Law Commons^™

Paradise Lost: Good News Club, Charitable Choice, And The State Of Religious Freedom, Ian C. Bartrum

Scholarly Works

The United States Constitution's two religion clauses prohibit Congress from passing laws that establish religion or restrict its free exercise. This Note argues that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson worked to include this language in the Constitution because of their belief that citizens' religious duties were more fundamental than their civic duties. It argues that they intended the Constitution's religion clauses to form a simple dialectic: the government may not force citizens to renounce their religious duties by compelling them to support another faith, nor may it pass laws that act coercively to restrict their religious beliefs and practices. This …

Conflicts Of Interest And The Constitution, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Deciding When Hate Is A Crime: The First Amendment, Police Detectives, And The Identification Of Hate Crime, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article adds to the debate a story of how hate crime law is enforced, based on the experiences of the police detectives who are required to enforce hate crime law. Part I of this Article provides a brief description of hate crime laws and argues that the police play an important role in the determination of how hate crime law is enforced and ultimately, whether defendants’ First Amendment rights will be respected. Part II describes critics’ concerns about defendants’ First Amendment rights and the narrow constitutional line that enforcers of hate crime law must walk between enforcing hate crime …

Constitutional Issues In Information Privacy, Fred H. Cate, Robert E. Litan

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The U.S. Constitution has been largely ignored in the recent flurry of privacy laws and regulations designed to protect personal information from incursion by the private sector, despite the fact that many of these enactments and efforts to enforce them significantly implicate the First Amendment. Questions about the role of the Constitution have assumed new importance in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Efforts to identify and bring to justice the perpetrators and to protect against future terrorist attacks, while threatening to weaken constitutional protections against government intrusions into personal …

Baker's Promise, Equal Protection, And The Modern Redistricting Revolution: A Plea For Rationality, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The conventional wisdom contends that Baker v. Carr did not set down a standard for lower courts to follow. This Article responds to this position. It reaches three conclusions. First, it argues the implicit promise of Baker v. Carr pointed toward a loose, flexible rationality standard for deciding redistricting controversies. Under this approach, states were given much room to enact redistricting plans in accordance to their states' particular needs. Second, the lower courts applied precisely this standard in litigation in the wake of Baker, and did so quite capably. This conclusion responds to those who exhort the imposition of a …

A Balanced Diet Of First Amendment Cases, Joel Gora

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Enda Before It Starts: Section 5 Of The Fourteenth Amendment And The Availability Of Damages Awards To Gay State Employees Under The Proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act, William D. Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Looking Back On Planned Parenthood V. Casey, Christina B. Whitman

Articles

Scholarship that tells us what is really at stake in the lives of people affected makes the law honest and responsive. Whether or not it directly shapes doctrine, this type of scholarship can capture imagination and influence judgment. The Michigan Law Review has published some of the best of this work: Yale Kamisar's articles on coerced confessions, Terry Sandalow's essay on affirmative action, Joe Sax and Phillip Hiestand's description of the emotional impact of living in a slum, Martha Chamallas and Linda Kerber's demonstration of how injuries that uniquely befall women have been dismissed as merely emotional wrongs, and, most …

Proposed Amendments To Fed. R. Crim. P. 26: An Exchange: Remote Testimony, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Recently, the Supreme Court declined to pass on to Congress a proposed change to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 26 submitted to it by the Judicial Conference. In this Article, Professor Friedman addresses this proposal, which would allow for more extensive use of remote, video-based testimony at criminal trials. He agrees with the majority of the Court that the proposal raised serious problems under the Confrontation Clause. He also argues that a revised proposal, in addition to better protecting the confrontation rights of defendants, should include more definite quality standards, abandon its reliance on the definition of unavailability found in …

The Conundrum Of Children, Confrontation, And Hearsay, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

The adjudication of child abuse claims poses an excruciatingly difficult conundrum. The crime is a terrible one, but false convictions are abhorrent. Often the evidence does not support a finding of guilt or innocence with sufficient clarity to allow a decision free of gnawing doubt. In many cases, a large part of the problem is that the prosecution's case depends critically on the statement or testimony of a young child. Even with respect to adult witnesses, the law of hearsay and confrontation is very perplexing, as anyone who has studied American evidentiary law and read Supreme Court opinions on the …

Dial-In Testimony, Richard D. Friedman, Bridget Mary Mccormack

Articles

For several hundred years, one of the great glories of the common law system of criminal justice has been the requirement that prosecution witnesses give their testimony in the presence of the accused" face to face," in the time-honored phrase-under oath, subject to cross-examination, and, unless unfeasible, in open court. In the United States, this principle is enshrined in the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment, which provides that "[i]n all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right ... to be confronted with the witnesses against him." But now a new way is developing for witnesses for the prosecution …

America’S Death Penalty: Just Another Form Of Violence, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

The author in this piece reflects on the death penalty in the U.S. in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The writer goes on to argue that capital punishment is, in and of itself, a form of violence. Also discussed in the article are the gradual removal of executions from public view, issues of deterrence and violent crime, and the author's preference for life-without-possibility-of-parole sentences.

