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Full-Text Articles in Law
Eighty Years Of Federalism Forbearance: Rationing, Resignation, And The Rule Of Law, Gil Seinfeld
Eighty Years Of Federalism Forbearance: Rationing, Resignation, And The Rule Of Law, Gil Seinfeld
Reviews
Andrew Coan’s book, Rationing the Constitution, offers a novel account of the forces that drive Supreme Court decisions across a wide array of highly controversial, vitally important areas of law. The project is ambitious. It endeavors to improve our understanding of forces that constrain the form and, ultimately, the substance of our constitutional law along each of its major axes: federalism, the separation of powers, and individual rights. I think it succeeds. The book’s central claim—that familiar (but underexplored) institutional constraints and background norms sharply limit the range of choices available to the Court when it is called upon to …
Neglecting Nationalism, Gil Seinfeld
Neglecting Nationalism, Gil Seinfeld
Articles
Federalism is a system of government that calls for the division of power between a central authority and member states. It is designed to secure benefits that flow from centralization and from devolution, as well as benefits that accrue from a simultaneous commitment to both. A student of modern American federalism, however, might have a very different impression, for significant swaths of the case law and scholarly commentary on the subject neglect the centralizing, nationalist side of the federal balance. This claim may come as a surprise, since it is obviously the case that our national government has become immensely …
Wrong Turn On The Ex Post Facto Clause, Paul D. Reingold, Kimberly Thomas
Wrong Turn On The Ex Post Facto Clause, Paul D. Reingold, Kimberly Thomas
Articles
The Ex Post Facto Clause bars any increase in punishment after the commission of a crime. But deciding what constitutes an increase in punishment can be tricky. At the front end of a criminal case, where new or amended criminal laws might lengthen prisoners’ sentences if applied retroactively, courts have routinely struck down such changes under the Ex Post Facto Clause. At the back end, however, where new or amended parole laws or policies might lengthen prisoners’ sentences in exactly the same way if applied retroactively, courts have used a different standard and upheld the changes under the Ex Post …
The Fortification Of Inequality: Constitutional Doctrine And The Political Economy, Kate Andrias
The Fortification Of Inequality: Constitutional Doctrine And The Political Economy, Kate Andrias
Articles
As Parts I and II of this Essay elaborate, the examination yields three observations of relevance to constitutional law more generally: First, judge-made constitutional doctrine, though by no means the primary cause of rising inequality, has played an important role in reinforcing and exacerbating it. Judges have acquiesced to legislatively structured economic inequality, while also restricting the ability of legislatures to remedy it. Second, while economic inequality has become a cause célèbre only in the last few years, much of the constitutional doctrine that has contributed to its flourishing is longstanding. Moreover, for several decades, even the Court’s more liberal …
Reflections On Comity In The Law Of American Federalism, Gil Seinfeld
Reflections On Comity In The Law Of American Federalism, Gil Seinfeld
Articles
Comity is a nebulous concept familiar to us from the law of international relations. Roughly speaking, it describes a set of reciprocal norms among nations that call for one state to recognize, and sometimes defer to, the laws, judgments, or interests of another. Comity also features prominently in the law of American federalism, but in that context, it operates within limits that have received almost no attention from scholarly commentators. Specifically, although courts routinely describe duties that run from one state to another, or from the federal government to the states, as exercises in comity, they almost never rely on …
The Limits Of Enumeration, Richard A. Primus
The Limits Of Enumeration, Richard A. Primus
Articles
According to a well-known principle of constitutional interpretation here identified as the “internal-limits canon,” the powers of Congress must always be construed as authorizing less legislation than a general police power would. This Article argues that the internallimits canon is unsound. Whether the powers of Congress would in practice authorize any legislation that a police power would authorize is a matter of contingency: it depends on the relationship between the powers and the social world at a given time. There is no reason why, at a given time, the powers cannot turn out to authorize any legislation that a police …
Enacted Legislative Findings And The Deference Problem, Daniel A. Crane
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
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 …
Election Law's Lochnerian Turn, Ellen D. Katz
Election Law's Lochnerian Turn, Ellen D. Katz
Articles
This panel has been asked to consider whether "the Constitution [is] responsible for electoral dysfunction."' My answer is no. The electoral process undeniably falls well short of our aspirations, but it strikes me that we should look to the Supreme Court for an accounting before blaming the Constitution for the deeply unsatisfactory condition in which we find ourselves.
