Law Commons^™

The Defamation Injunction Meets The Prior Restraint Doctrine, Doug Rendleman

San Diego Law Review

This article maintains that, under defined circumstances, a judge should be able to grant an injunction that forbids the defendant’s proved defamation. It analyzes the common law of defamation, the constitutional prior restraint doctrine, the constitutional protection for defamation that stems from New York Times v. Sullivan, and injunctions and their enforcement.

In Near v. Minnesota, the Supreme Court expanded protection for expression by adding an injunction to executive licensing as a prior restraint. Although the Near court circumscribed the injunction as a prior restraint, it approved criminal sanctions and damages judgment for defamation. An injunction that forbids the defendant’s …

The Problem With Procedure: Some Inconvenient Truth About Aspirational Goals, George Rutherglen

San Diego Law Review

Procedure aspires to lofty goals: fairness, efficiency, and speedy adjudication, or so says Rule 1. The rule states the aims of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in admirably succinct terms: “They should be construed and administered to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding.” Who could oppose any of these goals? Yet for all its virtues as a concise summary of what the Federal Rules seek to achieve, this provision cannot be taken literally as a guide to interpretation. The goals it aspires to are, on even a cursory examination, deeply inconsistent with each …

Judicial Deference And Political Power In Fourteenth Amendment And Dormant Commerce Clause Cases, F. Italia Patti

San Diego Law Review

The Supreme Court lacks a coherent approach to deciding how much to defer to state legislatures when reviewing allegedly unconstitutional legislation. The Court grants very little deference to state legislatures in dormant Commerce Clause cases but significant deference to state legislatures in Fourteenth Amendment cases. The Court has never acknowledged this divergence, let alone justified it. Scholars have also failed to note this divergence or explore whether it can be justified. By ignoring this divergence, the Court and scholars have ignored a situation that exacerbates existing power imbalances and fails to recognize a more promising approach to judicial deference.

This …

The Rational Basis Test And Why It Is So Irrational: An Eighty-Year Retrospective, James M. Mcgoldrick Jr.

San Diego Law Review

The Rational Basis test is one of the most common and yet perhaps the most insignificant United States Supreme Court test in the history of the constitution, yet year in year out clients and lawyers will submit another brief hoping against hope that this time there might be a meaningful outcome. There will not be.

This article attempts to explain why the rational basis test is so irrational in its outcome, why basic interests are disregarded in the name of judicial respect for the legislative process, and how easy it would be for there to be a better outcome. The …

Laying Siege To The Ivory Tower: Resource Allocation In Response To The Heckler's Veto On University Campuses, Macklin W. Thornton

San Diego Law Review

High in the towers of academia, the lofty ideals of free speech are tossed around with a deceptive ease. However, as legal minds grapple with heady legal doctrines, free speech has concrete consequences down at the foot of those towers. At this ivory base, the property line between the university and the community blur. Students and nonstudents assemble and deliver conflicting speech that, at times, foments violence. Molotov cocktails, gun shots, broken windows, disgruntled students. All attempts to trigger the dreaded heckler’s veto—an attempt the government has an obligation to prevent. In addition to the public relations disasters grown from …

The Need To Attend To Probabilities—For Purposes Of Self-Defense And Other Preemptive Actions, Larry Alexander

San Diego Law Review

I was not certain I was going to write something for this symposium. After all, I had written a lot on the topic of self-defense, so what was there left to say that I had not said before? I have concluded, however, after reading a new generation of literature on self-defense, that most who write on the topic neglect its perhaps most important aspect, namely, that it is a preemptive action. As a preemptive action, self-defense perforce takes place before the attack to which it is a response occurs. This preemptive aspect of self-defense brings with it a nest of …

The Vindication Of Good Over Evil: “Futile” Self-Defense, Douglas Husak

San Diego Law Review

The burgeoning self-defense literature, like that in most areas of moral and legal philosophy, typically begins with and seeks to rationalize our intuitions. I submit that the intuitive judgment of virtually all respondents, at least initially, is that IV is permitted to exercise her right of self-defense, however futile, and scratch WA. This intuition, I believe, is incredibly powerful and robust; I certainly have it myself. Yet quite a few philosophers and legal theorists contend IV is not permitted to employ futile self-defense against WA. Presumably, they believe IV must passively accept her fate without injuring WA. Why hold this …

