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Popular Constitutionalism As Political Law, Mark V. Tushnet
Popular Constitutionalism As Political Law, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This Article addresses some of the critical reviews of ‘The People Themselves’, focusing on how they respond to the proposition, which I believe to be correct and made in ‘The People Themselves’, that constitutional law is a distinctive or special kind of law. I call that kind of law political law. Both parts of the formulation are equally important. Constitutional law is law, what is sometimes described as "hard" law. As law, it sometimes induces decision-makers to make decisions that are inconsistent with their "pure" preferences, that is, those they would hold in the absence of law. My aim is …
Referring To Foreign Law In Constitutional Interpretation: An Episode In The Culture Wars, Mark V. Tushnet
Referring To Foreign Law In Constitutional Interpretation: An Episode In The Culture Wars, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
As Judge Messitte's essay demonstrates, recent references in Supreme Court decisions to non-U.S. legal materials have generated a great deal of controversy. Those who make such references say that doing so is no big deal. I have called the controversy a tempest in a teapot. My topic here is the disjuncture between the perception on one side that something important and troubling has happened - or, as I will argue, may be about to happen - and the perception on the other that there is nothing to be concerned about. After describing in Section I the practice that has given …
Political Power And Judicial Power: Some Observations On Their Relation, Mark V. Tushnet
Political Power And Judicial Power: Some Observations On Their Relation, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This Essay summarizes and perhaps extends slightly some important recent work, mostly by political scientists, on the structural relation between the array of political power in a nation's nonjudicial branch or branches and the way in which judicial review is exercised in relatively stable democracies. Robert Dahl's classic article identified one such relation. According to Dahl, "[e]xcept for short-lived transitional periods when the old alliance is disintegrating and the new one is struggling to take control of political institutions, the Supreme Court is inevitably a part of the dominant national alliance." What, though, if there is no "dominant" national political …
The "Constitution Restoration Act" And Judicial Independence: Some Observations, Mark V. Tushnet
The "Constitution Restoration Act" And Judicial Independence: Some Observations, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This Essay uses the proposed Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 as the vehicle for exploring some aspects of contemporary concerns about judicial independence and the mechanisms available to control what might be perceived as abuses of judicial authority . . . I doubt that the Act has a serious chance of enactment, but its introduction provides an opportunity to examine some difficulties associated with congressional control of judicial decision-making. I begin by treating the Constitution Restoration Act as a real statute, asking what its substantive terms mean. I argue that there is substantial tension between what the Act says and …
"A Decent Respect To The Opinions Of Mankind": Referring To Foreign Law To Express American Nationhood, Mark V. Tushnet
"A Decent Respect To The Opinions Of Mankind": Referring To Foreign Law To Express American Nationhood, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Why might a court refer to non-U.S. law? Justice Stephen Breyer's pragmatic defense of the practice is probably the most widely known, as are its defects. Here, I want to sketch a counterintuitive explanation for the practice. Referring to non-U.S. law in Supreme Court opinions might be a way in which Supreme Court Justices participate in the dissemination of a distinctively American self-understanding. By this I do not mean that Justices who refer to non-U.S. law necessarily endorse the (reasonable) interpretive theory that the U.S. Constitution instantiates universally true propositions of political morality. Rather, I mean that references to non-U.S. …
When Is Knowing Less Better Than Knowing More? Unpacking The Controversy Over Supreme Court Reference To Non-U.S. Law, Mark V. Tushnet
When Is Knowing Less Better Than Knowing More? Unpacking The Controversy Over Supreme Court Reference To Non-U.S. Law, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
