Law Commons^™

A Further Comment On Robert P. George's "Natural Law", James E. Fleming

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Impenetrable Constitution And Status Quo Morality, Charles A. Kelbley

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Natural Law And The Constitution Revisited, Robert P. George

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Clinton's Legacy On Indigenous Issues, David E. Wilkins

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

The president, of course, has not express constitutional responsibility for Indian nations—that is a power reserved to the Congress under the commerce clause. Nevertheless, it is to the president, dating back to George Washington, who had an active hand in Indian affairs through the treaty process, that tribal nations and their leaders have most often looked to gauge the federal government's character and commitment to fulfill the nation's historic treaty and ongoing trust obligations to indigenous people.

Crosby As Foreign Relations Law, Edward T. Swaine

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This brief essay addresses the Supreme Court's end-of-term decision in Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council, which preempted Massachusetts's law limiting public procurement from companies doing business in Burma. The essay addresses the perception that Crosby was limited in its implications for foreign relations law, and explores the Court's minimalist approach to inescapably constitutional questions - concluding, in the end, that the Court made foreign relations law without professing to do so, and without fully appreciating its consequences or capitalizing on its benefits.

Selected Conceptions Of Federalism: The Selective Use Of History In The Supreme Court's States' Rights Opinions, Lucian E. Dervan

Law Faculty Scholarship

In the period leading to the Civil War, debate over federalism and states’ rights developed into the seeds of a war that would forever change America. Over one hundred years later, the debate over federalism continues, unanswered by the blood of more than half a million soldiers. Over the last decade, the United States Supreme Court has increased state sovereignty and state immunity to levels unseen since the pre-Civil War period. The Court’s opinions are structured in a manner that relies significantly on historical methodologies. The multiple rationales used to structure the Justices’ arguments clash, and the Justices spar with …

Everything I Need To Know About Presidents I Learned From Dr. Seuss, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Oaths are out of fashion these days. This is an era in which it is widely considered unreasonable to expect the President of the United States to obey basic principles of law and justice, much less to honor something as abstract as an oath. Perjury the violation of a legally binding oath-is publicly defended as proof of the offender's humanity rather than his criminality. And one should not even mention in polite company something as gauche as honoring an oath of marriage. Those pesky vows of marital fidelity were, after all, just words.

Introduction: Towards Understanding South African Constitutionalism, Penelope Andrews, Stephen Ellmann

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Making Sense Of The Eleventh Amendment: International Law And State Sovereignty, Thomas H. Lee

Faculty Scholarship

The Judicial Power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State. - Eleventh Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America The thesis of this article is that the Eleventh Amendment, ratified in 1798, represented the incorporation into the American domestic constitutional law of federalism (specifically, the doctrine of state sovereign immunity) the late eighteenth-century international law rule that only states have rights against other states …

Towards A Practice Of Deliberative Democracy: A Proposal For A Popular Branch , Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

Proposals for practical institutional reforms are notoriously absent from discussions about deliberative democracy. It is imperative to engage in the “nuts and bolts” debate of just what kinds of changes we discourse theorists or deliberative democrats want to effect. Here I would like to try to synthesize a reform proposal of my own based upon three major assumptions. Without argument, I assume a largely discourse-theoretic view of democracy that takes for granted the republican virtue of collective self-government as well as the Kantian claim that each citizen should be the author of his own laws. I further assume that our …

The Privatization Of The Civil Commitment Process And The State Action Doctrine: Have The Mentally Ill Been Systematically Stripped Of Their Fourteenth Amendment Rights?, William Brooks

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Why It's Smart To Think About Constitutional Stupidities, Sanford Levinson

Georgia State University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Assessing The New Judicial Minimalism, Christopher J. Peters

