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Full-Text Articles in Law

Interest-Based Incorporation: Statutory Realism Exploring Federalism, Delegation, And Democratic Design, Sheldon Evans Jan 2022

Interest-Based Incorporation: Statutory Realism Exploring Federalism, Delegation, And Democratic Design, Sheldon Evans

Faculty Publications

Statutory interpretation is a unique legal field that appreciates fiction as much as fact. For years, judges and scholars have acknowledged that canons of interpretation are often based on erudite assumptions of how Congress drafts federal statutes. But a recent surge in legal realism has shown just how erroneous many of these assumptions are. Scholars have created a robust study of congressional practices that challenge many formalist canons of interpretation that are divorced from how Congress thinks about, drafts, and enacts federal statutes. This conversation, however, has yet to confront statutory incorporation, which describes when Congress incorporates state law into …


State Rejection Of Federal Law, Thomas B. Bennett Jan 2022

State Rejection Of Federal Law, Thomas B. Bennett

Faculty Publications

Sometimes the United States Supreme Court speaks, and states do not follow. For example, in 2003, the Arizona Supreme Court agreed to "reject" a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, because no "sound reasons justif[ied] following" it. Similarly, in 2006, Michigan voters approved a ballot initiative that, according to the legislature that drafted it, sought "at the very least to freeze' the state's ... law to prevent" state courts from following a ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court. Surprising though this language may be, there is nothing nefarious about these cases. Cooper v. Aaron this is not. Unlike more notorious …


Response To Wasserman And Rhodes: The Texas S.B. 8 Litigation And “Our Formalism”, B. Jessie Hill Jan 2022

Response To Wasserman And Rhodes: The Texas S.B. 8 Litigation And “Our Formalism”, B. Jessie Hill

Faculty Publications

In Solving the Procedural Puzzles of the Texas Heartbeat Act and Its Imitators: The Limits and Opportunities of Offensive Litigation, Professors Howard Wasserman and Rocky Rhodes explain why the U.S. Supreme Court correctly rejected the pre-enforcement legal challenge brought by abortion providers challenging Texas’s draconian abortion law, S.B. 8, which was specifically designed to evade such challenges. Wasserman and Rhodes also provide grounds for hope on the part of future similarly situated challengers to S.B. 8 copycat laws, outlining a route by which the clinics could have engaged in offensive federal-court litigation against “any person” plaintiffs who seek to …