Self-Defense And Culpability: Fault Forfeits First, Richard J. Arneson

San Diego Law Review

Under what conditions is it morally permissible to kill someone in order to save your own life—or the life of another who is threatened? There seem to be clear cases. Threatened by an assailant who is trying to kill you for no good reason, you may use lethal force if necessary to save yourself from death or serious injury from the assailant’s attack. Threatened with death in the form of an onrushing runaway truck, you may not save yourself by using a bystander or imposing on a bystander in a way that inflicts severe harm on her. In a justly …

Defense And Desert: When Reasons Don’T Share, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

San Diego Law Review

Assume Culpable Aggressor threatens Innocent Victim with a knife. Victim is stronger than Culpable Aggressor and is able to defend herself by punching Culpable Aggressor in the face, causing him to stumble back and drop the knife. Not only was this action necessary, but also Victim believed it to be so to save her life.

I take it that this is an uncontroversial case of self-defense. My question is whether this is also a case of punishment. Uwe Steinhoff suggests that it might be. Indeed, he states that “nothing hinders an act from being both punitive and defensive. In fact, …

Steinhoff And Self-Defense, Michael S. Moore

San Diego Law Review

I shall first describe what moral combat would be if it existed, separate it into distinct species, and say why it is so undesirable that one should be brought to acknowledge its existence only reluctantly and as a last resort. I will then detail two ways in which rights to do things—often called “action rights” or “active rights”—such as the right to defend oneself, are integrated into standard deontic logic: (1) Hohfeld’s way and (2) the older but still popular Kantian alternative that Hurd and I recently defended. The first of these is compatible with—indeed, inviting of—moral combat, whereas the …

The Nature Of Self-Defense, Samuel C. Rickless

San Diego Law Review

What is self-defense? Most theorists of self-defense are mainly interested in explaining why and when we are morally justified in defending ourselves from a threat posed by another. The moral questions here are important, not just because self-defense represents an interesting moral conundrum, but because morality, at least in this case, is, or should be, a reliable guide to the law. So theorists of self-defense often start with paradigm cases—the culpable aggressor, the justified aggressor, the innocent aggressor, the innocent threat, and so on—and try to explain moral intuitions about them with the help of moral theory, whether Hohfeldian, utilitarian, …

The Right To Cause Harm As An Alternative To Being Sacrificed For Others: An Exploration Of Agent-Rights With A Special Focus On Intervening Agency, Alec Walen

San Diego Law Review

My strategy for defending the right of non-sacrifice and the connected agent–patient inference is to move through a series of cases, starting with easy cases—clearly permissible acts of non-sacrifice—and moving to more controversial ones. The controversial cases are those in which intervening agency is central to explaining why an agent should have the right of non-sacrifice. My argument will not simply be an attempt to explain intuitions. I take the intuitions on the easy cases to be reliable, but once we move to controversial cases, I think moral intuitions become unreliable. My argument fundamentally trades on two thoughts: (1) there …

Self-Defense, Necessity, And The Duty To Compensate, In Law And Morality, Kenneth W. Simons

San Diego Law Review

What is the proper scope of the right to self-defense in law and morality? How does this right compare to the privilege of necessity? Professor Uwe Steinhoff’s manuscript offers a distinctive and wide-ranging perspective on the controversial questions these privileges raise. This essay engages with a number of his arguments, particularly focusing on legal and moral duties of compensation.

First, this essay examines how Anglo-American tort law would likely address the defender’s liability in a variety of scenarios, including disproportionate, excessive, and unnecessary force; unreasonable and reasonable mistakes; and use of force against innocent aggressors. It next considers whether private …

Culture Wars On Campus: Academic Freedom, The First Amendment, And Partisan Outrage In Polarized Times, Jason M. Shepard, Kathleen B. Culver

San Diego Law Review

After a California community college professor called the election of President Donald Trump an “act of terrorism” in her classroom the week after the vote, a student-recorded viral video sparked a national conservative media firestorm. Critics said the professor should be fired for outrageous liberal bias, while supporters defended her comments as being protected by academic freedom and the First Amendment. The student, meanwhile, was suspended for his unauthorized recording while defenders decried his punishment as evidence of anti-conservative discrimination and harassment. By examining tensions between faculty and student speech rights, the use of technologies to take ideological disagreements viral …

In Defense Of A Little Judiciary: A Textual And Constitutional Foundation For Chevron, Terence J. Mccarrick Jr.

