Law Commons^™

The Weaponization Of Attorney’S Fees In An Age Of Constitutional Warfare, Rebecca Aviel, Wiley Kersh

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

If you want to win battles in the culture war, you enact legislation that regulates firearms, prohibits abortions, restricts discussion of critical race theory, or advances whatever other substantive policy preferences represent a victory for your side. But to win the war decisively with an incapacitating strike, you make it as difficult as possible for your adversaries to challenge those laws in court. Clever deployment of justiciability doctrines will help to insulate constitutionally questionable laws from judicial review, but some of the challenges you have sought to evade will manage to squeak through.

To fully disarm your opponents in an …

The Broken Fourth Amendment Oath, Laurent Sacharoff

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The Fourth Amendment requires that warrants be supported by “Oath or affirmation.” Under current doctrine, a police officer may swear the oath to obtain a warrant merely by repeating the account of an informant. This Article shows, however, that the Fourth Amendment, as originally understood, required that the real accuser with personal knowledge swear the oath.

That real-accuser requirement persisted for nearly two centuries. Almost all federal courts and most state courts from 1850 to 1960 held that the oath, by its very nature, required a witness with personal knowledge. Only in 1960 did the Supreme Court hold in Jones …

Privacy Losses As Wrongful Gains, Bernard Chao

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Perhaps nowhere has the pace of technology placed more pressure on the law than in the area of data privacy. Huge data breaches fill our headlines. Companies often violate their own privacy policies by selling customer data, or by using the information in ways that fall outside their policy. Yet, even when there is indisputable misconduct, the law generally does not hold these companies accountable. That is because traditional legal claims are poorly suited for handling privacy losses.

Contract claims fail when privacy policies are not considered contractual obligations. Misrepresentation claims cannot succeed when customers never read and rely on …

The Fourth Amendment Inventory As A Check On Digital Searches, Laurent Sacharoff

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Police and federal agents generally must obtain a warrant to search the tens of thousands of devices they seize each year. But once they have a warrant, courts afford these officers broad leeway to search the entire device, every file and folder, all metadata and deleted data, even if in search of only one incriminating file. Courts avow great reverence for the privacy of personal information under the Fourth Amendment but then claim there is no way to limit where an officer might find the target files, or know where the suspect may have hidden them.

These courts have a …

Saving The Electoral College: Why The National Popular Vote Would Undermine Democracy, Robert M. Hardaway

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Ever since the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College, Congress has tried to overturn it. The latest attempt is taking place not in Congress, but in state legislatures around the country, where a well-financed campaign by a private California group calling itself "National Popular Vote" (NPV) is proposing an "interstate compact" to circumvent the process for amending the U.S. Constitution. If adopted by states representing a majority of electoral votes, the signatory states would bind themselves to ignore the popular votes within their respective states, and instead allocate their electoral votes to the candidate whom the media proclaimed to be …

What Am I Really Saying When I Open My Smartphone: A Response To Prof. Kerr, Laurent Sacharoff

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

In his forthcoming article in the Texas Law Review, Compelled Decryption and the Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, Orin S. Kerr addresses a common question confronting courts. If a court orders a suspect or defendant to enter her password to open a smartphone or other device as part of a law enforcement investigation, does that order violate the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination?

To answer this question, Kerr appropriately looks by analogy to existing Fifth Amendment case law as applied to document subpoenas, the “act of production” doctrine, and its mysterious cousin, the “foregone conclusion” doctrine. From these materials, he gleans a …

Why Courts Fail To Protect Privacy: Race, Age, Bias, And Technology, Bernard Chao, Catherine Durso, Ian Farrell, Christopher Robertson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable “searches and seizures,” but in the digital age of stingray devices and IP tracking, what constitutes a search or seizure? The Supreme Court has held that the threshold question depends on and reflects the “reasonable expectations” of ordinary members of the public concerning their own privacy. For example, the police now exploit the “third party” doctrine to access data held by email and cell phone providers, without securing a warrant, on the Supreme Court’s intuition that the public has no expectation of privacy in that information. Is that assumption correct? If judges’ intuitions about …

Unlocking The Fifth Amendment: Passwords And Encrypted Devices, Laurent Sacharoff

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Each year, law enforcement seizes thousands of electronic devices — smartphones, laptops, and notebooks — that it cannot open without the suspect’s password. Without this password, the information on the device sits completely scrambled behind a wall of encryption. Sometimes agents will be able to obtain the information by hacking, discovering copies of data on the cloud, or obtaining the password voluntarily from the suspects themselves. But when they cannot, may the government compel suspects to disclose or enter their password?

