Law Commons^™

Moore V. Harper: The Independent State Legislature Theory And The Court At The Brink, Braden Fain

Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy Sidebar

Moore v. Harper tasks the Supreme Court with considering a fringe legal idea known as the Independent State Legislature Theory (ISLT). Donald Trump gave ISLT new life by invoking the theory during his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Instead of presidential elections, the litigation in Moore concerns congressional elections and partisan gerrymandering. Were the Court to accept ISLT, the theory would render states effectively impotent to curb gerrymandering and would aggrandize the Court's authority in federal elections. Scholars have recognized the theory's threat to American democracy and have accordingly produced a detailed record debunking the ISLT. …

The Possible Futures Of American Democracy, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dysfunction, Deference, And Judicial Review, Barry Friedman, Margaret H. Lemos

Faculty Scholarship

This symposium poses a provocative question: Should judges exercising the power of judicial review defer to the political branches as a means of giving voice to the “will of the people”? The inquiry assumes a connection between majority will and the outputs of the political branches—a connection we argue is frayed, at best, in the current political context.

In the first part of this Essay, we highlight how well-known aspects of our political system—ranging from representational distortions in federal and state governments to the relationship between partisan polarization and the behavior of elected officials—call into question whether political outcomes reliably …

Presidential Responses To Protest: Lessons Jefferson Davis Never Learned, Ashlee Paxton-Turner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dartmouth College V. Woodward And The Structure Of Civil Society, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The United States As An Idea: Constitutional Reflections, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Bosses' Constitution: The First Amendment And Class Entrenchment, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s “weaponized” First Amendment has been its strongest antiregulatory tool in recent decades, slashing campaign-finance regulation, public-sector union financing, and pharmaceutical regulation, and threatening a broader remit. Along with others, I have previously criticized these developments as a “new Lochnerism.” In this Essay, part of a Columbia Law Review Symposium, I press beyond these criticisms to diagnose the ideological outlook of these opinions and to propose an alternative. The leading decisions of the antiregulatory First Amendment often associate free speech with a vision of market effi­ciency; but, I argue, closer to their heart is antistatist fear of entrench­ment …

Normcore, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

The proliferating "crisis-of-democracy" literature, like The Fast and the Furious franchise, has only one plot. And, like the crash-up car-chase movies, it has not let this fact slow its growth. Likely none of these books would exist—certainly none would be remotely the same—if Hillary Clinton had pulled a hundred thousand more votes out of the Midwest in 2016. All are organized around the shock of Trump's victory and allege a national and international crisis of democracy. Just what is the crisis? What is missing from these works, and the commentariat that they represent, is a genuine reckoning with twenty-first-century questions: …

Sustaining Collective Self-Governance And Collective Action: A Constitutional Role Morality For Presidents And Members Of Congress, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

In the United States today, the behavior of the political branches is generally viewed as more damaging to the American constitutional system than is the behavior of the federal courts. Yet constitutional law scholarship continues to focus primarily on judges and judging. This Article suggests that such scholarship should develop for presidents and members of Congress what it has long advocated for judges: a role morality that imposes normative limits on the exercise of official discretion over and above strictly legal limits. The Article first grounds a role morality for federal elected officials in two purposes of the U.S. Constitution …

Patriotic Philanthropy? Financing The State With Gifts To Government, Margaret H. Lemos, Guy-Uriel Charles

Faculty Scholarship

Federal and state law prohibit government officials from accepting gifts or “emoluments” from outside sources. The purpose of gift bans, like restrictions on more explicit forms of bribery, is to protect the integrity of political processes and to ensure that decisions about public policy are made in the public interest — not to advance a private agenda. Similar considerations animate regulations on campaign funding and lobbying. Yet private entities remain free to offer gifts to government itself, to foot the bill for particular public projects they would like to see government pursue. Such gifts — dubbed “patriotic philanthropy” by one …

Continuity And The Declaration Of Independence, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Democratic Rulemaking, John M. De Figueiredo, Edward H. Stiglitz

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines to what extent agency rulemaking is democratic. It reviews theories of administrative rulemaking in light of two normative benchmarks: a “democratic” benchmark based on voter preferences, and a “republican” benchmark based on the preferences of elected representatives. It then evaluates how the empirical evidence lines up in light of these two approaches. The paper concludes with a discussion of avenues for future research.

Reynolds Reconsidered, Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Ethnic Power Sharing: Three Big Problems, Donald L. Horowitz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Prosecutorial Discretion In Three Systems: Balancing Conflicting Goals And Providing Mechanisms For Control, Sara Sun Beale

Faculty Scholarship

In regulating the authority and discretion exercised by contemporary prosecutors,national systems balance a variety of goals, many of which are in tension or direct conflict. Forexample, making prosecutors politically or democratically accountable may conflict with theprinciple of prosecutorial neutrality, and the goal of efficiency may conflict with accuracy. National systems generally seek to foster equal treatment of defendants and respect for theirrights while also controlling or reducing crime and protecting the rights of victims. Systems thatrecognize prosecutorial discretion also seek to establish and implement policy decisions aboutthe best ways to address various social problems, priorities, and the allocation of resources. …

Democratic Development And The Public Sphere: The Rights To Hear And Be Heard In Ghana, Duke Law School Seminar And Fact-Finding Trip To Ghana

Duke Law Student Papers Series

No abstract provided.

