Law Commons^™

Section Three Of The Fourteenth Amendment: Insurrection, Mark A. Graber

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

The public, scholarly, and legal debate over whether former president Donald Trump is eligible to hold office under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment has focused far more on technical legal questions than on whether Trump engaged in an insurrection. Scholarly and public commentary rarely examines the constitutional/ common law of insurrection, preferring instead to examine whether Trump is exempt from Section Three because Section Three either exempts presidents or the presidency from disqualification or because Section Three is not self-executing. Trump v. Anderson (2024) focused on state incapacity to disqualify “oathbreaking insurrectionists” rather than on whether Trump was an …

Standing For Change: Associational Standing As An Aggregational Mechanism In Tenants' Rights, Hope Peraria

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note argues that tenant associations can serve as an effective vehicle for aggregate lawsuits to vindicate tenants' rights, addressing the persistent enforcement gap in housing rights. By leveraging associational standing, these associations can advocate for shared interests, facilitate community organizing, and complement legal reforms. This approach not only strengthens tenants' collective power but also offers practical solutions to systemic barriers that prevent individuals from asserting their rights.

Not Just Mercy: Governors Should Use The Executive Clemency Power As A Corrective Tool For Mass Incarceration, Laura Tierney

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note argues that state governors should revive the use of executive clemency as a corrective tool to address mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on communities of color. Executive clemency, which includes pardons, commutations, and sentence reductions, offers a means to provide immediate relief and promote social justice. The author emphasizes the historical roots of clemency as a check on the criminal justice system and advocates for its use to reduce prison populations and counteract the legacy of punitive policies.

Renewing Our Vows: The Lawyer's Oath And Our Pledge To Democracy, Colin M. Black

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

For centuries, lawyers have sworn to an oath as a prerequisite to admission. The oath, barely evolved from their historical roots, represents the guiding commitment lawyers make to democratic principles of honesty, integrity, fairness, and the rule of law. This commitment is in exchange for the power and privilege of belonging to the legal profession. However, the ethical landscape for legal practitioners has evolved, particularly in response to the alarming events of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. These events revealed significant lapses in the judgment and conduct among some lawyers, exposing the need for a recommitment to the democratic principles …

Constitutional Disorder, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This is a review essay inspired by two books: Yuval Levin's American Covenant (2024) and Erwin Chemerinsky's No Democracy Lasts Forever (2024). I make the following points. First, all treatments of the U.S. Constitution can be mapped on a continuum from the worshipful to the diagnostic. Second, Levin's account, which inclines toward the devotional, extols certain features deemed both originalist and virtuous: social unity over untidiness, consensus over dissent, fear and loathing of mass politics. Third, such accounts may not be sufficiently nimble to grapple with contemporary problems such as new forms of oligarchy or movement capture of traditional parties. …

An Extremely Important Document: Khea's Struggle For A Contract, 1974-1978, John L.S. Daley Dr

KNEA 50th Anniversary

In 1973, the Kansas State College, Pittsburg administration fired thirteen faculty members without cause. In order to improve administration-faculty relations, remaining faculty organized, petitioned for recognition, and drafted PSU/KNEA's first contract with PSU/KBOR, which went into effect five years later. The narrative covering this period draws on Axe Library's KNEA Collection and interviews of former faculty.

The Takings Blunderbuss: From Pennsylvania Coal To Dobbs, Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article explores three problems with the excess use of the Takings Clause (the "takings blunderbuss") that should cause concern not to left-wing judges and scholars who endorse seemingly unfettered activism from the bench and champion an organic view of the Constitution, but instead, and somewhat surprisingly, to conservatives who claim to eschew those practices. The first problem is that the text and original understanding, as far as we can discern, indicate that the Takings Clause was designed to ensure that owners receive payment when they are forced to sacrifice ownership of their tangible property for public use, most commonly …

Representation Without Taxation? A Historical Review Of Newfoundland And Labrador’S Municipal System And Quasi-Municipal Structures, Gregory French

Dalhousie Law Journal

Newfoundland and Labrador is unique among Canadian provinces in its municipallevel governmental structures, and in particular, its substantial lack thereof. The province does not have a system of counties or an operating form of regional government. Many areas of the province operate without a formal municipal government and avoid property taxation by operating on a limited fee-for-service model of local government, or in some cases a total lack of sub-provincial government. Tens of thousands of residents live within this tax-free model today. This paper explores how this anomalous situation came to be, the issues it creates in modern society and …

