Law Commons^™

Abortion Politics And The Rise Of Movement Jurists, Robert L. Tsai, Mary Ziegler

Faculty Scholarship

This Article employs the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and litigation in its wake as the jumping off point to reconsider the connections between judges, the Constitution, and social movements. That movements influence constitutional law, and that judicial pronouncements in turn are reshaped by politics, is well-established. But, while these accounts of legal change depend upon judges to embrace movement ideas, less has been written about the conditions under which judicial entrenchment can be expected to take place. There may, in fact, be different types of judicial dispositions towards external political phenomena.

In this Article, …

After Mccleskey, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

In the 1987 decision, McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court rejected a black death row inmate's argument that significant racial disparities in the administration of Georgia's capital punishment laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. In brushing aside the most sophisticated empirical study of a state 's capital practices to date, that ruling seemingly slammed the door on structural inequality claims against the criminal justice system. Most accounts of the case end after noting the ruling's incompatibility with more robust theories of equality and meditating on the deep sense of demoralization felt by social justice advocates. One might …

The Fundamental Building Blocks Of Social Relations Regarding Resources: Hohfeld In Europe And Beyond, Anna Di Robilant, Talha Syed

Faculty Scholarship

In the hundred years since Hohfeld published his two “Fundamental Legal Conceptions” articles, the “bundle-of-rights” view of property associated with his work has come to enjoy the status of conventional wisdom in American legal scholarship. Seen as a corrective to lay conceptions and a predecessor “Blackstonian” view of property as the “sole and despotic dominion” of an “owner” over a thing, the central insight of Hohfeldian analysis is standardly taken to be that property is not a single “thing” but rather a “bundle of rights” with respect to things and persons. In recent years, however, this Hohfeldian view has come …

Second Amendment Realism, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court declared a constitutionally protected individual right to keep and bear arms. Subsequently, the scope of the right has been hotly debated, resulting in circuit splits and lingering questions about what, exactly, the right entails. Despite these splits, the Court has denied certiorari to the myriad gun cases to land on its doorstep. But the balance of the Court has shifted, and likely, too, its willingness to hear these cases. Among the most pressing questions in Second Amendment jurisprudence is the constitutionality of public carry restrictions. With a constitutional challenge inevitable given …

Litigation As Education: The Role Of Public Health To Prevent Weaponizing Second Amendment Rights, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

Tobacco litigation was unquestionably successful, but it is dangerous to expect that it can be easily duplicated. An unrealistic reliance on litigation as a regulatory measure can blind public health advocates to other mechanisms of change. And that includes litigation as a means of enabling actual regulation. Firearms and the gun violence epidemic provides a useful case study. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) essentially bars litigation as a regulatory tool for firearms. This legislation means every time someone pulls the trigger, they become the party to blame. Soto v. Bushmaster Firearms presents a rare exception based …

A Tradition At War With Itself: A Reply To Professor Rana's Review Of America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions Of Power And Community, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

his essay responds to Professor Aziz Rana's review essay, "The Many American Constitutions," 93 Texas Law Review 1193 (2015).

He contends: (1) my portrayal of American constitutionalism might contain a “hidden” teleological understanding of the development of constitutional law; (2) my notion of "conventional sovereignty" sometimes seems content-free and at other times "interlinked with liberal egalitarianism"; and (3) a focus on failed constitutions "inadvertently tends to compartmentalize the overall tradition."

I answer in the following ways: (1) I reject any sense that constitutional law has moved in an arc of steady progress toward Enlightenment and instead embrace a tradition of …

Law And Politics, An Emerging Epidemic: A Call For Evidence-Based Public Health Law, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

As Jacobson v. Massachusetts recognized in 1905, the basis of public health law, and its ability to limit constitutional rights, is the use of scientific data and empirical evidence. Far too often, this important fact is lost. Fear, misinformation, and politics frequently take center stage and drive the implementation of public health law. In the recent Ebola scare, political leaders passed unnecessary and unconstitutional quarantine measures that defied scientific understanding of the disease and caused many to have their rights needlessly constrained. Looking at HIV criminalization and exemptions to childhood vaccine requirements, it becomes clear that the blame cannot be …

Revisiting Mary Ann Glendon: Abortion, Divorce, Dependency, And Rights Talk In Western Law, Linda C. Mcclain, Margaret F. Brining

Faculty Scholarship

This essay revisits Mary Ann Glendon’s comparative law study, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law and her subsequent book, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. Glendon’s comparative study actually included a third topic: “forms of dependency which are connected with pregnancy, marriage, and child raising.” The topic of dependency has obvious relevance to consideration of intergenerational obligations and the interplay between family responsibility and societal responsibility for addressing dependency needs.

