Law Commons^™

Law School News: The View From The Statehouse 04-27-2021, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Rwu Law News: The Newsletter Of Roger Williams University School Of Law 04-2021, Michael M. Bowden, Barry Bridges, Political Roundtable

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

2nd Annual Women In Law Leadership Lecture: A Fireside Chat With Debra Katz, Esq. 03-03-2021, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Rwu Law News: The Newsletter Of Roger Williams University School Of Law 12-2020, Barry Bridges, Michael M. Bowden, Nicole Dyszlewski, Louisa Fredey

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

2nd Annual Stonewall Lecture 04-16-2019, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Law Library Blog (March 2019): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Deliberation's Demise: The Rise Of One-Party Rule In The Senate, Kathleen Clark, Tiefer Charles

Scholarship@WashULaw

Much of the recent legal scholarship on the Senate expresses concern about gridlock, which was caused in part by the Senate’s supermajority requirement to pass legislation and confirm presidential nominees. This scholarship exalted the value of procedural changes permitting the majority party to push through legislation and confirmations, and failed to appreciate salutary aspects of the supermajority requirement: that it provided a key structural support for stability and balance in governance. The Senate changed its rules in order to address the problem of partisan gridlock, and now a party with a bare majority is able to force through much of …

Law School News: Rwu Law Alum Elected Attorney General Of Maine 12-06-2018, Alex Acquisto, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Confirmation Bias, Patrick Barry

Articles

Supreme Court confirmation hearings are vapid. Supreme Court confirmation hearings are pointless. Supreme Court confirmation hearings are harmful to a citizenry already cynical about government. Sentiments like these have been around for decades and are bound to resurface each time a new nomination is made. This essay, however, takes a different view. It argues that Supreme Court confirmation hearings are a valuable form of cultural expression, one that provides a unique record of as the theater critic Martin Esslin might say, a nation thinking about itself in public.

Difficult Questions For The Senate Minority, John M. Greabe

Law Faculty Scholarship

This column is the first in a biweekly Constitutional Connections series that will examine the constitutional implications of various topics in the news. The author, John Greabe, teaches constitutional law and related subject at the University of New Hampshire School of Law. He also serves on the board of trustees of the New Hampshire Institute for Civics Education.

My Turn: 'We The People' And The Garland Nomination, John M. Greabe

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] "Because I teach constitutional law, a friend recently asked me whether Judge Merrick Garland or President Obama might successfully sue to compel the Senate to take action on the nomination of Judge Garland to fill the vacancy on the United States Supreme Court.

Almost certainly not, I told him. Under settled precedent, a judge would dismiss such a case as raising a non-legal ''political" question. It would be very difficult to develop acceptable decisional standards for such a claim. Moreover, courts are reluctant to entertain lawsuits challenging mechanisms that the Senate uses to oversee the judiciary."

The Uncertain Effects Of Senate Confirmation Delays In The Agencies, Nina A. Mendelson

Articles

As Professor Anne O’Connell has effectively documented, the delay in Senate confirmations has resulted in many vacant offices in the most senior levels of agencies, with potentially harmful consequences to agency implementation of statutory programs. This symposium contribution considers some of those consequences, as well as whether confirmation delays could conceivably have benefits for agencies. I note that confirmation delays are focused in the middle layer of political appointments—at the assistant secretary level, rather than at the cabinet head—so that formal functions and political oversight are unlikely to be halted altogether. Further, regulatory policy making and even agenda setting can …

Uncivil Obedience, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars and activists have long been interested in conscientious law-breaking as a means of dissent. The civil disobedient violates the law in a bid to highlight its illegitimacy and motivate reform. A less heralded form of social action, however, involves nearly the opposite approach. As a wide range of examples attest, dissenters may also seek to disrupt legal regimes through hyperbolic, literalistic, or otherwise unanticipated adherence to their formal rules.

