Law Commons^™

Sacred Cows, Holy Wars: Exploring The Limits Of Law In The Regulation Of Raw Milk And Kosher Meat, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

In a free society law and religion seldom coincide comfortably, tending instead to reflect the inherent tension that often resides between the two. This is nowhere more apparent than in America, where the underlying principle upon which the first freedom enunciated by the Constitution's Bill of Rights is based ‒ the separation of church and state – is conceptually at odds with the pragmatic compromises that may be reached. But our adherence to the primacy of individual rights and civil liberties ‒ that any activity must be permitted if it is not imposed upon others without their consent, and if …

Keynote Speech: A Letter From The Original Cause Lawyer, F. Michael Higginbotham

All Faculty Scholarship

This symposium speech is a short piece which talks about why there is a need for law students to become cause lawyers, the symposium being: cause lawyers and cause lawyering in the sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education. The writer creates an allegorical scene where he's snowed in in his home during a snowstorm, lightning strikes his computer, and the computer comes to life in the form a message being typed, and "channeled" to him by Thurgood Marshall. The former Justice of the Supreme Court proceeds to state the many reasons why there is still a need for …

Federalism And Phantom Economic Rights In Nfib V. Sibelius, Matthew Lindsay

All Faculty Scholarship

Few predicted that the constitutional fate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would turn on Congress’ power to lay and collect taxes. Yet in NFIB v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court upheld the centerpiece of the Act — the minimum coverage provision (MCP), commonly known as the “individual mandate” — as a tax. The unexpected basis of the Court’s holding has deflected attention from what may prove to be the decision’s more constitutionally consequential feature: that a majority of the Court agreed that Congress lacked authority under the Commerce Clause to penalize people who decline to purchase health insurance. …

Foreword: The Death Penalty In Decline: From Colonial America To The Present, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article traces the history of capital punishment in America. It describes the death penalty's curtailment in colonial Pennsylvania by William Penn, and the substantial influence of the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria -- the first Enlightenment thinker to advocate the abolition of executions -- on the Founding Fathers' views. The Article also describes the transition away from "sanguinary" laws and punishments toward the "penitentiary system" and highlights the U.S. penal system's abandonment of non-lethal corporal punishments.

Anonymity, Faceprints, And The Constitution, Kimberly L. Wehle

All Faculty Scholarship

Part I defines anonymity and explains that respect for the capacity to remain physically and psychologically unknown to the government traces back to the Founding. With the advent and expansion of new technologies such as facial recognition technology (“FRT”), the ability to remain anonymous has eroded, leading to a litany of possible harms.

Part II reviews the existing Fourth and First Amendment doctrine that is available to stave off ubiquitous government surveillance and identifies anonymity as a constitutional value that warrants more explicit doctrinal protection. Although the Fourth Amendment has been construed to excise surveillance of public and third-party information …

Resolving The Original Sin Of Bolling V. Sharpe, Gregory Dolin

All Faculty Scholarship

On May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court handed down two decisions that for the first time categorically held that racial segregation in public schools was per se unlawful – Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe. Ostensibly, both cases dealt with a same question; however, in Brown the entity accused of discrimination was a creature of the State of Kansas, while in Bolling the discrimination was practiced by the federal government. The problem that the Supreme Court faced was the language of the Fourteenth Amendment, which, by its own terms, guaranteed “equal protection of the laws” only vis-à-vis …