Law Commons^™

Drawing Lines Of Sovereignty: State Habeas Doctrine And The Substance Of States' Rights In Confederate Conscription Cases, Withrop Rutherford

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Highest Court: A Dialogue Between Justice Louis Brandeis And Justice Antonin Scalia On Stare Decisis, P. Thomas Distanislao Iii

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Anchors Aweigh: Analyzing Birthright Citizenship As Declared (Not Established) By The Fourteenth Amendment, Elizabeth Farrington

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Preventing An Air Panopticon: A Proposal For Reasonable Legal Restrictions On Aerial Surveillance, Jake Laperruque

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Soft Supremacy, Corinna Barrett Lain

Law Faculty Publications

The debate over judicial supremacy has raged for more than a decade now, yet the conception of what it is we are arguing about remains grossly oversimplified and formalistic. My aim in this symposium contribution is to push the conversation in a more realistic direction; I want those who claim that judicial supremacy is antidemocratic to take on the concept as it actually exists. The stark truth is that judicial supremacy has remarkably little of the strength and hard edges that dominate the discourse in judicial supremacy debates. It is porous, contingent- soft. And the upshot of soft supremacy is …

Natural Rights And The First Amendment, Jud Campbell

Law Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court often claims that the First Amendment reflects an original judgment about the proper scope of expressive freedom. After a century of academic debate, however, the meanings of speech and press freedoms at the Founding remain remarkably hazy. Many scholars, often pointing to Founding Era sedition prosecutions, emphasize the limited scope of these rights. Others focus on the libertarian ideas that helped shape opposition to the Sedition Act of 1798. Still more claim that speech and press freedoms lacked any commonly accepted meaning. The relationship between speech and press freedoms is contested, too. Most scholars view these freedoms …

The Highest Court: A Dialogue Between Justice Louis Brandeis And Justice Antonin Scalia On Stare Decisis, P. Thomas Distanislao, Iii

Law Student Publications

The scene is the main reading room in the Supreme Court library. It is 12:01 AM on a Thursday night, and a hapless law clerk' named Madison Nomos' is working on a draft of a dissenting opinion for his Justice. Specifically, Nomos is researching whether an earlier Supreme Court case- one with which his Justice vehemently disagrees- should play a significant role in the Court's analysis of an issue that has gripped the nation. Nomos's Justice was recently confirmed, and this will be her first opportunity to firmly state her views on stare decisis in the Supreme Court. She has …

Enduring Originalism, Kevin C. Walsh

Law Faculty Publications

If our law requires originalism in constitutional interpretation, then that would be a good reason to be an originalist. This insight animates what many have begun to call the "positive turn" in originalism. Defenses of originalism in this vein are "positive" in that they are based on the status of the Constitution, and constitutional law, as positive law. This approach shifts focus away from abstract conceptual or normative arguments about interpretation and focuses instead on how we actually understand and apply the Constitution as law. On these grounds, originalism rests on a factual claim about the content of our law: …

The Limits Of Reading Law In The Affordable Care Act Cases, Kevin C. Walsh

Law Faculty Publications

One of the most highly lauded legacies of Justice Scalia's decades-long tenure on the Supreme Court was his leadership of a movement to tether statutory interpretation more closely to statutory text. His dissents in the Affordable Care Act cases- National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius and King v. Burwell- demonstrate both the nature and the limits of his success in that effort.

These were two legal challenges, one constitutional and the other statutory, that threatened to bring down President Obama's signature legislative achievement, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Both times the Court swerved away from a direct …

Republicanism And Natural Rights At The Founding, Jud Campbell

Law Faculty Publications

Today we tend to think about natural rights as non-positivist claims to limits on governmental authority — typically claims derived from religion, morality, or logic. These “rights,” by their very definition, exist independent of governmental control. Indeed, that is what makes them “natural.” This Essay, responding to Randy Barnett's Our Republican Constitution, sketches a different view of Founding-Era natural rights, their relationship to governmental authority, and their enforceability. With the exception of certain “rights of the mind,” natural rights were not really “rights” at all, in the sense of being determinate legal privileges or immunities. Rather, embracing natural rights meant …

