Law Commons^™

The Hollowness Of The Harm Principle, Steven D. Smith

Steven D. Smith

Among the various instruments in the toolbox of liberalism, the so-called “harm principle,” presented as the central thesis of John Stuart Mill’s classic On Liberty, has been one of the most popular. The harm principle has been widely embraced and invoked in both academic and popular debate about a variety of issues ranging from obscenity to drug regulation to abortion to same-sex marriage, and its influence is discernible in legal arguments and judicial opinions as well. Despite the principle’s apparent irresistibility, this essay argues that the principle is hollow. It is an empty vessel, alluring but without any inherent legal …

The Tenuous Case For Conscience, Steven D. Smith

Steven D. Smith

If there is any single theme that has provided the foundation of modern liberalism and has infused our more specific constitutional commitments to freedom of religion and freedom of speech, that theme is probably “freedom of conscience.” But some observers also perceive a progressive cheapening of conscience– even a sort of degradation. Such criticisms suggest the need for a contemporary rethinking of conscience. When we reverently invoke “conscience,” do we have any idea what we are talking about? Or are we just exploiting a venerable theme for rhetorical purposes without any clear sense of what “conscience” is or why it …

Holmes And Dissent, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

Holmes saw the dissent as a mechanism to advance and preserve arguments and as a pageant for wordplay. Dissents, for Holmes, occupied an interstitial space between law and non-law. The thought and theory of pragmatism allowed him to recreate the dissent as a stage for performative text, a place where signs and syntax could mimic the environment of the particular time and place and in so doing become, or strive to become, law. Holmes’s dissents were sites of aesthetic adaptation. The language of his dissents was acrobatic. It acted and reacted and called attention to itself. The more provocative and …

Reason, The Common Law, And The Living Constitution (Review Of The Living Constitution By David Strauss), Matthew J. Steilen

Book Reviews

This article reviews David Strauss’s recent book, The Living Constitution. The thesis of Strauss’s book is that constitutional law is a kind of common law, based largely on judicial precedent and common-sense judgments about what works and what is fair. Strauss argues constitutional doctrines prohibiting discrimination and protecting free speech have a common law basis, and that the originalist would have to reject them. However, it is unclear that the common law can justify these rights. This review examines Strauss’s account of the common law and shows why it cannot justify our First Amendment protections of subversive advocacy, as Strauss …

A Vanishing Virginia Constitution?, Hon. Stephen R. Mccullough

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Cosmopolitanism And Constitutional Self-Government, Vlad F. Perju

Vlad Perju

This paper, which was selected for presentation at the 2010 Yale/Stanford Junior Faculty Forum, articulates the theoretical steps by which self-government in a free community of equals leads constitutional analysis outside the boundaries of that political community. Openness to the experiences in self-government of other peoples is commonly assumed to undermine political legitimacy by loosing citizens’ control over their political fate. But is it possible that such openness might in fact render that control more effective? Could it actually enhance political and constitutional legitimacy? This paper articulates and defends the following claims: 1) The legitimacy of a political order is …

Supreme Court Criminal Law Jurisprudence: Fair Trials, Cruel Punishment, And Ethical Lawyering—October 2009 Term, Richard Klein

Richard Daniel Klein

No abstract provided.

The Last Common Law Justice: The Personal Jurisdiction Jurisprudence Of Justice John Paul Stevens, Rodger D. Citron

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Individual Mandate, Sovereignty, And The Ends Of Good Government: A Reply To Professor Randy Barnett, Patrick Mckinley Brennan

Working Paper Series

Randy Barnett has recently argued that the individual mandate is unconstitutional because it is an improper regulation under the Necessary and Proper Clause (in conjunction with the Commerce Clause) because it improperly "commandeers" the people and thereby violates their sovereignty. In this paper, I counter that the argument from sovereignty is unavailing because it is, among other defects, hopelessly ambiguous. The variety of historically attested meanings of "sovereignty" renders the concept useless for purposes of answering questions of comparative authority, including the authority of the Congress to mandate that individuals purchase health insurance from a private market. There is no …

