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Full-Text Articles in Law
In Defense Of Ideology: A Principled Approach To The Supreme Court Confirmation Process, Lori A. Ringhand
In Defense Of Ideology: A Principled Approach To The Supreme Court Confirmation Process, Lori A. Ringhand
Scholarly Works
In this paper, Professor Ringhand offers a principled defense of an ideological approach to the Supreme Court justice confirmation process. In constructing her argument, she does three things. First, she explores how the insights provided by recent empirical legal scholarship have created a need to re-think the role of the Supreme Court and, consequently, the process by which we select Supreme Court justices. In doing so, Professor Ringhand explains how these insights have called into question much of our conventional constitutional narrative, and how this failure of the conventional narrative has in turn undermined traditional objections to an ideologically-based confirmation …
Originalism And The Difficulties Of History In Foreign Affairs, Eugene Kontorovich
Originalism And The Difficulties Of History In Foreign Affairs, Eugene Kontorovich
Faculty Working Papers
This Article spotlights some of the idiosyncratic features of admiralty law at the time of the founding. These features pose challenges for applying the original understanding of the Constitution to contemporary questions of foreign relations. Federal admiralty courts were unusual creatures by Article III standards. They sat as international tribunals applying international and foreign law, freely hearing cases that implicated sensitive questions of foreign policy, and liberally exercising universal jurisdiction over disputes solely between foreigners. However, these powers did not arise out of the basic features of Article III, but rather from a felt need to opt into the preexisting …
Judicial Activism And Fourteenth Amendment Privacy Claims: The Allure Of Originalism And The Unappreciated Promise Of Constrained Nonoriginalism, Daniel O. Conkle
Judicial Activism And Fourteenth Amendment Privacy Claims: The Allure Of Originalism And The Unappreciated Promise Of Constrained Nonoriginalism, Daniel O. Conkle
Articles by Maurer Faculty
Among other meanings, "judicial activism" can be defined as judicial decisionmaking that frustrates majoritarian self-government and that is unconstrained by law. So understood, judicial activism is presumptively problematic, because it frustrates customary democratic and judicial norms.
In this essay, I address originalist and nonoriginalist responses to the presumptive problem of judicial activism in the context of Fourteenth Amendment privacy claims, including claims relating to abortion, sexual conduct, and same-sex marriage. I argue that originalism is an overrated solution, largely because current understandings of originalism, despite claims to the contrary, do not provide standards of decision that are sufficiently clear to …