Law Commons^™

Care Work, Gender Equality, And Abortion: Lessons From Comparative Feminist Constitutionalism, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

Julie Suk, After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do About It (2023).

Julie Suk’s ambitious book, After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do About It, contributes to a feminist literature on equality and care spanning centuries and national boundaries, yet offers timely diagnoses and prescriptions for the United States at a very particular moment. That “moment” includes being four years into the COVID-19 pandemic and over one year into the post-Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey world wrought by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. That moment …

Eighty Years Of Federalism Forbearance: Rationing, Resignation, And The Rule Of Law, Gil Seinfeld

Reviews

Andrew Coan’s book, Rationing the Constitution, offers a novel account of the forces that drive Supreme Court decisions across a wide array of highly controversial, vitally important areas of law. The project is ambitious. It endeavors to improve our understanding of forces that constrain the form and, ultimately, the substance of our constitutional law along each of its major axes: federalism, the separation of powers, and individual rights. I think it succeeds. The book’s central claim—that familiar (but underexplored) institutional constraints and background norms sharply limit the range of choices available to the Court when it is called upon to …

Republicans And The Voting Rights Act, Michael T. Morley

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Corporate Personhood And The History Of The Rights Of Corporations: A Reflection On Adam Winkler’S Book We The Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Adam Winkler’s book We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights is an impressive work on several different levels. Because so much of the development of American constitutional law over the centuries has involved businesses, the book is a nearly comprehensive legal history of federal constitutional law. It certainly would be worthwhile reading for anyone interested in the constitutionality of economic regulation in the United States, spanning the controversies over the first and second Banks of the United States, through the Lochner era and present-day clashes over corporate campaign spending, and religiously-based exemptions to generally applicable laws such …

Review Of David Cole. Engines Of Liberty: The Power Of Citizen Activists To Make Constitutional Law., Pat Newcombe

Faculty Scholarship

In Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law, David Cole presents a fascinating perspective on constitutional law by recounting three engaging stories of enormous constitutional change and of the organizations and individuals, whose efforts achieved such change. Cole’s accounts are well supported with citations to documents and personal interviews, all written in an accessible, engaging, and clear style. The Author highly recommends this first-rate work to law, general academic, and public libraries.

Creating Precedents Through Words And Deeds, Harold Krent

All Faculty Scholarship

Book review: Untrodden ground: how presidents interpret the Constitution. By Harold H. Bruff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 557 pages. Reviewed by Harold J. Krent

Intentionalism Justice Scalia Could Love, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

There is something useful, indeed beautiful, about a work that carefully and eloquently explores a new idea or reexamines an old one. The Nature of Legislative Intent is therefore useful and beautiful, and it offers much of philosophical value for textualist and non-textualist alike. but it offers little of practical consequence and is therefore unlikely to advance the ball outside of the hall of academia, not simply because of the failure of judges to take legal scholarship seriously (which is there loss, as well as sosciety's), but because on its own terms it cannot.

Looking For Mr. (Or Ms.) Rights, Jack M. Beermann

Shorter Faculty Works

I am on the prowl. It’s 1 a.m. and I’ve been looking for Mr. (or Ms.) Rights all night. I’ve been hanging out in every Article of the Constitution of the United States and I have been deep into the pages of the United States Reports and the Federal Reporter. Oh, I have found plenty of negative rights, like the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment and the right not to be twice placed in jeopardy for the same criminal act. But I need something more positive in my life. I want those things that make a …

Constitutional Conundrums In Arbitration: Book Review Of Arbitration And The Constitution, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

The combination of arbitration and constitutional law is the topic of Professor Peter Rutledge's new book, and the focus of this review essay, which will consider, among other things, whether these two subjects are compatible.

The American Historical Review (April 2012) (Reviewing David Garland, Peculiar Institution: America’S Death Penalty In An Age Of Abolition, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Review: The Free Press Crisis Of 1800: Thomas Cooper's Trial For Seditious Libel, Eric Easton

All Faculty Scholarship

This article was an invited book review of a book of the same title by Peter Charles Hoffer. Hoffer, Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of Georgia, has published this accessible case history as part of the University Press of Kansas’s Landmark Law Cases & American Society series, which he co-edits.

The book discusses one of the cases arising as a result of the Alien & Sedition Act under the presidency of John Adams, mostly targeting Republicans who editorialized against the Adams administration.

