Law Commons^™

The Disfavored Constitution: State Fiscal Limits And State Constitutional Law, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The dominant theme in the resurgent state constitutional jurisprudence of the last quarter-century has been the effort of many scholars and jurists to find in state constitutions a progressive alternative to the conservative turn federal constitutional doctrine has taken in the Burger and Rehnquist eras. Following the tone set by Justice William Brennan's path-breaking 1977 article in the Harvard Law Review, the state constitutional law literature has sought a more expansive protection of civil liberties through state constitutional provisions dealing with criminal law and procedure, freedom of expression, and equality, and to ground positive rights to public services in state …

Establishing Religious Ideas: Evolution, Creationism, And Intelligent Design, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, I first sketch the basic conflict between evolutionary theory and creationism and describe the opposition of creationists to the teaching of standard evolutionary theory. I then state the basic educational and constitutional questions

about evolution, standard creationism, and "intelligent design." After exploring of five fundamental premises that, in combination, generate the most troubling questions about science, religion, and the public schools, I turn to claims of miracles. Like assertions that God has intervened in natural processes of development, these claims suppose that God transcends or violates scientific principles; their investigation suggests that scientific principles; their investigation suggests …

The Federal No Child Left Behind Act And The Post-Desegregation Civil Rights Agenda, James S. Liebman, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

Despite many deficiencies, the No Child Left Behind Act ("NCLB" or "Act") extends to the federal level and diffuses to the states an innovative system of publicly monitored decentralization of school governance known as the "New Accountability." This Article argues that, given background changes in the understanding of effective classroom teaching, accountability systems of the type imposed by the NCLB can enable willing school districts to build the capacity for school-level reform upon which the ultimate improvement of public schooling depends. It claims further that activists can accelerate the reforms and ensure respect for the requirements of racial and economic …

What Did They Do And What Does It Mean? The Three-Judge Court's Decision In Mcconnell V. Fec And The Implications For The Supreme Court, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

My role at this symposium is to provide a brief overview of the three-judge court's decision in McConnell v. FEC, review the opinions, piece together what the court actually decided, and see how the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 ("BCRA") now stands. I will try to do that briefly, while giving a few general comments about what the court's opinions tell us about the state of campaign finance law today. As a preliminary matter, the three-judge court's opinions provide us with two radically different world views – almost two different intellectual universes – for thinking about campaign finance …

The Making Of The Second Rehnquist Court: A Preliminary Analysis, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court is implicitly assumed to have a certain unity of character under each Chief Justice. Hence, we refer to the "Marshall Court," the "Warren Court," and the "Rehnquist Court." A closer look at history reveals that this assumption of a natural Court defined by the tenure of each Chief Justice is often misleading. The Marshall Court had a different character late in its life than it did in its early years. Similarly, the Warren Court became distinctively more liberal and activist after 1962 when Felix Frankfurter retired and was replaced by Arthur Goldberg.

Although the Rehnquist Court is …

Incomplete Compensation For Takings, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

If a tribunal determines that a state actor has expropriated foreign investment property, or, under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), that a state actor has adopted a regulation that is "tantamount to" an expropriation of foreign investment property, then that tribunal must determine the amount of compensation owed. International law has developed methods to determine the size of a compensation award when a state formally expropriates property. But the notion, reflected in Chapter 11 of NAFTA, that states may be required to pay compensation to foreign investors for what are, in effect, regulatory takings, is …

Youngstown: Pages From The Book Of Disquietude, Philip Chase Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

The Youngstown holding is widely admired. One reads with pride those passages in which the Supreme Court denies to a president with whom they are in considerable political sympathy the power to enlarge executive authority by militarizing the homeland. And yet one wonders, as we confront in the 21st century a lethal foreign enemy who has demonstrated the ability to infiltrate and assault the domestic environment, precisely what restraints ought to govern a presidential response to that enemy.

