Law Commons^™

America’S Two Pastimes: Baseball And Constitutional Law; Review Of Adrian Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism, Paul J. Larkin

Catholic University Law Review

For the last 50 years, the two prevailing constitutional interpretation methodologies have been Originalism and Living Constitutionalism. The former treats the Constitution almost like a contract and demands that interpreters focus on the ordinary contemporary understanding its terms would have received when they became law. The latter treats the Constitution as a charter for the structure of a new government that would survive and mature as needed to protect both the nation and its people as new threats to government and civil liberties arise. Professor Adrian Vermeule’s book Common Good Constitutionalism offers a new approach to constitutional interpretation, one that …

Judicial Selection That Fails The Separation Of Powers, Stephen Ware

Catholic University Law Review

Executive power should be constrained by checks and balances. The United States’ long and strong tradition of concerns about executive power, and its complementary tradition of Madisonian checks and balances on and to the executive, include the selection of supreme court justices. Neither the U.S. Constitution nor the constitution of any state places solely in the executive the power to appoint a justice to begin a new term on the (federal or state) supreme court. However, several states fail to constrain gubernatorial power in selecting justices to finish a term already started by another justice and these interim appointments are …

Sacred Spheres: Religious Autonomy As An International Human Right, Diana V. Thomson, Kayla A. Toney

Catholic University Law Review

How should courts resolve thorny human rights disputes that arise within religious groups? According to an emerging international consensus, they shouldn’t. When a case involves sensitive internal decisions by a religious organization, such as choosing who is qualified to teach the faith, courts are increasingly taking a hands-off approach. This global consensus has formed across international treaties, tribunals, and domestic courts in European and American nations. Every major human rights instrument and many international and domestic courts recognize that religious freedom must extend to religious communities, especially houses of worship and schools where believers gather to practice their faith and …

The Originalist Jurisprudence Of Justice Samuel Alito, J. Joel Alicea

Scholarly Articles

Since Justice Alito’s appointment to the Supreme Court in 2006, constitutional theorists have struggled with how to characterize his approach to constitutional adjudication. Many scholars have argued that “Justice Alito is not to any significant extent an originalist” but is, instead, “a methodological pluralist” who uses both originalist and non-originalist tools of constitutional adjudication. Others have contended that “Justice Alito’s jurisprudence is originali[st], though not in the traditional sense.”

Establishment As Tradition, Marc O. Degirolami

Scholarly Articles

Traditionalism is a constitutional theory that focuses on concrete political and cultural practices, and the endurance of those practices before, during, and after the ratification of the Constitution, as the presumptive determinants of constitutional meaning and constitutional law. The Supreme Court has long interpreted traditionally but now says explicitly that it uses a method of “text, history, and tradition” in several areas of constitutional law. Foremost among these is the Establishment Clause. This Essay examines two questions about traditionalism, both of which concern the Establishment Clause in distinct but related ways. First, why has traditionalism had special salience in this …

Playing God In The 21st Century: How The Push For Human Embryonic Germline Gene Editing Sidelines Individual And Generational Autonomy, Anna E. Melo

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Every four and a half minutes a child with a genetic birth defect is born in the United States. For some, these conditions are treatable and manageable, but sadly for others, they are a death sentence. Congenital malformations and chromosomal abnormalities are the leading cause of infant mortality. CRISPR-Cas9 presents hope for the future, a liberation from the heritable genetic shackles that a child would otherwise be trapped in. With such optimism for future applications of germline gene editing, there are also great concerns with what national and global limitations and auditing must be in place to permit “genetic hedging.” …

Airdropping Justice: The Constitutionality Of Service Of Process Via Non-Fungible Token, Jenifer Jackson

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Practice-Based Constitutional Theories, J. Joel Alicea

Scholarly Articles

This Feature provides the first full-length treatment of practice-based constitutional theories, which include some of the most important theories advanced in modern scholarship. Practice-based constitutional theories come in originalist and nonoriginalist—as well as conservative and progressive—varieties, and they assert that a constitutional theory should generally conform to our social practices about law. If, for example, it is part of our social practices for courts to apply a robust theory of stare decisis, then a constitutional theory that would require a less deferential theory of stare decisis is a less persuasive theory. Practice-based constitutional theorists would usually see it as a …

