Law Commons^™

Unraveling Judicial Restraint: Guns, Abortion, And The Faux Conservatism Of J. Harvie Wilkinson, Iii, Nelson Lund, David B. Kopel

David B Kopel

Writing in the Virginia Law Review, a distinguished federal judge maintains that true conservatives are required to substitute principles of judicial restraint for an inquiry into the original meaning of the Constitution. Accordingly, argues J. Harvie Wilkinson, III, the Supreme Court's Second Amendment decision in District of Columbia v. Heller is an activist decision just like Roe v. Wade: "[B]oth cases found judicially enforceable substantive rights only ambiguously rooted in the Constitution's text." In this response, we challenge his critique.

Part I shows that Judge Wilkinson's analogy between Roe and Heller is untenable. The right of the people to keep …

Eloquence And Reason: Creating A First Amendment Culture, Robert L. Tsai

Robert L Tsai

This book presents a general theory to explain how the words in the Constitution become culturally salient ideas, inscribed in the habits and outlooks of ordinary Americans. "Eloquence and Reason" employs the First Amendment as a case study to illustrate that liberty is achieved through the formation of a common language and a set of organizing beliefs. The book explicates the structure of First Amendment language as a distinctive discourse and illustrates how activists, lawyers, and even presidents help to sustain our First Amendment belief system. When significant changes to constitutional law occur, they are best understood as the results …

A Darwinist View Of The Living Constitution, Scott Dodson

Scott Dodson

The metaphor of a “living" Constitution imports terms from biology into law and, in the process, relies on biology for its meaning. A proper understanding of biology is therefore central to understanding living constitutionalism. Yet despite its rampant use by both opponents and proponents of living constitutionalism, and despite the current fervent debate over whether biology can be useful to the law, no one has evaluated the metaphor from a biological perspective.

This Essay begins that inquiry in an interdisciplinary study of law, science, and philology. The Essay first evaluates the metaphor as it is currently used and concludes that …

Settling The West: The Annexation Of Texas, The Louisiana Purchase, And Bush V. Gore, Mark Graber

Mark Graber

No abstract provided.

Thick And Thin: Interdisciplinary Conversations On Populism, Law, Political Science, And Constitutional Change, Mark A. Graber

Mark Graber

No abstract provided.

Bush V. Boumediene: The Court Is Back, Jay Dratler

Akron Law Faculty Publications

This short article is a follow-up to a piece I wrote two years ago on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, SSRN No. 913822. While applauding the result in Hamdan, I critiqued the Supreme Court for missing a “teachable moment” and obscuring the great issues at stake in prolixity and mind-numbing technical detail.

In this article, I applaud the Boumediene v. Bush Court not only for its result—that the Constitution’s Suspension Clause can require habeas corpus for aliens held abroad under certain circumstances—but for its reasoning and style as well. This time, the majority of five did not miss its “teachable …

Bush V. Boumediene: The Court Is Back, Jay Dratler

Jay Dratler

This short article is a follow-up to a piece I wrote two years ago on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, SSRN No. 913822. While applauding the result in Hamdan, I critiqued the Supreme Court for missing a “teachable moment” and obscuring the great issues at stake in prolixity and mind-numbing technical detail.In this article, I applaud the Boumediene v. Bush Court not only for its result—that the Constitution’s Suspension Clause can require habeas corpus for aliens held abroad under certain circumstances—but for its reasoning and style as well. This time, the majority of five did not miss its “teachable moment,” but placed …

Less Than Fundamental: The Myth Of Voter Fraudand The Coming Of The Second Great Disenfranchisement, David A. Schultz

David A Schultz

This article examines the issue of voter fraud and efforts to regulate it through new photo identification requirements. The overall thesis is that voting fraud is a pretext for a broader agenda to disenfranchise Americans and rig elections. However, the more specific focus of this article is both to examine the evidence of fraud and the litigation around voter IDs thus far, and what supporters of voting rights can learn from both as they move forward and challenge these laws in the future. The Article will argue that the evidence being offered for the photo IDs does not justify the …

Conflicts Between The Commander In Chief And Congress: Concurrent Power Over The Conduct Of War, Jules Lobel

Articles

The Bush Administration argues that the Commander in Chief has exclusive power to decide what military tactics to use to defeat a wartime enemy. The Administration's constitutional position that Congress may not permissibly interfere with these Executive Commander in Chief powers has been heavily criticized, particularly with respect to the Executive power to interrogate prisoners or engage in warrantless wiretapping on American citizens and its argument that Congress cannot limit the Iraq war. Yet, many critics concur in the Administration's starting point - that the President has exclusive authority over battlefield operations.

This article challenges that assumption. It argues that …

Sovereignty As Discourse, Robert Tsai

Robert L Tsai

This is a review of Howard Schweber's book, "The Language of Liberal Constitutionalism" (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Schweber argues that "the creation of a legitimate constitutional regime depends on a prior commitment to employ constitutional language, and that such a commitment is both the necessary and sufficient condition for constitution making." I critique the power and limits of this reformulated Lockean thesis, as well as Schweber's secondary claims that, for constitutional language to remain legitimate, it must increasingly become autonomous, specialized, and secular.