Law Commons^™

Constitutional Clichés, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Popular discourse on constitutional interpretation and judicial review tend to employ a series of catch phrases that have become constitutional clichés. Phrases such as “judicial activism,” “judicial restraint,” “strict construction,” “not legislating from the bench,” “Framers’ intent,” the “dead hand of the past,” and “stare decisis” so dominate public commentary on the Constitution and the courts that quite often that is all one hears. Unfortunately, even law professors are not immune. There was a time when each of these catch phrases meant something and, although each could mean something again, in current debates all have become trite and largely devoid …

Underlying Principles, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In his forthcoming article, Original Meaning and Abortion, Jack Balkin makes the startling disclosure that he is now an originalist. "[C]onstitutional interpretation," he writes, "requires fidelity to the original meaning of the Constitution and to the principles that underlie the text. The task of interpretation is to look to original meaning and underlying principle and decide how best to apply them in current circumstances. I call this the method of text and principle."

In this brief reply, the author cautions that, to remain faithful to the Constitution when referring to underlying principles, we must never forget it is a text …

Taking Text Too Seriously: Modern Textualism, Original Meaning, And The Case Of Amar's Bill Of Rights, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Championed on the Supreme Court by Justices Scalia and Thomas and championed in academia most prominently by Professor Akhil Amar, textualism has in the past twenty years emerged as a leading school of constitutional interpretation. Textualists argue that the Constitution should be interpreted in accordance with its original public meaning and, in seeking that meaning, they closely parse the Constitution's words and grammar and the placement of clauses in the document. They have assumed that this close parsing recaptures original meaning, but, perhaps because it seems obviously correct, that assumption has neither been defended nor challenged. This article uses Professor …

The Supreme Court In Bondage: Constitutional Stare Decisis, Legal Formalism, And The Future Of Unenumerated Rights, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay advances a formalist conception of constitutional stare decisis. The author argues that instrumentalist accounts of precedent are inherently unsatisfying and that the Supreme Court should abandon adherence to the doctrine that it is free to overrule its own prior decisions. These moves are embedded in a larger theoretical framework--a revival of formalist ideas in legal theory that he calls "neoformalism" to distinguish his view from the so-called "formalism" caricatured by the legal realists (and from some other views that are called "formalist").

In Part II, The Critique of Unenumerated Constitutional Rights, the author sets the stage by …

Scalia's Infidelity: A Critique Of "Faint-Hearted" Originalism, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this essay, based on the 2006 William Howard Taft lecture, the author critically evaluates Justice Antonin Scalia's famous and influential 1988 Taft Lecture, entitled Originalism: The Lesser Evil. In his lecture, Justice Scalia began the now-widely-accepted shift from basing constitutional interpretation on the intent of the framers to relying instead on the original public meaning of the text. At the same time, the essay explains how Justice Scalia allows himself three ways to escape originalist results that he finds to be objectionable: (1) when the text is insufficiently rule-like, (2) when precedent has deviated from original meaning and …

Constitutional Texting, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

"Constitutional Texting" introduces an account of constitutional meaning that draws on Paul Grice's distinction between "speaker's meaning" and "sentence meaning." The constitutional equivalent of speaker's meaning is "framer's meaning," the meaning that the author of the constitutional text intended to convey in light of the author's beliefs about the reader's beliefs about the author's intentions. The constitutional equivalent of sentence meaning is "clause meaning," the meaning that an ordinary reader would attribute to the text at the time of utterance without any beliefs about particular intentions on the part of the author. Clause meaning is possible because the words and …

Eldred And Lochner: Copyright Term Extension And Intellectual Property As Constitutional Property, Paul M. Schwartz, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Since the ratification of the constitution, intellectual property law in the United States has always been, in part, constitutional law. Among the enumerated powers that Article I of the Constitution vests in Congress is the power to create certain intellectual property rights. To a remarkable extent, scholars who have examined the Constitution's Copyright Clause have reached a common position. With striking unanimity, these scholars have called for aggressive judicial review of the constitutionality of congressional legislation in this area. The champions of this position--we refer to them as the IP Restrictors--represent a remarkable array of constitutional and intellectual property scholars. …