The Jurisprudence Of Union, Gil Seinfeld
The Jurisprudence Of Union, Gil Seinfeld
Articles
The primary goal of this Article is to demonstrate that the interest in national unity does important, independent work in the law of vertical federalism. We have long been accustomed to treating union as a constitutionally operative value in cases involving the duties states owe one another (i.e. horizontal federalism cases), but in cases involving the relationship between the federal government and the states, the interest in union is routinely ignored. This Article shows that, across a wide range of cases relating to the allocation of power between the federal government and the states, the states are constrained by a …
How The Gun-Free School Zones Act Saved The Individual Mandate, Richard A. Primus
How The Gun-Free School Zones Act Saved The Individual Mandate, Richard A. Primus
Articles
For all the drama surrounding the Commerce Clause challenge to the in-dividual mandate provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”), the doctrinal question presented is simple. Under existing doctrine, the provision is as valid as can be. To be sure, the Supreme Court could alter existing doctrine, and many interesting things could be written about the dynamics that sometimes prompt judges to strike out in new directions under the pressures of cases like this one. But it is not my intention to pursue that possibility here. My own suspicion, for what it is worth, is that the …
The Functions Of Ethical Originalism, Richard A. Primus
The Functions Of Ethical Originalism, Richard A. Primus
Articles
Supreme Court Justices frequently divide on questions of original meaning, and the divisions have a way of mapping what we might suspect are the Justices’ leanings about the merits of cases irrespective of originalist considerations. The same is true for law professors and other participants in constitutional discourse: people’s views of original constitutional meaning tend to align well with their (nonoriginalist) preferences for how present constitutional controversies should be resolved. To be sure, there are exceptions. Some people are better than others at suspending presentist considerations when examining historical materials, and some people are better than others at recognizing when …
Constitutional Expectations, Richard A. Primus
Constitutional Expectations, Richard A. Primus
Articles
The inauguration of Barack Obama was marred by one of the smallest constitutional crises in American history. As we all remember, the President did not quite recite his oath as it appears in the Constitution. The error bothered enough people that the White House redid the ceremony a day later, taking care to get the constitutional text exactly right. Or that, at least, is what everyone thinks happened. What actually happened is more interesting. The second time through, the President again departed from the Constitution's text. But the second time, nobody minded. Or even noticed. In that unremarked feature of …
Public Consensus As Constitutional Authority, Richard A. Primus
Public Consensus As Constitutional Authority, Richard A. Primus
Articles
Barry Friedman's new book The Will of the People attempts to dissolve constitutional law's countermajoritariand ifficulty by showing that, in practice,t he Supreme Court does only what the public will tolerate. His account succeeds if "the countermajoritarian difficulty" refers to the threat that courts will run the country in ways that contravene majority preference, but not if the "the countermajoritarian difficulty" refers to the need to explain the legitimate sources of judicial authority in cases where decisions do contravene majority preference. Friedman's book does not pursue the second possibility, and may suggest that doing so is unimportant, in part because …
Article I, Article Iii, And The Limits Of Enumeration, Gil Seinfeld
Article I, Article Iii, And The Limits Of Enumeration, Gil Seinfeld
Articles
Article I, Section 8 and Article Ill, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution deploy parallel strategies for constraining the power of the federal government. They enumerate powers that the national legislature and judiciary, respectively, are permitted to exercise and thereby implicitly prohibit these two branches of government from exercising powers not enumerated. According to conventional thinking, this strategy has failed in connection with Article I and succeeded in connection with Article III. That is, it is widely acknowledged that Congress routinely exercises powers that are difficult to square with the Article I enumeration; but it is commonly thought that the …
Limits Of Interpretivism, Richard A. Primus
Limits Of Interpretivism, Richard A. Primus
Articles
Justice Stephen Markman sits on the Supreme Court of my home state of Michigan. In that capacity, he says, he is involved in a struggle between two kinds of judging. On one side are judges like him. They follow the rules. On the other side are unconstrained judges who decide cases on the basis of what they think the law ought to be. This picture is relatively simple, and Justice Markman apparently approves of its simplicity. But matters may in fact be a good deal more complex.
