Law Commons^™

Weakening The Bill Of Rights: A Victory For Terrorism, Stephen Reinhardt

Michigan Law Review

What is most remarkable about Richard Posner's latest book-and he has written many-is that he argues that we should repose full confidence in the executive branch to handle the most sensitive constitutional issues of our time without once mentioning the flagrant breaches of law and critical falsehoods with which President Bush and his administration have deluged the public since 9/11. This only seven years after he composed a lengthy tome regarding President Clinton's impeachment in which he appropriately, if harshly, condemned the president for his unethical and illegal conduct, principally his deliberate lies and purposeful lack of candor with the …

Taking Text Too Seriously: Modern Textualism, Original Meaning, And The Case Of Amar's Bill Of Rights, William Michael Treanor

Michigan Law Review

Championed on the Supreme Court by Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas and in academia most prominently by Professor Akhil Amar textualism has emerged within the past twenty years as a leading school of constitutional interpretation. Textualists argue that the Constitution should be interpreted in accordance with its original public meaning, and in seeking that meaning, they closely parse the Constitution's words and grammar and the placement of clauses in the document. They have assumed that this close parsing recaptures original meaning, but, perhaps because it seems obviously correct, that assumption has neither been defended nor challenged. This Article uses Professor …

When Constitutional Worlds Colide: Resurrecting The Framers' Bill Of Rights And Criminal Procedure, George C. Thomas Iii

Michigan Law Review

For two hundred years, the Supreme Court has been interpreting the Bill of Rights. Imagine Chief Justice John Marshall sitting in the dim, narrow Supreme Court chambers, pondering the interpretation of the Sixth Amendment right to compulsory process in United States v. Burr. Aaron Burr was charged with treason for planning to invade the Louisiana Territory and create a separate government there. To help prepare his defense, Burr wanted to see a letter written by General James Wilkinson to President Jefferson. In ruling on Burr's motion to compel disclosure, Marshall departed from the literal language of the Sixth Amendment - …

Taking Aim At An American Myth, Paul Finkelman

Michigan Law Review

Every American had a musket hanging over his fireplace at night, and by his side during the day. Like Cincinnatus, time and again Americans dropped their plows to shoulder their arms, to fight the Indians, the French, the Indians, the British, the Indians, the Mexicans, the Indians yet again, and then, from 1861 to 1865, each other. American men were comfortable with guns; they needed them and wanted them. They felt at home in woods, in search of food, or in defense of their homesteads. It is a story as old as our first pulp novels and earliest movies. It …

Separated At Birth But Siblings Nonetheless: Miranda And The Due Process Notice Cases, George C. Thomas Iii

Michigan Law Review

Paraphrasing Justice Holmes, law is less about logic than experience. Courts and scholars have now had thirty-four years of experience with Miranda v. Arizona, including the Court's recent endorsement in Dickerson v. United States last Term. Looking back over this experience, it is plain that the Court has created a Miranda doctrine quite different from what it has said it was creating. I think the analytic structure in Dickerson supports this rethinking of Miranda. To connect the dots, I offer a new explanation for Miranda that permits us to reconcile Dickerson and the rest of the post-Miranda doctrine with the …

The Second Amendment: Structure, History, And Constitutional Change, David Yassky

Michigan Law Review

A fierce debate about the Second Amendment has been percolating in academia for two decades, and has now bubbled through to the courts. The question at the heart of this debate is whether the Amendment restricts the government's ability to regulate the private possession of firearms. Since at least 1939 - when the Supreme Court decided United States v. Miller, its only decision squarely addressing the scope of the right to "keep and bear Arms" - the answer to that question has been an unqualified "no." Courts have brushed aside Second Amendment challenges to gun control legislation, reading the Amendment …

Treaty-Making And The Nation: The Historical Foundations Of The Nationalist Conception Of The Treaty Power, David M. Golove

Michigan Law Review

Characteristic of the most enduring constitutional controversies is a clash between fundamental but ultimately irreconcilable principles. Unable to synthesize opposing precepts, we visit and revisit certain issues in an endless cycle. Each generation marches forward heedless, and sometimes only dimly aware, of how many times the battle has already been fought. Even the peace of exhaustion achieves only a temporary respite. The abiding controversy over the relationship between the treaty power of the national government and the legislative powers of the states is paradigmatic in this respect. Beginning as early as in the first debate over ratification of the Articles …

Rights Against Rules: The Moral Structure Of American Constitutional Law, Matthew D. Adler

Michigan Law Review

The Bill of Rights, by means of open-ended terms such as "freedom of speech," "equal protection," or "due process," refers to moral criteria, which take on constitutional status by virtue of being thus referenced. We can disagree about whether the proper methodology for judicial application of these criteria is originalist or nonoriginalist. The originalist looks, not to the true content of the moral criteria named by the Constitution, but to the framers' beliefs about that content; the nonoriginalist tries to determine what the criteria truly require, and ignores or gives less weight to the framers' views. Bracketing this disagreement, however, …

Moses And Modernism, Neil H. Cogan

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Bill of Rights and the States: The Colonial and Revolutionary Origins of American Liberties by Patrick T. Conley and John P. Kaminski and State Constitutional Law: Litigating Individual Rights, Claims and Defenses by Jennifer Friesen and Reference Guides to the State Constitutions of the United States

The Constitution's Accommodation Of Social Change, Philip A. Hamburger

Michigan Law Review

Did the framers and ratifiers of the United States Constitution think that changes in American society would require changes in the text or interpretation of the Constitution? If those who created the Constitution understood or even anticipated the possibility of major social alterations, how did they expect constitutional law - text and interpretation - to accommodate such developments?