My goal in this Essay is simply to lay out the criticisms of the use of non-U.S. law in constitutional interpretation, so as to identify what might be correct (not much, in the end) in those criticisms. I discuss criticisms based on theories of interpretation, on the claim that reference to non-U.S. law is merely decoration playing no role in generating outcomes, on the role the Constitution has in expressing distinctively American values, and on the proposition that judges are unlikely to do a good job in understanding - and therefore in referring to - non-U.S. law. This last "quality-control" …
Weak-Form Judicial Review And "Core" Civil Liberties, Mark V. Tushnet
Weak-Form Judicial Review And "Core" Civil Liberties, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In this Essay, I want to unearth some subordinated strands in the Rehnquist Court's free speech jurisprudence. For example, the Rehnquist Court allowed Congress to regulate campaign finance in ways subject to credible First Amendment objections, and to impose obligations on cable television systems that would almost certainly be unconstitutional were they imposed on newspapers. These decisions, I suggest, do not rest simply on the kind of deference to legislative judgment that fits comfortably into a system of strong-form review. Rather, they represent what I call a managerial model of the First Amendment, which accords legislatures a large role in …
Foreword: What's So Wicked About Lochner?, Randy E. Barnett
Foreword: What's So Wicked About Lochner?, Randy E. Barnett
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In this brief Foreword to a forthcoming symposium on Lochner v. New York, Professor Randy Barnett asks the question, What's So Wicked About Lochner? Modern Progressives cannot complain about its protection of so-called substantive due process, since they favor just that. Nor can they claim that Lochner violates the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, since these legal analysts by and large reject originalism altogether. This leaves only today's judicial conservatives to adhere to a purified Roosevelt New Deal jurisprudence of disdain for Lochner.
The author answers that Lochner is objectionable precisely because its reliance on the Due …
Trumping Precedent With Original Meaning: Not As Radical As It Sounds, Randy E. Barnett
Trumping Precedent With Original Meaning: Not As Radical As It Sounds, Randy E. Barnett
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Originalism was thought to be buried in the 1980s with critiques such as those by Paul Brest and Jeff Powell. Brest charged that originalism was unworkable, while Powell maintained that originalism was inconsistent with the original intentions of the Founders. Others raised the moral challenge of why we should be ruled by the "dead hand" of the past. Yet an originalist approach to interpretation has-like a phoenix from the ashes or Dracula from his grave, depending on your point of view-survived into the Twenty-first Century as an intellectual contender. Indeed, it has thrived like no other approach to interpretation.
The Unfulfilled Promise Of The Constitution In Executive Hands, Cornelia T. Pillard
The Unfulfilled Promise Of The Constitution In Executive Hands, Cornelia T. Pillard
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Many leading constitutional scholars now argue for greater reliance on the political branches to supplement or even supplant judicial enforcement of the Constitution. Responding to our national preoccupation with the judiciary as the mechanism of constitutional enforcement, these scholars stress that the executive and legislature, too, bear responsibility to think about the Constitution for themselves and to take steps to fulfill the Constitution's promise. Joining a debate that goes back at least as far as Marbury v. Madison, current scholars seek to reawaken the political branches to their constitutional potential, and urge the Supreme Court to leave the other branches …
Marbury V. Madison Around The World, Mark V. Tushnet
Marbury V. Madison Around The World, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
To put the point somewhat strongly for emphasis, the U.S. system of judicial review is now something of an outlier among systems of constitutional review. In this Essay, I consider three aspects of such systems: the structures of review, the theories of review, and the forms of review. My aim is primarily one of description, aiming to highlight the ways in which the U.S. system resembles and differs from the newer systems of judicial review. The U.S. system of judicial review has close-and more distant-relatives in each of these categories. However, the U.S. system remains distinctive in that it combines …
Interpreting Constitutions Comparatively: Some Cautionary Notes, With Reference To Affirmative Action, Mark V. Tushnet
Interpreting Constitutions Comparatively: Some Cautionary Notes, With Reference To Affirmative Action, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
