Law Commons^™

Putting The Dormancy Doctrine Out Of Its Misery, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Justice Antonin Scalia has put on the academic table the question of whether the doctrine of the dormant commerce clause should be abandoned. That is a significant contribution, for this is an issue that should be debated thoroughly. But Justice Scalia's campaign against the doctrine has been notably ambivalent. On the one hand, he argues that the doctrine lacks justification in constitutional text, history, and theory.1 On the other hand, assertedly feeling the pressure of stare decisis,2 he has gone along with, and even led, applications of the doctrine, although within narrow limits.3 In this essay, I argue that Justice …

Does The Camel Have Its Nose In The Tent: Individual Religious Freedom V. Prayer In Public Schools, Elizabeth Brandt

Articles

No abstract provided.

When Is There A Constitutional 'Right To Die'? When Is There No Constitutional 'Right To Live'?, Yale Kamisar

Articles

When I am invited to participate in conferences on the "right to die," I suspect that the organizers of such gatherings expect me to fill what might be called the " 'slippery slope' slot" on the program or, more generally, to articulate the "conservative" position on this controversial matter. These expectations are hardly surprising. The "right to die" is a euphemism for what almost everybody used to call a form of euthanasia-" passive" or "negative" or "indirect" euthanasia-and some thirty years ago, in the course of raising various objections to proposed euthanasia legislation, I advanced the "thin edge of the …

Confessions And The Right To Silence In Japan, Daniel H. Foote

Articles

In several highly-publicized recent cases in Japan, individuals convicted of murder and sentenced to death were acquitted in retrials obtained after decades on death row. These so-called "death penalty retrial cases'" generated great controversy and considerable reflection about the criminal justice system in Japan. A central, substantive issue presented by these cases relates to the procurement and use of confessions; each of these cases-and several other major recent Japanese cases in which defendants have been acquitted following bitterly contested trials-turned on the validity of repudiated confessions.

Consequently, much recent commentary has focussed on conf essions and related issues. Not surprisingly, …

Controlling Legislative Shortsightedness: The Effectiveness Of Constitutional Debt Limitations, Stewart E. Sterk, Elizabeth S. Goldman

Articles

In this article, Professor Sterk and Ms. Goldman examine the efficacy of constitutional debt limitations as a method of controlling the incurrence of public debt. In examining the historical development of such limitations, the authors conclude that they are responses to perceived deficiencies in the legislative process rather than reactions to specific instances of legislative abuse. The authors determine, however, that courts have transformed absolute constraints on legislative power to incur debt into more flexible limitations that leave the judiciary with a substantial role in determining the fate of proposed borrowing schemes. Moreover, the authors found that few states revised …