All Faculty Scholarship

In this article, which has been published in slightly revised form at 100 Colum. L. Rev. 1454 (2000), I critique some recently prominent arguments for "judicial minimalism" in constitutional decisionmaking. Current minimalist arguments, I contend, are primarily "policentric," that is, focused on the role the judiciary can play in bolstering the accountability and deliberativeness of the political branches. Drawing in part on a previous article, I offer an alternative approach to minimalism that is "juricentric" - focused on the inherent democratic legitimacy of the adjudicative process and the unique competence of that process to produce decisions about individual rights. I …

The Application Of Product Liability Principles To Publishers Of Violent Or Sexually Explicit Material, Richard C. Ausness

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

There have been a number of tragic incidents during the past few years in which mentally unstable teenagers have carried guns into school and shot teachers and fellow students. These schoolyard killings have generated an intense debate about the problem of violence in our society. Some social commentators have attributed teenage violence to the widespread availability of firearms, while others blame parental neglect, lack of discipline in the schools, or the declining influence of religion and morality in contemporary culture. However, another source of concern is the popular media, which stands accused of purveying sex and violence on a massive …

Access Denied: Prohibiting Home-Schooled Students From Participating In Public-School Athletics And Activities, William Grob

Georgia State University Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Review Essay: Limits Of Gaylaw, Dale Carpenter

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Part of Professor William Eskridge's mission in Gaylaw (Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet by William N. Eskridge, Jr., Harvard University Press, 1999) is to describe the historical development of the complex legal and, to some extent the cultural, landscape for gays. (pp. 17-137) Though not much of Eskridge's presentation of the history of American law's treatment of gays draws from original research, its synthesis of the available secondary sources is a useful contribution and will likely become a staple of classes treating the subject.

The larger part of Gaylaw is the book's greatest challenge and the place where …

United States Supreme Court: 2000 Term, Paul C. Giannelli

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Gravity: A Unitary Theory Of Alternative Dispute Resolution And Public Civil Justice, Richard C. Reuben

Faculty Publications

Under the traditional bipolar model, civil dispute resolution is generally divided into two spheres: trial, which is public in nature and therefore subject to constitutional due process, and alternative dispute resolution (ADR), which is private in nature and therefore not subject to such constraints. In this article, Professor Richard Reuben proposes a unitary understanding of public civil dispute resolution, one that recognizes that ADR is often energized by state action and thus is constitutionally required to comply with minimal but meaningful due process standards. Depending upon the process, such standards might include the right to an impartial forum, the right …

Alden V. Maine And State Sovereign Immunity Original Intent Or An Intent Congenial To The Court's Desires, Jeffrey H. Canja

Cleveland State Law Review

In Alden v. Maine the Supreme Court considered whether Congress, pursuant to its Article I powers, can subject a nonconsenting state to a private suit for damages in the state's own courts. Alternatively viewed, the question was whether a state has sovereign immunity which precludes such suits. The Supreme Court affirmed, holding that Article I of the Constitution does not grant Congress the power to subject a nonconsenting state to a private suit for damages in the state's own courts. The decision represents a direct extension of the federalism developed by the Court in Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, …

Business Method Patents, John J. Love

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

Good morning, it's a pleasure to be here alive. We just participated in the daily road race from Washington to Richmond that many of you do every day. The first question I've been asked to deal with is why do we have patents? Of course we're very proud of fact that the PTO's origins date back the Constitution itself. In Article I Section 8 of the Constitution, the framers specifically gave Congress the power to grant inventors, for a limited time, the exclusive right to their inventions. So this is not a product of the industrial revolution but dates back …

The Tenth Amendment Among The Shadows: On Reading The Constitution In Plato's Cave, Jay S. Bybee

Scholarly Works

In Plato's Allegory of the Cave, he describes a cavernous chamber in which men are imprisoned. Although a large fire lights the cave, the prisoners cannot see the light source. Instead, they can only make out figures that dance and parade in front of them illuminated by the fire. The prisoners cannot even see the figures directly, only their shadows. Everything that the prisoners know about reality they have learned from the distorted shapes of the shadows dancing about the cave's walls. Socrates wonders, if a prisoner were suddenly freed and could see the objects themselves and not merely their …

