Law Commons^™

Winston Churchill On The American Constitution, Gerard N. Magliocca

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Though best known for leading Britain during World War II, Winston Churchill was a keen observer of constitutional law. Most of his insights concerned the unwritten conventions of the British Constitution, but Churchill also commented extensively on the American Constitution. Intellectual curiosity and a desire to forge a closer alliance between Great Britain and the United States were at the root of Churchill’s interest in the institutions of what he called “The Great Republic.” As with all things Churchill, his observations on our Constitution were sometimes inspiring, sometimes illuminating, and sometimes noxious.

This Article provides the first comprehensive analysis …

Absolute Publishing Power And Bulletproof Immunity: How Section 230 Shields Internet Service Providers From Liability And Makes It Impossible To Protect Your Reputation Online, Victoria Anderson

Seattle University Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

The Meaning, History, And Importance Of The Elections Clause, Eliza Sweren-Becker, Michael Waldman

Washington Law Review

Historically, the Supreme Court has offered scant attention to or analysis of the Elections Clause, resulting in similarly limited scholarship on the Clause’s original meaning and public understanding over time. The Clause directs states to make regulations for the time, place, and manner of congressional elections, and grants Congress superseding authority to make or alter those rules.

But the 2020 elections forced the Elections Clause into the spotlight, with Republican litigants relying on the Clause to ask the Supreme Court to limit which state actors can regulate federal elections. This new focus comes on the heels of the Clause serving …

Police Or Pirates? Reforming Washington's Civil Asset Forfeiture System, Jasmin Chigbrow

Washington Law Review

Civil asset forfeiture laws permit police officers to seize property they suspect is connected to criminal activity and sell or retain the property for the police department’s use. In many states, including Washington, civil forfeiture occurs independent of any criminal case—many property owners are never charged with the offense police allege occurred. Because the government is not required to file criminal charges, property owners facing civil forfeiture lack the constitutional safeguards normally guaranteed to defendants in the criminal justice system: the right to an attorney, the presumption of innocence, the government’s burden to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, …

The Religion Of Race: The Supreme Court As Priests Of Racial Politics, Audra Savage

Utah Law Review

The tumultuous summer of 2020 opened the eyes of many Americans, leading to a general consensus on one issue—racism still exists. This Article offers a new descriptive account of America’s history that can contextualize the zeitgeist of racial politics. It argues that the Founding Fathers created a national civil religion based on racism when they compromised on the issue of slavery in the creation of the Constitution. This religion, called the Religion of Race, is built on a belief system where whiteness is sacred and Blackness is profane. The sacred text is the Constitution, and it is interpreted by the …

The Place Of The Presidency In Historical Time, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay arises from a symposium based on Jack Balkin’s book, The Cycles of Constitutional Time, which argues that America’s constitutional development is marked by patterns of decline and renewal. I contend that the presidency today has become endowed with outsized expectations borne of popular frustrations with a centuries-old document that is desperately in need of updating. As a result, Presidents enjoy imbalanced and dangerous power to initiate legal reform or stymie it. Going forward, three dynamics are worth watching. First, noisy signals coming from performative transformation can obscure the true source and scope of legal changes initiated by a …

Health And Safety Receivership: California's Cure For Zombie Foreclosures, Vacant, And Other Nuisance Properties, Ryan Griffith Esq.

Lincoln Memorial University Law Review Archive

Almost every city or county has abandoned, fire damaged, vacant or other nuisance properties. The majority these properties sit abandoned and blight communities for years with no solution in sight. However, California has solution for these longstanding nuisance properties known as Health and Safety “H & S” receiverships. The statutory authority for H &S receiverships is found at California Health and Safety Code (“HSC”) §§ 17980.6 and 17980.7. Abandoned, vacant and other nuisance properties surface in a variety of ways. However, a few of the most common occurrences are:Deceased property owners without heirs; Zombie foreclosures; Hoarders and other mental health …

The Return Of A Judicial Artifact? How The Supreme Court Could Examine The Question Of The Nondelegation Doctrine’S Place In Future Cases, Dalton Davis

Helms School of Government Undergraduate Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dissent: Not Popular Enough, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

The draft constitution does a nice job of reducing existing institutional obstacles to effective government. Yet there is one persistent manner in which the draft repeats the Framers’ error and, indeed, doubles down on it: by replicating the elitist part of the republican tradition at the expense of the plebeian one. In that sense, the proposal doesn’t do nearly enough to rebuild the frayed bonds between citizen and government. More effective policymaking is the technocrat’s solution, but multiple methods of exercising power is the populist’s response to a metastasizing sense of dislocation.

