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Full-Text Articles in Law

Standing For The Public: A Lost History, Elizabeth Magill Jan 2009

Standing For The Public: A Lost History, Elizabeth Magill

All Faculty Scholarship

This article recaptures a now-anachronistic approach to standing law that the Supreme Court followed in the middle decades of the 20th Century and explains how and when it died. It then speculates about why the federal courts retreated from the doctrine when they did. The now-anachronistic view of the permissible scope of standing, which is called here 'standing for the public,' permitted Congress to authorize parties who had no cognizable legal rights to challenge government action, in order to, as the Supreme Court itself said 'represent the public' and bring the government’s legal errors before the courts. Ironically, the federal …


The Missing Jurisprudence Of The Legislated Constitution, Robin West Jan 2009

The Missing Jurisprudence Of The Legislated Constitution, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Does the fourteenth Amendment and its Equal Protection Clause — the promise that "no state shall deny equal protection of the laws" — have any relevance to the progressive project of reducing economic inequality in various spheres of life or, more modestly, of ameliorating the multiple vulnerabilities of this country's poor people? The short answer, I believe, is, it depends. It will depend, in 2020, just as it depends now, on what we mean by the Constitution we are expounding: the Constitution as read and interpreted by courts — the adjudicated Constitution — or what I propose to call the …