It has now become the conventional wisdom that many justices on the United States Supreme Court are thinking about the relevance of comparative constitutional law to the interpretation of the United States Constitution. An emerging conservative critique of doing so questions the democratic legitimacy of the practice. I believe that those questions are badly formed, but that other questions are worth raising about the (perhaps) emerging practice. In this comment I identify some reasons for caution about the use of transnational comparative law in interpreting domestic constitutions. Some reasons are institutional, others arise from the doctrinal context within which particular …
The Original Meaning Of The Necessary And Proper Clause, Randy E. Barnett
The Original Meaning Of The Necessary And Proper Clause, Randy E. Barnett
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In this Article, I present the evidence of the original public meaning of the Necessary and Proper Clause." These findings will, of course, be of interest to originalists. But, they should also be of interest to the many constitutional scholars who consider original meaning to be one among several legitimate modes of constitutional analysis, or who consider original meaning the starting point of a process by which this meaning is translated into contemporary terms. By either account, it is important to find the correct original meaning, even if it is not dispositive of today's cases and controversies. I will show …
Self-Historicism, Mark V. Tushnet
Self-Historicism, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Among the contributors to this symposium, I may be the person with the longest acquaintance with Sandy Levinson. I want to begin, therefore, with a recollection of the period of my earliest contacts with Sandy - a recollection that, as I hope to show, has some bearing on some of the aspects of Sandy's work that most interest me . . . I use these examples to introduce an argument connected to Sandy's longstanding interest in historical memory. The casebook of which he is a co-author is organized historically-relentlessly so, I would put it, to the point where I personally …
Alternative Forms Of Judicial Review, Mark V. Tushnet
Alternative Forms Of Judicial Review, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The invention in the late twentieth century of what I call weak-form systems of judicial review provides us with the chance to see in a new light some traditional debates within U.S. constitutional law and theory, which are predicated on the fact that the United States has strong-form judicial review. Strong- and weak-form systems operate on the level of constitutional design, in the sense that their characteristics are specified in constitutional documents or in deep-rooted constitutional traditions. After sketching the differences between strong- and weak-form systems, I turn to design features that operate at the next lower level. Here legislatures …
New Forms Of Judicial Review And The Persistence Of Rights - And Democracy-Based Worries, Mark V. Tushnet
New Forms Of Judicial Review And The Persistence Of Rights - And Democracy-Based Worries, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Recent developments in judicial review have raised the possibility that the debate over judicial supremacy versus legislative supremacy might be transformed into one about differing institutions to implement judicial review. Rather than posing judicial review against legislative supremacy, the terms of the debate might be over having institutions designed to exercise forms of judicial review that accommodate both legislative supremacy and judicial implementation of constitutional limits. After examining some of these institutional developments in Canada, South Africa, and Great Britain, this Article asks whether these accommodations, which attempt to pursue a middle course, have characteristic instabilities that will in the …
Non-Judicial Review, Mark V. Tushnet
Non-Judicial Review, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Professor Mark Tushnet challenges the view that democratic constitutionalism requires courts to dominate constitutional review. He provides three diverse examples of non-judicial institutions involved in constitutional review and examines the institutional incentives to get the analysis" right." Through these examples, Professor Tushnet argues that non-judicial actors may perform constitutional review that is accurate, effective, and capable of gaining public acceptance. Professor Tushnet recommends that scholars conduct further research into non-judicial review to determine whether ultimately more or less judicial review is necessary in constitutional democracies.