This Article asks how to make sense of these more paradoxical protests, involving not explicit law-breaking but rather extreme law following. We seek to identify, elucidate, and call attention to …

The Filibuster And Reconciliation: The Future Of Majoritarian Lawmaking In The U.S. Senate, Tonja Jacobi, Jeff Vandam

Faculty Articles

Passing legislation in the United States Senate has become a de facto super-majoritarian undertaking, due to the gradual institutionalization of the filibuster — the practice of unending debate in the Senate. The filibuster is responsible for stymieing many legislative policies, and was the cause of decades of delay in the development of civil rights protection. Attempts at reforming the filibuster have only exacerbated the problem. However, reconciliation, a once obscure budgetary procedure, has created a mechanism of avoiding filibusters. Consequently, reconciliation is one of the primary means by which significant controversial legislation has been passed in recent years — including …

Is The Filibuster Constitutional?, Josh Chafetz, Michael J. Gerhardt

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

With the help of the President, Democrats in Congress were able to pass historic healthcare-reform legislation in spite of - and thanks to - the significant structural obstacles presented by the Senate’s arcane parliamentary rules. After the passage of the bill, the current political climate appears to require sixty votes for the passage of any major legislation, a practice which many argue is unsustainable.

In this Debate, Professors Josh Chafetz and Michael Gerhardt debate the constitutionality of the Senate’s cloture rules by looking to the history of those rules in the United States and elsewhere. Professor Chafetz argues that the …

Leaving The House: The Constitutional Status Of Resignation From The House Of Representatives, Josh Chafetz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Do members of the House of Representatives have a constitutional right to resign their seats? This Article uses that question as a window onto broader issues about the relationship between legislators and citizens and the respective roles of liberalism and republicanism in the American constitutional order. The Constitution explicitly provides for the resignation of senators, presidents, and vice presidents, but, curiously, it does not say anything about resigning from the House of Representatives. Should we allow the expressio unius interpretive canon to govern and conclude that the inclusion of some resignation provisions implies the impermissibility of resignation when there is …

A Vote Cast; A Vote Counted: Quantifying Voting Rights Through Proportional Representation In Congressional Elections, Michael Mccann

Law Faculty Scholarship

The current winner-take-all or first-past-the-post system of voting promotes an inefficient market where votes are often wasted. In this system, representatives are selected from a single district in which the candidate with the plurality of votes gains victory. Candidates who appear non-generic can rarely, if ever, expect to receive the most votes in this system. This phenomenon is especially apparent when African-Americans and other minority groups seek elected office. In part because white voters constitute at least a plurality of voters in every state except Hawaii, minorities in the forty-nine other states have had historically little success in gaining election …

The Role Of Legal Scholars In The Confirmation Hearings For Supreme Court Nominees—Some Reflections, Thomas B. Mcaffee

Scholarly Works

Until recently legal scholars have traditionally not been much involved in the process of confirming Justices. As the legal and political ideology of prospective Justices have come to play an important role in the process of nomination and confirmation, however, it is perhaps inevitable that legal scholars would also become more involved. At least since the nomination of Judge Bork, legal scholars have contributed in unprecedented numbers both to the Senate's deliberation process and to the public debate over the fitness of the nominees to the Court. The Bork hearings themselves were, of course, the watershed, and they remain, for …

The Supreme Court In Politics., Terrance Sandalow

Reviews

Despite all that has been written about the bitter struggle initiated by President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to a seat on the Supreme Court, its most remarkable feature, that it was waged over a judicial appointment, has drawn relatively little comment. Two hundred years after the Philadelphia Convention, Hamilton's "least dangerous" branch - least dangerous because it would have "no influence over either the sword or the purse, no direction either of the strength or the wealth of the society, and can take no active resolution whatever"'-had come to occupy so important a place in the nation's political life …

Some Modest Proposals On The Vice-Presidency, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

There are many good things in the Constitution, but the vice-presidency isn't one of them. In Part I of this essay, I will argue that there are three basic problems with the vice-presidency: the method of nomination, the method of election, and the office itself. That just about covers the waterfront.' If we had to do it all over again, we almost certainly would not" create the system we currently have. We cannot undo history, but we do have a very strong incentive to develop a better system of succession to the presidency. Whom we choose as vice-president is a …