The Appropriate Appropriations Inquiry, Chad Squitieri

Scholarly Articles

The Supreme Court is set to hear oral argument this fall concerning whether the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is unconstitutionally self-funded. The question presented in the case asks whether the statute establishing the CFPB’s self-funding scheme, 12 U.S.C. § 5497, “violates the Appropriations Clause.” But that question is incomplete at best, because although the Appropriations Clause requires that “appropriations” be “made by law,” the Appropriations Clause does not itself vest Congress with any authority to make “law” in the first place. Instead, Congress’s authority to make appropriations laws is vested in part by the Necessary and Proper Clause. Thus, …

Mysterizing Religion, Marc O. Degirolami

Scholarly Articles

In this short essay, I suggest that "mysterizing" religion may change the stakes in some of the most controversial contemporary conflicts in law and religion. To mysterize (not a neologism, but an archaism) is to cultivate mystery about a subject, in the sense described above-to develop and press the view that a certain subject or phenom-enon is not merely unknown, but unknowable by human beings. At the very least, such mysteries are unknowable by those human beings who have charge of the secular legal order of earthly human affairs, Paul's "princes of this world." That is what I propose to …

Traditionalism Rising, Marc O. Degirolami

Scholarly Articles

Constitutional traditionalism is rising. From due process to free speech, religious liberty, the right to keep and bear arms, and more, the Court made clear in its 2021 term that it will follow a method that is guided by “tradition.”

This paper is in part an exercise in naming: the Court’s 2021 body of work is, in fact, thoroughly traditionalist. It is therefore a propitious moment to explain just what traditionalism entails. After summarizing the basic features of traditionalism in some of my prior work and identifying them in the Court’s 2021 term decisions, this paper situates these recent examples …

New Light On The History Of Free Exercise Exemptions: The Debates In Two Eighteenth-Century State Legislatures, Stanton D. Krauss

Catholic University Law Review

As Justice Gorsuch pointed out in his concurring opinion in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 138 S. Ct. 1719, 1734 (2018), there is an ongoing debate about whether the First Amendment ever requires the recognition of religion-based exemptions to neutral and generally applicable laws. The leading proponent of such exemptions has argued that the original understanding of the Free Exercise Clause supports his claim, and that the existence of such exemptions in preconstitutional American statutes – which he believed to have been granted because legislators thought them mandated by “the free exercise principle” – is one factor …

Federal Courts: Article I, Ii, Iii, And Iv Adjudication, Laura K. Donohue, Jeremy Mccabe

Catholic University Law Review

The distinction among the several types of federal courts in the United States has gone almost unremarked in the academic literature. Instead, attention focuses on Article III “constitutional” courts with occasional discussion of how they differ from what are referred to as “non-constitutional” or “legislative” courts. At best, these labels are misleading: all federal courts have a constitutional locus. Most (but not all) are brought into being via legislation. The binary approach ignores the full range of adjudicatory bodies, which find root in different constitutional provisions: Article III, Section 1, Article I, Section 8; Article IV, Section 3; Article II, …

Administrative Apparition: Resurrecting The Modern Administrative State’S Legitimacy Crisis With Agency Law Analysis, Tabitha Kempf

Catholic University Law Review

There is an enduring discord among academic and political pundits over the state of modern American government, with much focus on the ever-expanding host of federal agencies and their increasing regulatory, investigative, enforcement, and adjudicatory authority. The growing conglomerate of federal agencies, often unfavorably regarded as the “administrative state,” has invited decades of debate over the validity and proper scope of this current mode of government. Advocates for and against the administrative state are numerous, with most making traditional constitutional arguments to justify or delegitimize the current establishment. Others make philosophical, moral, or practical arguments in support or opposition. Though …

Heirs Of An Administration: Unlawful Executive Actions, Jerome Perez

Catholic University Law Review

The Supreme Court of the United States in DHS v. Regents on June 18, 2020, decided to stall the Trump administration from rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy that the Obama administration created contrary to the Administrative Procedures Act (APA)––even though in 2016 the Supreme Court affirmed a preliminary injunction on the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) policy, which mirrors DACA. This blunder offhandedly sacrifices the Supreme Court’s reputation as nonpartisan by enlisting itself as the future arbiter of administrative issues with self-evident resolutions and deciding contrary to those resolutions to endorse a political agenda. …

Will Due Process Be Returned To Academic Suspension?: An Analysis Of Academia's Rejection Of The Title Ix Final Rule, Andrew F. Emerson