A central claim Glendon made in both books is that the U.S. legal tradition is “libertarian,” views individuals as “lone rights bearers,” and exalts the “right to be let …

What Is Parenthood?: Contemporary Debates About The Family Introduction, Linda C. Mcclain, Daniel Cere

Faculty Scholarship

Extraordinary changes in patterns of family life – and family law – have dramatically altered the boundaries of parenthood and opened up numerous questions about debates. What is parenthood and why does it matter? How should society define, regulate, and support it? Despite this uncertainty, the intense focus on the definition and future of marriage diverts attention from parenthood. Demographic reports suggesting a shift away from marriage and toward alternative family forms also keep marriage in constant public view, obscuring the fact that disagreements about marriage are often grounded in deeper, conflicting convictions about parenthood. This book (as the posted …

Respecting Freedom And Cultivating Virtues In Justifying Constitutional Rights, Linda C. Mcclain, James E. Fleming

Faculty Scholarship

What’s new in the long-standing debate between civic republicans and liberals about how best to understand and justify rights? This article picks up the thread with political philosopher Michael Sandel’s recent, internationally-renowned book, Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do? The article evaluates the sharp contrasts his book draws between justice as cultivating virtues and justice as respecting freedom, using his example of contemporary arguments for and against opening up civil marriage to same-sex couples. Sandel contends that “liberal neutrality” and a public square denuded of religious arguments and convictions are impossible on this issue. Drawing on Aristotle, he contends …

From Words To Worlds: Exploring Constitutional Functionality By Beau Breslin, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This is a review of Beau Breslin's book, "From Words to Worlds: Exploring Constitutional Functionality" (Johns Hopkins, 2009). As an antidote to what he believes to be scholarly marginalization of the "unique" aspects of a written constitution, Breslin focuses attention on seven functions of such a legal text: transforming existing orders, conveying collective aspirations, designing institutions, mediating conflict, recognizing claims of subnational communities, empowering social actors, and constraining governmental authority. This review briefly critiques Breslin's functional approach and discusses two of the more pressing goals of modern constitutionalism: managing social conflict and preserving cultural heritage.

"Respectful Consideration" After Sanchez-Llamas V. Oregon: Why The Supreme Court Owes More To The International Court Of Justice, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

This Note argues that the doctrine of “respectful consideration” has emerged as little more than a hollow acknowledgement of the ICJ before the Court engages in its own independent interpretation of the Vienna Convention. It further argues that, while the ICJ has no actual legal authority to interpret the Vienna Convention from the U.S. domestic perspective, the Supreme Court should nonetheless treat ICJ decisions with greater deference. Specifically, Justice Stephen Breyer’s test from his Sanchez-Llamas dissent accords the proper level of deference by permitting, in limited circumstances, the remedies of suppression of the evidence and exceptions to state procedural default …

Gaining Momentum: A Review Of Recent Developments Surrounding The Expansion Of The Copyright Misuse Doctrine And Analysis Of The Doctrine In Its Current Form, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

The United States intellectual property ("IP") system is the foundation for incentives for authors and inventors to create and invent so that their work will be distributed to the public for the betterment of society. These incentives, in the form of limited monopolies over creations via patents, copyrights, and trademarks, are becoming increasingly important as the United States depends upon intellectual property to sustain its economy. As the intellectual property industry grows, it becomes vital to preserve the impetus behind its creation: the public good, or more specifically, the public's ability to make use of and enjoy new ideas and …

Privacy And The Post-September 11 Immigration Detainees: The Wrong Way To A Right (And Other Wrongs), Sadiq Reza

Faculty Scholarship

In forthcoming work, I argue that this common-law privacy right should indeed attach to individuals arrested for or suspected of crime.9 I also argue that support for the right exists in a variety of judicial, statutory, and other sources, and that legislation to formally protect the right is warranted and constitutional. The reasoning is simple: being publicly named in connection with criminal allegations is stigmatizing, and the resultant personal harm-social, professional, emotional, other-lasts, and is difficult to justify when it is visited upon someone who is acquitted of the charges or against whom the charges are dismissed. Equally troubling is …

The Bill Of Rights As An Exclamation Point, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Akhil Amar's The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction ("The Bill of Rights")' is one of the best law books of the twentieth century. That is not surprising, as it grows out of two of the best law review articles of the twentieth century' and was written by one of the century's premier legal scholars. I have been an unabashed Akhil Amar fan ever since our overlapping law school days more than fifteen years ago, and I am thrilled to have my perspicacity and good judgment vindicated by the publication of this remarkable work.