A Social Status Theory Of Defamation Law, Yonathan A. Arbel

Articles

Despite deep inequality in social status and social capital in American society, legal scholarship has done relatively little to understand the structures that produce status and maintain its distribution. The Article argues that defamation law plays such a role. The orthodox view is that defamation law's goal is to protect dignity. This view was expressed in a famous Supreme Court holding in 1966, which held that defamation law is necessary to protect "the essential dignity" of "every human being. " The later seminal work of Robert Post cemented it. Seemingly unrelated, scholars of defamation law have found its structure mystifying, …

Prudence, Role Morality, And Restraint: Judge Wilkinson On The Separation Of Powers, Katherine Mims Crocker, Jack Goldsmith

Faculty Scholarship

Caution in reviewing the actions of the legislative and executive branches has been a hallmark of the jurisprudence of Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III. The Constitution “at most gives judges specific authority to redress violations of specific provisions,” Judge Wilkinson writes in his book Cosmic Constitutional Theory. But even when doing so, “courts must exercise great caution before injecting themselves into the vortex of varied political questions,” for “[i]t is often far preferable to allow the political institutions under our Constitution to struggle among themselves, with each bringing to bear the respective arsenal of powers the Framers accorded them.” …

What Originalism Can Teach Historians: History As Analogy, Means-Ends Tests, And The Problem Of History In Bruen, Kunal M. Parker

Notre Dame Law Review

There is a long tradition of professional historians’ critiques of lawyers’ truncated understandings and clumsy deployments of the past. The intellectual historian J.G.A. Pocock’s The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, with its depiction of a “common-law mind” obdurately committed to the continuity of law and unable to grasp the significance of situating law in historical context, might be taken as the origin point of a post–World War II tradition. Historians’ critiques have enjoyed a fresh lease of life since constitutional originalism began to assume prominence in the closing decades of the twentieth century. As legal scholars and judges …

Bruen’S Enforcement Puzzle: Unearthing And Adjudicating The Historical Enforcement Record In Second Amendment Cases, Andrew Willinger

Notre Dame Law Review

The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen brings historical complexity to the fore by instituting a history-focused test for the Second Amendment that demands analogues from the Founding or Reconstruction eras to support modern gun regulations. The majority opinion in Bruen considers, in multiple places, how certain historical gun regulations may have been enforced. In each instance, the Court suggests that evidence of racially disparate enforcement of a historical law is relevant to whether that law is part of the American historical tradition and an appropriate analogue. Historical enforcement data appear to …

The General-Law Right To Bear Arms, William Baude, Robert Leider

Notre Dame Law Review

In this Article, we argue that Bruen's intended methodological shift has been widely misunderstood by the bench and bar. This has led to confusion and misapplication in the lower courts, as well as much scholarly criticism of the test that is, we think, misdirected. As we will explain, Bruen calls for a form of legal originalism, applying a classical view of fundamental rights as a form of unwritten customary law. This is consistent with the text and history of the Constitution and leads to results that are less mechanical and more sensible than many lower courts have thought. Understanding …

Diverse Originalism, History & Tradition, Christina Mulligan

Notre Dame Law Review

The Supreme Court’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen decision appears to be an originalist opinion, ostensibly looking for the meaning of the Constitution’s text by looking to the public’s understanding of the language used. But Bruen's test actually fails to follow a public meaning originalist methodology. The Court focuses present-day constitutional interpreters on evidence of constitutional meaning that only reflects a portion of the public—the politically empowered men who were in a position to pass legislation. Two unfortunate outcomes follow. First, by limiting potential evidence of public meaning so severely, the Court raises the risk …

Historical Fact, Ryan C. Williams

Notre Dame Law Review

The growing emphasis on history as a criterion of constitutional decision-making in Supreme Court jurisprudence has raised the importance of a distinctive type of judicial fact-finding—namely, the investigation and resolution of contested questions of historical fact. Although history has always played an important role in constitutional adjudication, its primary role has traditionally been as an input to constitutional interpretation. But in cases like New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Court has increasingly demanded that factual determinations regarding the content, meaning, purposes, and effects of decisions taken in the distant past should also guide the lower …

Interview Of Professor John Brittain, Donny R. Williams

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Complexity Of American Federalism, Christian G. Fritz

Faculty Scholarship

For the Balkinization Symposium on Alison L. LaCroix, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms (Yale University Press, 2024).

