Law Commons^™

Movement On Removal: An Emerging Consensus On The First Congress, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

What did the “Decision of 1789” decide about presidential removal power, if anything? It turns out that an emerging consensus of scholars agrees that there was not much consensus in the First Congress.

Two more questions follow: Is the “unitary executive theory” based on originalism, and if so, is originalism a reliable method of interpretation based on historical evidence?

The unitary executive theory posits that a president has exclusive and “indefeasible” executive powers (i.e., powers beyond congressional and judicial checks and balances). This panel was an opportunity for unitary executive theorists and their critics to debate recent historical research questioning …

Freehold Offices Vs. 'Despotic Displacement': Why Article Ii 'Executive Power' Did Not Include Removal, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

The Roberts Court has relied on an assertion that Article II’s “executive power” implied an “indefeasible” or unconditional presidential removal power. In the wake of growing historical evidence against their theory, unitary executive theorists have fallen back on a claim of a “backdrop” or default removal rule from English and other European monarchies. However, unitary theorists have not provided support for these repeated assertions, while making a remarkable number of errors, especially in the recent “The Executive Power of Removal” (Harvard L. Rev. 2023).

This Article offers an explanation for the difficulty in supporting this historical claim: Because …

The Indecisions Of 1789: Inconstant Originalism And Strategic Ambiguity, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

The unitary executive theory relies on the First Congress and an ostensible "Decision of 1789" as an originalist basis for unconditional presidential removal power. In light of new evidence, the First Congress was undecided on any constitutional theory and retreated to ambiguity in order to compromise and move on to other urgent business.

Seila Law's strict separation-of-powers argument depends on indefeasibility (i.e., Congress may not set limits or conditions on the president's power of civil removal). In fact, few members of the First Congress defended or even discussed indefeasibility. Only nine of fifty-four participating representatives explicitly endorsed the presidentialist …

Countering Gerrymandered Courts, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

The key insight in Professor Miriam Seifter's outstanding article Countermajoritarian Legislatures is that state legislatures are usually antidemocratic due to partisan gerrymandering, whereas state governors and judiciaries are insulated from gerrymandering by statewide elections (or selection), and thus they should have a more prominent role in framing election law and in enforcing the separation of powers.

This Piece offers afriendly amendment: These observations are true, so long as states do not gerrymander their state supreme courts into antidemocratic districts. The problem is that historically, judicial elections emerged generally as districted elections, and often with regional and partisan politics shaping those …

Authors’ Response: An Enquiry Concerning Constitutional Understanding, Gary S. Lawson, Guy I. Seidman

Faculty Scholarship

One of Professor Lawson’s first students, alluding to a 1985 article with the provocative title “Why Professor [Marty] Redish Is Wrong about Abstention,” declared that his ambition was to inspire someone to write an article entitled “Why [the student] Is Wrong about XXX.” The student claimed that, regardless of what filled in the “XXX,” this event would be the pinnacle of academic accomplishment.

If that view is even close to the mark, then having an entire conference devoted to explaining why Professors Lawson and Seidman are wrong about the Constitution is an extraordinary honor. In all seriousness, we are genuinely …

Faithful Execution And Article Ii, Andrew Kent, Ethan J. Leib, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

Article II of the U.S. Constitution twice imposes a duty of faithful execution on the President, who must "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" and take an oath or affirmation to 'faithfully execute the Office of President." These Faithful Execution Clauses are cited often, but their background and original meaning have never been fully explored. Courts, the executive branch, and many scholars rely on one or both clauses as support for expansive views of presidential power, for example, to go beyond standing law to defend the nation in emergencies; to withhold documents from Congress or the courts; or …

Revisionist History? Responding To Gun Violence Under Historical Limitations, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

In the D.C. Circuit case Heller v. District of Columbia (Heller II), Judge Kavanaugh wrote that “Heller and McDonald leave little doubt that courts are to assess gun bans and regulations based on text, history, and tradition, not by a balancing test such as strict or intermediate scrutiny.” Now Justice Kavanaugh, will he find support on the highest court for what was then a dissenting view? Chief Justice Roberts, during oral arguments for Heller I, asked “Isn’t it enough to…look at the various regulations that were available at the time…and determine how these—how this restriction and the scope of this …

The Depravity Of The 1930s And The Modern Administrative State, Gary S. Lawson, Steven Calabresi

Faculty Scholarship

Gillian Metzger’s 2017 Harvard Law Review foreword, entitled 1930s Redux: The Administrative State Under Siege, is a paean to the modern administrative state, with its massive subdelegations of legislative and judicial power to so-called “expert” bureaucrats, who are layered well out of reach of electoral accountability yet do not have the constitutional status of Article III judges. We disagree with this celebration of technocratic government on just about every level, but this Article focuses on two relatively narrow points.

