Law Commons^™

The Legal Significance Of Adolescent Development On The Right To Counsel: Establishing The Constitutional Right To Counsel For Teens In Child Welfare Matters And Assuring A Meaningful Right To Counsel In Delinquency Matters, Michael J. Dale, Jennifer K. Pokempner, Riya Saha Shah, Mark F. Houldin, Robert G. Schwartz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Why The 'Originalism' In 'Living Originalism'?, Hugh Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

Jack Balkin’s "Living Originalism" (2011), together with the companion volume "Constitutional Redemption," is an extraordinary achievement that secures his position in the front rank of American constitutional theorists. In those works, Balkin develops a constitutional theory he identifies alternatively as “living originalism” and as “framework originalism.” In this latter expression, Balkin distinguishes two senses of the term “framework.” In the first sense of “framework,” the Constitution establishes a framework for governance and politics. The second sense of “framework” derives from the first. Governance, Balkin argues, involves state-building and constitutional construction by the political branches, not just by the courts. Social …

First Amendment Protection For Union Appeals To Consumers, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

This article explains why decisions of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama holding non-picketing secondary appeals to consumers not to be illegal under the National Labor Relations Act were necessary under a 1988 decision of the Supreme Court, Edward J. DeBartolo Corp. v. Florida Gulf Coast Building & Construction Trades Council. The article also explains why both the Supreme Court decision and the Board’s recent decisions were compelled by the first amendment and could not be based on the language of § 8(b)(4)(ii)(B) of the National Labor Relations Act as interpreted by the Court in other cases. The …

In Medias Res, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

It’s common in academic circles to distinguish between positive arguments (which describe things as they are) and normative arguments (which prescribe the way things ought to be). The distinction dissolves as soon as accounts of how the world works spill over into justifications for the status quo. That happens a lot, especially in discussions of theory. It happens again in David Strauss’ wonderful monograph.1 Strauss offers a succinct exposition of the constitutional system we actually observe, coupled with a powerful explanation of how and why the scheme functions as it does and genuine reassurance that, on the whole, we can …

Living Originalism And Living Constitutionalism As Moral Readings Of The American Constitution, James E. Fleming

Faculty Scholarship

With this event – A Symposium on Jack Balkin’s Living Originalism and David Strauss’s The Living Constitution – we launch a Boston University School of Law series of symposia on significant recent books in law. The distinctive format is to pick two significant books that join issue on an important topic, to invite the author of each book to write an essay on the other book, and to invite several Boston University School of Law faculty to write an essay on one or both books.

What are the justifications for pairing Balkin’s Living Originalism1 and Strauss’s The Living Constitution2 in …

Constitutional And Religious Redemption: Assessing Jack Balkin's Call For A 'Constitutional Project’, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

I begin with a disclaimer: I am not a constitutional theorist. I haven’t even played one on TV. But according to Professor Jack Balkin’s ambitious new book Living Originalism, that should not stop me from engaging in what he calls “the constitutional project,” in which I, along with others, attempt to interpret – indeed, to redeem – the U.S. constitution.1 Living Originalism pairs two intriguing ideas: a “constitutional project” and “constitutional redemption.” I am excited by the notion of a project, and of a constitutional project in particular. In my work for at least a decade I have used the …

When The Cheering (For Gideon ) Stops: The Defense Bar And Representation At Initial Bail Hearings, Douglas L. Colbert

Faculty Scholarship

This article suggests that the absence of representation at the beginning of a State criminal prosecution must come to a screeching halt. The criminal defense bar should take a leadership role and dedicate Gideon's anniversary to making certain that an accused's right to the effective assistance of counsel begins at the initial bail hearing. Indeed, guaranteeing vigorous representation should be the defense bar's number one priority.

