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Full-Text Articles in Law

Due Process As Separation Of Powers, Nathan S. Chapman, Michael W. Mcconnell May 2012

Due Process As Separation Of Powers, Nathan S. Chapman, Michael W. Mcconnell

Scholarly Works

From its conceptual origin in Magna Charta, due process of law has required that government can deprive persons of rights only pursuant to a coordinated effort of separate institutions that make, execute, and adjudicate claims under the law. Originalist debates about whether the Fifth or Fourteenth Amendments were understood to entail modern “substantive due process” have obscured the way that many American lawyers and courts understood due process to limit the legislature from the Revolutionary era through the Civil War. They understood due process to prohibit legislatures from directly depriving persons of rights, especially vested property rights, because it was …


Congress's Constitution, Josh Chafetz Feb 2012

Congress's Constitution, Josh Chafetz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Congress has significantly more constitutional power than we are accustomed to seeing it exercise. By failing to make effective use of its power, Congress has invited the other branches to fill the vacuum, resulting in a constitutional imbalance. This Article considers a number of constitutional tools that individual houses—and even individual members—of Congress, acting alone, can deploy in interbranch conflicts. Although the congressional powers discussed in this Article are clearly contemplated in constitutional text, history, and structure, many of them have received only scant treatment in isolation. More importantly, they have never before been considered in concert as a set …


Youngston Sheet To Boumediene: A Story Of Judicial Ethos And The (Un)Fastidious Use Of Language, Laura A. Cisneros Jan 2012

Youngston Sheet To Boumediene: A Story Of Judicial Ethos And The (Un)Fastidious Use Of Language, Laura A. Cisneros

Publications

My goal in this Article is not to provide a comprehensive survey of the Court's separation of powers cases from 1952 to the present. Rather, I want to present a modest-sized account of this shift from humility to arrogance and to do so not by the direct method of scrupulous narration, but through a combination of stealth and selectivity, with the idea that less could be more. With this model in mind, I have focused on the language of a few representative opinions: Jackson and Frankfurters concurrences in Youngstown, Chief Justice Rehnquist's majority opinion in Dames & Moore v. Regan, …


The Constitutional Bond In Military Professionalism: A Reply To Professor Deborah N. Pearlstein, Diane H. Mazur Jan 2012

The Constitutional Bond In Military Professionalism: A Reply To Professor Deborah N. Pearlstein, Diane H. Mazur

UF Law Faculty Publications

The Soldier, the State, and the Separation of Powers is important and very persuasive. (In this Response, I will call it Separation of Powers to distinguish it clearly from The Soldier and the State,7 the classic work on civil–military relations referenced in the title.) Professor Pearlstein asks the right questions and reaches the right conclusions—no small task when law professors have typically deferred to expertise in other fields, if not avoided the subject entirely.8 What do we mean by civilian control of the military? Where is the line between a military that offers its professional expertise to civilian decision makers …


Political Hot Potato: How Closing Loopholes Can Get Policymakers Cooked, Stephanie Mcmahon Jan 2012

Political Hot Potato: How Closing Loopholes Can Get Policymakers Cooked, Stephanie Mcmahon

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Loopholes in the law are weaknesses that allow the law to be circumvented. Once created, they prove hard to eliminate. Acase study of the evolving tax unit used in the federal income tax explores policymakers' response to loopholes. The1913 income tax created an opportunity for wealthy married couples to shift ownership of family income between spouses, then to file separately, and, as a result, to reduce their collective taxes. In 1948, Congress closed this loophole by extending the income-splitting benefit to all married taxpayers filing jointly. Congress acted only after the federal judiciary and Treasury Department pleaded for congressional …


Historical Gloss And The Separation Of Powers, Curtis A. Bradley, Trevor W. Morrison Jan 2012

Historical Gloss And The Separation Of Powers, Curtis A. Bradley, Trevor W. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

Arguments based on historical practice are a mainstay of debates about the constitutional separation of powers. Surprisingly, however, there has been little sustained academic attention to the proper role of historical practice in this context. The scant existing scholarship is either limited to specific subject areas or focused primarily on judicial doctrine without addressing the use of historical practice in broader conceptual or theoretical terms. To the extent that the issue has been discussed, most accounts of how historical practice should inform the separation of powers require “acquiescence” by the branch of government whose prerogatives the practice implicates, something that …