When Should Original Meanings Matter?, Richard A. Primus
When Should Original Meanings Matter?, Richard A. Primus
Articles
Constitutional theory lacks an account of when each of the familiar sources of authority-text, original meaning, precedent, and so on-should be given weight. The dominant tendency is to regard all sources as potentially applicable in every case. In contrast, this Article proposes that each source of authority is pertinent in some categories of cases but not in others, much as a physical tool is appropriate for some but not all kinds of household tasks. The Article then applies this approach to identify the categories of cases in which original meaning is, or is not, a valid factor in constitutional decisionmaking.
Federalism And The Commerce Clause: A Comparative Perspective, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Federalism And The Commerce Clause: A Comparative Perspective, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Articles
The U.S. Supreme Court has on numerous occasions addressed the constitutionality of state taxes under the U.S. Constitution (most often under the Commerce Clause, but sometimes under the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses). In general, the Supreme Court has granted wide leeway to the states to adopt any tax system they wish, only striking down the most egregious cases of discrimination against out-of-state residents. Thus, for example, the Court has generally refused to intervene against state tax competition to attract business into the state. It has twice upheld a method of calculating how much income of a multinational enterprise …
The Riddle Of Hiram Revels, Richard A. Primus
The Riddle Of Hiram Revels, Richard A. Primus
Articles
In 1870, a black man named Hiram Revels was named to represent Mississippi in the Senate. Senate Democrats objected to seating him and pointed out that the Constitution specifies that no person may be a senator who has not been a citizen of the United States for at least nine years. Before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, the Democrats argued, Revels had not been a citizen on account of the Supreme Court's 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Thus, even if Revels were a citizen in 1870, he had held that status for only two years. …
Judicial Power And Mobilizable History, Richard A. Primus
Judicial Power And Mobilizable History, Richard A. Primus
Articles
One contribution that law professors can make to constitutional discourse, I suggest, is the nurturing of new mobilizable histories. A "mobilizable history," as I will use the term, is a narrative, image, or other historical source that is sufficiently well-known to the community of constitutional decisionmakers so as to be able to support a credible argument in the discourse of constitutional law. It draws upon materials that are within the collective memory of constitutional interpreters; indeed, a necessary step in nurturing a new mobilizable history is to introduce new information into that collective memory or to raise the prominence of …
A Government Of Limited Powers, Carl E. Schneider
A Government Of Limited Powers, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
Roscoe C. Filburn owned a small farm in Ohio where he raised poultry, dairy cows, and a modest acreage of winter wheat. Some wheat he fed his animals, some he sold, and some he kept for his family's daily bread. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 limited the wheat Mr. Filburn could grow without incurring penalties, but his 1941 crop exceeded those limits. Mr. Filburn sued. He said Claude Wickard, the Secretary of Agriculture, could not enforce the AAI's limits because Congress lacked authority to regulate wheat grown for one's own use. He reasoned: In our federal system, the states …
The Dormant Commerce Clause And The Hormones Problem, Donald H. Regan
The Dormant Commerce Clause And The Hormones Problem, Donald H. Regan
Book Chapters
It is obvious that no anti-discrimination regime can stop at forbidding explicit discrimination of the relevant sort. If only explicit discrimination is forbidden, lawmakers who want to discriminate can hide their discriminatory intentions behind facially neutral classifications that are nonetheless chosen because they differentially burden the protected class. So, we must be prepared to invalidate some facially neutral laws that have "discriminatory effect" or, as American lawyers often call it, "disparate impact." On the other hand, we cannot possibly invalidate all laws which have a disparate impact on a protected class; many perfectly reasonable laws adopted for completely innocent purposes …
The Constitution And The New Deal, Richard D. Friedman
The Constitution And The New Deal, Richard D. Friedman
Reviews
The Supreme Court of the New Deal era continues to captivate American lawyers and historians. Constitutional jurisprudence changed rapidly during the period. Moreover, some of the most significant changes appeared - whatever the reality - to result from pressure imposed in 1937 by President Franklin Roosevelt's plan to pack the Court with Justices amenable to his programme. The structure of constitutional law that emerged within a few years of Roosevelt's death remains intact in significant respects today.
