Law Commons^™

An Empirical Study Of Implicit Takings., James E. Krier, Stewart E. Sterk

Articles

Takings scholarship has long focused on the niceties of Supreme Court doctrine, while ignoring the operation of takings law "on the ground" in the state and lower federal courts, which together decide the vast bulk of all takings cases. This study, based primarily on an empirical analysis of more than 2000 reported decisions ovcr the period 1979 through 2012, attempts to fill that void. This study establishes that the Supreme Court's categorical rules govern almost no state takings cases, and that takings claims based on government regulation almost invariably fail. By contrast, when takings claims arise out of government action …

Incidental Burdens And The Nature Of Judicial Review, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Activists and scholars contesting the meaning of the Second Amendment argue over a startling number of its twenty-seven words: "regulated," "Militia," "State," "people," "keep," "bear," and "Arms." Heller and McDonald sought to resolve most of these debates, but before Professors Joseph Blocher and Darrell Miller, no one noticed the potential for contestation over the Second Amendment's final word: "infringed." When does the application of a gun-neutral law infringe the right? In that deceptively simple question lurk important future debates over the Second Amendment, the Constitution, and law itself.

The Challenges Of Fitting Principled Modern Government – A Unified Public Law – To An Eighteenth Century Constitution, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

The papers presented at a fall 2016 conference at Cambridge University, The Unity of Public Law?, generally addressed issues of judicial review in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, often from a comparative perspective and the view that unifying impulses in “public law” arose from the common law. Accepting what Justice Harlan Fisk Stone once characterized as the ideal of “a unified system of judge-made and statute law woven into a seamless whole by [judges],” The Common Law in the United States, 50 Harvard L Rev 4 (1936), this paper considers a variety of issues that have complicated maintaining …

Separations Of Wealth: Inequality And The Erosion Of Checks And Balances, Kate Andrias

Articles

American government is dysfunctional: Gridlock, filibusters, and expanding presidential power, everyone seems to agree, threaten our basic system of constitutional governance. Who, or what, is to blame? In the standard account, the fault lies with the increasing polarization of our political parties. That standard story, however, ignores an important culprit: Concentrated wealth and its organization to achieve political ends. The only way to understand our current constitutional predicament—and to rectify it—is to pay more attention to the role that organized wealth plays in our system of checks and balances. This Article shows that the increasing concentration of wealth and political …

Constitutional Bad Faith, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

The concepts of good faith and bad faith play a central role in many areas of private law and international law. Typically associated with honesty, loyalty, and fair dealing, good faith is said to supply the fundamental principle of every legal system, if not the foundation of all law. With limited exceptions, however, good faith and bad faith go unmentioned in constitutional cases brought by or against government institutions. This doctrinal deficit is especially striking given that the U.S. Constitution twice refers to faithfulness and that insinuations of bad faith pervade constitutional discourse.

This Article investigates these points and their …

Plenary Power Is Dead! Long Live Plenary Power!, Michael Kagan

Scholarly Works

For decades, scholars of immigration law have anticipated the demise of the plenary power doctrine. The Supreme Court could have accomplished this in its recent decision in Kerry v. Din, or it could have re-affirmed plenary power. Instead, the Court produced a splintered decision that did neither. This essay examines the long process of attrition that has significantly gutted the traditional plenary power doctrine with regard to procedural due process, while leaving it largely intact with regard to substantive constitutional rights.

Agora: Reflections On Zivotofsky V. Kerry : Historical Gloss, The Recognition Power, And Judicial Review, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Agora: Reflections On Zivotofsky V. Kerry, Curtis A. Bradley, Carlos M. Vazquez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Constitutionalism Outside The Courts, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is a chapter to be included in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on the U.S. Constitution. Using the actions of Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus during the Little Rock crisis of 1957 and the U.S. Supreme Court’s subsequent decision in Cooper v. Aaron as a lens, it explores constitutional interpretation and enforcement by extrajudicial institutions. I explore the critique of Cooper’s notion of judicial supremacy by departmentalists like Walter Murphy, empirical scholars skeptical of judicial efficacy like Gerald Rosenberg, and popular constitutionalists like Larry Kramer and Mark Tushnet. I also consider four distinct institutional forms of extrajudicial constitutional interpretation and …

Separations Of Wealth: Inequality And The Erosion Of Checks And Balances, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

American government is dysfunctional: Gridlock, filibusters, and expanding presidential power, everyone seems to agree, threaten our basic system of constitutional governance. Who, or what, is to blame? In the standard account, the fault lies with the increasing polarization of our political parties. That standard story, however, ignores an important culprit: Concentrated wealth and its organization to achieve political ends. The only way to understand our current constitutional predicament – and to rectify it – is to pay more attention to the role that organized wealth plays in our system of checks and balances.

