Law Commons^™

Who Decides On Security?, Aziz Rana

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Despite over six decades of reform initiatives, the overwhelming drift of security arrangements in the United States has been toward greater—not less— executive centralization and discretion. This Article explores why efforts to curb presidential prerogative have failed so consistently. It argues that while constitutional scholars have overwhelmingly focused their attention on procedural solutions, the underlying reason for the growth of emergency powers is ultimately political rather than purely legal. In particular, scholars have ignored how the basic meaning of "security" has itself shifted dramatically since World War II and the beginning of the Cold War in line with changing ideas …

Ideology "All The Way Down"? An Empirical Study Of Establishment Clause Decisions In The Federal Courts, Gregory C. Sisk, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"They Saw A Protest": Cognitive Illiberalism And The Speech-Conduct Distinction, Dan M. Kahan, David A. Hoffman, Donald Braman, Danieli Evans, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

“Cultural cognition” refers to the unconscious influence of individuals’ group commitments on their perceptions of legally consequential facts. We conducted an experiment to assess the impact of cultural cognition on perceptions of facts relevant to distinguishing constitutionally protected “speech” from unprotected “conduct.” Study subjects viewed a video of a political demonstration. Half the subjects believed that the demonstrators were protesting abortion outside of an abortion clinic, and the other half that the demonstrators were protesting the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy outside a campus recruitment facility. Subjects of opposing cultural outlooks who were assigned to the same experimental condition …

Congress's Constitution, Josh Chafetz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Congress has significantly more constitutional power than we are accustomed to seeing it exercise. By failing to make effective use of its power, Congress has invited the other branches to fill the vacuum, resulting in a constitutional imbalance. This Article considers a number of constitutional tools that individual houses—and even individual members—of Congress, acting alone, can deploy in interbranch conflicts. Although the congressional powers discussed in this Article are clearly contemplated in constitutional text, history, and structure, many of them have received only scant treatment in isolation. More importantly, they have never before been considered in concert as a set …

Convicting Lennie: Mental Retardation, Wrongful Convictions, And The Right To A Fair Trial, John H. Blume, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Susan E. Millor

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

"Lennie" refers to Lennie Small, the intellectually disabled character in John Steinbeck's famous novella Of Mice and Men, which tells the story of two Depression-era wandering farmhands, George and Lennie, who dream of getting their own stake and living "off the fat of the land." Their dream dies hard when Lennie accidently kills the young, beautiful, and flirtatious wife of a ranch owner's son and then tries to cover it up because he realizes that he has "done a bad thing." George, in turn, kills Lennie to prevent him from being lynched or tried for murder.

Lennie was doomed …

The Constitutional Imaginary: Just Stories About We The People, Gerald Torres, Lani Guinier

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Freedom Struggles And The Limits Of Constitutional Continuity, Aziz Rana

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Essay challenges the view that although the actual and everyday Constitution may be riddled with real injustices, progressives should maintain faith in an idealized document and should see the shared language of constitutionalism as the privileged instrument for redeeming political life. Instead, it argues that faith should reside in an ideal of effective and equal freedom alone. Indeed, such a commitment may at key moments require pursuing constitutional rupture and rejection. The Essay highlights this point by reinterpreting two central decisions from the Civil War and Reconstruction eras: The Prize Cases (1863) and Ex parte Milligan (1866). These cases …

Religion, School, And Judicial Decision Making: An Empirical Perspective, Michael Heise, Gregory C. Sisk

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

We analyze various influences on judicial outcomes favoring religion in cases involving elementary and secondary schools and decided by lower federal courts. A focus on religion in the school context is warranted as the most difficult and penetrating questions about the proper relationship between Church and State have arisen with special frequency, controversy, and fervor in the often-charged atmosphere of education. Schools and the Religion Clauses collide persistently, and litigation frames many of these collisions. Also, the frequency and magnitude of these legal collisions increase as various policy initiatives increasingly seek to leverage private and religious schools in the service …

Notes On Borrowing And Convergence, Robert L. Tsai, Nelson Tebbe

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This is a response to Jennifer E. Laurin, "Trawling for Herring: Lessons in Doctrinal Borrowing and Convergence," 111 Colum. L. Rev. 670 (2011), which analyzes the Supreme Court's resort to tort-based concepts to limit the reach of the Fourth Amendment's exclusionary rule. We press three points. First, there are differences between a general and specific critique of constitutional borrowing. Second, the idea of convergence as a distinct phenomenon from borrowing has explanatory potential and should be further explored. Third, to the extent convergence occurs, it matters whether concerns of judicial administration or political reconstruction are driving doctrinal changes.

