Law Commons^™

The Limits Of Executive Power, Robert J. Reinstein

American University Law Review

Justice Jackson’s concurring opinion in The Steel Seizure Case has taken on iconic status among legal scholars and had been adopted by the Supreme Court as the governing framework for evaluating presidential power. But Jackson’s principles are conclusory, do not rest on any historical foundation, and raise as many questions as they answer. He fails to examine, much less justify, the existence or scope of implied presidential powers, nor does he meaningfully explain the extent to which those powers are subject to congressional regulation and override. I apply novel originalist methodologies to answer those unexamined questions, with important consequences to …

Why Justice Scalia Should Be A Constitutional Comparativist ... Sometimes, David Gray

David C. Gray

The burgeoning literature on transjudicialism and constitutional comparativism generally reaffirms the familiar lines of contest between textualists and those more inclined to read the Constitution as a living document. As a consequence, it tends to be politicized, if not polemic. This article begins to shift the debate toward a more rigorous focus on first principles. In particular, it argues that full faith to the basic commitments of originalism, as advanced in Justice Scalia's writings, opinions, and speeches, requires domestic courts to consult contemporary foreign sources when interpreting universalist language found in the Constitution. While the article does not propose a …

Supreme Neglect Of Text And History, William Michael Treanor

Michigan Law Review

Since his classic book Takings appeared in 1985, Richard Epstein's ideas have profoundly shaped debate about the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause to a degree that no other scholar can even begin to approach. His broad, original, and stunningly ambitious reading of the clause has powerfully influenced thinking in academia, in the judiciary, and in the political arena. The firestorm of controvery that followed the Supreme Court's recent decision in Kelo - in which the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a municipal urban renewal plan that displaced long-time homeowners and conveyed their land to developers - is in critical part …

The Myth Of The Written Constitution, Todd E. Pettys

Todd E. Pettys

Many Americans have long subscribed to what this Article calls the myth of the written constitution—the claim that the nation’s Constitution consists entirely of those texts that the sovereign American people have formally ratified, and the claim that the will of the American people, as expressed in those ratified texts, determines the way in which properly behaving judges resolve constitutional disputes. Drawing on two different meanings of the term myth, this Article contends that neither of those claims is literally true, but that Americans’ attachment to those claims serves at least three crucial functions. Subscribing to the myth helps to …

A Concise Guide To The Records Of The State Ratifying Conventions As A Source Of The Original Meaning Of The U.S. Constitution, Gregory E. Maggs

Gregory E. Maggs

This article was published by the University of Illinois Law Review in 2009. The citation is: Gregory E. Maggs, A Concise Guide to the Records of the State Ratifying Conventions as a Source of the Original Meaning of the U.S. Constitution, 2009 U. Ill. L. Rev. 457.

Starting in the fall of 1787, legislatures in the original thirteen states called for conventions for the purpose of deciding whether to ratify the U.S. Constitution. Many of the records of these state ratifying conventions have survived. The records reveal some of what the delegates at the state conventions said during their debates …

Medellin And Originalism, D. A. Jeremy Telman

D. A. Jeremy Telman

In Medellín v. Texas, the Supreme Court permitted Texas to proceed with the execution of a Mexican national who had not been given timely notice of his right of consular notification and consultation in violation of the United States’ obligations under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. It did so despite its finding that the United States had an obligation under treaty law to comply with an order of the International Court of Justice that Medellín’s case be granted review and reconsideration. The international obligation, the Court found, was not domestically enforceable because the treaties at issue were not self-executing. …

Originalism As Jujitsu, Kurt T. Lash

Law Faculty Publications

The Ninth Amendment presents an irresistible mystery. It speaks of "other rights" retained by the people and it prohibits interpretations which "deny or disparage" those rights. The Amendment, however, tells us nothing about what these rights are or how they can be enforced. On the one hand, this makes the Ninth rather difficult to apply. On the other hand, the lack of definitional clarity also makes the Ninth Amendment something of a desideratum for those seeking expanded judicial protection of previously unrecognized individual rights. Accordingly, the Ninth Amendment has been cited in support of everything from Dial-a-Porn to freedom from …

Originalism And The Difficulties Of History In Foreign Affairs, Eugene Kontorovich

Faculty Working Papers

This Article spotlights some of the idiosyncratic features of admiralty law at the time of the founding. These features pose challenges for applying the original understanding of the Constitution to contemporary questions of foreign relations. Federal admiralty courts were unusual creatures by Article III standards. They sat as international tribunals applying international and foreign law, freely hearing cases that implicated sensitive questions of foreign policy, and liberally exercising universal jurisdiction over disputes solely between foreigners. However, these powers did not arise out of the basic features of Article III, but rather from a felt need to opt into the preexisting …