Alison LaCroix’s insightful new book, The Interbellum Constitution, builds on an often-overlooked fact: that Americans living before the Civil War did not know they were part of an “antebellum” period. That oversight has contributed to a conventional narrative of constitutional history and doctrine during the first half of the nineteenth-century that tends to read that history and doctrine backwards through the lens of a war that contemporaries did not know would define them. From this …

Even Laypeople Use Legalese, Eric H. Martinez, Francis Mollica, Edward Gibson

Faculty Scholarship

Whereas principles of communicative efficiency and legal doctrine dictate that laws be comprehensible to the common world, empirical evidence suggests legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike. Here, a corpus analysis (n=59 million words) first replicated and extended prior work revealing laws to contain strikingly higher rates of complex syntactic structures relative to six baseline genres of English.

Next, two pre-registered text generation experiments (n=286) tested two leading hypotheses regarding how these complex structures enter into legal documents in the first place. In line with the magic spell hypothesis, we found people tasked with writing official laws …

The U Visa: A Remedy For Vulnerable Immigrants Scammed By Unscrupulous Attorneys, Jennifer Piñeros

Cardozo Law Review

As of 2018, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimates that there are eleven million unauthorized immigrants† living in the United States. Due to limited resources, DHS has taken the position that it “cannot respond to all immigration violations or remove all persons unlawfully [residing] in the United States.” Congress has failed to enact comprehensive immigration reform, despite numerous attempts, since the Reagan administration. This leaves the unauthorized population in a limbo often characterized as “living in the shadows”—relegated to fading into the background so as to not draw the attention of immigration enforcement authorities. Immigration status impacts many …

The Voice Of Criminal Law, Michelle Madden Dempsey

Faculty Publications

In whose voice does the criminal law speak, and why does it matter? Miriam Gur-Arye argues that the answer to the first question depends on the kind of duty violated by the crime at issue. In some cases (say, election fraud or tax evasion), the criminal law speaks in the voice of the polity—but in other cases (say, murder or rape), it speaks in the voice of human beings. Or so argues Gur-Ayre. Not surprisingly, perhaps, a lot depends on what one means by the voice of the criminal law. In this paper, I defend two related arguments. First, the …

Dean Christiana Ochoa And 12 Maurer Alumni Named Indiana 250 Honorees, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

What do Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark, record-setting racecar driver and team owner Michael Andretti, Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay, broadcasting icon Pat McAfee, and Indiana Law Dean Christiana Ochoa have in common?

All are among this year’s list of Indiana 250 honorees, recognizing some of the most influential and impactful leaders across the state, a list that also includes a number of Maurer School of Law alumni.

“The evolution of the Indiana 250 over time is one of our favorite things about it—and the reason we update the list annually,” said Nate Feltman, CEO and owner of IBJ Media. …

Editorial, Nlsj Editorial Board

National Law School Journal

Drawing on select papers from the Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation (PACT) Conference, this first part of the PACT Special Issue recovers forgotten and unrecorded constitutional histories. The articles reflect on the constitutional archives as a source of historical writing and ask how they are constituted, studied, and challenged. In doing this, they explore the documentary record of India’s constitutional founding, question prevalent narratives, and uncover marginalised perspectives. This comprehensive engagement goes beyond orthodox legal scholarship and illustrates the university’s commitment to multidisciplinary research, with the first issue bringing together contributions from scholars of law, English literature, and political science.

Murder On The Hearsay Trail, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Publications

Judges, lawyers, and law students struggle to apply American evidence law’s most distinctive feature—the hearsay prohibition. The problem is that hearsay is difficult to master and somewhat dull. At the same time, hearsay evidence is ubiquitous and important. Every litigator has a story about a judge’s eccentric hearsay rulings; mine is the trial judge who waved his hand dismissively at hearsay objections, letting witnesses answer on the grounds that “I want to hear it.” And the case law is littered with appellate opinions scolding trial judges for erroneous hearsay rulings while introducing errors of their own.

