored book Democracy and Dysfunction, explains that the Constitution of …

Recovering The Lost History Of Presidential Removal Law, Jane Manners, Lev Menand

Faculty Scholarship

On March 3, 2020, the Supreme Court heard argument in Seila Law v. CFPB, the biggest removal law case since Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB was decided a decade ago. The petitioner challenges the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the independent agency established by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) to protect consumers from harmful financial products. Seila Law, a California firm under investigation by the CFPB for its debt-relief marketing practices, argues that statutory limits specifying that the president can fire the CFPB director only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office” (INM) violate the …

Constitutional Law And The Presidential Nomination Process, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The Constitution says nothing about the presidential nominating process and has had little direct role in the evolution of that process from congressional caucuses to party national conventions to our current primary-dominated system of selecting convention delegates. Yet, constitutional law is a factor in empowering and constraining the principal actors in the nomination process and in shaping the framework for potential future changes.

The constitutional law of the presidential nomination process operates along two axes: government-party, and state-national. The government-party dimension focuses on the tension between the states and the federal government in writing the rules for and administering the …

Delegating Or Divesting?, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

A gratifying feature of recent scholarship on administrative power is the resurgence of interest in the Founding. Even the defenders of administrative power hark back to the Constitution’s early history – most frequently to justify delegations of legislative power. But the past offers cold comfort for such delegation.

A case in point is Delegation at the Founding by Professors Julian Davis Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley. Not content to defend the Supreme Court’s current nondelegation doctrine, the article employs history to challenge the doctrine – arguing that the Constitution does not limit Congress’s delegation of legislative power. But the article’s most …

Legislatures, Executives And Political Control Of Government, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter examines how political control over government is exercised today in the UK, the US, and France, focusing on control of the executive branch by the legislature and control of the administrative executive by the political executive. These three jurisdictions were chosen because they are paradigmatic examples of different political regimes: parliamentarism, separation of powers presidentialism, and semi-presidentialism. In theory, these different institutional structures should affect how political control is understood and wielded. In the traditional Westminster parliamentary model, for example, the government is formed from the leadership of the majority party in Parliament and it is the government …

India’S First Period: Constitutional Doctrine And Constitutional Stability, Madhav Khosla

Faculty Scholarship

Studies on constitutional stability and endurance rarely gesture toward the role of legal doctrine. While the workings of courts are often considered in understanding how a constitutional order might be sustained, this is almost variably achieved by examining the relationship between courts and other institutions. This chapter takes a different approach and studies the way in which constitutional consolidation might also be shaped by the doctrinal orientations and forms of reasoning that courts adopt. It does so by considering the first period of Indian constitutionalism. The focus is on two specific areas: the place of the Directive Principles in India’s …

Principles Of Home Rule For The Twenty-First Century, Richard Briffault, Nestor M. Davidson, Paul A. Diller, Sarah Fox, Laurie Reynolds, Erin A. Scharff, Richard Schragger, Rick Su

Faculty Scholarship

The National League of Cities’ “Principles of Home Rule for the Twenty-First Century” updates the American Municipal Association’s 1953 “Model Constitutional Provisions for Municipal Home Rule.” The AMA approach was widely adopted, but those provisions are now over 65 years old and intervening social, demographic, economic, and political changes necessitates a new approach to the legal structure of state-local relations. The NLC’s approach is organized around four basic principles, which are cashed-out in a model constitutional home rule provision, with commentary. The first principle states that a state’s law of home rule should provide local governments the full capacity to …

Race And Reasonableness In Police Killings, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Alexis D. Campbell

Faculty Scholarship

Police officers in the United States have killed over 1000 civilians each year since 2013. The constitutional landscape that regulates these encounters defaults to the judgments of the reasonable police officer at the time of a civilian encounter based on the officer’s assessment of whether threats to their safety or the safety of others requires deadly force. As many of these killings have begun to occur under similar circumstances, scholars have renewed a contentious debate on whether police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans and other nonwhite civilians and whether such killings reflect racial bias. We analyze data on …

Covid-19 And Prisoners’ Rights, Gregory Bernstein, Stephanie Guzman, Maggie Hadley, Rosalyn M. Huff, Alison Hung, Anita N.H. Yandle, Alexis Hoag, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

As COVID-19 continues to spread rapidly across the country, the crowded and unsanitary conditions in prisons, jails, juvenile detention, and immigration detention centers leave incarcerated individuals especially vulnerable. This chapter will discuss potential avenues for detained persons and their lawyers seeking to use the legal system to obtain relief, including potential release, during this extraordinary, unprecedented crisis.

