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Full-Text Articles in Law
Transformative Properties Of Fdr's Court-Packing Plan And The Significance Of Symbol, Laura A. Cisneros
Transformative Properties Of Fdr's Court-Packing Plan And The Significance Of Symbol, Laura A. Cisneros
Publications
In this Article, I begin by laying a basic theoretical foundation for understanding how language choice provides contextual cues to direct interpretation. Next, I analyze cases that use the "Court-Packing Plan" language. I argue that these references are intended to trigger a response in the reader that is sympathetic to judicial independence and, in some instances, to judicial incursions into policymaking. I then analyze references to the "switch in time" language, extracting the arguments about constitutional methodology and judicial activism embedded in that phrase. Here, I argue that the phrase "switch in time" is deployed to remind the reader of …
Youngston Sheet To Boumediene: A Story Of Judicial Ethos And The (Un)Fastidious Use Of Language, Laura A. Cisneros
Youngston Sheet To Boumediene: A Story Of Judicial Ethos And The (Un)Fastidious Use Of Language, Laura A. Cisneros
Publications
My goal in this Article is not to provide a comprehensive survey of the Court's separation of powers cases from 1952 to the present. Rather, I want to present a modest-sized account of this shift from humility to arrogance and to do so not by the direct method of scrupulous narration, but through a combination of stealth and selectivity, with the idea that less could be more. With this model in mind, I have focused on the language of a few representative opinions: Jackson and Frankfurters concurrences in Youngstown, Chief Justice Rehnquist's majority opinion in Dames & Moore v. Regan, …
Necessary Suffering?: Weighing Government And Prisoner Interests In Determining What Is Cruel And Unusual, Brittany Glidden
Necessary Suffering?: Weighing Government And Prisoner Interests In Determining What Is Cruel And Unusual, Brittany Glidden
Publications
Part I of this Article gives background on the origins of the Eighth Amendment doctrine concerning prison conditions and identifies persistent conflicts regarding the theoretical underpinnings for the doctrine. This history then provides context for Part II's description of the problems plaguing the current two-prong Eighth Amendment test. Part III includes a brief examination of the theoretical basis underlying other areas of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, including those challenging criminal sentences, fines, and method of execution cases. This review demonstrates that nearly all of these doctrines rely on a determination of the "excessiveness" of a given punishment, a proportionality analysis that …
Requiring The State To Justify Supermax Confinement For Mentally Ill Prisoners: A Disability Discrimination Approach, Brittany Glidden, Laura Rovner
Requiring The State To Justify Supermax Confinement For Mentally Ill Prisoners: A Disability Discrimination Approach, Brittany Glidden, Laura Rovner
Publications
The Eighth Amendment has long served as the traditional legal vehicle for challenging prison conditions, including long-term isolation or "supermax" confinement. As described by Hafemeister and George in their article, The Ninth Circle of Hell: An Eighth Amendment Analysis of Imposing Prolonged Supermax Solitary Confinement on Inmates with a Mental Illness, some prisoners with mental illness have prevailed in Eighth Amendment challenges to prolonged isolation. Yet an equal or greater number of these claims have been unsuccessful. This Essay considers why some of these cases fail, and suggests that one reason is that Eighth Amendment jurisprudence does not contain a …