Law Commons^™

Working Mothers And The Postponement Of Women's Rights From The Nineteenth Amendment To The Equal Rights Amendment, Julie C. Suk

University of Colorado Law Review

The Nineteenth Amendment's ratification in 1920 spawned new initiatives to advance the status of women, including the proposal of another constitutional amendment that would guarantee women equality in all legal rights, beyond the right to vote. Both the Nineteenth Amendment and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) grew out of the long quest to enshrine women's equal status under the law as citizens, which began in the nineteenth century. Nearly a century later, the ERA remains unfinished business with an uncertain future. Suffragists advanced different visions and strategies for women's empowerment after they got the constitutional right to vote. They divided …

"Make The Map All White": The Meaning Of Maps In The Prohibition And Suffrage Campaigns, Susan Schulten

University of Colorado Law Review

Maps.have long been deployed as instruments of power, protest, and reform in American history. In the antebellum era, Northerners used maps to galvanize opposition to the expansion of slavery beyond the South. These dramatic and urgent anti-slavery maps served as powerful models for two of the most ambitious challenges to American law in the twentieth century: prohibition and woman's suffrage. Both movements began with regional strengths-suffrage in the West, prohibition in the South. Suffragists and prohibitionists widely circulated maps to highlight those legislative achievements and thereby generate further momentum for their respective causes. After 1913, both the suffrage and prohibition …

Swearing In The Phoenix: Toward A More Sensible System For Seating Members Of The House Of Representatives At Organization, Brian C. Kalt

Marquette Law Review

Under U.S. House precedent, any member-elect can challenge the right of

any other member-elect to take the oath of office at the beginning of a new term.

The uncontested members-elect then swear in and decide the fate of those who

were forced to stand aside. If the House is closely divided and there are

disputed elections at the margins, a minority party could exploit this procedure

to try to seize control of the House.

The People's Court: On The Intellectual Origins Of American Judicial Power, Ian C. Bartrum

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This article enters into the modern debate between “consti- tutional departmentalists”—who contend that the executive and legislative branches share constitutional interpretive authority with the courts—and what are sometimes called “judicial supremacists.” After exploring the relevant history of political ideas, I join the modern minority of voices in the latter camp.

This is an intellectual history of two evolving political ideas—popular sovereignty and the separation of powers—which merged in the making of American judicial power, and I argue we can only understand the structural function of judicial review by bringing these ideas together into an integrated whole. Or, put another way, …

The Carbon Price Equivalent: A Metric For Comparing Climate Change Mitigation Efforts Across Jurisdictions, Gabriel Weil

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Climate change presents a global commons problem: Emissions reductions on the scale needed to meet global targets do not pass a domestic cost-benefit test in most countries. To give national governments ample incentive to pursue deep decarbonization, mutual interstate coercion will be necessary. Many proposed tools of coercive climate diplomacy would require a onedimensional metric for comparing the stringency of climate change mitigation policy packages across jurisdictions. This article proposes and defends such a metric: the carbon price equivalent. There is substantial variation in the set of climate change mitigation policy instruments implemented by different countries. Nonetheless, the consequences of …

Don't Change The Subject: How State Election Laws Can Nullify Ballot Questions, Cole Gordner

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Procedural election laws regulate the conduct of state elections and provide for greater transparency and fairness in statewide ballots. These laws ensure that the public votes separately on incongruous bills and protects the electorate from uncertainties contained in omnibus packages. As demonstrated by a slew of recent court cases, however, interest groups that are opposed to the objective of a ballot question are utilizing these election laws with greater frequency either to prevent a state electorate from voting on an initiative or to overturn a ballot question that was already decided in the initiative’s favor. This practice is subverting the …

Some Objections To Strict Liability For Constitutional Torts, Michael L. Wells

Georgia Law Review

Qualified immunity protects officials from damages for
constitutional violations unless they have violated “clearly
established” rights. Local governments enjoy no immunity, but
they may not be sued on a vicarious liability theory for
constitutional violations committed by their employees. Critics
of the current regime would overturn these rules in order to
vindicate constitutional rights and deter violations. This
Article argues that across-the-board abolition of these limits on
liability would be unwise as the costs would outweigh the
benefits. In some contexts, however, exceptions may be justified.
Much of the recent controversy surrounding qualified
immunity involves suits in which police officers …