Law Commons^™

On The Place Of Judge-Made Law In A Government Of Laws, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

This essay explores a constitutional account of the elevation of the judiciary in American states following the Revolution. The core of the account is a connection between two fundamental concepts in Anglo-American constitutional thinking, discretion and a government of laws. In the periods examined here, arbitrary discretion tended to be associated with alien power and heteronomy, while bounded discretion was associated with self-rule. The formal, solemn, forensic, and public character of proceedings in courts of law suggested to some that judge-made law (a product of judicial discretion under these proceedings) did not express simply the will of the judge or …

Is The Supreme Court Disabling The Enabling Act, Or Is Shady Grove Just Another Bad Opera?, Robert J. Condlin

Faculty Scholarship

After seventy years of trying, the Supreme Court has yet to agree on whether the Rules Enabling Act articulates a one or two part standard for determining the validity of a Federal Rule. Is it enough that a Federal Rule regulates “practice and procedure,” or must it also not “abridge substantive rights”? The Enabling Act seems to require both, but the Court is not so sure, and the costs of its uncertainty are real. Among other things, litigants must guess whether the decision to apply a Federal Rule in a given case will depend upon predictable ritual, judicial power grab, …

The Judicial Role In Constraining Presidential Non-Enforcement Discretion: The Virtues Of An Apa Approach, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars, lawyers, and, indeed, the public at large increasingly worry about what purposive presidential inaction in enforcing statutory programs means for the rule of law and how such discretionary inaction can fit within a constitutional structure that compels Presidents to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Yet those who have recognized the problem have been hesitant to assign a role for the court in policing the constitutional limits they articulate, mostly because of the strain on judicial capacity that any formulation of Take Care Clause review would cause. In this Article, I argue that courts still can and …

The Bounds Of Executive Discretion In The Regulatory State, Cary Coglianese, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

What are the proper bounds of executive discretion in the regulatory state, especially over administrative decisions not to take enforcement actions? This question, which, just by asking it, would seem to cast into some doubt the seemingly absolute discretion the executive branch has until now been thought to possess, has become the focal point of the latest debate to emerge over the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers. That ever‐growing, heated debate is what motivated more than two dozen distinguished scholars to gather for a two‐day conference held late last year at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a conference organized …

Executive Opportunism, Presidential Signing Statements, And The Separation Of Powers, Daniel B. Rodriguez, Edward H. Stiglitz, Barry R. Weingast

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Executive discretion over policy outcomes is an inevitable feature of our political system. However, in recent years, the President has sought to expand his discretion through a variety of controversial and legally questionable tactics. Through a series of simple separation of powers models, we study one such tactic, employed by both Democratic and Republican presidents: the use of signing statements, which purport to have status in the interpretation of statutory meaning. Our models also show that signing statements upset the constitutional vision of lawmaking and, in a wide range of cases, exacerbate legislative gridlock. We argue that courts should not …

Standing For (And Up To) Separation Of Powers, Kent H. Barnett

Scholarly Works

The U.S. Constitution requires federal agencies to comply with separation-of-powers (or structural) safeguards, such as by obtaining valid appointments, exercising certain limited powers, and being sufficiently subject to the President’s control. Who can best protect these safeguards? A growing number of scholars call for allowing only the political branches — Congress and the President — to defend them. These scholars would limit or end judicial review because private judicial challenges are aberrant to justiciability doctrine and lead courts to meddle in minor matters that rarely effect regulatory outcomes.

This Article defends the right of private parties to assert justiciable structural …

Bills Of Attainder, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

What are bills of attainder? The traditional view is that bills of attainder are legislation that punishes an individual without judicial process. The Bill of Attainder Clause in Article I, Section 9 prohibits the Congress from passing such bills. But what about the President? The traditional view would seem to rule out application of the Clause to the President (acting without Congress) and to executive agencies, since neither passes bills.