Powers Inherent In Sovereignty: Indians, Aliens, Territories, And The Nineteenth Century Origins Of Plenary Power Over Foreign Affairs, Sarah H. Cleveland

Faculty Scholarship

Does the United States have powers inherent in sovereignty? At least since the 1819 decision in McCulloch v. Maryland, conventional wisdom has held that national government is one of limited, enumerated powers and exercises “only the powers granted to it” by the Constitution and those implied powers “necessary and proper” to the exercise of the delegated powers. All powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states and to the people. In the 1936 decision in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., however, the Supreme Court asserted that federal authority over foreign relations operated independently …

Bush V. Gore As An Equal Protection Case, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In Bush v. Gore, the United States Supreme Court applied the Equal Protection Clause to the mechanics of state election administration. The Court invalidated the manual recount of the so-called undervote – that is, ballots that vote-counting machinery had found contained no indication of a vote for President – which the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to determine the winner of Florida's vote for presidential electors in the 2000 presidential election. The United States Supreme Court reasoned that the principles it had previously articulated in applying the Equal Protection Clause to the vote were violated by the Florida court's …

Mark Tushnet: The Right Questions, Philip C. Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

It is the most grotesque of ironies that much of twentieth-century jurisprudence has been an effort to make law into a science. This effort amounts to a reversal of a far earlier appropriation. It was the observation of regularities in gravity and the movement of the planets that reformed science and gave credence to the locution, 'the laws of nature.' Nature was "lawful" because it appeared to follow undeviatingly a certain regimen, which is to say that any deviations observed were held to be clues as to the true content of the laws that were being followed. Mathematics was the …

"Project Exile" And The Allocation Of Federal Law Enforcement Authority, Daniel Richman

Faculty Scholarship

With each report of violent crime statistics (whether rising or falling) or of the latest firearms outrage, we hear the antiphony of the gun control debate. Advocates of increased federal regulation decry the inadequacies of a regime that permits relatively free access to firearms and argue that the availability of guns is itself a spur to more deadly violence. Advocates of minimal regulation, for their part, condemn measures that, they say, will primarily penalize law-abiding citizens, and instead call for more vigorous enforcement of existing laws, targeting "criminals," not their weapons. When the antiphony intrudes on funerals, the effect can …

Nixon V. Shrink Missouri Government Pac: The Beginning Of The End Of The Buckley Era?, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, the Supreme Court emphatically reaffirmed a key element of the campaign finance doctrine first articulated in Buckley v. Valeo a quarter-century earlier that governments may, consistent with the First Amendment, impose limitations on the size of contributions to election campaigns. Shrink Missouri was significant because the Eighth Circuit decision reversed by the Supreme Court had sought to strengthen the constitutional protection provided to contributions and had invalidated limitations on donations to Missouri state candidates that were actually higher than the limits on donations to federal candidates that the Supreme Court had previously …

Guns, Crime, And Punishment In America, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

There are over 200 million firearms in private hands in the United States, more than a third of which are handguns. In 1993 alone, it is estimated that 1.3 million victims of serious violent crime faced an offender with a gun. In 1999, there were approximately 563,000 such victims. Estimates of defensive uses of firearms – situations where individuals used a gun to protect themselves, someone else, or their property – range from 65,000 to 2.5 million per year. Punishments for crimes committed with a firearm are severe: under the federal firearms enhancement statute, the mandatory minimum sentence for use …

Transparent Adjudication And Social Science Research In Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Tracey L. Meares, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The October 1999 Term was a year of consolidation in the law of police investigations in constitutional criminal procedure. In four short and compact opinions – three supported by sizeable majorities and three written by the Chief Justice – the Supreme Court synthesized and consolidated its criminal procedure jurisprudence, and offered clear guidance to law enforcement officers and private citizens alike. Miranda warnings are required by the Fifth Amendment, and the police must continue to "Mirandize" citizens before conducting any custodial interrogations. Reasonable suspicion under the Fourth Amendment calls for a totality-of-the-circumstances test, and a citizen's flight from the police …

The Landscape Of Constitutional Property, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The Constitution contains two clauses that protect persons against governmental interference with their property. The Due Process Clause provides that "No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." The Takings Clause adds, "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Both provisions appear to impose a threshold condition that a claimant have some "property" at stake before the protections associated with the Clause apply. Thus, under the Due Process Clause, it would seem that a claimant must have an interest in "property" (or in "life" or "liberty") before …

Are Mental States Relevant For Statutory And Constitutional Interpretation, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Judges in the United States must interpret statutes and constitutions. Largely because these texts are framed in the English language, a language shared by legislators, judges, and other citizens, judges employ sufficiently common techniques to sustain a coherent practice. Lawyers can often say with some confidence how judges will construe particular legal provisions, and, when they have serious doubts, they can sketch the likely alternatives. But we are now in an era of sharp theoretical disagreement over what judges do when they interpret authoritative texts.