That is just the …

A Short History Of The Interpretation-Construction Distinction, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This document collects for ease of access and citation three of my posts on the New Private Law Blog, which chart the conceptual history of the interpretation-construction distinction. The posts begin with Francis Lieber’s 1939 introduction of the concepts, then describes Samual Williston’s 1920 account of the distinction in the first edition of Williston on Contracts, and concludes with Arthur Linton Corbin’s 1951 reconceptualization in the first edition of Corbin on Contracts. The posts identify two different conceptions of the distinction. Under the first (Lieber and Williston), construction supplements interpretation. Under the second (Corbin), the two activities complement one …

Radical Visions For The Law Of Peace: How W.E.B. Du Bois And The Black Antiwar Movement Reimagined Civil Rights And The Laws Of War And Peace, Andrew J. Lanham

Washington Law Review

This Article reconstructs the history of Black antiwar activism in the twentieth-century United States and argues that Black antiwar activists played a significant but largely forgotten role in the development of both modern civil rights law and the international law of war and peace. The Article focuses on the career of W.E.B. Du Bois, tracing how he built coalitions between civil rights and antiwar organizations to pursue a series of shared legal campaigns. Du Bois’s antiwar work was also representative of a larger tradition, and his career illuminates how a range of Black activists and civil rights lawyers like Pauli …

A Survey Of Slavery & The Slave Trade Law, Cardozo Law Institute In Holocaust And Human Rights (Clihhr), Benjamin B. Ferencz Human Rights And Atrocity Prevention Clinic

CLIHHR Reports & Policy Submissions

This comprehensive report, compiled by the Benjamin B. Ferencz Human Rights and Atrocity Prevention (HRAP) Clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law from 2020 to 2024, surveys domestic slavery and slave trade laws across States Parties to the Rome Statute. Law students conducted comparative legal research examining how national legislation defines and criminalizes slavery, the slave trade, sexual slavery, and related practices such as trafficking and forced labor. Organized by region, the report presents constitutional and penal code provisions, assesses compliance with international humanitarian law, and highlights legal trends and gaps. It serves as a vital resource for …

Sect And Superstition: The Protestant Framework Of American Codification, Kellen R. Funk

Faculty Scholarship

Elite lawyers who debated codification in the nineteenth-century United States treated codification as inseparable from a liberal Protestant textualism that had taken hold in the early national era. Legislators declared codification to be the necessary final step of the Protestant Reformation and frequently characterized common law lawyers as beholden to ‘superstition’ and ‘priestcraft’. Their opponents denounced the codifiers’ idea that texts alone could adequately convey common meanings and delighted to point out the endlessly fracturing glosses on supposedly ‘clear’ texts that divided the positivists into an ever-increasing number of sects.

Many works have addressed the relationship between populism and positivism …

All Roads Lead To Rome: Combating Impunity For Perpetration Of Slave Trade And Slavery Crimes, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum

Articles

The Republic of Sierra Leone has proposed amendments to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to include, inter alia, provisions for the slave trade as a crime against humanity and has recommended that the General Assembly include the slave trade as an enumerated crime in the Draft articles on Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Humanity (CAH) (Draft articles). This declaration came nearly five years after Cardozo’s Benjamin B Ferencz Human Rights and Atrocity Prevention Clinic, on behalf of slavery crimes expert Patricia Viseur Sellers, sent commentaries to the United Nations International Law Commission (ILC) to revise …

The Myth Of Slavery Abolition, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum

Articles

In many countries today, slavery and the slave trade continue with impunity. International human rights law prohibits both abuses, but states are rarely held accountable and people who are enslaved or slave traded rarely receive redress. This Article offers a novel account of why international human rights law advocacy neglects slavery and the slave trade. Specifically, this Article demonstrates that the abolition of the Transatlantic and East African slave trades was achieved through a legal framework that marginalized the human rights of enslaved persons while consolidating empire. In the wake of World War II, prohibitions on slavery and the slave …

Egypt’S Legal Modernism: Challenging The National Discourse, Mohamed A. El-Deeb

Theses and Dissertations

Egypt’s legal modernity is the story of the modern Egyptian state itself. Reforming the country’s judiciary in the late nineteenth century was meant to achieve ambitious aims beyond the functionality of a justice system. The utmost goal was the country’s independence from the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. The judicial reforms modernized the Egyptian state and built a judiciary and legal community like no other place. Egypt achieved its independent judiciary before gaining its political independence. That was a remarkable achievement of the judicial reform. That rich part of Egypt’s modern history is negated and disregarded from public awareness. Not …