Law Commons^™

December 28, 2018: Holiday Travel, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “ Holiday Travel“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Cooper V. State, 134 Nev. Adv. Op. 104 (Dec. 27, 2018), Christi Dupont

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court determined that removing a potential juror on the basis of race is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause and held that the district court erred when it did not find a prima facie showing of race-based discrimination during the jury selection process.

December 25, 2018: The Parable That Ends The Novel, The Chosen Is A Christmas Parable, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “The Parable that Ends the Novel, The Chosen is a Christmas Parable“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

December 23, 2018: More Of The New Mark Lilla, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “More of the New Mark Lilla“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

December 18, 2018: The Continuing Disintegration Of Politics In America, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “The Continuing Disintegration of Politics in America“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

December 14, 2018: What Will Post-Christianity Look Like?, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “What Will Post-Christianity Look Like?“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Plus Ça Change: A Century-Old Removal For Cause, Michael E. Herz

Online Publications

Lots of ink has been spilled over when Congress can give federal officials for-cause protection. One would think that a necessary antecedent to that discussion would be a determination of exactly what for-cause protection entails. What is “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office”? Yet no one knows; the debate over the permissibility of that restriction proceeds in blissful uncertainty as to its scope.

Rwu First Amendment Blog: David Logan's Blog: Recognizing The Free Press In The Crosshairs Across The Globe 12-12-2018, David A. Logan

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

December 10, 2018: The Democrats’ God Problem, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “The Democrats’ God Problem“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

December 7, 2018: Needed: A Party Of Democracy, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Needed: A Party of Democracy“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

State V. Second Judicial Dist. Court. (Hearn (Matthew)), 134 Nev. Adv. Op. 96 (Dec. 6, 2018) (En Banc), Taylor Buono

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court affirmed the district court’s decision and held that the prosecutorial consent provision in NRS 176A.290 violated the Nevada Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine. Furthermore, the Court struck the offending language, finding that the provision could be severed from the statute without impacting the legislature’s intent.

The Pope And The Capital Juror, Aliza Plener Cover

Articles

In a significant change to Catholic Church doctrine, Pope Francis recently declared that capital punishment is impermissible under all circumstances. Counterintuitively, the Pope’s pronouncement might make capital punishment less popular but more prevalent in the United States. This Essay anticipates this possible dynamic and, in so doing, explores how “death qualification” of capital juries can insulate the administration of the death penalty when community morality evolves away from capital punishment.

The Obama Judge And The Foundations Of The Rule Of Law, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

Diverse Originalism, Christina Mulligan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Preserving Life By Ranking Rights, John William Draper

Librarian Scholarship at Penn Law

Border walls, abortion, and the death penalty are the current battlegrounds of the right to life. We will visit each topic and more in this paper, as we consider ranking groups of constitutional rights.

The enumerated rights of the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments—life, liberty, and property—merit special treatment. They have a deeper and richer history that involves ranking. Ranking life in lexical priority over liberty and property rights protects life first and maximizes safe liberty and property rights in the absence of a significant risk to life. This is not new law; aspects of it …

What Happens In Vagueness Stays In Vagueness: The United States Constitution's Ideas On Race, Austin Clements

History Class Publications

The United States’ Constitution, while it may not explicitly discuss race in detail, has echoes of race throughout both its language and its history. Even during the origination of the Constitution, the inclusion of slavery was a hotly contested subject among the authors of the Constitution. The United States’ Constitution only uses the words “race” and “color” once and that is in the Fifteenth Amendment, which essentially gave black Americans the right to vote. While the US Constitution may not explicitly talk about race much, I argue that race is a present theme throughout the Constitution as well as behind …

December 1, 2018: "I Retired", Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, "I Retired“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Law Library Blog (December 2018) : Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

The Theory And Practice Of Contestatory Federalism, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

Madisonian theory holds that a federal division of power is necessary to the protection of liberty, but that federalism is a naturally unstable form of government organization that is in constant danger of collapsing into either unitarism or fragmentation. Despite its inherent instability, this condition may be permanently maintained, according to Madison, through a constitutional design that keeps the system in equipoise by institutionalizing a form of perpetual contestation between national and subnational governments. The theory, however, does not specify how that contestation actually occurs, and by what means.

This paper investigates Madison’s hypothesis by documenting the methods actually deployed …

The Depravity Of The 1930s And The Modern Administrative State, Gary S. Lawson, Steven Calabresi

Faculty Scholarship

Gillian Metzger’s 2017 Harvard Law Review foreword, entitled 1930s Redux: The Administrative State Under Siege, is a paean to the modern administrative state, with its massive subdelegations of legislative and judicial power to so-called “expert” bureaucrats, who are layered well out of reach of electoral accountability yet do not have the constitutional status of Article III judges. We disagree with this celebration of technocratic government on just about every level, but this Article focuses on two relatively narrow points.

First, responding more to implicit assumptions that pervade modern discourse than specifically to Professor Metzger’s analysis, we challenge the normally unchallenged …

Eugenics, Margaret Ann Donnell

History Class Publications

Naturally, and quite understandably, people avoid discussing the dark periods of human history, specifically the inconceivable acts of dehumanization imposed on their fellow man.

Individuals struggle to understand, sometimes simply because they cannot fathom, how a person—and in some cases, an institution—can manipulate and devalue another human being or groups of people. Often, the standards by which those with the “authority” to determine the lack of worth of the individual or population are arbitrary and subjective.

All of this is relevant in a conversation over the eugenics movement of the United States, occurring in the early to mid-twentieth century.

When …

Neoformalist Constitutional Construction And Public Employee Speech, Scott R. Bauries

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This Article examines, evaluates, and prescribes improvements to a familiar form of constitutional construction favored by neoformalists—the preference for rules over standards. Constitutional law development can be understood as being composed of two judicial tasks—interpretation and construction. Judicial interpretation of the Constitution involves determining the semantic meaning of the words contained in the document. Once that semantic meaning is determined, the interpreted meaning must be constructed into legal doctrine for application in court. Sometimes, that construction involves the articulation of the legal doctrines based on the interpreted constitutional text that will govern a particular case and those similar to it. …

November 24, 2018: Letter About Kornacki's Book, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “ Letter about Kornacki's book“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

November 23, 2018: Thanksgiving 2018, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Thanksgiving 2018“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

November 21, 2018: Is The New York Times Right About China?, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Is the New York Times Right About China?“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

November 17, 2018: The Matthew Whitaker Appointment, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “The Matthew Whitaker Appointment“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

11th Marine Law Symposium: Legal Strategies For Climate Adaptation In Coastal New England 2018, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Marine Affairs Institute Conferences, Lectures, and Events

No abstract provided.

November 9, 2018: The Electoral College, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “The Electoral College“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

November 4, 2018: The God Construct, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “The God Construct“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

November 3, 2018: A Society Without A Soul, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “A Society Without a Soul“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.