This Article shows that the increasing concentration …

Judicial Review And Non-Enforcement At The Founding, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

This Article examines the relationship between judicial review and presidential non-enforcement of statutory law. Defenders of non-enforcement regularly argue that the justification for judicial review that prevailed at the time of the founding also justifies the president in declining to enforce unconstitutional laws. The argument is unsound. This Article shows that there is essentially no historical evidence, from ratification through the first decade under the Constitution, in support of a non-enforcement power. It also shows that the framers repeatedly made statements inconsistent with the supposition that the president could refuse to enforce laws he deemed unconstitutional. In contrast, during this …

Liberty, James E. Fleming, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

"To secure the blessings of liberty," the Preamble to the US Constitution proclaims, "We the People . . . ordain and establish this Constitution." The Constitution is said to secure liberty through three principal strategies: the design of the Constitution as a whole; structural arrangements, most notably separation of powers andfederalism; and protection of rights. This chapter focuses on this third strategy of protecting liberty, in particular, through the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. We first examine the several approaches taken to the "Incorporation" of certain basic liberties "enumerated" in the Bill of Rights to apply to the state governments. We …

Substantive Habeas, Kimberly A. Thomas

Articles

Substantive Habeas identifies the US. Supreme Court's recent shift in its habeas jurisprudence from procedure to the substance of habeas review and explores the implications of this change. For decades, the US. Supreme Court has attempted to control the flood of habeas corpus petitions by imposing procedural requirements on prisoners seeking to challenge constitutional error in their cases. These restrictive procedural rules have remained at the center of habeas decision making until recently. Over the past few years, instead of further constraining the procedural gateway for habeas cases, the Supreme Court has shifted its focus to the substance of habeas. …

The Puzzling Presumption Of Reviewability, Nicholas Bagley

Articles

The presumption in favor of judicial review of agency action is a cornerstone of administrative law, accepted by courts and commentators alike as both legally appropriate and obviously desirable. Yet the presumption is puzzling. As with any canon of statutory construction that serves a substantive end, it should find a source in history, positive law, the Constitution, or sound policy considerations. None of these, however, offers a plausible justification for the presumption. As for history, the sort of judicial review that the presumption favors - appellate-style arbitrariness review - was not only unheard of prior to the twentieth century, but …

Enacted Legislative Findings And The Deference Problem, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

The constitutionality of federal legislation sometimes turns on the presence and sufficiency of congressional findings of predicate facts, such as the effects of conduct on interstate commerce, state discrimination justifying the abrogation of sovereign immunity, or market failures justifying intrusions on free speech. Sometimes a congressional committee makes these findings in legislative history. Other times, Congress recites its findings in a statutory preamble, thus enacting its findings as law. Surprisingly, the Supreme Court has not distinguished between enacted and unenacted findings in deciding how much deference to accord congressional findings. This is striking because the difference between enactedness and unenactedness …

The Puzzling Presumption Of Reviewability, Nicholas Bagley

Articles

The presumption in favor of judicial review of agency action is a cornerstone of administrative law, accepted by courts and commentators alike as both legally appropriate and obviously desirable. Yet the presumption is puzzling. As with any canon of statutory construction that serves a substantive end, it should find a source in history, positive law, the Constitution, or sound policy considerations. None of these, however, offers a plausible justification for the presumption. As for history, the sort of judicial review that the presumption favors - appellate-style arbitrariness review - was not only unheard of prior to the twentieth century, but …

The Cost Of Judicial Error: Stare Decisis And The Role Of Normative Theory, Kurt T. Lash

Law Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court of the United States has long embraced the doctrine of stare decisis as an appropriate consideration any time the Court considers overruling past precedent. However, because the Court's actual application of the doctrine has been both sporadic and seemingly inconsistent, some scholars (and Justices) have accused the Court of methodological hypocrisy and bad faith. Much of this criticism assumes that, if members of the Supreme Court find certain rule of law values dispositive in one case, they should find those same considerations dispositive in all cases. Failure to do so suggests either incompetence or insincerity. This Article …

Treaty Termination And Historical Gloss, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

The termination of U.S. treaties provides an especially rich example of how governmental practices can provide a “gloss” on the Constitution’s separation of powers. The authority to terminate treaties is not addressed specifically in the constitutional text and instead has been worked out over time through political-branch practice. This practice, moreover, has developed largely without judicial review. Despite these features, Congress and the President—and the lawyers who advise them—have generally treated this issue as a matter of constitutional law rather than merely political happenstance. Importantly, the example of treaty termination illustrates not only how historical practice can inform constitutional understandings …

The National Security State: The End Of Separation Of Powers, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

In Search Of Skidmore, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Ever since 1827, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly observed that when a court is interpreting a statute that falls within the authority of an administrative agency, the court in reaching its own judgment about the statute's meaning should give substantial weight to the agency's view. Repeated again and again over the years in varying formulations, this proposition found its apotheosis in Skidmore v. Swift & Co., a unanimous opinion authored by Justice Jackson in 1944. His opinion took the proposition to be so obvious that no citation was required. Justice Jackson's typically incisive and memorable formulation stuck. It …

The Constitution And Legislative History, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this article, the author provides an extended analysis of the constitutional claims against legislative history, arguing that, under textualists’ own preference for constitutional text, the use of legislative history should be constitutional to the extent it is supported by Congress’s rulemaking power, a constitutionally enumerated power.