This Article aims to bring historical evidence to bear on the question of the scope of the Bill of Attainder Clause. The argument of the Article is that bills of …

Does A House Of Congress Have Standing Over Appropriations?: The House Of Representatives Challenges The Affordable Care Act, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In U.S. House of Representatives v. Sylvia Matthews Burwell, the District Court for D.C. in 2015 held that the House of Representatives has Article III standing to challenge certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act as violations of the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause. The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on legislative standing is complicated. The Court has generally avoided the contentious question of whether Congress has standing to challenge certain presidential actions because of the difficult separation-of-powers concerns in such cases. In Raines v. Byrd, the Court held that individual members of Congress generally do not have Article III standing by simply holding …

Disciplinary Regulation Of Prosecutors As A Remedy For Abuses Of Prosecutorial Discretion: A Descriptive And Normative Analysis, Samuel J. Levine, Bruce A. Green

Scholarly Works

Although courts have traditionally relied primarily on prosecutors’ individual self-restraint and institutional self-regulation to curb prosecutors’ excesses and redress their wrongdoing, aspects of prosecutors’ conduct can be regulated externally as well. One potential source of external regulation is professional discipline. As lawyers, prosecutors are regulated by state courts, which oversee processes for disciplining lawyers who engage in misconduct. In responding to prosecutors’ wrongdoing, courts generally express a preference for professional discipline over civil liability, which is limited by principles of absolute and qualified immunity. Likewise, courts favor professional discipline over adjudicatory remedies such as reversal of criminal convictions or suppression …

Practice And Precedent In Historical Gloss Games, Joseph Blocher, Margaret H. Lemos

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Clean Power Plan, The Supreme Court’S Stay, And Irreparable Harm, Erin Ryan

Scholarly Publications

Invited by the American Constitution Society, this very short essay critiques the decision by the Supreme Court to stay implementation of the Clean Power Plan (CPP), the cornerstone of the Obama Administration’s climate policy, while twenty-nine states proceed with litigation against it. The CPP targets greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, which account for about a third of all U.S. carbon emissions. It provides for substantial flexibility in how reduction targets may be attained within states, but generators heavily invested in coal argue that implementation will require unfair and expensive changes. It therefore surprised no one that states closely aligned …

Politics And Agencies In The Administrative State: The U.S. Case, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

The pending American presidential election, culminating a period of extreme political partisanship in our national government generally, gives point to an essay on politics and agencies in the American regulatory state. In our two-party system, it has often been the case in recent times, including the last six years, that the President comes from one of our two major political parties and one or both houses of Congress are controlled by the other. All American agencies (including, in the American case, the so-called independent regulatory bodies) are associated with the President in the executive branch, yet dependent on the Senate …

The New Elections Clause, Michael T. Morley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Does The Death Penalty Require Death Row? The Harm Of Legislative Silence, Marah S. Mcleod

Journal Articles

This Article addresses the substantive question, "Does the death penalty require death row?" and the procedural question, "Who should decide? In most capital punishment states, prisoners sentenced to death are held, because of their sentences alone, in far harsher conditions of confinement than other prisoners. Often, this means solitary confinement for the years and even decades until their executions. Despite a growing amount of media attention to the use of solitary confinement, most scholars and courts have continued to assume that the isolation of death-sentenced prisoners on death row is an inevitable administrative aspect of capital punishment. To the extent …

Separations Of Wealth: Inequality And The Erosion Of Checks And Balances, Kate Andrias

Articles

American government is dysfunctional: Gridlock, filibusters, and expanding presidential power, everyone seems to agree, threaten our basic system of constitutional governance. Who, or what, is to blame? In the standard account, the fault lies with the increasing polarization of our political parties. That standard story, however, ignores an important culprit: Concentrated wealth and its organization to achieve political ends. The only way to understand our current constitutional predicament—and to rectify it—is to pay more attention to the role that organized wealth plays in our system of checks and balances. This Article shows that the increasing concentration of wealth and political …

Making Sense Of Legislative Standing, Matthew I. Hall

Scholarly Works

Legislative standing doctrine is neglected and under-theorized. There has always been a wide range of opinions on the Supreme Court about the proper contours of legislative standing doctrine and even about whether the Court should adjudicate disputes between the other two branches at all. Perhaps owing to these disagreements, the full Court has never articulated a clear vision of the doctrine. While the Court has managed to resolve some cases, it has not achieved the consensus necessary to provide a comprehensive and coherent account of critical doctrinal issues such as what type of injury can give rise to legislative standing …

Plenary Power, Political Questions, And Sovereignty In Indian Affairs, Michalyn Steele

Faculty Scholarship

A generation of Indian law scholars has roundly, and rightly, criticized the Supreme Court’s invocation of the political question doctrine to deprive tribes of meaningful judicial review when Congress has acted to the detriment of tribes. Similarly, many Indian law scholars view the plenary power doctrine — that Congress has expansive, virtually unlimited authority to regulate tribes — as a tool that fosters and formalizes the legal oppression of Indian people by an unchecked Federal government. The way courts have applied these doctrines in tandem has frequently left tribes without meaningful judicial recourse against breaches of the federal trust responsibility …

The President's Faithful Execution Duty, Harold H. Bruff

Publications

No abstract provided.