In difficult cases of statutory interpretation, are judges mainly trying to give language its ordinary …

The Constitutionality Of Copyright Term Extension: How Long Is Too Long, Jane C. Ginsburg, Wendy J. Gordon, Arthur R. Miller, William F. Patry

Faculty Scholarship

I am Professor William Patry of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. I will be the moderator of this star-studded debate on the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

This panel will try to determine, on the great continuum of limited times that the Constitution prescribes for copyright in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, the term of protection that Congress has actually fixed. In other words: How long is too long? Sonny's bill establishes a term of protection of life plus seventy years for individual authors for works created on or after January 1, 1978. The bill retroactively …

Drug Treatment Courts And Emergent Experimentalist Government, Michael C. Dorf, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

Despite the continuing "war on drugs," the last decade has witnessed the creation and nationwide spread of a remarkable set of institutions, drug treatment courts. In drug treatment court, a criminal defendant pleads guilty or otherwise accepts responsibility for a charged offense and accepts placement in a court-mandated program of drug treatment. The judge and court personnel closely monitor the defendant's performance in the program and the program's capacity to serve the mandated client. The federal government and national associations in turn monitor the local drug treatment courts and disseminate successful practices. The ensemble of institutions, monitoring, and pooling exemplifies …

The President And Choices Not To Enforce, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

The executive branch is often called upon to assess how a particular statute it is charged to administer fits within the larger framework of the law. Professor Dawn Johnsen's thoughtful analysis addresses an important subset of these challenges: situations in which the President believes a particular statute is inconsistent with one or another provision of the Constitution and, therefore, should not be enforced. My purpose here is to explore the context of executive non-enforcement more broadly, in a way that may help in understanding the particular problem she addresses.

Issues of constitutional structure and function are among the most daunting …

The Political Parties And Campaign Finance Reform, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Recent campaign finance innovations of the major political parties have blown large and widening holes in federal campaign finance regulation. The relationship between parties and candidates also challenges the basic doctrinal categories of campaign finance law. The Constitution permits regulation of campaign finances to deal with the danger of corruption. But some judges and commentators have argued that the parties present no danger of corruption. This Article finds that, although parties play a positive role in funding campaigns, certain party practices raise the specter of corruption in the constitutional sense. Moreover, due to the close connection between parties and candidates, …

Constitutional Constraints On Redistribution Through Class Power, Mark Barenberg

Faculty Scholarship

My comments will not be so much a critique as an elaboration of the two papers, especially Professor Neuman's paper on United States (U.S.) law, since I am not an expert on German constitutional law. For those less familiar with U.S. law, my goal is to bring to light some additional elements of the U.S. constitutional tradition that impede the use of law to achieve economic equality-elements of U.S. constitutional law that reinforce the weak "general equality" principle of the Equal Protection Clause.2 I will use U.S. labor law as my vehicle for showing the variety of constitutional principles that …

The Political Economy Of Recognition: Affirmative Action Discourse And Constitutional Equality In Germany And The U.S.A., Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

This paper undertakes a comparative exploration of affirmative action discourse in German and American constitutional equality law. The first task for such a project is to acknowledge an important threshold dilemma. The difficulty in question derives not so much from dissimilarities between the technical legal structures of German and American affirmative action policy. The problem stems rather from the different social grounds and groupings on which those legal structures have been erected. Because German "positive action"' applies only to women, gender and its cultural meanings have constituted the paradigmatic subject of the policy. The legal discussion of positive action has …

The Supreme Court, Sexual Citizenship And The Idea Of Progress, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

Is American Progressive Constitutionalism dead ... yet? I propose to seek the beginnings of an answer to this question in the pages of a recent decision by the United States Supreme Court. I do feel obliged to say this, not because I am committed to a court-centered adjudicative conception of American constitutionalism; to the contrary. But rather, because the decision on which I want to focus seems to me to offer a rich resource for critical reflection on the idea of self-government whose connections to Progressive Constitutionalism give us our topic this afternoon.

