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2012

Constitution

University of Florida Levin College of Law

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law

Punishment Without Culpability, John F. Stinneford Jul 2012

Punishment Without Culpability, John F. Stinneford

UF Law Faculty Publications

For more than half a century, academic commentators have criticized the Supreme Court for failing to articulate a substantive constitutional conception of criminal law. Although the Court enforces various procedural protections that the Constitution provides for criminal defendants, it has left the question of what a crime is purely to the discretion of the legislature. This failure has permitted legislatures to evade the Constitution’s procedural protections by reclassifying crimes as civil causes of action, eliminating key elements (such as mens rea) or reclassifying them as defenses or sentencing factors, and authorizing severe punishments for crimes traditionally considered relatively minor.

The …


Nullifying The Debt Ceiling Threat Once And For All: Why The President Should Embrace The Least Unconstitutional Option, Neil H. Buchanan, Michael C. Dorf Jan 2012

Nullifying The Debt Ceiling Threat Once And For All: Why The President Should Embrace The Least Unconstitutional Option, Neil H. Buchanan, Michael C. Dorf

UF Law Faculty Publications

In August 2011, Congress and the President narrowly averted economic and political catastrophe, agreeing at the last possible moment to authorize a series of increases in the national debt ceiling. This respite, unfortunately, was merely temporary. The amounts of the increases in the debt ceiling that Congress authorized in 2011 were only sufficient to accommodate the additional borrowing that would be necessary through the end of 2012. In an economy that continued to show chronic weakness -- weakness that continues to this day -- the federal government would pre-dictably continue to collect lower-than-normal tax revenues and to make higher-than-normal expenditures, …


The Constitutional Bond In Military Professionalism: A Reply To Professor Deborah N. Pearlstein, Diane H. Mazur Jan 2012

The Constitutional Bond In Military Professionalism: A Reply To Professor Deborah N. Pearlstein, Diane H. Mazur

UF Law Faculty Publications

The Soldier, the State, and the Separation of Powers is important and very persuasive. (In this Response, I will call it Separation of Powers to distinguish it clearly from The Soldier and the State,7 the classic work on civil–military relations referenced in the title.) Professor Pearlstein asks the right questions and reaches the right conclusions—no small task when law professors have typically deferred to expertise in other fields, if not avoided the subject entirely.8 What do we mean by civilian control of the military? Where is the line between a military that offers its professional expertise to civilian decision makers …