How Presidents Interpret The Constitution, Harold H. Bruff

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Challenges Of Fitting Principled Modern Government – A Unified Public Law – To An Eighteenth Century Constitution, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

The papers presented at a fall 2016 conference at Cambridge University, The Unity of Public Law?, generally addressed issues of judicial review in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, often from a comparative perspective and the view that unifying impulses in “public law” arose from the common law. Accepting what Justice Harlan Fisk Stone once characterized as the ideal of “a unified system of judge-made and statute law woven into a seamless whole by [judges],” The Common Law in the United States, 50 Harvard L Rev 4 (1936), this paper considers a variety of issues that have complicated maintaining …

Executive Federalism Comes To America, Jessica Bulman-Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

This Article proposes a different way of thinking about contemporary American governance, looking to an established foreign practice. Executive federalism – “processes of intergovernmental negotiation that are dominated by the executives of the different governments within the federal system” – is pervasive in parliamentary federations, such as Canada, Australia, and the European Union. Given the American separation of powers arrangement, executive federalism has been thought absent, even “impossible,” in the United States. But the partisan dynamics that have gridlocked Congress and empowered both federal and state executives have generated a distinctive American variant.

Viewing American law and politics through the …

Constitutional Bad Faith, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

The concepts of good faith and bad faith play a central role in many areas of private law and international law. Typically associated with honesty, loyalty, and fair dealing, good faith is said to supply the fundamental principle of every legal system, if not the foundation of all law. With limited exceptions, however, good faith and bad faith go unmentioned in constitutional cases brought by or against government institutions. This doctrinal deficit is especially striking given that the U.S. Constitution twice refers to faithfulness and that insinuations of bad faith pervade constitutional discourse.

This Article investigates these points and their …

Confronting Power In Public Law, Kate Andrias

Articles

In his important and provocative Foreword, Professor Daryl Levinson criticizes American constitutional law for failing to attend sufficiently to questions of power, which he defines as “the ability to effect substantive policy outcomes by influencing what the government will or will not do.” As Levinson details, structural constitutional law has focused on how power is distributed among governmental institutions. It has not consistently or adequately considered how power is — or should be — distributed among social groups. Ultimately, Levinson suggests that the narrow focus of separation of powers law and theory on “equalizing the power of government institutions” lacks …

The Judicial Role In Constraining Presidential Nonenforcement Discretion: The Virtues Of An Apa Approach, Daniel E. Walters

All Faculty Scholarship

Scholars, lawyers, and, indeed, the public at large increasingly worry about what purposive presidential inaction in enforcing statutory programs means for the rule of law and how such discretionary inaction can fit within a constitutional structure that compels Presidents to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Yet those who have recognized the problem have been hesitant to assign a role for the court in policing the constitutional limits they articulate, mostly because of the strain on judicial capacity that any formulation of Take Care Clause review would cause. In this Article, I argue that courts still can and …

Governance Reform And The Judicial Role In Municipal Bankruptcy, Clayton P. Gillette, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent proceedings involving large municipalities such as Detroit, Stockton, and Vallejo illustrate both the utility and the limitations of using the Bankruptcy Code to adjust municipal debt. In this article, we contend that, to truly resolve the distress of a substantial city, municipal bankruptcy needs to do more than simply provide immediate debt relief. Debt adjustment alone does nothing to remedy the fragmented decision-making and incentives for expanding municipal budgets that underlie municipal distress. Unless bankruptcy also addresses governance dysfunction, the city may slide right back into financial crisis. Governance restructuring has long been an essential element of corporate bankruptcy. …

Presidential Signing Statements: A New Perspective, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers a new perspective on Presidents’ use of signing statements. Following the dichotomy reflected in the literature, I will analyze signing statements raising constitutional objections and those offering interpretive guidance for ambiguous provisions separately. With respect to constitutional interpretation of statutes by the executive branch, Presidents have long asserted the authority and obligation to consider constitutionality when executing statutes. The widespread acceptance of the President’s power to construe statutes to avoid constitutional problems and to refuse to defend the constitutionality of or to enforce statutes in appropriate cases confirms the propriety of this conclusion. If these fairly uncontroversial …