Catholic University Law Review

In 2011, the Department of Education ("DOE") under the Obama administration issued its Dear College Letter ("DCL") ordering publicly funded educational institutions to undertake aggressive actions to deter what was deemed an epidemic of sexual violence on college campuses. DOE subsequently aggressively enforced the directives of the DCL with scores of costly investigations of college disciplinary systems and threatened withdrawal of federal funding for institutions that failed to respond to sexual harassment claims aggressively. Hundreds of lawsuits followed in the wake of the DCL's issuance. Specifically, the flood of litigation was initiated by males contending they were briskly expelled, suspended, …

Religious Liberty And Judicial Deference, Mark L. Rienzi

Scholarly Articles

Many of the Supreme Court’s most tragic failures to protect constitutional rights—cases like Plessy v. Ferguson, Buck v. Bell, and Korematsu v. United States—share a common approach: an almost insuperable judicial deference to the elected branches of government. In the modern era, this approach is often called “Thayerism,” after James Bradley Thayer, a nineteenth-century proponent of the notion that courts should not invalidate actions of the legislature as unconstitutional unless they were clearly irrational. Versions of Thayerism have been around for centuries, predating Thayer himself.

The Supreme Court took a decidedly Thayerian approach to the First Amendment in the first …

The Negative Impact Of Service Member And Veteran Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Ptsd) Rating Or Specter Of Ptsd On Child Custody Arrangements, Erhan Bedestani

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Passcodes, Protection, And Legal Practicality: The Necessity Of A Digital Fifth Amendment, Ethan Swierczewski

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Moving From Harm Mitigation To Affirmative Discrimination Mitigation: The Untapped Potential Of Artificial Intelligence To Fight School Segregation And Other Forms Of Racial Discrimination, Andrew Gall

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Emotion In Constitutional Theory, J. Joel Alicea

Scholarly Articles

Although the role of emotion in law has become a major field of scholarship, there has been very little attention paid to the role of emotion in constitutional theory. This Article seeks to fill that gap by providing an integrated account of the role of emotion within the individual, how emotion affects constitutional culture, and how constitutional culture, properly understood, should affect our evaluation of major constitutional theories.

The Article begins by reconstructing one of the most important and influential accounts of emotion in the philosophical literature: that of Thomas Aquinas. Because Aquinas’s description of the nature of emotion accords …

Recovering Classical Legal Constitutionalism: A Critique Of Professor Vermeule’S New Theory,, Kevin C. Walsh

Scholarly Articles

Professor Adrian Vermeule has provoked renewed interest in the relationship between the classical natural law tradition and the Constitution of the United States with his book, Common Good Constitutionalism: Recovering the Classical Legal Tradition. As scholars self-consciously working in that tradition, we welcome contemporary attention to that perennial legal philosophy. Yet in reading and rereading the book, we found ourselves frustrated with it, notwithstanding the apparent agreement we shared with the author at some abstract level of principle. And that abstraction, it turns out, is just the problem with the book’s application of the classical legal tradition to constitutional law. …

Establishment’S Political Priority To Free Exercise, Marc O. Degirolami

Scholarly Articles

Americans are beset by disagreement about the First Amendment. Progressive scholars are attacking the venerable liberal view that First Amendment rights must not be constricted to secure communal, political benefits. To prioritize free speech rights, they say, reflects an unjust inflation of individual interest over our common political commitments. These disagreements afflict the Religion Clauses as well. Critics claim that religious exemption has become more important than the values of disestablishment that define the polity. Free exercise exemption, they argue, has subordinated establishment. This Article contests these views. The fundamental rules and norms constituting the political regime—what the Article calls …

An Originalist Victory, J. Joel Alicea

Scholarly Articles

Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey are no more. Like Plessy v. Ferguson before them, Roe and Casey were constitutionally and morally indefensible from the day they were decided, yet they endured for generations, becoming the foundation of a mass political movement that did all it could to prevent their overruling. Thus, like the overruling of Plessy, the overruling of Roe and Casey was by no means inevitable; it was the result of a half-century of disciplined, persistent, and prudent political, legal, and religious effort. The victory in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was earned by …

The New Disestablishments, Marc O. Degirolami

Scholarly Articles

This Article attempts to map out a set of social and legal phenomena-features of what it calls the new establishment, responses to it, and possible implications of dissenting new disestablishments-without offering an evaluation either of the new establishment or the new disestablishments. That is, this Article tries to point out the structural conditions within which claims of religious free exercise are now situated, but it does not opine on the morality or justice of the general social structure or the dissenting views that it discusses. Like everyone, I have my views about these subjects, but I have tried, as much …