Law Commons^™

Countering Gerrymandered Courts, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

The key insight in Professor Miriam Seifter's outstanding article Countermajoritarian Legislatures is that state legislatures are usually antidemocratic due to partisan gerrymandering, whereas state governors and judiciaries are insulated from gerrymandering by statewide elections (or selection), and thus they should have a more prominent role in framing election law and in enforcing the separation of powers.

This Piece offers afriendly amendment: These observations are true, so long as states do not gerrymander their state supreme courts into antidemocratic districts. The problem is that historically, judicial elections emerged generally as districted elections, and often with regional and partisan politics shaping those …

New Copyright Stories: Clearing The Way For Fair Wages And Equitable Working Conditions In American Theater And Other Creative Industries, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

We need some new intellectual property stories. By stories, I don’t mean entertaining fictions. I mean instead accounts or explanations that make sense of the world as it is lived by everyday people. Most of our relevant intellectual property laws were forged in the mid-twentieth century and have failed to keep pace with the transformations in creative and innovative practices of the twentyfirst. Being out-of-sync or failing to recognize broader existing stakeholders means laws are poorly aligned with on-the-ground realities and are out-of-touch with values and interests of the people laws serve. The Article at the center of this Symposium …

The Bi-Partisan Enabling Of Presidential Power: A Review Of David Driesen's The Specter Of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling Of Presidential Power (2021), Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

In "The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power," David Driesen questions the unitary executive theory and other doctrines of unchecked executive power. He offers primarily a critique of purposivism, a mix of original public meaning and more recent history illuminating those purposes: the Founders’ anti-tyranny purpose and then the rise of European tyranny from Nazi Germany to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Poland.

This review first focuses on Driesen’s approach to Congress: He identifies the broad congressional delegation of powers to the president as a source of expansive executive power, but he does not entertain that doctrines of deference …