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Full-Text Articles in Law
Delegation At The Founding, Julian Davis Mortenson, Nicholas Bagley
Delegation At The Founding, Julian Davis Mortenson, Nicholas Bagley
Articles
This article refutes the claim that the Constitution was originally understood to contain a nondelegation doctrine. The founding generation didn’t share anything remotely approaching a belief that the constitutional settlement imposed restrictions on the delegation of legislative power---let alone by empowering the judiciary to police legalized limits. To the contrary, the overwhelming majority of Founders didn’t see anything wrong with delegations as a matter of legal theory. The formal account just wasn’t that complicated: Any particular use of coercive rulemaking authority could readily be characterized as the exercise of either executive or legislative power, and was thus formally valid regardless …
Discerning A Dignitary Offense: The Concept Of Equal 'Public Rights' During Reconstruction, Rebecca J. Scott
Discerning A Dignitary Offense: The Concept Of Equal 'Public Rights' During Reconstruction, Rebecca J. Scott
Articles
The mountain of modern interpretation to which the language of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution has been subjected tends to overshadow the multiple concepts of antidiscrimination that were actually circulating at the time of its drafting. Moreover, as authors on race and law have pointed out, Congress itself lacked any African American representatives during the 1866–68 moment of transitional justice. The subsequent development of a “state action doctrine” limiting the reach of federal civil rights enforcement, in turn, eclipsed important contemporary understandings of the harms that Reconstruction-era initiatives sought to combat. In contrast to the oblique language …
Constitutional Theology: The Revival Of Whig History In American Public Law, William J. Novak
Constitutional Theology: The Revival Of Whig History In American Public Law, William J. Novak
Articles
One of the things I admire about the profession of history is that there are no admissions requirements. Like being a novelist or a member of Congress, the door is open to almost anyone who wants to try their hand at the art or craft. In a world of an increasingly specialized division of professional labor, that is a relatively rare and special thing. Though I teach in a law school, for example, I would be in trouble if I tried to pass myself off as a lawyer. Though I could perhaps irritatingly refer to myself as a doctor owing …
The Functions Of Ethical Originalism, Richard A. Primus
The Functions Of Ethical Originalism, Richard A. Primus
Articles
Supreme Court Justices frequently divide on questions of original meaning, and the divisions have a way of mapping what we might suspect are the Justices’ leanings about the merits of cases irrespective of originalist considerations. The same is true for law professors and other participants in constitutional discourse: people’s views of original constitutional meaning tend to align well with their (nonoriginalist) preferences for how present constitutional controversies should be resolved. To be sure, there are exceptions. Some people are better than others at suspending presentist considerations when examining historical materials, and some people are better than others at recognizing when …
Anomalies, Warts And All: Four Score Of Liberty, Privacy And Equality, Francisco Valdes
Anomalies, Warts And All: Four Score Of Liberty, Privacy And Equality, Francisco Valdes
Articles
Lawrence was decided exactly eighty years after the first liberty-privacy case, and in the midst of a fierce kulturkampf striving to roll back civil rights generally. In this Article, Professor Valdes situates Lawrence in the context formed both by these four score of liberty-privacy jurisprudence that precede it as well as by the politics of backlash that envelop it today. After canvassing the landmark rulings from Meyer in 1923 to Lawrence in 2003, in the process acknowledging both their emancipatory strengths and their traditionalist instrumentalism, Professor Valdes concludes that Lawrence is a long overdue recognition of the prior precedents and …