Policing School Discipline, Catherine Y. Kim

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Back To The Future, William Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Modern Odysseus Or Classic Fraud - Fourteen Years In Prison For Civil Contempt Without A Jury Trial, Judicial Power Without Limitation, And An Examination Of The Failure Of Due Process, Mitchell J. Frank

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Back To The Future (Reviewing David Bernstein, Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform (2011)), William D. Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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 …

Exactions For The Future, Timothy M. Mulvaney

Faculty Scholarship

New development commonly contributes to projected infrastructural demands caused by multiple parties or amplifies the impacts of anticipated natural hazards. At times, these impacts only can be addressed through coordinated actions over a lengthy period. In theory, the ability of local governments to attach conditions, or “exactions,” to discretionary land use permits can serve as one tool to accomplish this end. Unlike traditional exactions that regularly respond to demonstrably measurable, immediate development harms, these “exactions for the future” — exactions responsive to cumulative anticipated future harms — admittedly can present land assembly concerns and involve inherently uncertain long-range government forecasting. …

Democracy And Productivity: The Glass-Steagall Act And The Shifting Discourse Of Financial Regulation, K. Sabeel Rahman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Judicial Formalism And The State Secrets Privilege, Sudha Setty

Faculty Scholarship

Congress has, in the last few years, toyed with the idea of attempting to rein in the executive’s increasing reliance on the state secrets privilege as a means of escaping the possibility of accountability. The Author examines one high-profile case, that of Binyam Mohamed and other plaintiffs claiming that they had been subject to extraordinary rendition, torture, and prolonged detention. The Mohamed litigation offers evidence of a disturbing trend of U.S. courts retreating to formalistic reasoning to extend unwarranted deference to the executive branch in security-related contexts. In this essay the Author limits her analysis to the recent jurisprudence surrounding …

Anonymously Provided Sperm And The Constitution, Mary P. Byrn, Rebecca Ireland

Faculty Scholarship

Obtaining sperm to use in Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) is relatively simple. Hospitals, clinics, and sperm banks throughout the United States are in the business of selling sperm from literally thousands of men. Once a man is approved to provide sperm, he contracts with the sperm bank to supply sperm for a specified period of time and designates himself as either an anonymous or open-identity sperm provider. When a man chooses to provide his sperm anonymously, both the sperm provider and intended parents agree to complete anonymity – that is, the sperm provider can never know the parents or any …

Stare Decisis And Foreign Affairs, Michael P. Van Alstine

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines whether the jurisprudential and institutional premises of the doctrine of stare decisis retain their validity in the field of foreign affairs. The proper role of the judicial branch in foreign affairs has provoked substantial scholarly debates—historical, institutional, normative—since the very founding of the republic. Precisely because of the sensitivity of the subject, the Supreme Court itself has both cautioned about the judicial branch’s comparative lack of expertise in the field and recognized a web of deference doctrines designed to protect against improvident judicial action. Notwithstanding all of this, however, neither the Supreme Court nor any scholar has …

Defining Corruption And Constitutionalizing Democracy, Deborah Hellman

Faculty Scholarship

The central front in the battle over campaign finance laws is the definition of corruption. The Supreme Court has allowed restrictions on giving and spending money in connection with elections only when they serve to avoid corruption or its appearance. The constitutionality of such laws, therefore, depends on how the Court defines corruption. Over the years, campaign finance cases have conceived of corruption in both broad and narrow terms, with the most recent cases defining it especially narrowly. While supporters and critics of campaign finance laws have argued for and against these different formulations, both sides have missed the more …

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 …

The Constitutional Bounding Of Adjudication: A Fuller(Ian) Explanation For The Supreme Court's Mass Tort Jurisprudence, Donald G. Gifford

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, I argue that the Supreme Court is implicitly piecing together a constitutionally mandated model of bounded adjudication governing mass torts, using decisions that facially rest on disparate constitutional provisions. This model constitutionally restricts common law courts from adjudicating the rights, liabilities, and interests of persons who are neither present before the court nor capable of being defined with a reasonable degree of specificity. I find evidence for this model in the Court’s separate decisions rejecting tort-based climate change claims, global settlements of massive asbestos litigation, and punitive damages awards justified as extra-compensatory damages. These new forms of …

Can He Legally Do That? Does The President Have Directive Authority Over Agency Regulatory Decisions?, Robert V. Percival

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Subtraction By Addition?: The Thirteenth And Fourteenth Amendments, Mark A. Graber

Faculty Scholarship

The celebration of the Thirteenth Amendment in many Essays prepared for this Symposium may be premature. That the Thirteenth Amendment arguably protects a different and, perhaps, wider array of rights than the Fourteenth Amendment may be less important than the less controversial claim that the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified after the Thirteenth Amendment. If the Fourteenth Amendment covers similar ground as the Thirteenth Amendment, but protects a narrower set of rights than the Thirteenth Amendment, then the proper inference may be that the Fourteenth Amendment repealed or modified crucial rights originally protected by the Thirteenth Amendment. The broad interpretation of …