Human Rights And Health - The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights At 50, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

War, famine, pestilence, and poverty have had obvious and devastating effects on health throughout human history. In recent times, human rights have come to be viewed as essential to freedom and individual development. But it is only since the end of World War II that the link between human rights and these causes of disease and death has been recognized.1-3 The 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — signed on December 10, 1948 — provides an opportunity to review its genesis, to explore the contemporary link between health and human rights, and to develop effective human-rights …

A National Bill Of Patients' Rights, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In one of the most enthusiastically received proposals in his January State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton called on Congress to enact a national bill of rights in health care. The President said, “You have the right to know all your medical options, not just the cheapest. You have the right to choose the doctor you want for the care you need. You have the right to emergency room care, wherever and whenever you need it. You have the right to keep your medical records confidential.”

The System Worked: Our Schizophrenic Stance On Welfare, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This is a review of Steven M. Teles's book, Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics (University Press of Kansas, 1996), which argues that welfare policy reflects a dynamic of elite dissensus, in which public policy fails to reflect popular opinion. I make two central points in the review: first, there are reasons to believe that welfare policy does, in fact, reflect a deeply conflicted American electorate; and second, such a conflict may reveal a healthy deliberative order struggling to reconcile changing priorities with enduring values.

Proprietary Rights In Digital Data, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

The Clinton Administration in 1993 announced its intention to develop a National ; Information Infrastructure (NII), an "information superhighway" designed to make electronic digital information more widely available and accessible to the public. This announcement has . ~ stimulated a national debate over how best to define and enforce an appropriate set of proprietary rights in digital information. That debate should begin with an analysis and assessment of the current state of the law of digital data. While that law resembles a moving target, general trends may be identified. The current framework provides the background against which NIL may be …

Detention Of Hiv-Positive Haitians At Guantanamo, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Speaking for the United States, Secretary of State Warren Christopher told the June 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna that human rights are universal and that “we cannot let cultural relativism become the last refuge of repression”. The universality of human rights was first recognized internationally in the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. But the fact that these rights are recognized and even seen as universal does not ensure that they will be respected, even by their strongest supporters. The lack of an international tribunal with jurisdiction to hear complaints about human-rights violations and provide remedies …

Rethinking "Original Intent", David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

Although Dred Scott v. Sandford is one of the Supreme Court's most controversial decisions, it is not often taught or read. But its approach to constitutional interpretation is by no means outdated, and its historical importance has not diminished. So it seems a good example to consider.

Review Of Red, White, And Blue: A Critical Analysis Of Constitutional Law By Mark Tushnet, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

Mark Tushnet's new book offers no such counsel. Mainly a critique of interpretative theories, its conclusions are profoundly skeptical. Tushnet's central claim is that judicial review and constitutional theory cannot possibly perform their assigned functions, and that liberalism is to blame. This review will focus on those facets of the book.

The Right To Refuse Treatment: A Model Act, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Although the right to refuse medical treatment is universally recognized as a fundamental principle of liberty, this right is not always honored. A refusal can be thwarted either because a patient is unable to competently communicate or because providers insist on continuing treatment. To help enhance the patient's right to refuse treatment, many states have enacted so-called "living will" or "natural death" statutes. We believe the time has come to move beyond these current legislative models, and we therefore propose a Model Act that clearly enunciates an individual's right to refuse treatment, does not limit its exercise to the terminally …

The Emerging Stowaway: Patients' Rights In The 1980s, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

At one point in Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pyr of Nantucket, Pym, who has stowed away in the hold of a whaling vessel, believes he has been abandoned and that the hold will be his tomb. He expressed sensations of "extreme horror and dismay," and "the most gloomy imaginings, in which the dreadful deaths of thirst, famine, suffocation, and premature interment, crowded in as the prominent disasters to be encountered."