Law Commons^™

Arming The Second Amendment—And Enforcing The Fourteenth, William D. Araiza

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article considers the timely and important question of Congress’s power to enforce the Second Amendment. Such legislation would test the Court’s current enforcement power doctrine, which ostensibly acknowledges a congressional role in vindicating constitutional rights while insisting on judicial supremacy in stating constitutional meaning. Second Amendment doctrine is complex and, importantly, methodologically varied. That complexity and variety would require the Court to perform a more nuanced, granular approach to the enforcement power than it has thus far in the modern era.

Part II quickly recaps the Court’s Enforcement Clause jurisprudence. It concludes that its most recent enforcement power cases …

The Klein Rule Of Decision Puzzle And The Self-Dealing Solution, Evan C. Zoldan

Washington and Lee Law Review

Scholars and courts have struggled to make sense of the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Klein, an intriguing but enigmatic opinion concerning the limits of Congress’s ability to interfere with cases pending before the federal courts. Klein is intriguing because its broad and emphatic language suggests significant limits on the power of Congress. Klein is enigmatic because the Court has never again struck down a statute because of Klein or even made clear what principle animates its result. In fact, despite reaffirming the existence of a principle based on Klein, the Court has repeatedly read it …

Biometric Cyberintelligence And The Posse Comitatus Act, Margaret Hu

Scholarly Articles

This Article addresses the rapid growth of what the military and the intelligence community refer to as “biometric-enabled intelligence.” This newly emerging intelligence tool is reliant upon biometric databases—for example, digitalized storage of scanned fingerprints and irises, digital photographs for facial recognition technology, and DNA. This Article introduces the term “biometric cyberintelligence” to more accurately describe the manner in which this new tool is dependent upon cybersurveillance and big data’s massintegrative systems.

This Article argues that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, designed to limit the deployment of federal military resources in the service of domestic policies, will be difficult …

Germany's German Constitution, Russell A. Miller

Scholarly Articles

Comparative lawyers, working with blunt taxonomies such as “legal families,” have been satisfied with characterizing Germany as representative or a member of the “Germanic-Roman” law tradition. The life of the Federal Republic’s post-war legal culture, however, reveals a richly more complicated story. The civil law tradition, with its emphasis on abstract conceptualism and codification, remains dominant. But it has had to accommodate a new, vigorous constitutionalism that bears many of the traits of the common law tradition, including judicial supremacy and a form of case law. This is the encounter of discrete legal traditions within a particular legal system that …

Brief Of Scholars Of The History And Original Meaning Of The Fourth Amendment As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioner: Carpenter V. United States, Margaret Hu

Scholarly Articles

Law enforcement officials wanted to learn where Petitioner Timothy Carpenter was at the time of certain robberies. To figure that out, they obtained records from his cellular service provider showing the movements of his cell phone. Examining those records, they were able to track Carpenter’s whereabouts over a four-month period. Obtaining and examining those records was a “search” in any normal sense of the word—a search of documents and a search for Carpenter and one of his personal effects. It was therefore a “search” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. When the Amendment was ratified, to “search” meant to …

Precedent And Preclusion, Alan M. Trammell

Scholarly Articles

Preclusion rules prevent parties from revisiting matters that they have already litigated. A corollary of that principle is that preclusion usually does not apply to nonparties, who have not yet benefited from their own “day in court.” But precedent works the other way around. Binding precedent applies to litigants in a future case, even those who never had an opportunity to participate in the precedent-creating lawsuit. The doctrines once operated in distinct spheres, but today they often govern the same questions and apply under the same circumstances, yet to achieve opposite ends. Why, then, does due process promise someone a …