...A Rendezvous With Kreplach: Putting The New Deal Court In Context, Richard D. Friedman
...A Rendezvous With Kreplach: Putting The New Deal Court In Context, Richard D. Friedman
Reviews
The Supreme Court of the New Deal era continues to captivate lawyers and historians. Constitutional jurisprudence changed rapidly during the period. Moreover, some of the most significant changes seemed--whatever the reality--to result from pressure imposed in 1937 by President Franklin Roosevelt's plan to pack the Court. The structure of constitutional law that emerged within a few years of Roosevelt's death remains intact in significant respects today.
Free-Standing Due Process And Criminal Procedure: The Supreme Court's Search For Interpretive Guidelines, Jerold H. Israel
Free-Standing Due Process And Criminal Procedure: The Supreme Court's Search For Interpretive Guidelines, Jerold H. Israel
Articles
When I was first introduced to the constitutional regulation of criminal procedure in the mid-1950s, a single issue dominated the field: To what extent did the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment impose upon states the same constitutional restraints that the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments imposed upon the federal government? While those Bill of Rights provisions, as even then construed, imposed a broad range of constitutional restraints upon the federal criminal justice system, the federal system was (and still is) minuscule as compared to the combined systems of the fifty states. With the Bill of Rights provisions …
'Bush' V. 'Gore': What Was The Supreme Court Thinking?, Richard D. Friedman
'Bush' V. 'Gore': What Was The Supreme Court Thinking?, Richard D. Friedman
Articles
One of the most astonishing episodes in American political history ended last month with perhaps the most imperial decision ever by the United States Supreme Court. In one stroke, the Court exercised power that belonged to Congress, the legislature of Florida, Florida's courts and administrators, and, most importantly, the people of the state.
Finding The Constitution: An Economic Analysis Of Tradition's Role In Constitutional Interpretation, Adam C. Pritchard, Todd J. Zywicki
Finding The Constitution: An Economic Analysis Of Tradition's Role In Constitutional Interpretation, Adam C. Pritchard, Todd J. Zywicki
Articles
In this Article, Professor Pritchard and Professor Zywicki examine the role of tradition in constitutional interpretation, a topic that has received significant attention in recent years. After outlining the current debate over the use of tradition, the authors discuss the efficiency purposes of constitutionalism--precommitment and the reduction of agency costs--and demonstrate how the use of tradition in constitutional interpretation can serve these purposes. Rejecting both Justice Scalia's majoritarian model, which focuses on legislative sources of tradition, and Justice Souter's common-law model, which focuses on Supreme Court precedent as a source of tradition, the authors propose an alternative model--the "finding model"-- …
Chief Justice Hughes' Letter On Court-Packing, Richard D. Friedman
Chief Justice Hughes' Letter On Court-Packing, Richard D. Friedman
Articles
After one of the great landslides in American presidential history, Franklin D. Roosevelt took the oath of office for the second time on January 20, 1937. As he had four years before, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, like Roosevelt a former governor of New York, administered the oath. Torrents of rain drenched the inauguration, and Hughes’ damp whiskers waved in the biting wind. When the skullcapped Chief Justice reached the promise to defend the Constitution, he “spoke slowly and with special emphasis.” The President responded in kind, though he felt like saying, as he later told his aide Sam Rosenman: …
Art Of Judgement In Planned Parenthood V. Casey, James Boyd White
Art Of Judgement In Planned Parenthood V. Casey, James Boyd White
Articles
This article was excerpted and abridged with permission from a chapter in Professor White's recent book Acts of Hope: Creating Authority in Literature, Law, and Politics. In the book, he explores the nature of authority in various cultural contexts. Here he examines the Joint Opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which has been attacked both from the right, on the grounds that it tried to keep Roe v. Wade alive, and from the left, on the grounds that it significantly weakens the force of that case. Professor White, by contrast, admires it greatly, and in this chapter explains …
State-Interest Analysis In Fourteenth-Amendment "Privacy" Law: An Essay On The Constitutionalization Of Social Issues, Carl E. Schneider
State-Interest Analysis In Fourteenth-Amendment "Privacy" Law: An Essay On The Constitutionalization Of Social Issues, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
Asked to resolve a social issue, Americans today turn readily to rights and to the Constitution that is understood to embody them. Many "vice" issues have long been thought particularly apt for a rights analysis. A constitutional resolution of vice issues is therefore inevitably a possibility, and its wisdom is inevitably a question. In this essay, I want to address that question by investigating an area of the law that has been recently constitutionalized family law. Family law is an example worth studying because rights thinking has won a considerable prominence in it: The Constitution has been used to transform …