This Article considers the Fifth Amendment protection against compelled disclosures of passwords — a question that has split and …

Equalizing Exactions, Sarah Schindler

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Some exactions are just bad. By this, I mean that they fail to mitigate the harms they were created to internalize. This struck me recently while I was researching privately owned public open spaces (POPOS), which are often exacted in exchange for a density bonus. Through my research, I determined that POPOS often fail to achieve the goals of good public space, in part because they are often exclusionary. I found myself wondering whether the citizens who were stuck with new dense buildings that block light and air, and who received only a poorly functioning POPOS in exchange, had any …

Who Should Own Police Body Camera Videos?, Laurent Sacharoff, Sarah Lustbader

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Numerous cities, states, and localities have adopted police body camera programs to enhance police accountability in the wake of repeated instances of police misconduct, as well as recent reports of more deep-seated police problems. These body camera programs hold great promise to achieve accountability, often backed by millions of dollars of federal grants.

But so far, this promise of accountability has gone largely unrealized, in part because police departments exercise near-total control over body camera programs and the videos themselves. In fact, the police view these programs chiefly as a tool of ordinary law enforcement rather than accountability — as …

The Strange Career Of Private Takings Of Private Property For Private Use, Jan G. Laitos

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Part I summarizes the two private entities thattraditionally have been conferred the power to take private property for their own private use: (1) natural resource developers and (2) common carriers involved in, andresponsible for, our country’s transportation, storage, and distribution (TS&D) system for energy infrastructure—pipelines, electrical transmission lines, and rail lines. Part II considers the traditional rationale for those private takings, which typically relies on some version ofthe notion thatthe public atlarge may, or will, eventually benefit from this private exercise of eminent domain. Part III explores the four central problems associated with these kinds of private takings: (1) the …

Domestic Violence And The Confrontation Clause: The Case For A Prompt Post-Arrest Confrontation Hearing, Robert M. Hardaway

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Part I and Part II of this article discuss the consequences of Crawford v. Washington for domestic violence victims and detail the problem of domestic violence in America, including the current prosecution strategies and challenges in domestic violence cases. Part III reviews the evolution of confrontation law jurisprudence. Part IV sets forth a proposed Crawford-compliant procedure that also protects domestic violence victims. Part V addresses anticipated objections to the prompt-post arrest confrontation hearing.

The Compact Clause And National Popular Vote: Implications For The Federal Structure, Robert M. Hardaway, Tara Ross

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The Electoral College is a vital part of the Founders' federalist Constitution. NPV pretends to be in line with this federalist structure, but its claims are disingenuous. In reality, NPV would destroy the federalist nature of the presidential election process. A system that today operates as a combination of democracy and federalism would change: It would instead operate as pure democracy. This change from federalism to pure democracy would be made even if a majority of states disapproved. As a policy matter, eliminating federalism from the presidential election process will have many practical consequences that make such a change inadvisable. …

Guantanamo, Boumediene, And Jurisdiction-Stripping: The Imperial President Meets The Imperial Court, Martin J. Katz

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This essay argues that the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Boumediene v. Bush, its latest pronouncement on the detainees in Guantanamo Bay, should be understood as a jurisdiction-stripping case. Most of the commentators to address the case so far have seen it as a case about the war on terror, or about the reach of habeas corpus. I argue that this decision takes significant steps toward resolving a debate that has been raging among the giants of constitutional law for more than 50 years: Can Congress “strip” jurisdiction from the federal courts to prevent them from hearing certain important cases? …

Former Presidents And Executive Privilege, Laurent Sacharoff

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The Constitution provides former Presidents with no powers or role, and yet numerous former Presidents including Truman and Nixon have asserted executive privilege in order to withhold information from Congress, historians, and the public. The most recent former President, George W. Bush, is likely to make similar assertions based upon his sweeping view of the rights of former Presidents as reflected in his recently revoked Executive Order 13,233, potentially leading to a constitutional collision between the rights of former Presidents and those of Congress. This article argues that notwithstanding Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, former Presidents should retain no …

Beyond A Conceivable Doubt: The Quest For A Fair And Constitutional Standard Of Proof In Death Penalty Cases, Robert M. Hardaway

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The death penalty remains the most contentious issue in criminal law jurisprudence, and continues to be challenged on both constitutional and moral grounds. What is most remarkable about American death penalty jurisprudence is that it has traditionally focused on purely technical and procedural aspects of the imposition of the death penalty, despite the fact that the most vulnerable plank in the arsenal of death penalty defenders is evidence that innocent people have been, and will continue to be, executed. Perhaps no legal principle is more difficult to explain to the layman or first-year law student than that of all the …