Resolving The Qualified Immunity Dilemma: Constitutional Tort Claims For Nominal Damages, James E. Pfander

Faculty Working Papers

Scholars have criticized the Court's qualified immunity decision in Pearson v. Callahan on the ground that it may lead to stagnation in the judicial elaboration of constitutional norms. Under current law, officers sued in their personal capacity for constitutional torts enjoy qualified immunity from liability unless the plaintiff can persuade the court that the conduct in question violated clearly established law. Pearson permits the lower courts to dismiss on the basis of legal uncertainty; it no longer requires the courts to address the merits of the constitutional question. This essay suggests that constitutional tort claimants should be permitted to avoid …

The Architecture Of First Amendment Free Speech, Edward J. Eberle

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Children's Oppression, Rights And Liberation, Samantha Godwin

Samantha Godwin

This paper advances a radical and controversial analysis of the legal status of children. I argue that the denial of equal rights and equal protection to children under the law is inconsistent with liberal and progressive beliefs about social justice and fairness. In order to do this I first situate children’s legal and social status in its historical context, examining popular assumptions about children and their rights, and expose the false necessity of children’s current legal status. I then offer a philosophical analysis for why children’s present subordination is unjust, and an explanation of how society could be sensibly and …

Nonpublic Reasons And Political Paradigm Change, Ian C. Bartrum

Ian C Bartrum

This article was a contribution to the 2010 Religious Legal Theory symposium held at St. John's Law School.

John Rawls famously argued that citizens in a just democracy have a moral duty to ensure that “the principles and policies they advocate and vote for can be supported by the political values of public reason.” This so-called “duty of civility” obligates us to cast our votes on “constitutional questions and matters of basic justice” for reasons that we can explain in terms of the public good and the “ideals and principles expressed by society’s conception of political justice.” Rawls contrasts these …

Why The Demands Of Formalism Will Prevent New Originalism From Furthering Conservative Political Goals, Daniel Hornal

Daniel Hornal

Proponents of New Originalism propose that their modifications solve the indeterminacy and predictability problems inherent in early conceptions of originalism. This paper argues that excluding extrinsic evidence and relying only on the formal implications of the text merely switches one indeterminacy and predictability problem for another. Rules inherently carry implications unknown to rule writers. In the case of open-textured rules such as those in the Constitution, a broad reading can occupy whole fields of law, whereas a narrow reading can have almost no real-world effects. Because they must ignore extrinsic evidence, new originalists are almost unbound in their choice of …

Personae Non Suspect: Sexual Orientation Discrimination Under The Supreme Court’S New Anticlassification Regime, Chris R. Copeland

Chris R Copeland

As Perry v. Schwarzenegger seemingly makes its way to the Supreme Court, LGBT advocates are staking their legal claims around the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause – arguing for the designation of LGBTs as a suspect or quasi-suspect group. The desire for suspect class designation is in vain though. In the late 1970s, the Supreme Court closed the set of suspect and quasi-classifications, and the set will likely remain closed. Around the same time, the Court faced a series of affirmative action cases in which it was forced to choose between two approaches to equal protection: antisubordination and anticlassification. It …

What Will We Lose If The Trial Vanishes?, Robert P. Burns

Faculty Working Papers

The number of trials continues to decline andfederal civil trials have almost completely disappeared. This essay attempts to address the significance of this loss, to answer the obvious question, "So what?" It argues against taking a resigned or complacent attitude toward an important problem for our public culture. It presents a short description of the trial's internal structure, recounts different sorts of explanations, and offers an inventory of the kinds of wounds this development would inflict.

Supreme Court Criminal Law Jurisprudence: Fair Trials, Cruel Punishment, And Ethical Lawyering—October 2009 Term, Richard Klein

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Advice And Consent Vs. Silence And Dissent? The Contrasting Roles Of The Legislature In U.S. And U.K. Judicial Appointments, Mary Clark

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The Senate‘s role in judicial appointments has come under increasingly withering criticism for its uninformative and spectacle-like nature. At the same time, Britain has established two new judicial appointment processes - to accompany its new Supreme Court and existing lower courts - in which Parliament plays no role. This Article seeks to understand the reasons for the inclusion and exclusion of the legislature in the U.S. and U.K. judicial appointment processes adopted at the creation of their respective Supreme Courts.