A New Constitutionalism For Liberals?, Mark V. Tushnet
A New Constitutionalism For Liberals?, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
It has been apparent for at least a decade that liberal constitutional theory is in deep trouble. Of course there are many versions of liberal constitutional theory, but they have essentially no connection to existing practices of constitutional law, considering as practices of constitutional law all the activities of our institutions of government that implicate - interpret, advance, deal with, whatever - fundamental principle. Instead, liberal constitutional theory's vision of the future is nostalgia for the past. For liberal constitutional theorists the Warren Court, or Justice Brennan, basically got everything right, at least in their approach to identifying constitutional law. …
Constitution-Talk And Justice-Talk, Mark V. Tushnet
Constitution-Talk And Justice-Talk, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Inside the courts, one might distinguish between constitution-talk and justice-talk on the ground that the former, but not the latter, results in enforceable legal judgments. So, inside the courts, we might interpret the Constitution with justice in mind, but what we do is produce legally enforceable judgments. Outside the courts, however, it might seem that all we do is interpret and talk. It is not immediately obvious that cloaking justice-talk as constitution-talk outside the courts has much rhetorical force. As I will argue, the fact that invoking the Constitution outside the courts, in the course of discussing justice, does have …
Subconstitutional Constitutional Law: Supplement, Sham, Or Substitute?, Mark V. Tushnet
Subconstitutional Constitutional Law: Supplement, Sham, Or Substitute?, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In this brief Comment I make two points. First, the subconstitutional doctrines appear to have the advantage of allowing elected lawmakers to pursue whatever course they wish, as long as they satisfy the requirements of these subconstitutional doctrines. In practice, however, what appears to be a provisional invalidation based on subconstitutional law turns out to be - and, indeed, might be expected at the moment of decision to be - a final, unrevisable decision. Further, courts might strategically deploy these sub constitutional doctrines to avoid the sting of the charge that they are foreclosing legislative choice while effectively doing so. …
Thinking About The Constitution At The Cusp, Mark V. Tushnet
Thinking About The Constitution At The Cusp, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
What do I mean in saying that we need to think about the Constitution "at the cusp?" I have in mind an image in which we have one way of thinking about the Constitution on one side of a line, and another way of thinking about the Constitution on the other. My sense is that we may have crossed such a line quite recently. I believe that we may be in a new constitutional order, different from the New Deal-Great Society constitutional order that existed from 1937 to sometime in the 1980s. If so, those of us who have been …
The Canon(S) Of Constitutional Law: An Introduction, Mark V. Tushnet
The Canon(S) Of Constitutional Law: An Introduction, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Any discipline has a canon, a set of themes that organize the way in which people think about the discipline. Or, perhaps, any discipline has a number of competing canons. Is there a canon of constitutional law? A group of casebook authors met in December 1999 to discuss the choices they had made - what they had decided to include, what to exclude, what they regretted excluding (or including), what principles they used in developing their casebooks. Most of the authors were affiliated with law schools, but some had developed coursebooks for use in undergraduate political science and constitutional history …
The Constitution Of Civil Society, Mark V. Tushnet
The Constitution Of Civil Society, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This Article . . .sketches how the free expression, freedom of religion, and substantive due process provisions of the U.S. Constitution have been interpreted to define and protect families, religious institutions, non-political associations, and political parties. I have organized the discussion by topics rather than by institutions. The next section examines the ways in which constitutional law defines civil society's institutions, and Section III examines the extent to which it allows government to regulate them. Section IV deals with the constitutional restrictions on government's power to give unconditional or conditional grants to civil society's institutions. The Conclusion returns to the …
Globalization And Federalism In A Post-Printz World, Mark V. Tushnet
Globalization And Federalism In A Post-Printz World, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This Article uses the recent Supreme Court decision in Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council as the vehicle for examining the way in which the U.S. constitutional law of federalism might be responding to globalization. Part II develops the argument that globalization as such has no strong implications for domestic constitutional law. The remainder of the Article examines the U.S. constitutional response to the aspect of globalization revealed in Crosby, and argues that the Court's decision in Crosby is in tension with its other federalism decisions. But, the Article argues, that tension arises not from the fact that Crosby arises …
Hanging With The Wrong Crowd: Of Gangs, Terrorists, And The Right Of Association, David Cole
Hanging With The Wrong Crowd: Of Gangs, Terrorists, And The Right Of Association, David Cole
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Part I will sketch the current contours of the right of association, a right limited to "expressive" and "intimate" association, and will describe the government's attempts to extend this categorical approach by limiting associational protection still further to membership per se. Part II will argue that the Court's limitation of associational rights to expressive and intimate associations and the government's attempt to distinguish association from conduct are unworkable, inconsistent with the Court's own precedents, and fail to reflect the normative reasons for protecting the right of association. Part III will offer an alternative framework for addressing the right of association, …