The Foreign Affairs Power: Does The Constitution Matter?, D. A. Jeremy Telman

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Journal Articles

In volume 1, James Hitchcock provides a comprehensive historical treatment of all the U.S. Supreme Court cases involving the religion clauses. Volume 2 focuses on the broader “context of the continuing dialogue about the role of religion in public life” and its relationship to the Court’s interpretation of the religion clauses.

Review Of David E. Bernstein's "You Can't Say That!--The Growing Threat To Civil Liberties From Antidiscrimination Laws", Ivan E. Bodensteiner

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Journal Articles

Lucinda Peach addresses the issue of religious lawmaking by focusing on the constitutional implications and gender issues that she argues have been overlooked by the Supreme Court and by participants in the debate about religion in politics.

Book Review, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Journal Articles

Eric Michael Mazur’s dissertation (supervised by Phillip E. Hammond) argues that minority religious communities have had to “subordinate their distinct theological beliefs to the transcending principles of the majority articulated by the constitutional order, or they are forced to do so by the physical powers of the government” (p. xxv). To support this argument, he takes an empirical approach and focuses on the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons), and Native American religious traditions.

Mathematics And The Legal Imagination: A Response To Paul Edelman, Michael I. Meyerson

All Faculty Scholarship

This article, a response to a review by Prof. Paul Edelman of Prof. Meyerson's book "Political Numeracy: Mathematical Perspectives on Our Chaotic Constitution," explains how the study of mathematics can spur creative legal thinking.

Book Review: We The People: The Fourteenth Amendment And The Supreme Court, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

Never one to shirk a challenge, Michael Perry has taken on the difficult task of investigating whether, as charged by a number of prominent social and legal commentators, "the modern Supreme Court, in the name of the Fourteenth Amendment [to the US Constitution], [has] usurped prerogatives and made choices that properly belong to the electorally accountable representatives of the American people," and if so, to what extent (p. 8). Perry makes no attempt to address every facet of Fourteenth Amendment doctrine, but instead focuses his discussion on some of the most controversial topics: racial segregation, affirmative action, discrimination on the …

I Love You, Big Brother, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Liberalism And Abortion, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

First in a groundbreaking book, Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From Choice to Consent, published in 1996, then in various public fora, from academic conference panels to Christian radio call-in shows, and now in a major law review article entitled My Body, My Consent: Securing the Constitutional Right to Abortion Funding, Eileen McDonagh has sought to redefine drastically our understanding of the still deeply contested right to an abortion, and hence, of the nature of the constitutional protections which in her view this embattled right deserves. Her argument is complicated and subtle, but its basic thrust can be readily …

Book Review And Commentary: What Price Freedom?, Vincent A. Wellman

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

The Interactive Constitution: An Essay On Clothing Emperors And Searching For Constitutional Truth, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Progress And Constitutionalism, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

Government Lawyers And The New Deal, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

This Could Be Your Culture--Junk Speech In A Time Of Decadence, Pierre Schlag

Publications

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Fictions And Meritocratic Success Stories, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

L.H. LaRue demonstrates in his book, Constitutional Law as Fiction, that, at least in the realm of constitutional law, there is no simple correspondence between fiction and falsehood, or fact and truth. Partial or fictive accounts of our constitutional history, even when they are riddled with inaccuracies, may state deep truths about our world, and accurate recitations of historical events may be either intentionally or unintentionally misleading in the extreme. According to LaRue, the Supreme Court engages in a form of storytelling or myth-making that goes beyond the inevitably partial narratives of fact and precedent. The Supreme Court also tells …

Through The Looking Glass: What Abortion Teaches Us About American Politics, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Constitution Of Reasons, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Cass Sunstein's book, The Partial Constitution, brings together a number of his constitutional law essays from the last ten years. During that time, Sunstein has argued, powerfully, for the unconstitutionality of regulatory constraints on access to abortion; for the constitutionality of and the need for regulation of violent pornography; for the constitutionality of limits on both campaign spending and congressional control over public broadcasting; for the deep consistency, conventional wisdom to the contrary notwithstanding, of the Court's repudiation of Lochner in 1937 with its 1974 decision in Roe v. Wade; for the view that we should accord far less deference …

Book Review, Richard B. Collins

Publications

No abstract provided.

Meeting The Enemy, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.