The Article proceeds by highlighting the ideas and concerns motivating inclusion of the legislature in judicial appointments in the early …

Justice Stevens And The Obligations Of Judgment, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

How to sum up a corpus of opinions that spans dozens of legal fields and four decades on the bench? How to make the most sense of a jurisprudence that has always been resistant to classification, by a jurist widely believed to have "no discernible judicial philosophy"? These questions have stirred Justice Stevens' former clerks in recent months. Since his retirement, many of us have been trying to capture in some meaningful if partial way what we found vital and praiseworthy in his approach to the law. There may be something paradoxical about the attempt to encapsulate in a formula …

The First Principles Of Standing: Privilege, System Justification, And The Predictable Incoherence Of Article Iii, Christian Sundquist

Articles

This Article examines the indeterminacy of standing doctrine by deconstructing recent desegregation, affirmative action, and racial profiling cases. This examination is an attempt to uncover the often unstated meta-principles that guide standing jurisprudence. The Article contends that the inherent indeterminacy of standing law can be understood as reflecting an unstated desire to protect racial and class privilege, which is accomplished through the dogma of individualism, equal opportunity (liberty), and “white innocence.” Relying on insights from System Justification Theory, a burgeoning field of social psychology, the Article argues that the seemingly incoherent results in racial standing cases can be understood as …

Affirmative Action As Government Speech, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

This article seeks to transform how we think about “affirmative action.” The Supreme Court’s affirmative action jurisprudence appears to be a seamless whole, but closer examination reveals important differences. Government race-consciousness sometimes grants a benefit to members of a minority group for remedial or diversifying purposes. But the government may also undertake remedial or diversifying race-conscious action without it resulting in unequal treatment or disadvantage to non-minorities. Under the Court’s current equal protection doctrine, both categories of cases are treated as presumptively unconstitutional. Race-consciousness itself has become a constitutional harm, regardless of tangible effects.

Prior scholarship has suggested that the …

Documentary Disenfranchisement, Jessie Allen

Articles

In the generally accepted picture of criminal disenfranchisement in the United States today, permanent voting bans are rare. Laws on the books in most states now provide that people with criminal convictions regain their voting rights after serving their sentences. This Article argues that the legal reality may be significantly different. Interviews conducted with county election officials in New York suggest that administrative practices sometimes transform temporary voting bans into lifelong disenfranchisement. Such de facto permanent disenfranchisement has significant political, legal, and cultural implications. Politically, it undermines the comforting story that states’ legislative reforms have ameliorated the antidemocratic interaction of …

Finding Home In The World: A Deontological Theory Of The Right To Be Adopted, Paulo Barrozo

Paulo Barrozo

Because of the continued dominance of consequentialist views, the deontological paradigm that emerges in the form of a human rights approach to adoption faces two major and partially connected obstacles. First, and despite the fact that the human rights approach has found compelling advocates, its jurisprudential basis has yet to be fully articulated. And in part because of insufficient theorization, the emerging deontological adoption is constantly at risk of being rhetorically and practically subsumed or engulfed by the resilient consequentialist-cum-charity paradigm. This article addresses these two obstacles, laying out the foundations of a deontological theory of adoption.After the Introduction, Part …

Thurgood Marshall: The Writer, Anna P. Hemingway, Starla J. Williams, Jennifer M. Lear, Ann E. Fruth

Anna P. Hemingway

Modern American Supreme Court Judicial Methodology And Its Origins: A Critical Analysis Of The Legal Thought Of Roscoe Pound, Beau James Brock

Beau James Brock

The pragmatic philosophy of law espoused by Pound has come to be regarded as a textbook method of adjudication. The most telling commentators of all have been the judges themselves who utilize his balancing of social interests in their adjudication of cases. Finally, his pragmatism has been assimilated into mainstream legal thought producing innovative attempts to address the possibly unanswerable question of the proper valuation of competing interests.