This article has five parts. In part I, the author explains the importance of this question, considering the vast range of cases to which this claim of unconstitutionality could possibly apply—after all, statutory interpretation cases are the vast bulk of the work of the federal courts. She also explains why these claims should …

Reconciling Positivism And Realism: Kelsen And Habermas On Democracy And Human Rights, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is well known that Hans Kelsen and Jürgen Habermas invoke realist arguments drawn from social science in defending an international, democratic human rights regime against Carl Schmitt’s attack on the rule of law. However, despite embracing the realist spirit of Kelsen’s legal positivism, Habermas criticizes Kelsen for neglecting to connect the rule of law with a concept of procedural justice (Part I). I argue, to the contrary (Part II), that Kelsen does connect these terms, albeit in a manner that may be best described as functional, rather than conceptual. Indeed, whereas Habermas tends to emphasize a conceptual connection between …

Presidential Power, Historical Practice, And Legal Constraint, Curtis A. Bradley, Trevor W. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

The scope of the President’s legal authority is determined in part by historical practice. This Essay aims to better understand how such practice-based law might operate as a constraint on the presidency. Some scholars have suggested that presidential authority has become “unbounded” by law, and is now governed only or primarily by politics. At the same time, there has been growing skepticism about the ability of the familiar political checks on presidential power to work in any systematic or reliable fashion. Skepticism about law’s potential to constrain in this context is heightened by the customary nature of much of what …

Unbundling Constitutionality, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Constitutional theory features a persistent controversy over the source or sources of constitutional status, that is, over the criteria that qualify some rules as constitutional rules. This Article contends that no single criterion characterizes all of the rules that American law treats as constitutional, such that it is a mistake to think of constitutionality as a status with necessary conditions. It is better to think of constitutionality on a bundle-of-sticks model: different attributes associated with constitutionality might or might not be present in any constitutional rule. Analysts should often direct their attention more to the separate substantive properties that are …

Lower Court Constitutionalism: Circuit Court Discretion In A Complex Adaptive System, Doni Gewirtzman

Articles & Chapters

While federal circuit courts play an essential role in defining what the Constitution means, one would never know it from looking at most constitutional scholarship. The bulk of constitutional theory sees judge-made constitutional law through a distorted lens, one that focuses solely on the Supreme Court with virtually no attention paid to other parts of the judicial hierarchy. On the rare occasions when circuit courts appear on the radar screen, they are treated either as megaphones for communicating the Supreme Court’s directives or as tools for implementing the theorist’s own interpretive agenda. Both approaches would homogenize the way circuit courts …

Constitutional Forbearance, A. Christopher Bryant

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This essay begins by developing the concept of constitutional forbearance and exploring the role it plays in the craft of good judging. This first Part also illustrates what is meant by constitutional forbearance by recovering a forgotten but illustrative example from a century ago. Part II then argues that the need for forbearance has at present become unusually acute. Finally, in Part III this essay identifies some of the qualities of the Obama care cases that make them such singular opportunities for the exercise of this much needed judicial virtue and answers some anticipated objections to thinking about the cases …

Sorrell V. Ims Health And The End Of The Constitutional Double Standard, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Advisory Adjudication, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court decision in Camreta v. Greene is revealing. The Court first issues an opinion authorizing appeals by prevailing parties in qualified immunity cases, even though doing so entails the issuance of an advisory opinion that is not necessary to resolution of the dispute between the parties. And the Court then declines to reach the merits of the underlying constitutional claim in the case, because doing so would entail the issuance of an advisory opinion that was not necessary to the resolution of the dispute between the parties. The Court's decision, therefore, has the paradoxical effect of both honoring …

Judicial Activism And The Interpretation Of The Voting Rights Act, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Articles by Maurer Faculty

From the moment the U.S. Supreme Court first confronted the difficult constitutional questions at the heart of the Voting Rights Act, its posture has been one of deference. This posture has continued to this day. In contrast, the Court has interpreted the language of the Act dynamically, often in total disregard to the text of the law or the intent of Congress. But as this Article explains, the Roberts Court appears poised to unsettle this longstanding narrative. The Act is in serious constitutional danger. One way to explain this move on the part of the Court is by invoking the …

Looking For A Few Good Philosopher Kings: Political Gerrymandering As A Question Of Institutional Competence, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The redistricting season is about to begin in full swing, and with it will come renewed calls for the federal courts, and particularly the U. S. Supreme Court, to aggressively review the work of the political branches. This is an intriguing puzzle. Since the early 1960’s, the federal courts have regulated questions of politics aggressively. They have done this even in the face of difficult questions of political representation. The courts have taken sides, to be sure, but these can only be described as acts of volition and will, not constitutional law. The leading case is Reynolds v. Sims. This …