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Full-Text Articles in Law
Equality, Sovereignty, And The Family In Morales-Santana, Kristin Collins
Equality, Sovereignty, And The Family In Morales-Santana, Kristin Collins
Faculty Scholarship
In Sessions v. Morales-Santana, 3 the Supreme Court encountered a body of citizenship law that has long relied on family membership in the construction of the nation’s borders and the composition of the polity.4 The particular statute at issue in the case regulates the transmission of citizenship from American parents to their foreign-born children at birth, a form of citizenship known today as derivative citizenship.5 When those children are born outside marriage, the derivative citizenship statute makes it more difficult for American fathers, as compared with American mothers, to transmit citizenship to their foreign-born children.6 Over …
The Second Amendment & Private Law, Cody Jacobs
The Second Amendment & Private Law, Cody Jacobs
Faculty Scholarship
The Second Amendment, like other federal constitutional rights, is a restriction on government power. But what role does the Second Amendment have to play—if any—when a private party seeks to limit the exercise of Second Amendment rights by invoking private law causes of action? Private law—specifically, the law of torts, contracts, and property—has often been impacted by constitutional considerations, though in seemingly inconsistent ways. The First Amendment places limitations on defamation actions and other related torts, and also prevents courts from entering injunctions that could be classified as prior restraints. On the other hand, the First Amendment plays almost no …
Legal Language: Expansion, Consolidation, Resistance, Robert L. Tsai
Legal Language: Expansion, Consolidation, Resistance, Robert L. Tsai
Faculty Scholarship
Legal language in America, a species of the political discourse of popular sovereignty, underwent significant changes during the nineteenth century. Beyond dramatic changes in the technologies of language, two major sociolegal dynamics of political development drove linguistic innovation during the nineteenth century: expansion and consolidation. Religious revivals and political reform movements, including a number of utopian projects, spread the language of liberty and popular consent as groups migrated west. The sensational 1829 pamphlet known as Walker's Appeal turned America's language of political liberty against the slave trade. David Walker, a former slave, directed his words primarily to the colored people …