Laughing At Treaties, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article responds to two articles by Professor John Yoo appearing in the same volume. Professor Yoo maintains that treaties, either categorically or presumptively, have the same status in the United States as in the United Kingdom, where they lack the force of domestic law, and hence are not judicially enforceable, until implemented by statute. This response argues that Yoo's thesis contradicts the text of the Constitution, which declares treaties to be the 'law of the land.' The response notes, further, that Professor Yoo's reliance on the ratification debates to read the Supremacy Clause's reference to treaties out of the …

An Originalism For Nonoriginalists, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The received wisdom among law professors is that originalism is dead, having been defeated in intellectual combat sometime in the eighties. According to this story, Edwin Meese and Robert Bork proposed that the Constitution be interpreted according to the original intentions of its framers. Their view was trounced by many academic critics, perhaps most notably by Paul Brest in his widely-cited 1980 Boston University Law Review article, The Misconceived Quest for Original Understanding, and by H. Jefferson Powell in his 1985 Harvard Law Review article, The Original Understanding of Original Intent. Taken together, these and other articles represent …

Translation Without Fidelity: A Response To Richard Epstein’S Fidelity Without Translation, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article is a response to Fidelity Without Translation by Richard Epstein (1997).

Explaining why a body of work is influential is inevitably a complex matter, but part of the success of Professor Epstein’s writings undoubtedly stems from their grounding in the original understanding of the Constitution. He has claimed the mantle of the framers, and that claim gives his reading of the takings clause a deep resonance it would not otherwise have.

Explicitly rejecting Epstein’s reading of the clause and the history that lay behind its adoption, the author has previously advanced his own view of the original understanding …

Fame, The Founding, And The Power To Declare War, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Almost without discussion, and essentially without opposition, the Framers and Ratifiers of the United States Constitution vested in Congress the "Power ... To declare War, [and] grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal." During the past fifty years, one of the fiercest controversies in constitutional law has concerned what the Founders meant by this grant. It is a debate that has had, and that continues to have, dramatic importance. When Presidents committed troops or prepared to commit troops in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, and, most recently, Bosnia, they claimed that the Constitution did not require them to seek …

The Relevance Of The Framers’ Intent, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Ever since the revival of interest in originalism that occurred in the 1980s, critics have 'charged that for a variety of reasons it is impractical, if not impossible, to determine the Framers' intentions. In addition, they argue that we today should not be bound by the intentions of a few men who lived and died over two-hundred years ago. In sum, adherence to original intent is rejected as being impractical, unjust, or both.

In this article, the author argues that we cannot assess either the practicality or the justice of discerning original intent without first asking why it is we …

The Original Understanding Of The Takings Clause And The Political Process, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The original understanding of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment was clear on two points. The clause required compensation when the federal government physically took private property, but not when government regulations limited the ways in which property could be used. In 1922, however, the Supreme Court's decision in Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon established a new takings regime. In an opinion by Justice Holmes, the Court held that compensation must be provided when government regulation "goes too far" in diminishing the value of private property. Since that decision, the Supreme Court has been unable to define clearly what kind …

The Case Of The Prisoners And The Origins Of Judicial Review, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For over one hundred years, scholars have closely studied the handful of cases in which state courts, in the years before the Federal Constitutional Convention, confronted the question whether they had the power to declare laws invalid. Interest in these early cases began in the late nineteenth century as one aspect of the larger debate about the legitimacy of judicial review, a debate triggered by the increasing frequency with which the Supreme Court and state courts were invalidating economic and social legislation. The lawyers, political scientists, and historians who initially unearthed the case law from the 1770s and 1780s used …

Taking The Framers Seriously, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article reviews Taking the Constitution Seriously by Walter Berns (1987).

This review focuses on three of the key historical points that Walter Berns makes: his arguments that the Declaration of Independence is a Lockean document; that the Constitution encapsulates the political philosophy of the Declaration; and that the framers viewed the commercialization of society as a salutary development and were unambivalent champions of the right to property. Examination of these issues suggests that the ideological universe of the framers was far more complex than Berns indicates. While the revolutionary era witnessed a new concern with individual rights and a …