The Two Faces Of American Freedom: A Reply, Aziz Rana

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Coming Off The Bench: Legal And Policy Implications Of Proposals To Allow Retired Justices To Sit By Designation On The Supreme Court, Lisa T. Mcelroy, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In the fall of 2010, Senator Patrick Leahy introduced a bill that would have overridden a New Deal-era federal statute forbidding retired Justices from serving by designation on the Supreme Court of the United States. The Leahy bill would have authorized the Court to recall willing retired Justices to substitute for recused Justices. This Article uses the Leahy bill as a springboard for considering a number of important constitutional and policy questions, including whether the possibility of 4-4 splits justifies the substitution of a retired Justice for an active one; whether permitting retired Justices to substitute for recused Justices would …

Unwell: Indiana V. Edwards And The Fate Of Mentally Ill Pro Se Defendants, John H. Blume, Morgan J. Clark

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Same-Sex Marriage, Second-Class Citizenship, And Law's Social Meanings, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Government acts, statements, and symbols that carry the social meaning of second-class citizenship may, as a consequence of that fact, violate the Establishment Clause or the constitutional requirement of equal protection. Yet social meaning is often contested. Do laws permitting same-sex couples to form civil unions but not to enter into marriage convey the social meaning that gays and lesbians are second-class citizens? Do official displays of the Confederate battle flag unconstitutionally convey support for slavery and white supremacy? When public schools teach evolution but not creationism, do they show disrespect for creationists? Different audiences reach different conclusions about the …

Nonbelievers, Nelson Tebbe

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

How should courts handle nonbelievers who bring religious freedom claims? Although this question is easy to grasp, it presents a genuine puzzle because the religion clauses of the Constitution, along with many contemporary statutes, protect only religion by their terms. From time to time, judges and lawyers have therefore struggled with the place of nonbelievers in the American scheme of religious freedom. Today, this problem is gaining prominence because of nonbelievers’ rising visibility. New lines of social conflict are forming around them, generating disputes that have already gone legal. In this Article, I argue that no wholesale response will do. …

Smith In Theory And Practice, Nelson Tebbe

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Employment Division v. Smith controversially held that general laws that were neutral toward religion would no longer be presumptively invalid, regardless of how much they incidentally burdened religious practices. That decision sparked a debate that continues today, twenty years later. This symposium Essay explores the argument that subsequent courts have in fact been less constrained by the principal rule of Smith than advocates on both sides of the controversy usually assume. Lower courts administering real world disputes often find they have all the room they need to grant relief from general laws, given exceptions written into the decision itself and …

The Unconstitutionality Of The Filibuster, Josh Chafetz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article, written for the Connecticut Law Review's 2010 "Is Our Constitutional Order Broken?" symposium, argues that the filibuster, as currently practiced, is unconstitutional.

After a brief introduction in Part I, Part II describes the current operation of the filibuster. Although the filibuster is often discussed in terms of "unlimited debate," this Part argues that its current operation is best understood in terms of a sixty-vote requirement to pass most bills and other measures through the Senate.

Part III presents a structural argument that this supermajority requirement for most Senate business is unconstitutional. This Part argues that the words "passed" …

The Marginality Of Citizens United, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Multiplicity In Federalism And The Separation Of Powers, Josh Chafetz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

By highlighting multiplicity in the federalism context, Alison LaCroix’s new book does constitutional scholarship a great service. Her tracing of the federal idea in the 1760s and 1770s, as well as her tracing of jurisdictional ideas in the early Republic, is thorough and insightful. But it is unclear why her focus suddenly narrows from the federal idea—the idea that multiplicity in levels of government was a virtue rather than a vice—to federal jurisdiction. Certainly, as this Review has endeavored to show, her claim that federalism discourse after 1787 reduced entirely (or even primarily) to jurisdictional debates cannot stand.

And this …

The Political Animal And The Ethics Of Constitutional Commitment, Josh Chafetz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In his article Parchment and Politics: The Positive Puzzle of Constitutional Commitment, Professor Daryl J. Levinson identifies a variety of public choice mechanisms that lead politically empowered groups to accept constitutional limitations on their political power. In this response, Professor Josh Chafetz argues that Levinson overlooks another set of mechanisms, ones which work not at the level of material interests but rather at the level of political morality. Focusing on an Aristotelian account of political morality—an account that was influential among the Framers of the U.S. Constitution and that remains influential today — Chafetz suggests that at least some …

Impeachment And Assassination, Josh Chafetz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In 1998, the conservative provocateur Ann Coulter made waves when she wrote that President Clinton should be either impeached or assassinated. Coulter was roundly - and rightly - condemned for suggesting that the murder of the President might be justified, but her conceptual linking of presidential impeachment and assassination was not entirely unfounded. Indeed, Benjamin Franklin had made the same linkage over two hundred years earlier, when he noted at the Constitutional Convention that, historically, the removal of “obnoxious” chief executives had been accomplished by assassination. Franklin suggested that a proceduralized mechanism for removal - impeachment - would be preferable. …