America's Hidden Foster Care System, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

In most states, child protection agencies induce parents to transfer physical custody of their children to kinship caregivers by threatening to place the children in foster care and bring them to family court. Both the frequency of these actions (this Article establishes that they occur tens or even hundreds of thousands of times annually) and their impact (they separate parents and children, sometimes permanently) resemble the formal foster care system. But they are hidden from courts, because agencies file no petition alleging abuse or neglect, and hidden from policymakers, because agencies do not generally report these cases.

While informal custody …

Election Law Localism In The Time Of Covid-19, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In just a few short months, the COVID-19 pandemic has already provoked multiple election law disputes. These have tended to track the same normative and policy conflicts that have marked election law for years, particularly the tension between strict adherence to preexisting rules and the willingness to stretch or relax those rules in order to deal with emergency conditions, and the overlapping debate over whether the primary threat to the integrity of the electoral system is fraud or the legal and administrative obstacles to voting during a pandemic. A third, but much less discussed, strand in the emerging COVID-19 election …

Future Scenarios: “We Are All Failed States, Now”, Philip C. Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

As I write this, the constitutional environment of the United States is experiencing its greatest stresses since the American Civil War. A viral pandemic has engulfed the world and especially stricken the United States; as of this writing more than 3 million coronavirus cases have been reported in the United States, more than in any other country. Although the United States has about 4.2% of the global population, it has suffered 25% of the deaths worldwide – more than 132,000 Americans have died from the COVID-19 virus. Partly as a consequence of this viral apocalypse, US unemployment is experiencing levels …

On Trust, Law, And Expecting The Worst, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

This Review has three parts. Part I aims to convey something of the breadth and interest of Hasday’s fascinating new book, foregrounding the role of gender and beginning to touch the subject of trust. Part II delves briefly but widely into the theme of trust, which pervades the book and invites further examination. Part III presents a framework that combines affective trust and epistemic curiosity and applies this framework to illuminate and sort Hasday’s proposals for reform; to critique a recent, dramatic change in the evidentiary treatment of marital confidences; and to devise a novel approach to prenuptial agreements. Throughout, …

Profiling And Consent: Stops, Searches, And Seizures After Soto, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Amanda Geller

Faculty Scholarship

Following Soto v. State (1999), New Jersey was the first state to enter into a Consent Decree with the U.S. Department of Justice to end racially selective enforcement on the state’s highways. The Consent Decree led to extensive reforms in the training and supervision of state police troopers, and the design of information technology to monitor the activities of the State Police. Compliance was assessed in part on the State’s progress toward the elimination of racial disparities in the patterns of highway stops and searches. We assess compliance by analyzing data on 257,000 vehicle stops on the New Jersey Turnpike …

Constitutional War Powers In World War I: Charles Evans Hughes And The Power To Wage War Successfully, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

On September 5, 1917, at the height of American participation in the Great War, Charles Evans Hughes famously argued that “the power to wage war is the power to wage war successfully.” This moment and those words were a collision between the onset of “total war,” Lochner-era jurisprudence, and cautious Progressive-era administrative development. This article tells the story of Hughes’s statement – including what he meant at the time and how he wrestled with some difficult questions that flowed from it. The article then concludes with some reasons why the story remains important today.

The New "Essential": Rethinking Social Goods In The Age Of Covid-19, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

The Covid-19 crisis has laid bare the fragility of social insurance systems in the United States and the lack of income security and basic benefits for many workers and residents. The United States has long had weaker protections for workers compared to other liberal democracies racial and economic disparities among those most affected by these dislocations (analyses are hampered by a paucity of demographic data). Those who were socially and economically vulnerable before the pandemic (for example due to homelessness, immigration status, or incarceration) are likely to suffer the most harm. Changes in workplace conditions as a result of the …

Covid-19 And The Law: Elections, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

With one Supreme Court decision, lower federal and state court decisions, pending litigation, and proposals around the country for major changes in how elections are conducted, COVID-19 has already had and likely will continue to have a significant impact on election law.