Our Twenty-First Century Constitution, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Accommodating our Eighteenth Century Constitution to the government that Congress has shaped in the intervening two and a quarter centuries, Professor Strauss argues, requires accepting the difference between the President’s role as “Commander in Chief” of the Nation’s military, and his right to seek written opinions from those Congress has empowered to administer domestic laws under his oversight. Thus, the question for today is not whether the PCAOB offends Eighteenth Century ideas about government structure, but the question asked by Professors Bruff, Lawson, and Pildes – whether the relationships between PCAOB and SEC, SEC and President meet the constitutional necessity …

On The Origins Of Originalism, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

For all its proponents' claims of its necessity as a means of constraining judges, originalism is remarkably unpopular outside the United States. Recommended responses to judicial activism in other countries more typically take the form of minimalism or textualism. This Article considers why. Ifocus particular attention on the political and constitutional histories of Canada and Australia, nations that, like the United States, have well-established traditions of judicial enforcement of a written constitution, and that share with the United States a common law adjudicative norm, but whose political and legal cultures less readily assimilate judicial restraint to constitutional historicism. I offer …

Selling Originalism, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Justice Scalia has described an originalist approach to interpretation as a prerequisite to faithful application of a written Constitution. If, says he, constitutional judicial review is implicit in the notion that the Constitution is paramount law, as has been settled in this country at least since Marbury v. Madison, then that review must be guided by the ordinary tools of legislative interpretation. In a democracy, serious legislative interpretation requires that judges keep faith with the meaning of the text as understood at the time of enactment, not as desired by those judges or by anyone else who does not, …

The Living Constitution Of Ancient Athens: A Comparative Perspective On The Originalism Debate, Mark J. Sundahl

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article provides a fresh perspective on the originalism debate by undertaking a comparative study of constitutional interpretation in the United States and ancient Athens. By observing how the ancient Athenians resolved the same interpretational problems that face the Supreme Court today, we are able to gain a better understanding of the issues that drive the originalism debate. The study focuses on Athenian practice in 350 B.C., which falls late in the history of the Athenian democracy, well after the legal system had achieved its final form. Like the United States, Athens had a strong tradition of judicial review and …

Constitutional Borrowing, Robert L. Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Borrowing from one domain to promote ideas in another domain is a staple of constitutional decisionmaking. Precedents, arguments, concepts, tropes, and heuristics all can be carried across doctrinal boundaries for purposes of persuasion. Yet the practice itself remains underanalyzed. This Article seeks to bring greater theoretical attention to the matter. It defines what constitutional borrowing is and what it is not, presents a typology that describes its common forms, undertakes a principled defense of borrowing, and identifies some of the risks involved. The authors' examples draw particular attention to places where legal mechanisms and ideas migrate between fields of law …

Heller High Water? The Future Of Originalism, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Has originalism won? It's easy to think so, judging from some of the reaction to the Supreme Court's recent decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. The Heller Court held that the District of Columbia could neither ban possession of handguns nor require that all other firearms be either unloaded and disassembled or guarded by a trigger lock. In finding for the first time in the Court's history that a gun control law violated the Second Amendment, Justice Scalia's opinion for the 5-4 majority appeared to be a sterling exemplar of originalism, the method of constitutional interpretation that he …

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.

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 …

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 …

An Originalist Defense Of Substantive Due Process: Magna Carta, Higher-Law Constitutionalism, And The Fifth Amendment, Frederick Mark Gedicks

Faculty Scholarship

A longstanding scholarly consensus holds that the Due Process Clause of the FifthAmendment protects only rights to legal process. Both this consensus and the occasional challenges to it have generally overlooked the interpretive significance of the classical natural law tradition that made substantive due process textually coherent, andthe emergence of public-meaning originalism as the dominant approach to constitutional interpretation. This Article fills those gaps.

One widely shared understanding of the Due Process Clause in the late eighteenth century encompassed judicial recognition of unenumerated substantive rights as a limit on congressional power. This concept of substantive due process originated in Sir …

The New Originalism Meets The Fourteenth Amendment: Original Public Meaning And The Problem Of Incorporation, Lawrence Rosenthal

Lawrence Rosenthal

This paper, prepared for a symposium on the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment at the University of San Diego's Institute for Constitutional Originalism, examines the historical case for incorporation within the Fourteenth Amendment of the rights in first eight amendments to the Constitution in light of the recent turn in thinking about originalist methods of constitutional interpretation. In recent decades, the historical case for incorporation has made something of a comeback, resting on strong evidence that many of the key framers of the Fourteenth Amendment considered the first eight amendments to be among the privileges and immunities of …