Law Commons^™

Turtles All The Way Down: A Clearer Understanding Of The Scope Of Waters Of The United States Based On The U.S. Supreme Court Decisions, Jesse J. Richardson Jr., Tiffany Dowell Lashmet, Gatlin Squires

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

The meaning of “waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act (“CWA”) has been debated in Congress, federal agencies, and courtrooms across the country for almost fifty years. Despite the longstanding attention to the term, most consider the term even more unclear today than in 1972 when the CWA was adopted. However, a methodical examination of the statutory and regulatory history and the U.S. Supreme Court decisions on the issue reveal more consensus than previously understood. In addition, this focused examination shows that the debate centers on one problem that the arguments rarely acknowledge: wetlands adjacent to a …

The Qualitative Fourth Amendment: The Case For A Refined, Information-Focused Approach To Fourth Amendment Cases Involving Non-Trespassatory Government Surveillance, Joshua L. Wagner

William & Mary Law Review

In his 2001 majority opinion for Kyllo v. United States, Justice Scalia adopted his characteristic chiding tone to gently reproach what he saw as a notably liberal departure from the original textual interpretation of the Constitution. The Katz test for Fourth Amendment violations, to Scalia, was plainly “circular, and hence subjective and unpredictable.” That it was one of the most influential and oft-discussed decisions the Supreme Court has ever handed down made little difference; regardless of whatever Justice Harlan and his successors had said, the Fourth Amendment was, at its heart, a protection against government interference with property and had …

Free Speech, Strict Scrutiny And A Better Way To Handle Speech Restrictions, Aaron Pinsoneault

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

When it comes to unprotected speech categories, the Roberts Court has taken an amoral and inaccurate approach. When the Court first created unprotected speech categories-- defined categories of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment-- it was unclear what rendered a category of speech unprotected. One school of thought argued that speech was unprotected if it provided little or no value to society. The other school of thought argued that speech was unprotected if it fell into a certain category of speech that was simply categorically unprotected. Then, in 2010, the Court strongly sided with the latter approach, …

Against Congressional Case Snatching, Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Atticus Deprospro

William & Mary Law Review

Congress has developed a deeply problematic habit of aggrandizing itself by snatching cases from the Article III courts. One form of contemporary case snatching involves directly legislating the outcome of pending litigation by statute. These laws do not involve generic amendments to existing statutes but rather dictate specific rulings by the Article III courts in particular cases. Another form of congressional case snatching involves rendering ongoing judicial proceedings essentially advisory by unilaterally permitting a disgruntled litigant to transfer a pending case from an Article III court to an executive agency for resolution. Both practices involve Congress reallocating the business of …

The Guiding Hand Of Counsel, For A Price: Juvenile Public Defender Fees And Their Effects, Hannah R. Gourdie

William & Mary Law Review

When he was thirteen, Jonathan, a teenager from New Hampshire, was charged with simple assault after a fight with his father. During his hearing in juvenile court, his father refused to pay the $275 New Hampshire public defender fee, and Jonathan—unable to afford the price of counsel—waived his right to an attorney. He was placed on probation and struggled to meet his probation requirements, resulting in his arrest for probation violations. Because the court was deciding whether to detain Jonathan, Jonathan was appointed a juvenile defender. The attorney brought Jonathan’s unstable home life to the judge’s attention, and the judge …

Janus-Faced Judging: How The Supreme Court Is Radically Weakening Stare Decisis, Michael Gentithes

William & Mary Law Review

Drastic changes in Supreme Court doctrine require citizens to reorder their affairs rapidly, undermining their trust in the judiciary. Stare decisis has traditionally limited the pace of such change on the Court. It is a bulwark against wholesale jurisprudential reversals. But, in recent years, the stare decisis doctrine has come under threat.

With little public or scholarly notice, the Supreme Court has radically weakened stare decisis in two ways. First, the Court has reversed its long-standing view that a precedent, regardless of the quality of its reasoning, should stand unless there is some special, practical justification to overrule it. Recent …

Courts, Culture, And The Lethal Injection Stalemate, Eric Berger

William & Mary Law Review

The Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in Bucklew v. Precythe reiterated the Court’s great deference to states in Eighth Amendment lethal injection cases. The takeaway is that when it comes to execution protocols, states can do what they want. Events on the ground tell a very different story. Notwithstanding courts’ deference, executions have ground to a halt in numerous states, often due to lethal injection problems. State officials and the Court’s conservative Justices have blamed this development on “anti-death penalty activists” waging “guerilla war” on capital punishment. In reality, though, a variety of mostly uncoordinated actors motivated by a range of …

Preventing Parkland: A Workable Fourth Amendment Standard For Searching Juveniles' Smartphones Amid School Threats In A Post-Parkland World, Andrew Mueller

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

On February 14, 2018, Nikolas Cruz, age nineteen, went to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School campus in Parkland, Florida, armed with an AR-15 rifle. He opened fire, killing seventeen students. His unspeakable actions culminated in an attack, which eclipsed the 1999 Columbine High School Massacre to become the deadliest school shooting at a high school in American history. In the immediate months following this still-recent tragedy, schools across the United States were flooded with “copycat” threats of violence. Terroristic threat charges levied against juveniles have likewise skyrocketed.