The Anti-Secular Regulation Of Religious Difference In Egypt, Meriam Wagdy Azmi

Theses and Dissertations

Egyptian religious freedom activists and researchers have for decades called for more secularism to remedy the violations facing religious minorities. Those religious minorities have been subject to attacks for practicing religious rituals and suffered from lack of recognition by the government. As those activists advocated secularism, some academics critiqued it and deemed it the instigator of the very problems it claims to uproot. Saba Mahmood famously argued that secularism is a primary producer of religious tension in Egypt. In this thesis, I argue that it is not the mere regulation of religious difference as a feature of secularism that is …

Enjoyed By White Citizens, Nancy Leong

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Whiteness is largely invisible in American law. The United States Constitution never mentions white people. Indeed, the entirety of constitutional and statutory law, at both the federal and state level, includes only two antidiscrimination statutes that refer explicitly to white people. These Reconstruction-era statutes—42 U.S.C § 1981 and § 1982—declare that all people shall have the “same right” regarding contracts and property as “enjoyed by white citizens.”

This Article argues that the unique visibility of whiteness in § 1981 and § 1982 presents an opportunity. The plain language of these statutes exposes whiteness and requires explicit analysis of the contract …

The Federalist Society And Constitutional Interpretation: Who Gets To Say What The Constitution Says, Deborah L. Toscano

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The Federalist Society was organized in 1982 by conservative law students to counteract what they perceived to be a liberal bias in law schools, the courts, and government administration. Forty years later there is an acknowledgement of a rightward turn in the Supreme Court which scholars have attributed in part to the efforts of the Federalist Society. However, there is still little understanding of just how that change came about. This dissertation takes a step toward understanding that question. Viewing the Federalist Society as the center of a network of lawyers, think tanks, and legal institutions, I examine the influence …

Jus Ad Bellum, Natural Law And The 2003 Invasion Of Iraq, Johnny Davis

Helm's School of Government Conference - 2021-2024

The legality of the invasion of Iraq is a vital question that goes to the heart of international law. The proper legal authority for military force and the overthrow of a sovereign government is the single most important area of international law.[1] This paper will consider whether the invasion of Iraq complied with the original intent of the Founding Fathers for the Constitutional authority to wage war and satisfied the requirements for a Just War under natural law.

Adat Institutions In Aceh Government: A Constitutional Perspective, Yunani Abiyoso, Ali Abdillah, Ryan Muthiara Wasti, Ghurnarsa Sujatnika, Mustafa Fakhri

Journal of Islamic Law Studies

The existence of adat (customary law) in Indonesia becomes a source of value for the survival of the nation. Each region in Indonesia has different adat that can be used as a reference for the form of governmental system in Indonesia. The 1945 Constitution has recognized the existence of adat government that consisting of various forms of adat that have been adopted long before the 1945 Constitution existed. The existence of adat cannot be separated from national and Islamic values. This research was conducted to find out form of adat institution in Aceh and how the integration of such adat …

First Amendment Knowledge And Competence In United States Residents, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Kimberly M. Bernstein

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Lacking adequate knowledge about one's rights could inhibit the likelihood of exercising one's rights or lead one to unwittingly violate laws that place legitimate limits on these rights. Thus, the present research examines First Amendment knowledge as well as competence to apply this knowledge in relevant circumstances. Results revealed that one-quarter of participants failed a test of objective knowledge on First Amendment rights. Furthermore, participants' belief in their ability varied depending on their level of knowledge, in line with the Dunning–Kruger effect. Participants also failed to transfer their limited objective knowledge to “real-world” situations, exhibiting impaired First Amendment competence. These …

New England State Senates: Case Studies For Revisiting The Indirect Election Of Legislators, Tyler Quinn Yeargain

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

No abstract provided.