The Plenary Power Background Of Curtiss-Wright, Sarah H. Cleveland

Faculty Scholarship

In his article The Transformation of the Constitutional Regime of Foreign Relations, Professor Ted White argues that the early twentieth century saw a major shift in constitutional understandings and expectations regarding the distribution of authority in foreign affairs. According to White, until that era the foreign affairs power, like all other powers under the Constitution, were considered subject to a formalistic, essentialist world view in which powers were distributed by the text of the Constitution according to clear principles of federalism and separation of powers. Congress and the President could only exercise powers in this area that had been dedicated …

Impeachment As A Technique Of Parliamentary Control Over Foreign Affairs In A Presidential System, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

The central inquiry for this essay is the proper use of the impeachment tool in foreign relations contexts, including war powers. In Part I, the essay begins with a brief review of British impeachment practice (limited to war and foreign policy concerns) known to the Founding generation and reflected in certain fundamental texts of the Founding; this treatment does not betoken any originalist orientation on my part (au contraire) but will set the context for later developments. Part II then turns to the travails of President Andrew Johnson as seen through the eyes of Walter Bagehot, the author of …

Diverse Perspectives And The Religion Clauses: An Examination Of Justifications And Qualifying Beliefs, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Some of the most complex questions about constitutional provisions governing religion concern the status of various kinds of convictions. Put most simply, how do undoubted religious convictions compare with convictions that appear to have little to do with religion, with convictions that derive from negative answers to religious questions, and with convictions that seem to be on some borderline of what may count as religion? In this Essay, I focus on two kinds of questions about this range of convictions.

Part I of the Essay explores justifications underlying the religion clauses of federal and state constitutions. It asks how explicitly …

Progressive Constitutionalism: Conceptions Of Interpretation And The Religion Clauses, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In this paper, I concentrate on the narrower, more typical topic of judicial interpretation. At least in regard to the religion clauses, this may be warranted because any progressive constitution would probably include something similar to the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses, and these would be judicially enforceable to some degree.

The first part of this essay explores relations between progressive values and interpretive approaches. When I asked myself how a judge, committed to progressive values, would interpret the Federal Constitution, I was troubled by whether a progressive approach would be activist or restrained in relation to legislative authority. I …

The Boundaries Of Private Property, Michael A. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

If your house and fields are worth more separately, divide them; if you want to leave a ring to your child now and grandchild later, split the ownership in a trust. The American law of property encourages owners to subdivide resources freely. Hidden within the law, however, is a boundary principle that limits the right to subdivide private property into wasteful fragments. While people often create wealth when they break up and recombine property in novel ways, owners may make mistakes, or their self-interest may clash with social welfare. Property law responds with diverse doctrines that prevent and abolish excessive …

Disenfranchisement As Punishment: Reflections On The Racial Uses Of Infamia, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

The practice of disenfranchising felons, though decreasing, is still widespread. In this Article, Professor George Fletcher reflects on the use of disenfranchisement as punishment, the lack of a convincing theoretical justification for it, and its disproportionate impact on the African.American community. Fletcher presents a number of powerful arguments against the constitutionality of the practice, but he emphasizes that there is a deeper problem with disenfranchisement as punishment: It reinforces the branding of felons as an "untouchable" class and thus helps to prevent their effective reintegration into our society.

In God's Image: The Religious Imperative Of Equality Under Law, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay argues that the principle of equality under law is best grounded in a holistic view of human dignity. Rejecting modem attempts to justify equality by reducing humanity to a particular actual characteristic, it articulates a religious imperative to treat people equally by drawing on biblical as well as modern philosophical sources. The principle "all men are created equal," as celebrated in the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address, draws on this holistic understanding of humanity. This admittedly romantic approach to equality generates a critique of contemporary Supreme Court doctrine, including the prevailing approaches to strict scrutiny, affirmative action, …