These recent events have resulted in new and burdensome pressures for schools …

Secondary Meaning And Religion: An Analysis Of Religious Symbols In The Courts, Eric D. Yordy, Elizabeth Brown

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

In the Supreme Court’s most recent freedom of religion case, Justice Alito and Justice Ginsburg disagreed about the actual and potential meaning of the Latin cross, a traditional symbol of Christianity in which the upright leg of the cross is longer than the horizontal arms of the cross. Justice Alito stated that the Latin cross, while not losing its religious meaning, has acquired what might be called a “secondary meaning” as a symbol of World War I. He couched his analysis in language suggesting that a religious symbol’s meaning may depend on its circumstances. While he also denied that he …

Dissent, Disagreement And Doctrinal Disarray: Free Expression And The Roberts Court In 2020, Clay Calvert

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

Using the United States Supreme Court’s 2019 rulings in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, Nieves v. Bartlett, and Iancu v. Brunetti as analytical springboards, this Article explores multiple fractures among the Justices affecting the First Amendment freedoms of speech and press. All three cases involved dissents, with two cases each spawning five opinions. The clefts compound problems witnessed in 2018 with a pair of five-to-four decisions in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra and Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. Partisan divides, the Article argues, are only one problem with First Amendment …

Kill Cammer: Securities Litigation Without Junk Science, J. B. Heaton

William & Mary Business Law Review

Securities litigation is a hotbed of junk science concerning market efficiency. This Article explains why and suggests a way out. In its 1988 decision in Basic v. Levinson, the Supreme Court endorsed the fraud on the market presumption for securities traded in an efficient market. Faced with the task of determining market efficiency, courts throughout the nation embraced the ad hoc speculations of a first-mover district court that proclaimed, in Cammer v. Bloom, how to allege (and presumably prove) facts that would do just that. The Cammer court’s analysis did not rely on financial economics for its notions, but instead …

Securities Exchange Act Section 4e(A): Toothless "Internal-Timing Directive" Or Statute Of Limitation?, Richard E. Brodsky

William & Mary Business Law Review

The Securities and Exchange Commission has a problem, and everyone knows it: its investigative process suffers from excessive delay, which harms both individuals and entity it investigates and its own enforcement program. This problem has long been recognized and complained about, but never remedied.

In 2010, Congress passed a law specifically designed to solve the problem of excessive delay but, the way the SEC has read the law—which has been acquiesced in by the courts and ignored by subsequent Congresses—has rendered it toothless and essentially meaningless. This has been accomplished, first, by the Commission’s cabined interpretation of the purpose of …

The Court Should Not Let Politically Divided Times Affects Its Choices And Decisions, Erwin Chemerinsky

William & Mary Law Review

The Court should not let politically divided times affect its choices or decisions. Altering the Court’s role in politically divided times would require a definition of what qualifies as such an era and a theory of how to act in such times. Almost every era in American history could be deemed a politically divided time. Changing the Court’s role in politically divided times is inconsistent with its preeminent role: interpreting and enforcing the Constitution. This role does not change, and should not change, in politically charged moments. Indeed, history shows that the Court cannot know what is likely to lessen …

The Judicial Reforms Of 1937, Barry Cushman

William & Mary Law Review

The literature on reform of the federal courts in 1937 understandably focuses on the history and consequences of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ill-fated proposal to increase the membership of the Supreme Court. A series of decisions declaring various components of the New Deal unconstitutional had persuaded Roosevelt and some of his advisors that the best way out of the impasse was to enlarge the number of justiceships and to appoint to the new positions jurists who would be “dependable” supporters of the administration’s program. Yet Roosevelt and congressional Democrats also were deeply troubled by what they perceived as judicial obstruction …

Packing And Unpacking State Courts, Marin K. Levy

William & Mary Law Review

When it comes to court packing, questions of “should” and “can” are inextricably intertwined. The conventional wisdom has long been that federal court packing is something the President and Congress simply cannot do. Even though the Constitution’s text does not directly prohibit expanding or contracting the size of courts for political gain, many have argued that there is a longstanding norm against doing so, stemming from a commitment to judicial independence and separation of powers. And so (the argument goes), even though the political branches might otherwise be tempted to add or subtract seats to change the Court’s ideological makeup, …

Crisis? Whose Crisis?, Jack M. Beermann

William & Mary Law Review

Every moment in human history can be characterized by someone as “socially and politically charged.” For a large portion of the population of the United States, nearly the entire history of the country has been socially and politically charged, first because they were enslaved and then because they were subjected to discriminatory laws and unequal treatment under what became known as “Jim Crow.” The history of the United States has also been a period of social and political upheaval for American Indians, the people who occupied the territory that became the United States before European settlement. Although both African-Americans and …

Summary Dispositions As Precedent, Richard C. Chen

William & Mary Law Review

The Supreme Court’s practice of summarily reversing decisions based on certiorari filings, without the benefit of merits briefing or oral argument, has recently come under increasing scrutiny. The practice is difficult to square with the Court’s stated criteria for granting certiorari and its norms against reviewing fact-bound cases to engage in mere error correction. Nonetheless, there is growing acceptance that the practice is likely to continue in some form, and the conversation has shifted to asking when the use of summary dispositions should be considered proper. Commentators have had no trouble identifying the Court’s tendencies: summary dispositions are most commonly …

Free-Speech Formalism And Social Injustice, Stephen M. Feldman

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

The Roberts Court has shifted constitutional law in a formalist direction. This Essay explains the Court’s formalism and its causes and consequences in First Amendment free-expression cases. The thesis is that the current conservative justices’ reliance on formalism intertwines with their attitudes toward public and private spheres of activity. Their attitudes toward the public-private dichotomy are, in turn, shaped by their political ideologies as well as by the contemporary practices of democratic government, which have shifted significantly over American history. Formalism contains an inherent political tilt favoring those who already wield power in the private sphere. Formalism favors the wealthy …