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Full-Text Articles in Law

Constitution And The Laws Of War During The Civil War, The Federal Courts, Practice & Procedure, Andrew Kent Jan 2009

Constitution And The Laws Of War During The Civil War, The Federal Courts, Practice & Procedure, Andrew Kent

Faculty Scholarship

This Article uncovers the forgotten complex of relationships between the U.S. Constitution, citizenship and the laws of war. The Supreme Court today believes that both noncitizens and citizens who are military enemies in a congressionally-authorized war are entitled to judicially-enforceable rights under the Constitution. The older view was that the U.S. government’s military actions against noncitizen enemies were not limited by the Constitution, but only by the international laws of war. On the other hand, in the antebellum period, the prevailing view was U.S. citizenship should carry with it protection from ever being treated as a military enemy under the …


This Right Is Not Allowed By Governments That Are Afraid Of The People: The Public Meaning Of The Second Amendment When The Fourteenth Amendment Was Ratified , Clayton E. Cramer, Nicholas J. Johnson, George A. Moscary Jan 2009

This Right Is Not Allowed By Governments That Are Afraid Of The People: The Public Meaning Of The Second Amendment When The Fourteenth Amendment Was Ratified , Clayton E. Cramer, Nicholas J. Johnson, George A. Moscary

Faculty Scholarship

The lingering question following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia v. Heller is whether the Court will employ the Fourteenth Amendment to incorporate the newly confirmed right to keep and bear arms as a limitation on states. The answer will hinge substantially on the Court's assessment of the intent and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment with regard to the right to keep and bear arms. Discerning such intent requires detailed evaluation of the context within which the amendment emerged and the understanding of the right to keep and bear arms at the time. This Essay pursues in …


Congress's Power To Enforce Fourteenth Amendment Rights: Lessons From Federal Remedies The Framers Enacted , Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 2005

Congress's Power To Enforce Fourteenth Amendment Rights: Lessons From Federal Remedies The Framers Enacted , Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Robert Kaczorowski argues for an expansive originalist interpretation of Congressional power under the Fourteenth Amendment. Before the Civil War Congress actually exercised, and the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld plenary Congressional power to enforce the constitutional rights of slaveholders. After the Civil War, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment copied the antebellum statutes and exercised plenary power to enforce the constitutional rights of all American citizens when they enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and then incorporated the Act into the Fourteenth Amendment. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment thereby exercised the plenary power the Rehnquist Court claims the …


Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 1995

Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

The thesis of Professor Donald Nieman's paper, "From Slaves to Citizens: African-Americans, Rights Consciousness, and Reconstruction," is that the nation experienced a revolution in the United States Constitution and in the consciousness of African Americans. According to Professor Nieman, the Reconstruction Amendments represented "a dramatic departure from antebellum constitutional principles,"' because the Thirteenth Amendment reversed the pre-Civil War constitutional guarantee of slavery and "abolish[ed] slavery by federal authority." The Fourteenth Amendment rejected the Supreme Court's "racially-based definition of citizenship [in Dred Scott v. Sandford4], clearly establishing a color-blind citizenship” and the Fifteenth Amendment "wrote the principle of equality into the …


Chase Court And Fundamental Rights: A Watershed In American Constitutionalism, The , Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 1993

Chase Court And Fundamental Rights: A Watershed In American Constitutionalism, The , Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

Three weeks before he died in May 1873, the frail and ailing Salmon P. Chase joined three of his brethren in dissent in one of the most important cases ever decided by the United States Supreme Court, the Slaughter-House Cases.1 This decision was a watershed in United States constitutional history for several reasons. Doctrinally, it represented a rejection of the virtually unanimous decisions of the lower federal courts upholding the constitutionality of revolutionary federal civil rights laws enacted in the aftermath of the Civil War. Institutionally, it was an example of extraordinary judicial activism in overriding the legislative will of …


Nineteenth Century Interpretations Of The Federal Contract Clause: The Transformation From Vested To Substantive Rights Against The State , James L. Kainen Jan 1982

Nineteenth Century Interpretations Of The Federal Contract Clause: The Transformation From Vested To Substantive Rights Against The State , James L. Kainen

Faculty Scholarship

During the early nineteenth century, the contract clause served as the fundamental source of federally protected rights against the state. Yet the Supreme Court gradually eased many of the restrictions on state power enforced in the contract clause cases while developing the doctrine of substantive due process after the Civil War. By the end of the nineteenth century, the due process clause had usurped the place of the contract clause as the centerpiece in litigation about individual rights. Most analyses of the history of federally protected rights against the state have emphasized the rise of substantive due process to the …