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Full-Text Articles in Law
With Strings Attached: The Limits On Local Control, Richard Briffault
With Strings Attached: The Limits On Local Control, Richard Briffault
Faculty Scholarship
In a December 2003 decision, a Colorado trial court judge invalidated the state's new school voucher program. The decision was unusual in that the court relied not on traditional separation-of-church-and-state concerns, but instead on a provision of the Colorado state constitution that vests control over public education in local school boards. The court held that by failing to give local school boards any" input whatsoever into the instruction to be offered by the private schools" that accepted voucher students, the state had violated the constitutional provision that grants local boards "control of instruction in the public schools of their respective …
Madisonian Equal Protection, James S. Liebman, Brandon L. Garrett
Madisonian Equal Protection, James S. Liebman, Brandon L. Garrett
Faculty Scholarship
James Madison is considered the "Father of the Constitution," but his progeny disappointed him. It had no effective defense against self-government's "mortal disease" – the oppression of minorities by local majorities. This Article explores Madison's writings in an effort to reclaim the deep conception of equal protection at the core of his constitutional aspirations. At the Convention, Madison passionately advocated a radical structural approach to equal protection under which the "extended republic's" broadly focused legislature would have monitored local laws and vetoed those that were parochial and "unjust." Rejecting this proposal to structure equal protection into the "interior" operation of …