Law Commons^™

Family History: Inside And Out, Kerry Abrams

Michigan Law Review

The twenty-first century has seen the dawn of a new era of the family, an era that has its roots in the twentieth. Many of the social and scientific phenomena of our time - same-sex couples, in vitro fertilization, single-parent families, international adoption - have inspired changes in the law. Legal change has encompassed both constitutional doctrine and statutory innovations, from landmark Supreme Court decisions articulating a right to procreate (or not), a liberty interest in the care, custody, and control of one's children, and even a right to marry, to state no-fault divorce statutes that have fundamentally changed the …

Theorizing American Freedom, Anthony O'Rourke

Michigan Law Review

Some intellectual concepts once central to America's constitutional discourse are, for better and worse, no longer part of our political language. These concepts may be so alien to us that they would remain invisible without carefully reexamining the past to challenge the received narratives of America's constitutional development. Should constitutional theorists undertake this kind of historical reexamination? If so, to what extent should they be willing to stray from the disciplinary norms that govern intellectual history? And what normative aims can they reasonably expect to achieve by exploring ideas in our past that are no longer reflected in the Constitution's …

Civil Liberties And Civil War: The Great Emancipator As Civil Libertarian, Paul Finkelman

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties by Mark E. Neely, Jr.

The Constitution's Accommodation Of Social Change, Philip A. Hamburger

Michigan Law Review

Did the framers and ratifiers of the United States Constitution think that changes in American society would require changes in the text or interpretation of the Constitution? If those who created the Constitution understood or even anticipated the possibility of major social alterations, how did they expect constitutional law - text and interpretation - to accommodate such developments?

The effect of social change upon constitutional law was an issue the framers and ratifiers frequently discussed. For example, when AntiFederalists complained of the Constitution's failure to protect the jury trial in civil cases, Federalists responded that a change of circumstances might, …

Untangling The Strands Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Ira C. Lupu

Michigan Law Review

This Article explores such trends in the context of several recent cases and in the broader context of established patterns of constitutional law. Section II shows how the different strains of fourteenth amendment activism over the past century have tangled the strands of the fourteenth amendment in a thick, almost impenetrable knot. Section ill studies the tangle's reflection in three cases raising fundamental rights problems - Maher v. Roe, Moore v. City of East Cleveland, and Zablocki v. Redhail. Finally, Section N offers what Sections II and III suggest is missing from fourteenth amendment case law- a theory, abstract …

The Prospet Of Liberty Or The View From Saint-Remy, Ralph M. Carson

Michigan Law Review

This celebration of the first century of the Michigan Law School recalls the vain endeavor of the Holy Roman Empire to keep the craft of the law out of the Americas. Que no passasen abogados ni procuradores a las Indias was a clause inserted by the Emperor Charles V into the capitulation of 1540 with Alvar Nunez which sanctioned the exploration of the River Plate. Perhaps it was the futility of lawyers which prompted the Imperial veto. Twenty years before, when the Governor of Cuba sought to halt Cortez with decrees of outlawry from Spain, his cunning captain Sandoval evaded …

Mr. Justice William Johnson And The Common Incidents Of Life: I, A. J. Levin

Michigan Law Review

When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes filed his brief dissenting opinion in Lochner v. New York in 1905 he must have noticed something new on the American horizon. In this now famous opinion he initiated the first steps which were to usher in a new era in American jurisprudence. "General propositions do not decide concrete cases," he announced with axiomatic brevity and, thus, gave the first telling blow to what may well be termed "introspective jurisprudence." This generalization on the subject of generality was followed in the opinion by a more concrete application, the implementing assertion that a reasonable man might …

Review: The Revival Of Natural Law Concepts, Fowler Vincent Harper

Michigan Law Review

A Book Review of THE REVIVAL OF NATURAL LAW CONCEPTS By Charles Grove Haines.