United States V. Klein, Then And Now, Gordon G. Young

Faculty Scholarship

United States v. Klein, decided during Reconstruction, was the first Supreme Court case to invalidate a statutory restriction on federal courts’ jurisdiction. It is the only one to do so by finding a violation of Article III of the Constitution. Klein has been cited in thirty-three United States Supreme Court opinions, and roughly five hundred times each by lower federal courts and law journal articles. Recent commentators have read Klein both too broadly and narrowly. Its central holding is that Congress may not grant federal courts jurisdiction to decide a set of cases on the merits while depriving them …

Wedlocked, Mary P. Byrn, Morgan L. Holcomb

Faculty Scholarship

For as long as marriage has existed in the United States, divorce has been its necessary opposite. So strong is the need for divorce that the Supreme Court has suggested it is a fundamental right, and every state in the country allows access to no-fault divorce. For opposite-sex couples, legally ending their marriage is possible as a matter of right. For married same-sex couples, however, state DoMAs (Defense of Marriage Acts) have been a stumbling block – preventing access to divorce in some states. Same-sex couples in numerous states are being told by attorneys and judges that they cannot terminate …

Freedom Of Expression And Its Competitors, George C. Christie

Faculty Scholarship

The recognition of an increasing number of basic human rights, such as in the European Convention on Human Rights, has had the paradoxical effect of requiring courts in the common-law world to consider whether the extensive protection given by the common law to expression that was not false or misleading must be modified to accommodate these newly recognized basic rights. The most important of these newly recognized rights is the right of privacy, although expression has other competitors as well, such as what might be called a right to be spared the emotional trauma caused by abusive language. This article …

Thirteenth Amendment And The Regulation Of Custom, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

Custom is an underdeveloped concept in Thirteenth Amendment jurisprudence. While a substantial body of work has explored the technical meaning of custom as it applies to § 1983 and, to a lesser extent, Congress’s power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, few scholars have offered sustained treatment of custom as a way to understand the meaning and scope of the Thirteenth Amendment. This gap exists despite the fact that Congress specifically identified custom as a subject of regulation when it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and despite the fact that the Thirteenth Amendment operates directly on the behavior of …

The Right Not To Keep Or Bear Arms, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

Sometimes a constitutional right to do a particular thing is accompanied by a right not to do that thing. The First Amendment, for example, guarantees both the right to speak and the right not to speak. This Article asks whether the Second Amendment should likewise be read to encompass both the right to keep or bear arms for self-defense and the inverse right to protect oneself by avoiding them, and what practical implications, if any, the latter right would have. The Article concludes - albeit with some important qualifications - that a right not to keep or bear arms is …

“Early-Bird Special” Indeed!: Why The Tax Anti-Injunction Act Permits The Present Challenges To The Minimum Coverage Provision, Neil S. Siegel, Michael C. Dorf

Faculty Scholarship

In view of the billions of dollars and enormous effort that might otherwise be wasted, the public interest will be best served if the Supreme Court of the United States decides the present challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) during its October 2011 Term. Potentially standing in the way, however, is the federal Tax Anti-Injunction Act (TAIA), which bars any “suit for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax.” The dispute to date has turned on the fraught and complex question of whether the ACA's exaction for being uninsured qualifies as a …

Not The Power To Destroy: An Effects Theory Of The Tax Power, Neil S. Siegel, Robert D. Cooter

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s “new federalism” decisions impose modest limits on the regulatory authority of Congress under the Commerce Clause. According to those decisions, the Commerce Clause empowers Congress to use penalties to regulate interstate commerce, but not to regulate noncommercial conduct. What prevents Congress from penalizing non-commercial conduct by calling a penalty a tax and invoking the Taxing Clause? The only obstacle is the distinction between a penalty and a tax for purposes of Article I, Section 8. In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (NFIB), the Court considered whether the minimum coverage provision in the Patient …

States’ Rights, Southern Hypocrisy, And The Crisis Of The Union, Paul Finkelman

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the arguments used by southern secessionists to explain why they left the Union. The article demonstrates that support for "states' rights" was not the main reason for secession, and that on the contrary, most of the slave states left the Union because the free states were exercising their states' rights in opposing slavery. The main reason for secession, as this essay shows, was the desire to protect slavery and to create a new nation, self-consciously based on slavery and white supremacy. This article began as part of an AALS legal history section program in 2010 and is …