Law Commons^™

Why Professor Redish Is Wrong About Abstention, Michael Wells

Scholarly Works

Most critics of the Supreme Court's abstention doctrines have attacked the substantive merits of rules that channel constitutional litigation away from federal courts and into state courts instead. In a recent article, Martin Redish raises an interesting objection to abstention from a different perspective. He addresses the institutional legitimacy of the rules and contends that whatever their merits, rules like these should be made only by Congress and not the Supreme Court, for they contravene Congress' intent to grant federal courts jurisdiction over constitutional claims against state actors. Part I of this article describes the context in which the choice …

The Abortion Controversey: A Study In Law And Politics, Albert M. Pearson, Paul M. Kurtz

Scholarly Works

The Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which held that women have a federal constitutional right to an abortion, has generated considerable controversy. The abortion issue became politically significant in the 1960's, when, emboldened by the Supreme court's recognition of a constitutionally based right of privacy, activists initiated a series of legal challenges to the validity of state abortion laws. Their efforts finally succeeded in 1973 when the Supreme Court in Roe and Doe v. Bolton struck down as unconstitutional the Texas and Georgia abortion laws. For those who objected to the result in Roe, however, …

The Putative Marriage Doctrine, Christopher L. Blakesley

Scholarly Works

The classic putative marriage doctrine is substantive, ameliorative or corrective; it is designed to allow all the civil effects -- rights, privileges, and benefits -- which obtain in a legal marriage to flow to parties to a null marriage who had a good faith belief that their "marriage" was legal and valid. Most jurisdictions in the United States have developed equitable analogues to the putative spouse doctrine that provide all or part of the relief afforded by the classic doctrine.

If a marriage is declared to be null or void, that declaration is retroactive to the day that the null …