Dissent, Diversity, And Democracy: Heather Gerken And The Contingent Imperative Of Minority Rule, Guy-Uriel Charles

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Scaling Up Deliberative Democracy As Dispute Resolution In Healthcare Reform: A Work In Progress , Carrie Menkel-Meadow

Law and Contemporary Problems

No abstract provided.

Can Mature Democracies Be Perfected?, Guy-Uriel Charles

Faculty Scholarship

One of the more vexing questions about democracy that is often debated among political theorists, political scientists, and legal scholars is whether the democratic character of mature democracies can be improved. From one view, that of democratic realists, mature democracies are perfected as a matter of definition and as a matter of realistic expectations. Because mature democracies are those that respect core democratic principles, variations outside the core are simply policy differences based upon each democratic polity’s willingness to engage in a different set of trade-offs. For democratic realists, variations in democratic practice that are not related to core democratic …

Can Might Make Right? The Use Of Force To Impose Democracy And The Arthurian Dilemma In The Modern Era, Scott Thompson

Law and Contemporary Problems

US President George W. Bush used force to bring the Taliban to its knees and create a fledgling democracy in Afghanistan, then invaded Iraq with the end goal of establishing a democracy there, as well. Meanwhile, presidential hopeful Barack Obama praised those who built democracy's arsenal to vanquish fascism, and who then built a series of alliances and a world order that would ultimately defeat communism, seeming to extol and vindicate the previous US efforts to impose democracy by force. These two leaders' struggles to nail down a definitive answer on whether force should ever be used to impose democracy …

Could And Should America Have Made An Ottoman Republic In 1919?, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

Numerous Americans, perhaps especially American lawyers, have since the 1780s presumed to tell other peoples how to govern themselves. In 2006, that persistent impulse was once again echoed in an address to the American Bar Association by a Justice of the Supreme Court. The purpose of this essay is to question the wisdom of this evangelical ambition, especially when the form of instruction includes military force. It is draws on Spreading America's Word (2005) and directs attention to the hopes of American Protestant Zionists to make a democratic republic in Ottoman Palestine. It suggests that chances were better in 1919 …

Odious Debt, Odious Credit, Economic Development, And Democratization, Tom Ginsburg, Thomas S. Ulen

Law and Contemporary Problems

When a country signs an international treaty, it is not the government but the state that is bound, and the obligation will stand until a subsequent government formally exits the treaty. Exit is presumed to be costly: a government that "repudiates" earlier treaty obligations will suffer reputational harm in its international relations. Moreover, this general background norm of international law applies as well to debt: a government can announce that it is renouncing debt, but it will suffer severe reputational harm in the debt marketplace, much as a government that repudiates public international law obligations suffers a reputational harm. Here, …

Advisory Counterparts To Constitutional Courts, Christopher S. Elmendorf

Duke Law Journal

In recent years, legal scholars have paid a great deal of attention to the emergence of constitutional courts and judicial review in democracies worldwide, yet an intriguing parallel development in democratic constitutionalism has gone largely unnoticed: the establishment of independent bodies which, like constitutional courts, are concerned with foundational commitments of liberal democracy, but which advance these commitments mainly through investigations and advice-giving. Lacking de jure authority to block the implementation of unconstitutional laws and policies, the new advice givers instead make their contributions ex ante, identifying problems that warrant legislative attention and helping to craft laws and regulations that …

Writing Other Peoples’ Constitutions, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Mandatory Constitutions, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Working Toward Democracy: Thurgood Marshall And The Constitution Of Kenya, Mary L. Dudziak

Duke Law Journal

This Article is a work of transnational legal history. Drawing upon new research in foreign archives, it sheds new light on the life of Thurgood Marshall, exploring for the first time an episode that he cared very deeply about. his work with African nationalists on an independence constitution for Kenya. The story is paradoxical, for Marshall, a civil rights legend in America, would seek to protect the rights of white landholders in Kenya who had gained their land through discriminatory land laws, but were soon to lose political power. In order to understand why Marshall would take pride in entrenching …

Constitution-Making: A Process Filled With Constraint, Donald L. Horowitz

Faculty Scholarship

Constitutions are generally made by people with no previous experience in constitution making. The assistance they receive from outsiders is often less useful than it may appear. The most pertinent foreign experience may reside in distant countries, whose lessons are unknown or inaccessible. Moreover, although constitutions are intended to endure, they are often products of the particular crisis that forced their creation. Drafters are usually heavily affected by a desire to avoid repeating unpleasant historical experiences or to emulate what seem to be successful constitutional models. Theirs is a heavily constrained environment, made even more so by distrust and dissensus …

How Much Does Money Matter In A Direct Democracy?, John M. De Figueiredo

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Democracy And The Dominance Of Delaware In Corporate Law, Kent Greenfield

Law and Contemporary Problems

Delaware has a population less than one-third of one percent of the nation, but it is the state of incorporation for more than fifty percent of US public companies and more than sixty percent of the Fortune 500. Delaware's resulting dominance over the terms of corporate governance in the US has been the subject of one of the grandest debates within corporate law scholarship.

Democracy And Dispute Resolution: The Problem Of Arbitration, Richard C. Reuben

Law and Contemporary Problems

This article seeks to bring the submerged issue of arbitration's relationship to democracy to the surface of the mandatory arbitration debate. Its goal is relatively modest: To recognize and articulate the relationship between democracy and arbitration as an issue worth considering, to analyze the democratic character of arbitration and to suggest some implications of this assessment.