The discussion that follows proceeds in two parts. The first addresses the initial consequences of COVID-19 as an electoral emergency. Voters were due to go to the polls in states around the country just as the pandemic was gathering force and governors and mayors were calling on people to stay at home and avoid large gatherings – which, …

Symposium: The Puzzling And Troubling Grant In Kisor, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

From one perspective, the Supreme Court’s decision to grant review in Kisor v. Wilkie is not surprising. Dating back at least to Justice Antonin Scalia’s 2011 concurrence in Talk America v. Michigan Bell Telephone Co., through Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center in 2013 and Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Association in 2015, there’s been growing interest on the Supreme Court’s conservative wing in overturning Auer deference, or the doctrine that an agency’s interpretation of its own regulation is “controlling unless plainly erroneous or inconsistent with the regulation.” The campaign to overturn Auer v. Robbins then stalled, with the court denying …

Legitimate Interpretation – Or Legitimate Adjudication?, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Current debate about the legitimacy of lawmaking by courts focuses on what constitutes legitimate interpretation. The debate has reached an impasse in that originalism and textualism appear to have the stronger case as a matter of theory while living constitutionalism and dynamic interpretation provide much account of actual practice. This Article argues that if we refocus the debate by asking what constitutes legitimate adjudication, as determined by the social practice of the parties and their lawyers who take part in adjudication, it is possible to develop an account of legitimacy that produces a much better fit between theory and practice. …

War Powers: Congress, The President, And The Courts – A Model Casebook Section, Stephen M. Griffin, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

This model casebook section is concerned with the constitutional law of war powers as developed by the executive and legislative branches, with a limited look at relevant statutes and federal court cases. It is intended for use in Constitutional Law I classes that cover separation of powers. It could also be used for courses in National Security Law or Foreign Relations Law, or for graduate courses in U.S. foreign policy. This is designed to be the reading for one to two classes, and it can supplement or replace standard casebook sections on war powers that are shorter and offer less …

Coordinating Injunctions, Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

Consider this scenario: Two judges with parallel cases are each ready to issue an injunction. But their injunctions may clash, ordering incompatible actions by the defendant. Each judge has written an opinion justifying her own intended relief, but the need to avoid conflicting injunctions presses her to make a further choice – “Should I issue the injunction or should I stay it for now?” Each must make this decision in anticipation of what the other will do.

This Article analyzes such a judicial coordination problem, drawing on recent examples including the DACA cases and the “sanctuary cities” cases. It then …

Reframing Affirmative Action: From Diversity To Mobility And Full Participation, Susan P. Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

Legality and efficacy call for reframing the affirmative-action debate within a broader institutional effort to address structural inequality in higher education. Although defending affirmative action as we know it continues to be important and necessary, it is crucial to identify and address the disconnect between affirmative action and higher education's practices that contribute to enduring racial and economic inequality and waning social mobility. There is a persistent and growing gap between higher education’s rhetoric of diversity, opportunity, and mobility and the reality of underparticipation, polarization, and stratification. That gap has racial, gender, and socioeconomic dimensions. The path to shoring up …

Cyberattacks And The Constitution, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

Contrary to popular view, cyberattacks alone are rarely exercises of constitutional war powers – and they might never be. They are often instead best understood as exercises of other powers pertaining to nonwar military, foreign affairs, intelligence, and foreign commerce, for example. Although this more fine-grained, fact-specific conception of cyberattacks leaves room for broad executive leeway in some contexts, it also contains a strong constitutional basis for legislative regulation of cyber operations.

Strengthening The U.S.-Japan Alliance: Pathways For Bridging Law And Policy, Columbia Law School, 2020, Nobuhisa Ishizuka, Masahiro Kurosaki, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

During the three years leading up to this year ’s 60th anniversary of the signing of the 1960 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, a series of workshops were held under the joint sponsorship of Columbia Law School’s Center for Japanese Legal Studies and the National Defense Academy of Japan’s Center for Global Security. Bringing together experts in international law and political science primarily from the United States and Japan, the workshops examined how differing approaches to use of force and understandings of individual and collective self-defense in the two countries might adversely affect their alliance.

The workshop participants explored the underlying causes …

Executive Underreach, In Pandemics And Otherwise, David E. Pozen, Kim Lane Scheppele

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholars are familiar with the problem of executive overreach, especially in emergencies. But sometimes, instead of being too audacious or extreme, a national executive's attempts to address a true threat prove far too limited and insubstantial. In this Essay, we seek to define and clarify the phenomenon of executive underreach, with special reference to the COVID-19 crisis; to outline ways in which such underreach may compromise constitutional governance and the international legal order; and to suggest a partial remedy.