Law Commons^™

Censorship By Proxy: The First Amendment, Internet Intermediaries, And The Problem Of The Weakest Link, Seth F. Kreimer

All Faculty Scholarship

The rise of the Internet has changed the First Amendment drama, for governments confront technical and political obstacles to sanctioning either speakers or listeners in cyberspace. Faced with these challenges, regulators have fallen back on alternatives, predicated on the fact that, in contrast to the usual free expression scenario, the Internet is not dyadic. The Internet's resistance to direct regulation of speakers and listeners rests on a complex chain of connections, and emerging regulatory mechanisms have begun to focus on the weak links in that chain. Rather than attacking speakers or listeners directly, governments have sought to enlist private actors …

The Place Of Competition In American Election Law, In The Marketplace Of Democracy, Nathaniel Persily

All Faculty Scholarship

This forthcoming book chapter defines the problem of diminished political competition, describes the relevant legal analogies concerning regulation of economic competition, and explains how the law shapes the competitive environment for elections. It also details how Supreme Court justices have sometimes tried to incorporate competitiveness concerns into their election law decisions in cases concerning ballot access, redistricting, campaign finance, party reform, and term limits. For the most part, constitutional law proves to be both a blunt and a coarse instrument for addressing excesses of partisan greed or self-interest, but justices of varying ideological leanings have invoked such concerns (usually in …

Gay Marriage, Public Opinion And The Courts, Nathaniel Persily

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines trends in public opinion and media coverage on gay marriage to evaluate the claim that the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s decision in Goodridge v. Department of Health catalyzed an anti-gay “backlash.” We find that in the immediate aftermath of Lawrence a larger share of the American public expressed hostile attitudes on questions tapping opinions on gay sex and gay marriage. That backlash continued through the two Goodridge decisions and the 2004 election, but appears to have leveled off and even returned to pre-Lawrence levels by the summer of …

Forget The Fundamentals: Fixing Substantive Due Process, Kermit Roosevelt Iii

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Masthead

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law

No abstract provided.

Masthead

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law

No abstract provided.

Deriving Support From International Law For The Right To Counsel In Civil Cases, Sarah Paoletti

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Uselessness Of Public Use, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court decision of Kelo v. City of New London has been denounced by legal scholars from the entire political spectrum and given rise to numerous legislative proposals to reverse Kelo's deferential interpretation of the Public Use Clause of the Fifth Amendment, and instead, limit the use of eminent domain when taken property is transferred to private hands. In this Essay we argue that the criticisms of Kelo are ill-conceived and misguided. They are based on a narrow analysis of eminent domain that fails to take into account the full panoply of government powers with respect to property. Given …

Popular Constitutionalism And The Rule Of Recognition: Whose Practices Ground U.S. Law?, Matthew D. Adler

All Faculty Scholarship

The law within each legal system is a function of the practices of some social group. In short, law is a kind of socially grounded norm. H.L.A Hart famously developed this view in his book, The Concept of Law, by arguing that law derives from a social rule, the so-called “rule of recognition.” But the proposition that social facts play a foundational role in producing law is a point of consensus for all modern jurisprudents in the Anglo-American tradition: not just Hart and his followers in the positivist school, most prominently Joseph Raz and Jules Coleman, but also the anti-positivist …

Constitutional Decision Rules For Juries, Catherine T. Struve

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent scholarship on constitutional decision rules distinguishes courts from other constitutional decision makers, but has not explored distinctions - within the judicial institution - between judges and juries. Correlatively, social science literature on jury comprehension has proposed methods for improving jury instructions, but that literature has not considered in any detail the doctrinal complexities of constitutional law. This Article, drawing upon both fields, presents an agenda for crafting constitutional decision rules specifically for juries. Implementing this agenda will enhance the adjudication of constitutional tort claims, and could also render constitutional doctrine more accessible to non-lawyers.

Preemption In The Rehnquist Court: A Preliminary Empirical Assessment, Michael S. Greve, Jonathan Klick

All Faculty Scholarship

The federal preemption of state law has emerged as a prominent field of study for legal scholars and political scientists. This rise to prominence of a technical and often dull field of jurisprudence is due to a number of developments-increasingly frequent federal statutory preemptions; the states' unprecedented aggressiveness in regulating business transactions, the expansion of corporate liability under state common law and the increased resort of corporate defendants to federal preemption defenses; and, not least, the Rehnquist Court's discovery of federalism and states' rights.

Unfortunately, the preemption debate has been marred by misperceptions and a lack of reliable data. Extravagant …

Alternative Career Resolution Ii: Changing The Tenure Of Supreme Court Justices, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Fidelity, The Rule Of Recognition, And The Communitarian Turn In Contemporary Positivism, Matthew D. Adler

All Faculty Scholarship

Contemporary positivism has taken a communitarian turn. Hart, in the Postscript to the Concept of Law, clarifies that the rule of recognition is a special sort of social practice: a convention. It is not clear whether Hart, here, means “convention” in the strict sense elaborated by David Lewis, or in some weaker sense. A number of contemporary positivists, including Jules Coleman (at one point), Andrei Marmor, and Gerald Postema, have argued that the rule of recognition is something like a Lewis-convention. Others have suggested that the rule of recognition is conventional in a weaker sense -- specifically, by figuring in …

Aspiration And Underenforcement, Kermit Roosevelt Iii

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Preempting The People: The Judicial Role In Regulatory Concurrency And Its Implications For Popular Lawmaking, Theodore Ruger

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Strange Career Of Jane Crow: Sex Segregation And The Transformation Of Anti-Discrimination Discourse, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the causes and consequences of a transformation in anti-discrimination discourse between 1970 and 1977 that shapes our constitutional landscape to this day. Fears of cross-racial intimacy leading to interracial marriage galvanized many white Southerners to oppose school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, some commentators, politicians, and ordinary citizens proposed a solution: segregate the newly integrated schools by sex. When court-ordered desegregation became a reality in the late 1960s, a smattering of southern school districts implemented sex separation plans. As late as 1969, no one saw sex-segregated schools …

Aspirational Rights And The Two-Output Thesis, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.