First, responding more to implicit assumptions that pervade modern discourse than specifically to Professor Metzger’s analysis, we challenge the normally unchallenged …

Corporate Personhood And The History Of The Rights Of Corporations: A Reflection On Adam Winkler’S Book We The Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Adam Winkler’s book We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights is an impressive work on several different levels. Because so much of the development of American constitutional law over the centuries has involved businesses, the book is a nearly comprehensive legal history of federal constitutional law. It certainly would be worthwhile reading for anyone interested in the constitutionality of economic regulation in the United States, spanning the controversies over the first and second Banks of the United States, through the Lochner era and present-day clashes over corporate campaign spending, and religiously-based exemptions to generally applicable laws such …

The Political Economy Of "Constitutional Political Economy", Jeremy K. Kessler

Faculty Scholarship

Since the early 1990s, constitutional history has experienced a renaissance. This revival had many causes, but three stand out: the Rehnquist Court's attack on formerly sacrosanct features of the "New Deal agenda"; Reagan-Era reassessments of American political development by political scientists, historians, and historical sociologists; and the frustration of constitutional scholars with the inability of legal process theory or political philosophy to produce "authoritative constitutional principles." Spurred by legal crisis and this mix of disciplinary innovation and stagnation, law professors began to tell new stories about our constitutional heritage. They focused on the sources and significance of the New Deal's …

Constitutional Exaptation, Political Dysfunction, And The Recess Appointments Clause, Jay D. Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

The so-called Recess Appointments Clause of the Constitution provides that: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.”1 As of only a few years ago, I considered this clause so minor and quirky that I included it in a book about ten of the Constitution’s “oddest” clauses, right alongside such clearly weird provisions as the Title of Nobility Clause and the Third Amendment.2 Though I recognized that the Recess Appointments Clause was probably the least odd …

The Administrative Origins Of Modern Civil Liberties Law, Jeremy K. Kessler

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers a new explanation for the puzzling origin of modern civil liberties law. Legal scholars have long sought to explain how Progressive lawyers and intellectuals skeptical of individual rights and committed to a strong, activist state came to advocate for robust First Amendment protections after World War I. Most attempts to solve this puzzle focus on the executive branch's suppression of dissent during World War I and the Red Scare. Once Progressives realized that a powerful administrative state risked stifling debate and deliberation within civil society, the story goes, they turned to civil liberties law in order to …

American Influence On Israeli Law: Freedom Of Expression, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter provides a historical overview of the American influence on Israel’s jurisprudence of freedom of expression from the 1950s to the first decade of the twenty first century. The chapter uses the format of decades, presenting representative cases for each decade, to record the process by which Israeli judges incorporated and sometimes rejected themes from the U.S. jurisprudence of freedom of expression. In the course of discussing the jurisprudential themes the chapter also highlights the historical context in which the cases were decided, from the war in Korea and McCarthyism in the 1950s, to the process of globalization which …

Redeeming And Living With Evil, Mark A. Graber

Faculty Scholarship

Jack Balkin’s Constitutional Redemption and Sandy Levinson’s Constitutional Faith understand the problem of constitutional evil quite differently than Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil. Balkin and Levinson regard constitutional redemption and faith as rooted in the possibility that Americans will eventually defeat evil. Constitutional Evil takes the far more pessimistic view that evil will never be defeated. Constitutional faith and redemption in our permanently fallen state is rooted in the possibility that Americans will find ways of living with each other peaceably knowing that the price of union is the continual obligation to make what the abolitionist …

Representing Injustice: Justice As An Icon Of Woman Suffrage, Kristin Collins

Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, written as part of a symposium on Judith Resnik’s and Dennis Curtis's sumptuously illustrated volume Representing Justice, I offer a historically sensitive interpretation of the figure of Justice in woman suffrage spectacle and propaganda. American suffragists were drawn to Justice as a symbol of women's claim to political and legal rights. Why? Surely one reason is that, as Resnik and Curtis demonstrate, by the early twentieth century Justice had ascended as a distinctively resonant symbol of law and law's legitimacy in a democratic polity. Precisely because Justice was a legible symbol of law's legitimacy, she was ripe …

A Constitutional Amendment To Reform Kentucky’S Courts, Kurt Metzmeier

Faculty Scholarship

Responding to a confused patchwork of trial courts with overlapping jurisdiction, uneven justice around the state, and a growing backlog of appellate cases, voters in Kentucky went to the polls on November 4, 1975, to approve a sweeping constitutional amendment that radically revised Kentucky’s court system. Although reformers had decried Kentucky’s confusing court system since the 1940s, the real roots of the revision of the judicial article can be found in the failed movement in the late 1960s to replace Kentucky’s 1891 constitution. Unbowed by the defeat, judicial reformers immediately set out to pass a separate amendment reforming the courts, …

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 …

Constitutional Rights And Land Use Planning: The New And The Old Reality, Robert R. Wright

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.