The United States As A Democratic Ideal? International Lessons In Referendum Democracy, K.K. Duvivier

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Reports of how the United States works to spread democracy around the globe bombard the American public almost daily. Ironically, as principles of democratic governance expand worldwide, the United States, once the vanguard for citizen participation in government, has fallen behind. Although the U.S. system of government has evolved - average citizens now vote directly for their national representatives - the United States still stands as one of only three major industrialized countries in the world that has failed to allow its citizens to vote in a national referendum. Referendum democracy varies from representative democracy by allowing the public a …

No Price Too High : Victimless Crimes And The Ninth Amendment, Robert M. Hardaway

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Hardaway argues the criminalization of victimless crimes violates the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and creates enormous public policy problems in the society. He contends that the Ninth Amendment adjudication model and the concepts of self-determination and the harm principle are the standards to which privacy issues should be litigated. Hardaway contends that privacy issues should be litigated under the standards of the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution adjudication model, concepts of self-determination, and the harm principle. The Ninth Amendment follows the true beliefs of the founding fathers and their adherence to Natural Law, autonomy, liberty, and the …

The Inconvenient Militia Clause Of The Second Amendment: Why The Supreme Court Declines To Resolve The Debate Over The Rights To Bear Arms, Robert M. Hardaway, Elizabeth Gormley, Bryan Taylor

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

There are sound public policy reasons why gun ownership by law abiding citizens in a free society should be protected. Good public policy, however, cannot be formulated as long as there remain fundamental misconceptions about the meaning and history of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the law interpreting it. In August of 1994, an exasperated American Bar Association, finding itself unable to match the Gun Lobby's publicity campaigns, pleaded for help from the legal profession to educate the American public about the meaning of the Second Amendment and the intent of the Constitutional Framers. Specifically, the ABA …

The Right To Die And The Ninth Amendment: Compassion And Dying After Glucksberg And Vacco, Robert M. Hardaway, Miranda K. Peterson, Cassandra Mann

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Part I reviews the historical development of physician assisted suicide, describes current medical practices and physicians' attitudes, and outlines the related legal debate over euthanasia. Part II explains the statutory and case law precedent of physician-assisted suicide. This Part also examines the factual and procedural history of the Supreme Court's decisions in Glucksberg and Vacco. Part III explores the Ninth Amendment issues which the Court failed to address in Glucksberg and Vacco, and argues that a right to die exists under existing Ninth Amendment precedent. This part also provides recommendations for a model Dignity in Dying statute that would comply …

Pretrial Publicity In Criminal Cases Of National Notoriety: Constructing A Remedy For The Remediless Wrong, Robert M. Hardaway, Douglas B. Tumminello

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Part I of this Article examines the history of pretrial publicity in American courts and explores the values that the Sixth Amendment seeks to protect. Part II criticizes the Supreme Court's current approach to the pretrial publicity problem. Part III analyzes case studies of nationally notorious trials. Part IV explores remedial measures reasonably calculated to nullify the effects of prejudicial publicity and cases in which a trial judge's omission of those measures constitutes reversible error. Finally, this Article concludes by setting forth a proposed standard that should be applied in order to ensure the defendant's right to a fair trial …

The Electoral College And The Constitution : The Case For Preserving Federalism, Robert M. Hardaway

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This study examines how the Electoral College actually works, how it is supposed to work, and how it might be reformed. Robert Hardaway first looks at the Constitutional Convention, the Twelfth Amendment, and historical elections where the Electoral College has come into play, providing the historical background to the present-day College.

Student Practice In Colorado, Robert M. Hardaway

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Both the University of Denver College of Law and the University of Colorado Law School have active student law clinics. Law students in these clinics receive academic credit for representing indigent clients under the supervision of a faculty member or staff attorney. Students in the two clinics are permitted to practice in the Colorado courts pursuant to one of the nation's most liberal student practice rules.

Student Representation Of Indigent Defendants And The Sixth Amendment: On A Collision Course, Robert M. Hardaway

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This article will review the parallel patterns of development of clinical education and the sixth amendment, highlighting areas in which the practices of the former either conflict, or contain the potential for conflict with the latter. An analysis will be made of the present legal status of law student representation of indigent criminal defendants, with reference primarily to constitutional and sixth amendment considerations, but also to such related matters as the confidentiality of student-client communications, law student professional responsibility, and the applicability to students of state bar disciplinary rules. Finally, guidelines will be proposed regarding the proper scope of student …