Judicial Review And The Enumeration Of Rights, Jud Campbell

Law Faculty Publications

When introducing the Bill of Rights in Congress, James Madison explained that judges would "consider themselves in a peculiar manner the guardians" of those enumerated rights. This famous passage, often treated as authoritative, is conventionally understood to endorse the judicial enforceability of enumerated rights and deny the judicial enforceability of unenumerated rights. Enumeration, in other words, is considered as both a necessary and a sufficient condition for the judicial enforcement of rights against contrary legislation. This Essay disputes each of these orthodox views. Instead, it argues, Madison was commenting on judicial psychology and judicial politics, not judicial duty. Enumeration, in …

Originalist Law Reform, Judicial Departmentalism, And Justice Scalia, Kevin C. Walsh

Law Faculty Publications

Drawing on examples from Justice Antonin Scalia's jurisprudence, this Essay uses the perspective of judicial departmentalism to examine the nature and limits of two partially successful originalist law reforms in recent years. It then shifts to an examination of how a faulty conception of judicial supremacy drove a few nonoriginalist changes in the law that Scalia properly dissented from. Despite the mistaken judicial supremacy motivating these decisions, a closer look reveals them to be backhanded tributes to judicial departmentalism because of the way that the Court had to change jurisdictional and remedial doctrines to accomplish its substantive-law alterations. The Essay …

The Equal Protection Component Of Legislative Generality, Evan C. Zoldan

University of Richmond Law Review

This article advances the broad project outlined above by recognizing

the equal protection component of legislative generality.

Exploring the relationship between the Equal Protection Clause

and the value of legislative generality both enhances an understanding

of the proper bounds of the Equal Protection Clause and

helps define the ultimate parameters of a value of legislative generality.

Part I of this article defines and provides paradigmatic

examples of special legislation. Part II identifies the most widely

held conceptions of equality that can be enforced through the

Equal Protection Clause and describes how special legislation offends

these conceptions. Part III describes how …

Indecency Four Years After Fox Television Stations: From Big Papi To A Porn Star, An Egregious Mess At The Fcc Continues, Clay Calvert, Minch Minchin, Keran Billaud, Kevin Bruckenstein, Tershone Phillips

University of Richmond Law Review

Using the WDBJ case as an analytical springboard, this article examines the tumultuous state of the FCC's indecency enforcement regime more than three years after the Supreme Court's June 2012 opinion in Fox Television Stations. Part I of this article briefly explores the missed First Amendment opportunities in Fox Television Stations, as well as some possible reasons why the Supreme Court chose to avoid the free-speech questions in that case." Part II addresses the FCC's decision in September 2012 to target only egregious instances of broadcast indecency and, in the process, to jettison hundreds of thousands of complaints that had …

Judicial Departmentalism: An Introduction, Kevin C. Walsh

Law Faculty Publications

This Article introduces the idea of judicial departmentalism and argues for its superiority to judicial supremacy. Judicial supremacy is the idea that the Constitution means for everybody what the Supreme Court says it means in deciding a case. Judicial departmentalism, by contrast, is the idea that the Constitution means in the judicial department what the Supreme Court says it means in deciding a case. Within the judicial department, the law of judgments, the law of remedies, and the law of precedent combine to enable resolutions by the judicial department to achieve certain kinds of settlements. Judicial departmentalism holds that these …

The 2016 Amendments To Criminal Rule 41: National Search Warrants To Seize Cyberspace, “Particularly” Speaking, Devin M. Adams

Law Student Publications

George Orwell's dystopia, with the ever-watchful Big Brother, has seemingly become a reality with the recently passed amendments to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Rule 41, governing searches and seizures, now permits magistrate judges to authorize agents- under a single warrant- to "remotely access," and simultaneously search, copy and seize information from an infinite number of unknown electronic devices in multiple districts anywhere in the country. The unlimited jurisdiction provision is triggered when a device's location is obscured through "technological means," or if agents are investigating computer crimes in five or more districts- regardless of whether …

Digital Technology And Analog Law: Cellular Location Data, The Third-Party Doctrine, And The Law‘S Need To Evolve, Justin Hill

Law Student Publications

This comment explores how broader shifts in Fourth Amendment doctrine may affect the government's collection of Cell Site Location Information (CSLI) moving forward. It consists of three parts. Part I examines the technological underpinnings of cellular networks. The issue is frequently litigated, but few in the legal community have a real grasp on the technology. A nuanced understanding of the technology is crucial when examining the accuracy of CSLI or how the third-party doctrine ought to apply. This comment consolidates and simplifies the technical workings of cellular networks to enable better and more informed answers. Last, drawing on this understanding, …