The effect of social change upon constitutional law was an issue the framers and ratifiers frequently discussed. For example, when AntiFederalists complained of the Constitution's failure to protect the jury trial in civil cases, Federalists responded that a change of circumstances might, …

Constitutional Opinions: Aspects Of The Bill Of Rights, Kenneth F. Sparks

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Constitutional Opinions: Aspects of the Bill of Rights by Leonard W. Levy

No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment And The Bill Of Rights, Mark A. Grannis

Michigan Law Review

A Review of No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights by Michael Kent Curtis

Privacy In Connecticut, Arthur E. Sutherland

Michigan Law Review

Occasionally a judgment of our Supreme Court, delivered in a superficially petty case, suddenly before our startled eyes displays fundamentals of our constitutional theory. Thus, in Griswold v. Connecticut, holding unconstitutional an 1879 Connecticut statute forbidding all persons to use contraceptive devices, the Court found it necessary to discover a "right of privacy" latent in the Bill of Rights and incorporated into the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment. The outcome of the case is satisfying; all nine Justices joined in saying, in one way or another, that Connecticut's statute was nonsense. I am happy to see this …

The Right Of Privacy: Emanations And Intimations, Robert B. Mckay

Michigan Law Review

When Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren wrote in 1890 of "The Right to Privacy," they sought a means of protecting against unwelcome newspaper attention to social activities in the Warren household. Addressing their argument to the private law of torts, they presumably did not anticipate constitutional protection for other rights under the claim of privacy. Nevertheless, seventy· five years later that concept, now called the "right of privacy," was used by the Supreme Court of the United States in Griswold v. Connecticut to describe a constitutional right. Some members of the Court said the new right was within the "penumbra" …

The Griswold Penumbra: Constitutional Charter For An Expanded Law Of Privacy?, Robert G. Dixon Jr.

Michigan Law Review

The comments that follow are divided into a brief review, for purposes of perspective, of the elusive nature of "privacy" as developed in American law to date, and an attempted rigorous analysis of the privacy aspects of Griswold. A final section suggests that effectuation of the new constitutional right of marital privacy necessarily or derivatively implies a corollary right of access to birth control information and devices-a right which should have been more clearly articulated by the Court.

Penumbras, Peripheries, Emanations, Things Fundamental And Things Forgotten: The Griswold Case, Paul G. Kauper

Michigan Law Review

The varying theories followed in the several opinions in the Griswold case can be fully understood and appreciated only in the context of the tortuous but fascinating history of the judicial interpretation of the fourteenth amendment.

Nine Justices In Search Of A Doctrine, Thomas I. Emerson

Michigan Law Review

To the ordinary layman, Griswold v. Connecticut seemed easy. But to the lawyer it was somewhat more difficult. The lawyer's problem with the case was that the issues did not readily fit into any existing legal pigeonhole. Actually, there were five possibilities. The case could have been dealt with under the equal protection clause, the first amendment, substantive due process, the right of privacy, or, in extremis, the ninth amendment. In order to strike down the statute under any of these doctrines, however, the Court would be forced to enter uncharted waters. Whatever course the Court took, its action …

The Line Between Federal And State Court Jurisdiction, Leslie A. Anderson

Michigan Law Review

From the beginning of this nation, there have been controversies involving the division of jurisdiction between federal and state courts. Often, these controversies have centered on the diversity of citizenship provision of the federal constitution. Today, however, the more poignant question is whether any division of jurisdiction between the federal and state systems retains logical bases.

Although myriad developments have relevancy with respect to this question, I have here focused upon two of the more important ones: the increasing overlap of subject matter being litigated in federal and state courts and the growing uniformity of standards to be applied in …

"Congress Shall Make No Law..."*, O. John Rogge

Michigan Law Review

It is the position of the writer that, at least so far as Congress is concerned, speech is as free as thought, and that unless and until speech becomes a part of a course of conduct which Congress can restrain or regulate no federal legislative power over it exists. State power, despite the Fourteenth Amendment, may be somewhat more extensive. Certainly the framers of the First Amendment intended that it should be. This article will deal with federal power over speech.

Liberty Under The Fourteenth Amendment: 1943-44, John Raeburn Green

Michigan Law Review

Elsewhere efforts have been made to survey the status of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights with respect to their protection against state abridgment. The decisions of the Supreme Court were examined, from the February term, 1790, through the 1942 term. It was observed that the struggle to obtain for these rights and liberties federal constitutional protection against state abridgment, as well as against federal abridgment, had been almost continuous since the adoption of the Constitution; that Madison had sought, unsuccessfully, to include in the Bill of Rights guaranties against state abridgment for freedom of speech and …

Political Theory And Practice, Everett S. Brown

Michigan Law Review

A review of THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT. A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY. By J. Mark Jacobson, Ph.D.