Suspect Spheres, Not Enumerated Powers: A Guide For Leaving The Lamppost, Richard Primus, Roderick M. Hills Jr.

Michigan Law Review

Despite longstanding orthodoxy, the Constitution’s enumeration of congressional powers does virtually nothing to limit federal lawmaking. That’s not because of some bizarrely persistent judicial failure to read the Constitution correctly. It’s because the enumeration of congressional powers is not a well-designed technology for limiting federal legislation. Rather than trying to make the enumeration do work that it will not do, decisionmakers should find better ways of thinking about what lawmaking should be done locally rather than nationally. This Article suggests such a rubric, one that asks not whether Congress has permission to do a certain thing but whether a certain …

Texas: A Weak Governor State, Or Is It?, Ron Beal

St. Mary's Law Journal

The current Texas Constitution was adopted in 1876 and was written after the Civil War and the Reconstruction Period when Federal troops occupied the State. The general perception is that the Federal troops used the Governor, in essence, to impose a form of dictatorship over the people. It was clearly the intent of the new constitution’s framers to create a very weak governor form of government in order to spread its powers to many independently elected officials. It provided that the state officers who were appointed by the Governor and approved by the Senate were semi-independent from the Governor by …

Let’S Go To The Beach: Gender Segregation As A Tool To Accommodate Religious Minorities, Sarah Gibbons

Chicago-Kent Law Review

No abstract provided.

Two Federalist Constitutions Of Empire, Gregory Ablavsky

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Without Doors: Native Nations And The Convention, Mary Sarah Bilder

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

President Madison's Living Constitution: Fixation, Liquidation, And Constitutional Politics In The Jeffersonian Era, Saul Cornell

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Article Ix, Article Iii, And The First Congress: The Original Constitutional Plan For The Federal Courts, 1787-1792, Thomas H. Lee

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Federalist Constitution As A Project In International Law, David M. Golove, Daniel J. Hulsebosch

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Preventing A Permanent Underclass: Why In-State Tuition For Daca Students Just Makes Sense, Christian Bowcutt, Eliza Allen

Brigham Young University Prelaw Review

In the landmark 1982 Supreme Court Case "Plyler v. Doe", the right to a free education was guaranteed to undocumented students. One of the reasons for this was to "prevent a permanent underclass". Today, we have a similar opportunity to lift our fellow peers by passing legislation to guarantee in-state tuition to DACA recipients. DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is a program that grants temporary citizenship to qualifying children and youth who are brought to the United States with their parent(s) or guardian(s). Currently, the majority of states have not guaranteed this right to DACA students. With tuition rates …

Presidential Removal: The Marbury Problem And The Madison Solutions, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Foreword: The Federalist Constitution, David S. Schwartz

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

In Search Of Nationhood At The Founding, Jonathan Ginenapp

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Slavery's Constitution: Rethinking The Federal Consensus, Maeve Glass

Fordham Law Review

For at least half a century, scholars of the early American Constitution By recovering this genealogy and expanding our map of the founding, this Essay offers a more complete view of the origins of one of the oldest and most consequential rules of constitutional union. In doing so, it allows us to see the institution of racial slavery not simply as one confined to a single section of the South and upheld by its peculiar doctrine of states’ rights but as a fundamentally American institution, one upheld by a rule of federal and state inaction in the face of slavery’s …

The Unwritten Constitution For Admitting States, Roderick M. Hills Jr.

Fordham Law Review

The United States has experimented with several different constitutions for adding states. Of all of these regimes, the shortest lived was also the one selected by the Federalist drafters of the Constitution. Under this regime, Article IV, Section 3 bestowed on Congress broad power to govern new territories as colonies of the original states, allowing Congress to place any conditions that they pleased on their admissions. This regime was created by Federalists, like Gouvernour Morris, who were suspicious of Scots-Irish frontiersmen and eager to settle western territory using land companies who would insure that new settlers were deferential to Federalist …