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Full-Text Articles in Law
Beyond Incorporation, Kurt T. Lash
Beyond Incorporation, Kurt T. Lash
Law Faculty Publications
Incorporation as a theory of constitutional interpretation is dying. Incorporationist scholars are killing it. In this paper, I argue that they are right to do so, whether they mean to or not. The current incorporation debate bears so little resemblance to the theory of incorporation as it originally emerged at the time of the New Deal that I argue it is time to abandon the metaphor of incorporation altogether and admit that what we are after has nothing to do with incorporated texts from 1787. Our search is for the public understanding of texts added to the Constitution in 1868. …
Against Textualism, William Michael Treanor
Against Textualism, William Michael Treanor
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Modern textualists have assumed that careful attention to constitutional text is the key to the recovery of the Constitution's original public meaning. This article challenges that assumption by showing the importance of nontextual factors in early constitutional interpretation. The Founding generation consistently relied on structural concerns, policy, ratifiers' and drafters' intent, and broad principles of government. To exclude such nontextual factors from constitutional interpretation is to depart from original public meaning because the Founders gave these factors great weight in ascertaining meaning. Moreover, for a modern judge seeking to apply original public meaning, the threshold question is not simply; "How …
Taking History Seriously: Reflections On A Critique Of Amar’S Treatment Of The Ninth Amendment In His Work On The Bill Of Rights, Thomas B. Mcaffee
Taking History Seriously: Reflections On A Critique Of Amar’S Treatment Of The Ninth Amendment In His Work On The Bill Of Rights, Thomas B. Mcaffee
Scholarly Works
Dean William Treanor critiques constitutional textualism, contending that it pays too much attention to the words, grammar, and placement of clauses in the Constitution, and too little to the history leading to the adoption of the interpreted language. An important illustration is Professor Amar's treatment of the Ninth Amendment in his well-known book on the Bill of Rights. This treatment shares the perspective that history frequently sheds light on the meaning of constitutional text, but contends that the history yielding the Ninth Amendment demonstrates that it was drafted to secure the rights retained by the granting of limited federal powers—and …
Limits Of Interpretivism, Richard A. Primus
Limits Of Interpretivism, Richard A. Primus
Articles
Justice Stephen Markman sits on the Supreme Court of my home state of Michigan. In that capacity, he says, he is involved in a struggle between two kinds of judging. On one side are judges like him. They follow the rules. On the other side are unconstrained judges who decide cases on the basis of what they think the law ought to be. This picture is relatively simple, and Justice Markman apparently approves of its simplicity. But matters may in fact be a good deal more complex.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg And Sensible Pragmatism In Federal Jurisdictional Policy, Tobias Barrington Wolff
Ruth Bader Ginsburg And Sensible Pragmatism In Federal Jurisdictional Policy, Tobias Barrington Wolff
All Faculty Scholarship
This article, written as part of a symposium celebrating the work of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the occasion of her fifteenth year on the Supreme Court, examines the strain of sensible legal pragmatism that informs Justice Ginsburg's writing in the fields of Civil Procedure and Federal Jurisdiction. Taking as its point of departure the Supreme Court's decision in City of Chicago v. International College of Surgeons, in which Ginsburg dissented, the article develops an argument against strict textualism in federal jurisdictional analysis. In its place, the article urges a purposive mode of interpretation that approaches jurisdictional text with a …
Supreme Neglect Of Text And History, William Michael Treanor
Supreme Neglect Of Text And History, William Michael Treanor
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This article reviews Supreme Neglect: How to Revive Constitutional Protection for Private Property by Richard A. Epstein (2008).
In Supreme Neglect, Professor Richard Epstein has produced a clear and elegant synthesis for the general reader of his lifetime of thinking about the Takings Clause and, more broadly, about the role of property in our constitutional system. Appealing to both history and constitutional text, Epstein argues that the Takings Clause bars government regulations that diminish the value of private property (with the exception of a highly constrained category of police power regulations). This essay shows that neither the text of the …