San Diego Law Review

This Article hopes to help fill that “important gap in the administrative law literature.” And it proceeds in three parts. Part II offers a brief history of the Chevron doctrine and its discontents. It traces the doctrine’s origin and scope and ends by articulating the textualist and originalist critique of Chevron described above. Part III grapples with that criticism and offers a textualist and originalist defense of Chevron. Section III.A describes the textual footing for Chevron in the APA and argues that Chevron—if not commanded by the APA—does not upset the role it envisions for courts. Section III.B describes the …

Punitive Preemption And The First Amendment, Rachel Proctor May

San Diego Law Review

In recent years, state legislators have begun passing a new breed of “punitive” preemption laws–those that impose fines, civil and criminal sanctions, and other sanctions on local governments and their officials as a consequence of passing laws or enacting policies that are inconsistent with state laws. This represents a significant change from traditional preemption, under which a local government could enact laws based on its view of preempting state statutes and applicable state constitutional provisions and, if necessary, defend its interpretation in court. When punitive preemption prevents a local lawmaking process from taking place, the state forecloses a unique form …

Constitutional Theories: A Taxonomy And (Implicit) Critique, Larry Alexander

San Diego Law Review

I am honored to have been invited to present this Madison Lecture, and I want to thank my hosts, Robby George and Brad Wilson, for their hospitality and for the excellence achieved by the Madison Program under their stewardship. My charge was to present something on constitutional theory. Now, as you shall see, I do work in one corner of constitutional theory, and of course I believe it is the right corner to work in and that all constitutional theorists should be working in my corner. The baleful truth, however, is that most constitutional theorists reject that claim, despite several …

The Limits Of Custom In Constitutional And International Law, Michael D. Ramsey

San Diego Law Review

This Article does not contend that arguments for extension of custom are illegitimate. Instead, it makes two more limited claims. First, there is an important difference between arguments from pure custom and arguments for the extension of custom, with the latter being more properly called common law arguments. Second, the legitimacy of common law arguments in some fields, especially constitutional law and international law, is substantially more problematic than the legitimacy of arguments from pure custom. The Article develops as follows. Part II sets out in greater detail the proposed distinction between arguments from pure custom and arguments for extension …

The Role Of The Federal Judge In The Constitutional Structure: An Originalist Perspective, Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain

San Diego Law Review

Join me now in examining some of the structural features of our Constitution. And let’s do so by focusing upon cases that have come before my court—the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the second highest federal court in the land, inferior only to the Supreme Court of the United States. My goal is to present, in modest outline, an originalist perspective on the federal judge’s role, particularly my role as a circuit judge, in the constitutional order.

Joe The Ploughman Reads The Constitution, Or, The Poverty Of Public Meaning Originalism, Jack N. Rakove

San Diego Law Review

Originalism is hot. A couple of decades ago, one might have thought that its death knell had sounded when the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork failed in the Senate. Although one wondered exactly what kind of originalism Justice Bork might have performed in practice, he was regarded as the theory's leading academic spokesman, and the defeat of his nomination might have served as a fatal blow to the cause. Within a few years, however, Justice Antonin Scalia published his lecture Originalism: The Lesser Evil, signaling that the cause remained alive and well. Although Justice Scalia's views of the practice …

Mental Disorder And The Civil/Criminal Distinction, Grant H. Morris

San Diego Law Review

This essay, written as part of a symposium issue to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the University of San Diego Law School, discusses the evaporating distinction between sentence-serving convicts and mentally disordered nonconvicts who are involved in, or who were involved in, the criminal process–people we label as both bad and mad. By examining one Supreme Court case from each of the decades that follow the opening of the University of San Diego School of Law, the essay demonstrates how the promise that nonconvict mentally disordered persons would be treated equally with other civilly committed mental patients was made and …

Recovering (From) Enlightenment?, Steven D. Smith

San Diego Law Review

The American Constitution at its founding is often associated with "the Enlightenment," and modern liberal constitutionalism continues to be associated with what Bruce Ackerman refers to as "the spirit of the Enlightenment." This article contrasts the essential features of the classical or historical Enlightenment with those of the modern Enlightenment, as reflected in the thinking of theorists like Rawls, Dworkin, and others and as embodied in a good deal of modern constitutional doctrine. The article argues that the modern Enlightenment is more accurately viewed as an inversion than a continuation of the classical Enlightenment. Moreover, this inversion threatens to undermine …