Mathematics And The Legal Imagination: A Response To Paul Edelman, Michael I. Meyerson

All Faculty Scholarship

This article, a response to a review by Prof. Paul Edelman of Prof. Meyerson's book "Political Numeracy: Mathematical Perspectives on Our Chaotic Constitution," explains how the study of mathematics can spur creative legal thinking.

Incomplete Compensation For Takings, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

If a tribunal determines that a state actor has expropriated foreign investment property, or, under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), that a state actor has adopted a regulation that is "tantamount to" an expropriation of foreign investment property, then that tribunal must determine the amount of compensation owed. International law has developed methods to determine the size of a compensation award when a state formally expropriates property. But the notion, reflected in Chapter 11 of NAFTA, that states may be required to pay compensation to foreign investors for what are, in effect, regulatory takings, is …

Powers Inherent In Sovereignty: Indians, Aliens, Territories, And The Nineteenth Century Origins Of Plenary Power Over Foreign Affairs, Sarah H. Cleveland

Faculty Scholarship

Does the United States have powers inherent in sovereignty? At least since the 1819 decision in McCulloch v. Maryland, conventional wisdom has held that national government is one of limited, enumerated powers and exercises “only the powers granted to it” by the Constitution and those implied powers “necessary and proper” to the exercise of the delegated powers. All powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states and to the people. In the 1936 decision in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., however, the Supreme Court asserted that federal authority over foreign relations operated independently …

Bush V. Gore As An Equal Protection Case, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In Bush v. Gore, the United States Supreme Court applied the Equal Protection Clause to the mechanics of state election administration. The Court invalidated the manual recount of the so-called undervote – that is, ballots that vote-counting machinery had found contained no indication of a vote for President – which the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to determine the winner of Florida's vote for presidential electors in the 2000 presidential election. The United States Supreme Court reasoned that the principles it had previously articulated in applying the Equal Protection Clause to the vote were violated by the Florida court's …

Youngstown: Pages From The Book Of Disquietude, Philip Chase Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

The Youngstown holding is widely admired. One reads with pride those passages in which the Supreme Court denies to a president with whom they are in considerable political sympathy the power to enlarge executive authority by militarizing the homeland. And yet one wonders, as we confront in the 21st century a lethal foreign enemy who has demonstrated the ability to infiltrate and assault the domestic environment, precisely what restraints ought to govern a presidential response to that enemy.

When Lawyers Advise Presidents In Wartime: Kosovo And The Law Of Armed Conflict, James E. Baker

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The events of September 11 changed how we perceive national security as a society, a government, and as individuals. This is as true of national security specialists, who have been aware that America has been at war with terrorism sine at least the 1990s, as it is for those whose sense of geographic security was shattered in New York and Washington. There is talk of “new war” and “new rules,” and concern that we not apply twentieth-century lessons to a twenty-first-century war.

Over time, September 11 and its aftermath will test our interpretation and application of domestic law. It may …

Comment On Professor Carrington's Article "The Independence And Democratic Accountability Of The Supreme Court Of Ohio", Roy A. Schotland

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In my view, whether or not Article III is written as members of a new constitutional convention might write it, there is nothing more fundamental to the way our entire judicial system operates (including in many ways, although indirectly, our state courts) than federal judges being as independent as law can make them. Perhaps I suffer from Burkean skepticism about reform of long-standing institutions, or perhaps I am merely a supporter of the status quo. But I believe that, despite obvious drawbacks in giving anyone life tenure in any job, we gain far more than we lose by making federal …

A Goldilocks Account Of Judicial Review?, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

According to Professor Christopher Eisgruber, judicial review of the sort embedded in United States constitutional practice is a practical mechanism for implementing the Constitution's commitment to self-government. "The justices ... make a distinctive contribution to representative democracy" because they are "better positioned [than elected officials] to represent the people's convictions about what is right." Judges can articulate "a conception of justice with which Americans in general [can] plausibly identify themselves. "

