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SelectedWorks

2015

Constitutional Law

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Law

Beyond The Written Constitution: A Short Analysis Of Warren Court, Thiago Luis Santos Sombra Jul 2015

Beyond The Written Constitution: A Short Analysis Of Warren Court, Thiago Luis Santos Sombra

Thiago Luís Santos Sombra

This essay propose an analysis about how Warren Court became one of the most particular in American History by confronting Jim Crow law, especially by applying the Bill of Rights. In this essay, we propose an analysis of how complex the unwritten Constitution is. Cases like Brown vs. Board of Education will be analyzed from a different point of view to understand the methods of the Court.


A Call For An Overhaul Of The U.S. Federal Court System, Huhnkie Lee Jul 2015

A Call For An Overhaul Of The U.S. Federal Court System, Huhnkie Lee

Huhnkie Lee

No abstract provided.


Jones, Lackey, And Teague, Richard Broughton Feb 2015

Jones, Lackey, And Teague, Richard Broughton

Richard Broughton

In a recent, high-profile ruling, a federal court finally recognized that a substantial delay in executing a death row inmate violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments. Courts have repeatedly rejected these so-called “Lackey claims,” making the federal court’s decision in Jones v. Chappell all the more important. And yet it was deeply flawed. This paper focuses on one of the major flaws in the Jones decision that largely escaped attention: the application of the non-retroactivity rule from Teague v. Lane. By comprehensively addressing the merits of the Teague bar as applied to Lackey claims, and making …


Free Expression, In-Group Bias, And The Court's Conservatives: A Critique Of The Epstein-Parker-Segal Study, Todd E. Pettys Jan 2015

Free Expression, In-Group Bias, And The Court's Conservatives: A Critique Of The Epstein-Parker-Segal Study, Todd E. Pettys

Todd E. Pettys

In a recent, widely publicized study, a prestigious team of political scientists concluded that there is strong evidence of ideological in-group bias among the Supreme Court’s members in First Amendment free-expression cases, with the current four most conservative justices being the Roberts Court’s worst offenders. Beneath the surface of the authors’ conclusions, however, one finds a surprisingly sizable combination of coding errors, superficial case readings, and questionable judgments about litigants’ ideological affiliations. Many of those problems likely flow either from shortcomings that reportedly afflict the Supreme Court Database (the data set that nearly always provides the starting point for empirical …


Negotiating Federalism And The Structural Constitution: Navigating The Separation Of Powers Both Vertically And Horizontally (A Response To Aziz Huq), Erin Ryan Jan 2015

Negotiating Federalism And The Structural Constitution: Navigating The Separation Of Powers Both Vertically And Horizontally (A Response To Aziz Huq), Erin Ryan

Erin Ryan

This essay explores the emerging literature on the negotiation of structural constitutional governance, to which Professor Aziz Huq has made an important contribution in The Negotiated Structural Constitution, 114 Colum. L. Rev. 1595 (2014). In the piece, Professor Huq reviews the negotiation of constitutional entitlements and challenges the conventional wisdom about the limits of political bargaining as a means of allocating authority among the three branches of government. He argues that constitutional ambiguities in the horizontal allocation of power are sometimes best resolved through legislative-executive negotiation, just as uncertain grants of constitutional authority are already negotiated between state and federal …