Majoritarian Difficulty And Theories Of Constitutional Decision Making, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Recent scholarship in political science and law challenges the view that judicial review in the United States poses what Alexander Bickel famously called the "counter-majoritarian difficulty." Although courts do regularly invalidate state and federal action on constitutional grounds, they rarely depart substantially from the median of public opinion. When they do so depart, if public opinion does not eventually come in line with the judicial view, constitutional amendment, changes in judicial personnel, and/or changes in judicial doctrine typically bring judicial understandings closer to public opinion. But if the modesty of courts dissolves Bickel's worry, it raises a distinct one: Are …

Is It Admissible?: Tips For Criminal Defense Attorneys On Assessing The Admissibility Of A Criminal Defendant's Statements, Part Two, John H. Blume, Emily C. Paavola

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Part One of this article addressed the Fifth Amendment issues to be considered when analyzing the admissibility of a criminal defendant's out-of-court statements. Part Two discusses the Sixth Amendment, the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause and impeachment issues.

Is The Filibuster Constitutional?, Josh Chafetz, Michael J. Gerhardt

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

With the help of the President, Democrats in Congress were able to pass historic healthcare-reform legislation in spite of - and thanks to - the significant structural obstacles presented by the Senate’s arcane parliamentary rules. After the passage of the bill, the current political climate appears to require sixty votes for the passage of any major legislation, a practice which many argue is unsustainable.

In this Debate, Professors Josh Chafetz and Michael Gerhardt debate the constitutionality of the Senate’s cloture rules by looking to the history of those rules in the United States and elsewhere. Professor Chafetz argues that the …

When Lightning Strikes Back: South Carolina's Return To The Unconstitutional Standardless Capital Sentencing Regime Of The Pre-Furman Era, John H. Blume, Sheri Johnson, Emily C. Paavola, Keir M. Weyble

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Equal Access And The Right To Marry, Nelson Tebbe, Deborah A. Widiss

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

How should courts think about the right to marry? This is a question of principle, of course, but it has also become a matter of litigation strategy for advocates challenging different-sex marriage requirements across the country. We contend that courts and commentators have largely overlooked the strongest argument in support of a constitutional right to marry. In our view, the right to marry is best conceptualized as a matter of equal access to government support and recognition and the doctrinal vehicle that most closely matches the structure of the right can be found in the fundamental interest branch of equal …

Is It Admissible?: Tips For Criminal Defense Attorneys On Assessing The Admissibility Of A Criminal Defendant's Statements, Part One, John H. Blume, Emily C. Paavola

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article addresses the Fifth Amendment issues to be considered when analyzing the admissibility of a criminal defendant's out-of-court statements.

False Comfort And Impossible Promises: Uncertainty, Information Overload, And The Unitary Executive, Cynthia R. Farina

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The movement toward President-centered government is one of the most significant trends in modern American history. This trend has been accelerated by unitary executive theory, which provided constitutional and “good government” justifications for what political scientists have been calling the “personal” or “plebiscitary” presidency.

This essay draws on cognitive, social and political psychology to suggest that the extreme cognitive and psychological demands of modern civic life make us particularly susceptible to a political and constitutional ideology organized around a powerful and beneficent leader who champions our interests in the face of internal obstacles and external threats. The essay goes on …

Constitutional Borrowing, Nelson Tebbe, Robert L. Tsai

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Borrowing from one domain to promote ideas in another domain is a staple of constitutional decisionmaking. Precedents, arguments, concepts, tropes, and heuristics all can be carried across doctrinal boundaries for purposes of persuasion. Yet the practice itself remains underanalyzed. This Article seeks to bring greater theoretical attention to the matter. It defines what constitutional borrowing is and what it is not, presents a typology that describes its common forms, undertakes a principled defense of borrowing, and identifies some of the risks involved. Our examples draw particular attention to places where legal mechanisms and ideas migrate between fields of law associated …

Deconstructing Nondelegation, Cynthia R. Farina

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Essay (part of the panel on "The Administrative State and the Constitution" at the 2009 Federalist Society Student Symposium) suggests that the persistence of debates over delegation to agencies cannot persuasively be explained as a determination finally to get constitutional law “right,” for nondelegation doctrine—at least as traditionally stated—does not rest on a particularly sound legal foundation. Rather, these debates continue because nondelegation provides a vehicle for pursuing a number of different concerns about the modern regulatory state. Whether or not one shares these concerns, they are not trivial, and we should voice and engage them directly rather than …

The Argument For Same-Sex Marriage, Nelson Tebbe, Deborah A. Widiss, Shannon Gilreath

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Professors Tebbe and Widiss revisit the arguments they made in "Equal Access and the Right to Marry" and emphasize their belief that distinguishing between different-sex marriage and same-sex marriage is inappropriate. They lament the sustained emphasis on the equal-protection and substantive-due-process challenges in the Perry litigation and suggest that an equal-access approach is more likely to be successful on appeal.

Professor Shannon Gilreath questions some of the fundamental premises for same-sex marriage. He challenges proponents to truly reflect on "what there is to commend marriage to Gay people," and points to his own reversal on the question as evidence. Though …