Common Ground: Robert Jackson, Antonin Scalia, And A Power Theory Of The First Amendment, Jay S. Bybee

Scholarly Works

There are few cases that contrast more starkly than Justice Robert Jackson's opinion for the Court in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette and Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion in Employment Division v. Smith. Although we praise Barnette for its soaring defense of the Free Speech Clause and excoriate Smith for its crabbed reading of the Free Exercise Clause, in fact, Justice Jackson and Justice Scalia are not so far apart. When we read Barnette and Smith in context, we will find that Justice Jackson and Justice Scalia treaded common ground with respect to the First Amendment. …

Ninth Amendment Adjudication: An Alternative To Substantive Due Process Analysis Of Personal Autonomy Rights, Mark C. Niles

Faculty Publications

Notwithstanding decades of significant legal scholarship focusing on the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a large portion of the practicing legal community, and even a substantial percentage of legal scholars, are unfamiliar with the provision. The primary reason for this phenomenon is the striking absence of an identifiable body of Ninth Amendment adjudication. In this Article, Mark Niles focuses on this phenomenon and endeavors to develop an interpretative theory of the amendment upon which an adjudicative role can be founded.

In Part I of this Article, Niles outlines the traditional judicial treatment of the Ninth Amendment, or more precisely, …

Toward The Restorative Constitution: A Restorative Justice Critique Of Anti-Gang Public Nuisance Injunctions, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

Gang members from elsewhere congregated on lawns, on sidewalks, and in front of apartment complexes at all hours. They displayed a casual contempt for notions of law, order, and decency -- openly drinking, smoking dope, sniffing toluene, and even snorting cocaine laid out in neat lines on the hoods of residents' cars. San Jose prosecutors responded by obtaining and enforcing a broad injunction against the gangs and their members, based on the finding that the gangs' activities constituted a public nuisance. California prosecutors have sought such anti-gang public nuisance injunctions since 1987. Their constitutionality was in doubt for ten years …

Education And The Constitution: Shaping Each Other And The Next Century, Elizabeth Reilly

Con Law Center Articles and Publications

Thinking about the interaction between the Constitution and education reveals that they are deeply interconnected, at profound levels of interdependence and complexity. Those connections are often strikingly visible, but are sometimes quite subtle.

A fundamental interdependence was formed with the decision to formulate our governmental structure as a democratic republic. The Constitution created the necessity for adequate public education to prepare the citizenry to exercise the role of self-government. An educated voting public underpins a successful democratic structure, as was explicitly recognized in Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Court acknowledged:

the importance of education to our democratic …

The Constitutional Implications Of Human Cloning, Elizabeth Price Foley

Faculty Publications

Given the theoretical inevitability of human cloning, this Article attempts to fill a current intellectual void by providing an analysis of the most significant legal implications of cloning human beings. Part II sets forth the basic science behind cloning and how cloning differs from other, non-traditional forms of procreation such as in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination. Part III discusses the most commonly feared “science fiction” abuses associated with human cloning and current laws that may prevent such abuses from occurring. Part IV discusses the possible constitutional impediments to banning human cloning, including the First Amendment, the procreational liberty interest …

Towards A More Perfect Union: Some Thoughts On Amending The Constitution, Thomas E. Baker

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

How To Apply The Religious Freedom Restoration Act To Federal Law Without Violating The Constitution, Gregory P. Magarian

Scholarship@WashULaw

Learned commentators have called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 ("RFRA" or "the Act") "perhaps the most unconstitutional statute in the history of the nation" and "the most egregious violation of the separation of powers doctrine in American constitutional history." In the 1997 case of City of Boerne v. Flores, the Supreme Court struck down the Act in its applications to state and local governments, declaring that "RFRA contradicts vital principles necessary to maintain separation of powers and the federal balance." The Act's applications to federal law, however, survived Boerne, which means that plaintiffs with religious freedom claims against …

Due Process And Fundamental Rights, Martin A. Schwartz

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Section 1983 Litigation - Supreme Court Developments, Martin A. Schwartz

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.