“The Corporate Conscience” And Other First Amendment Follies In Pacific Gas & Electric

San Diego Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court, The Florida Vote, And Equal Protection, Larry Alexander

San Diego Law Review

The Supreme Court majority in Bush v. Gore1 has taken a lot of flak for its ruling that the Florida count of undervotes violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Commentators, and not only those on the left, have labeled the Court’s reasoning as without basis in precedent, weak in its logic, and breathtakingly sweeping in its implications.2 For those inclined to suspect the justices of naked partisanship, the equal protection argument did nothing to allay those suspicions.

It is argued in this Essay, however, that the case for an equal protection violation is supported both by precedent …

The Wrong Line Between Freedom And Restraint: The Unreality, Obscurity, And Hcivility Of The Fourth Amendment Consensual Encounter Doctrine, Daniel J. Steinbock

San Diego Law Review

restraint is clearly one of the most important, and one the law should be most anxious to get right. On the one side lies freedom to move around physically-the essence of what most people mean by "liberty." While not explicitly defined in the Constitution, this liberty is protected by several of its provisions: the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments,' the right to habeas corpus, the Thirteenth Amendment's ban on slavery, and the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable seizures. Together they ensure against interference with personal freedom of movement in the form of bondage, incarceration, civil confinement, …

David Versus Goliath: A Law School Debate About Bush V. Gore, H. Lee Sarokin

San Diego Law Review

For the first time in America’s history, the Supreme Court has, in effect, selected the President of the United States. The case was analogous to a claim that a jury verdict was tainted. The Court, in this instance, knew who would win if the verdict was permitted to stand, and who was likely to win if the jury was permitted to continue its deliberations. It was this knowledge that made the decision so sensitive and challenged the integrity and the role of the Court so profoundly.

Slaves To Fashion: A Thirteenth Amendment Litigation Strategy To Abolish Sweatshops In The Garment Industry, Samantha C. Halem

San Diego Law Review

Viewed as a relic of a bygone era, modem legal teaching largely ignores the Thirteenth Amendment. Few constitutional law textbooks give it any more than a passing glance.' After all, slavery was abolished in the United States in 1863. While it is true that some scholars have suggested new applications for the Civil War Amendment legal practitioners have found few practical applications. This Article proposes a real world application of the Thirteenth Amendment to a current real world problem. Legal practitioners have under-utilized the Thirteenth Amendment. They should employ the Thirteenth Amendment as a valuable tool for fighting slavery and …

The Irony Of Constitutional Democracy: Federalism, The Supreme Court, And The Seventeenth Amendment, Ralph A. Rossum

San Diego Law Review

The thesis of this Article can be stated briefly: The founding generation clearly understood that federalism would be protected primarily by the mode of electing the United States Senate. The adoption and ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment, providing for direct election of the Senate,' changed all that. The Seventeenth Amendment was ultimately approved by the United States Congress and ratified by the states to make the Constitution more democratic. Progressives argued forcefully, persistently, and successfully that the democratic principle required the Senate to be elected directly by the people rather than indirectly through their state legislatures. The consequences of the …

The Evolution Of The Capital Punishment Jurisprudence Of The United States Supreme Court And The Impact Of Tuilaepa V. California On That Evolution, David Hesseltine

San Diego Law Review

This Comment discusses the evolution of the death penalty statute in Supreme Court decisions and the emergence of guided discretion statutes, in which the sentencing authority’s discretion to impose the death penalty is guided by aggravating and mitigating factors. The Comment analyzes the constitutional requirements placed upon the process used to sentence a defendant to death. The Author then analyzes the impact of Tuilaepa v. California on these requirements.

The Exhaustion Doctrine: State Prisoners Caught Between Civil Rights Actions And Writs Of Habeas Corpus, Linda Marie Bell

San Diego Law Review

This Comment explores the conflict between two federal laws when prisoners challenging their confinement seek damages or declaratory relief. On one hand, the exhaustion doctrine requires state prisoners to exhaust their state remedies before filing a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal court when they contest their confinement. On the other hand, prisoners challenging their civil rights may file in federal court without exhausting all state remedies. This Comment addresses how federal courts should determine which rule to apply when a prisoner brings an action contesting confinement, but seeks only declaratory relief or damages. The author proposes …