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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Bond Court's Institutional Truce, Monica Hakimi
The Bond Court's Institutional Truce, Monica Hakimi
Articles
As many readers are aware, Bond v. United States is a quirky case. The federal government prosecuted under the implementing legislation for the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) a betrayed wife who used chemical agents to try to harm her husband’s lover. The wife argued that, as applied to her, the implementing legislation violated the Tenth Amendment. She thus raised difficult questions about the scope of the treaty power and of Congress’s authority to implement treaties through the Necessary and Proper Clause. The Bond Court avoided those questions with a clear statement rule: “we can insist on a clear indication that …
Lost In Translation: The Accidental Origins Of Bond V. United States, Kevin L. Cope
Lost In Translation: The Accidental Origins Of Bond V. United States, Kevin L. Cope
Michigan Law Review First Impressions
One of the unusual features of cases about the constitutionality of federal statutes is that they are nearly always foreseeable. Even before the bill’s introduction in Congress, lawmakers are often aware that they are inviting a federal lawsuit. Anticipating a legal challenge, legislators and their staffs attempt to predict the courts’ views of the statute and adapt the bill accordingly. Generally speaking, the bigger the bill’s potential constitutional impact, the more foreseeable the resulting case. By this logic, jurists should have seen the constitutional issues in Bond v. United States from a mile away. In reality, they were foreseen by …