Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in Law
Eleventh Amendment Schizophrenia, Carlos Manuel Vázquez
Eleventh Amendment Schizophrenia, Carlos Manuel Vázquez
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This article argues that conflicting analytical strains run through the Supreme Court's recent majority opinions in the area of state sovereign immunity. The "supremacy" strain stresses that, despite the Eleventh Amendment, the states remain obligated to comply with federal law, and that the Constitution envisions the "necessary judicial means" to enforce these obligations against the state. These means include suits by the federal government, private suits for injunctive relief, and suits seeking damages from state officials in their individual capacities. Thus, according to the supremacy strain, state sovereign immunity is unimportant because it merely bars unnecessary means of enforcing the …
Willard Hurst And The Administrative State: From Williams To Wisconsin, Daniel R. Ernst
Willard Hurst And The Administrative State: From Williams To Wisconsin, Daniel R. Ernst
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This article follows Willard Hurst from his undergraduate days at Williams College through the start of his teaching career at Wisconsin in the fall of 1937. During these years Hurst acquired an abiding interest in the rise of the administrative state as well as some of the insights he would use to account for it in his mature work. For the most part, the article proceeds chronologically through four episodes in Hurst's training: (1) his year-long study of Charles and Mary Beard's "Rise of American Civilization" undertaken as an undergraduate at Williams College; (2) his three years as a student …
Restoring What’S Environmental About Environmental Law In The Supreme Court, Richard J. Lazarus
Restoring What’S Environmental About Environmental Law In The Supreme Court, Richard J. Lazarus
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In this Article, Professor Richard Lazarus examines the votes of the individual Justices who have decided environmental law cases before the United States Supreme Court during the past three decades. The Article reports on a number of interesting statistics regarding the identity of those Justices who have most influenced the Court's environmental law jurisprudence and the sometimes curious patterns in voting exhibited by individual Justices. Lazarus's thesis is that the Supreme Court's apparent apathy or even antipathy towards environmental law during that time results from the Justices' failure to appreciate environmental law as a distinct area of law. The Justices …
Thinking About The Constitution At The Cusp, Mark V. Tushnet
Thinking About The Constitution At The Cusp, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
What do I mean in saying that we need to think about the Constitution "at the cusp?" I have in mind an image in which we have one way of thinking about the Constitution on one side of a line, and another way of thinking about the Constitution on the other. My sense is that we may have crossed such a line quite recently. I believe that we may be in a new constitutional order, different from the New Deal-Great Society constitutional order that existed from 1937 to sometime in the 1980s. If so, those of us who have been …
Writing Off Race, Girardeau A. Spann
Writing Off Race, Girardeau A. Spann
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The constitutionality of affirmative action has now become one of the central topics in the politics of race. Ironically, the United States Constitution says absolutely nothing about affirmative action. The text never mentions the term, and the equal protection language in the Fourteenth Amendment simply begs the question of whether equality requires or precludes the use of affirmative action. The intent of the Framers is similarly unhelpful. We know that the drafters of the Fifth Amendment owned slaves, and the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment envisioned a racially stratified society. But the Fourteenth Amendment was itself an affirmative action measure, …
Regulatory Takings And "Judicial Supremacy", J. Peter Byrne
Regulatory Takings And "Judicial Supremacy", J. Peter Byrne
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The thesis of this Article is that the Court of Federal Claims and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit have become exposed to this classic critique of constitutional decision-making through the recent expansions of the regulatory takings doctrine. Though the chief agent for this expansion has been the Supreme Court, these lower courts have made their own prominent contributions to broadening regulatory takings, and they are far more vulnerable to political reprisals. Like the Due Process Clause in the gilded age, the Takings Clause today can easily be and has been seen as an avenue for inappropriate judicial …