I will focus here on two themes in Professor Eisgruber's argument. The first theme can be found in many works of constitutional theory - the construction of a strong …

Is The Rehnquist Court An "Activist" Court? The Commerce Cause Cases, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In United States v. Lopez, the Supreme Court, for the first time in sixty years, declared an act of Congress unconstitutional because Congress had exceeded its powers under the Commerce Clause. In 2000, the Court reaffirmed the stance it took in Lopez in the case of United States v. Morrison, once again finding that Congress had exceeded its powers. Are these examples of something properly called "judicial activism"? To answer this question, we must clarify the meaning of the term "judicial activism." With this meaning in hand, the author examines the Court's Commerce Clause cases. The answer he …

Faith And Funding: Toward An Expressivist Model Of The Establishment Clause, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article seeks to provide an alternative to the polarization that so often characterizes debates about church and state. In Part I, the author suggests that there are good policy reasons for supporting faith-based initiatives, and that these reasons ought to be attractive to liberals and progressives, many of whom have opposed faith-based initiatives. Faith-based social services are, after all, social services, and are often the very types of welfare services that liberals and progressives tend to support. Core religious values--in particular, concern about the less fortunate, a belief in human dignity, and a commitment to the possibility of redemption--reinforce …

Incentives To Create Under A "Lifetime-Plus-Years" Copyright Duration: Lessons From A Behavioral Economic Analysis For Eldred V. Ashcroft, Avishalom Tor, Dotan Oliar

Journal Articles

In this Article, we highlight for the first time some of the significant but hitherto unrecognized behavioral effects of copyright law on individuals' incentives to create and then examine the implications of our findings for the constitutional analysis of Eldred v. Ashcroft. We show that behavioral biases - namely, individuals' optimistic bias regarding their future longevity and their sub-additive judgments in circumstances resembling the extant rule of copyright duration - explain the otherwise puzzling lifetime-plus-years basis for copyright protection given to individual authors, and reveal how this regime provides superior incentives to create. Thus, insofar as the provision of increased …

The Ins And Outs, Stops And Starts Of Speedy Trial Rights In Colorado--Part I, H. Patrick Furman

Publications

This two-part article discusses the constitutional right to a speedy trial and the basics of the speedy trial statute.

See Part II at http://scholar.law.colorado.edu/articles/551/.

An Introduction To The Federal Constitutional Court, Donald P. Kommers

Journal Articles

This essay introduces the Federal Constitutional Court, briefly surveying the Court’s legal heritage, the history of its founding, its jurisdiction, and its structure.

The Rehnquist Court And Criminal Procedure, Stephen F. Smith

Journal Articles

Much of recent discussions of conservative judicial activism has concerned the revival of federalism-based limits on Congress during the Rehnquist Court. The allure of federalism as a topic for discussion is understandable, yet I argue that constitutional criminal procedure provides a better context within which to test the Rehnquist Court's commitment to judicial restraint. In this Essay, I examine the topic at hand against the background of the many important developments that have taken place in criminal procedure on Rehnquist's watch. The results of this examination are surprising because they suggest that activism is not necessarily the antithesis of restraint. …

Law's Constitution: A Relational Critique, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is a simple fact: we begin from others. Without others we, quite literally, could not live, feel, be born. Every mother, every mother's partner, every father, every child, knows this. But law sees these relations as something lesser, as foreign. Mention the word "relationship" to the average lawyer and she will likely assume that you are talking about sex, dating, or perhaps marriage. She may even wonder what "relationship" has to do with the law at all.

In this paper, the author wonders whether it is possible to flip that equation, to think of the relational as central, rather …

Congress's Power To Promote The Progress Of Science: Eldred V. Ashcroft, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay investigates the issues raised by Eldred v. Ashcroft, in which the Supreme Court may decide whether the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) exceeds Congress's authority under that clause. The essay frames the issues in Eldred v. Ashcroft by discussing the history of copyright legislation in general and the CTEA in particular and then summarizing the procedural history of Eldred v. Ashcroft. The essay then undertakes a detailed investigation of the text of the Intellectual Property Clause, with a special emphasis on the interpretation of the clause by the first Congress and early judicial decisions. Three elements …

How Apprendi Affects Institutional Allocations Of Power, Stephanos Bibas

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Commercial Speech And The Unconstitutional Conditions Doctrine: A Second Look At "The Greater Includes The Lesser", Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.