Law Commons^™

Social Media Accountability For Terrorist Propaganda, Alexander Tsesis

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Terrorist organizations have found social media websites to be invaluable for disseminating ideology, recruiting terrorists, and planning operations. National and international leaders have repeatedly pointed out the dangers terrorists pose to ordinary people and state institutions. In the United States, the federal Communications Decency Act's § 230 provides social networking websites with immunity against civil law suits. Litigants have therefore been unsuccessful in obtaining redress against internet companies who host or disseminate third-party terrorist content. This Article demonstrates that § 230 does not bar private parties from recovery if they can prove that a social media company had received complaints …

Interest And Irritation: Brown V. Maryland And The Making Of A National Economy, Henry P. Callegary

Legal History Publications

This paper examines the United States Supreme Court case Brown v. Maryland, 25 U.S. (12 Wheat.) 419 (1827), which struck down Maryland’s licensing fee on wholesalers of imported goods. In doing so, the Court reaffirmed its commitment to a national economic policy, instead of a state-centric system. This paper explores the context of the decision, including profiles of the parties involved, the attorneys for both sides, the lower court decisions, and the majority opinion and dissent from the United States Supreme Court. Additionally, this paper follows the lineage of the case through to the present day, examining its doctrinal impact …

Our Prescriptive Judicial Power: Constitutive And Entrenchment Effects Of Historical Practice In Federal Courts Law, Ernest A. Young

William & Mary Law Review

Scholars examining the use of historical practice in constitutional adjudication have focused on a few high-profile separation of powers disputes, such as the recent decisions in NLRB v. Noel Canning and Zivotofsky v. Kerry. This Article argues that “big cases make bad theory”—that the focus on high-profile cases of this type distorts our understanding of how historical practice figures into constitutional adjudication more generally. I shift focus here to the more prosaic terrain of federal courts law, where practice plays a pervasive role. That shift reveals two important insights: First, while historical practice plays an important constitutive role structuring and …

Good Ole Rocky Top: Rocky Top Tennessee, Brian Krumm

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Intrastate Federalism, Rick Su

Journal Articles

In debates about the role of federalism in America, much turns on the differences between states. But what about divisions within states? The site of political conflict in America is shifting: battles once marked by interstate conflict at the national level are increasingly reflected in intrastate clashes at the local. This shift has not undermined the role of federalism in American politics, as many predicted. Rather, federalism's role has evolved to encompass the growing divide within states and between localities. In other words, federalism disputes — formally structured as between the federal government and the states — are increasingly being …

Exploiting Ambiguity In The Supreme Court: Cutting Through The Fifth Amendment With Transferable Development Rights, Trevor D. Vincent

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Senate Has No Constitutional Obligation To Consider Nominees, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

[After Justice Antonin Scalia's death in 2016 and i]n response to the Senate Republican leadership's stated intention to refuse to consider any nominee to replace Justice Scalia, some began to argue that the Senate has a constitutional obligation to act on a Supreme Court nomination.

The argument that the Senate has a constitutional obligation to act on a Supreme Court nomination is anything but "clear." This claim finds no support in the relevant constitutional text, constitutional structure, or the history of judicial nominations. While there are strong policy and prudential arguments that the Senate should promptly consider any and all …

Tiers Of Scrutiny In A Hierarchical Judiciary, Tara Leigh Grove

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review Of Constitutional Personae, Michael N. Umberger

Library Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Implementing Enumeration, Andrew Coan

William & Mary Law Review

The enumeration of legislative powers in Article I of the U.S. Constitution implies that those powers must have limits. This familiar “enumeration principle” has deep roots in American constitutional history and has played a central role in recent federalism decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. Courts and commentators, however, have seldom rigorously considered what follows from embracing it. The answer is by no means straightforward. The enumeration principle tells us that federal power must be subject to some limit, but it does not tell us what that limit should be. Nor does it tell us how the Constitution’s commitment to …

A Problem Of Standards?: Another Perspective On Secret Law, Jonathan Hafetz

William & Mary Law Review

This Article provides a new perspective on the growth of secret law in the United States. It is widely assumed that the U.S. government’s exercise of national security powers suffers from excessive secrecy. Although secrecy presents significant challenges, it does not alone explain the lack of clarity surrounding the government’s legal justifications for using military force, conducting surveillance, or exercising other national security powers. The Article argues that what is often labeled “secret law” may also be understood as a consequence of how legal standards are used in this context.

The Article draws on the larger rules versus standards literature …

Premodern Constitutionalism, Martin H. Redish, Matthew Heins

William & Mary Law Review

The traditional concept of American constitutionalism has long been a basic assumption not subject to tremendous examination. For generations, scholars have understood our Constitution to be the byproduct of a revolutionary war fought for representation and a foundinggeneration concernedwith preventingtyranny in any form. The traditional understandingof American constitutionalism thus consists of two elements: the underlyingprinciple of skeptical optimism, which can be found in the historical context within which the Framers gathered to draft the Constitution, and the political apparatus effectuating that idea— countermajoritarian constraint set against majoritarian power— which reveals itself through reverse engineeringfrom the structural Constitution.

Over the last …

End To End Encryption, The Wrong End, Amitai Etzioni

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Stanley V. Illinois’S Untold Story, Josh Gupta-Kagan

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

Stanley v. Illinois is one of the Supreme Court’s more curious landmark cases. The holding is well known: the Due Process Clause both prohibits states from removing children from the care of unwed fathers simply because they are not married and requires states to provide all parents with a hearing on their fitness. By recognizing strong due process protections for parents’ rights, Stanley reaffirmed Lochner-era cases that had been in doubt and formed the foundation of modern constitutional family law. But Peter Stanley never raised due process arguments, so it has long been unclear how the Court reached this decision. …

Attorney’S Fees, Nominal Damages, And Section 1983 Litigation, Thomas A. Eaton, Michael L. Wells

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

Can plaintiffs recover attorney’s fees under 42 U.S.C. § 1988 when they establish constitutional violations but recover only nominal damages or low compensatory damages? Some federal appellate courts have concluded that no fee, or a severely reduced fee, should be awarded in such circumstances. This position, which we call the “low award, low fee” approach, rests primarily on the Supreme Court’s 1992 opinion in Farrar v. Hobby.

We argue that a “low award, low fee” approach is misguided for two main reasons. First, the majority opinion in Farrar is fragmented, and the factual record is opaque regarding what and how …

The Administrative Constitution In Exile, Mila Sohoni

William & Mary Law Review

For decades, the aspiration of administrative law has been to develop legal structures that would constrain and legitimate the exercise of agency power. The fruition of that hope was the complex internal blueprint that has made modern administrative governance both successful and legitimate the framework for executive action that many have hailed as the administrative constitution. Today, however, novel exercises of administrative power are crowding out old and familiar varieties, making the conventional forms of administrative action less and less relevant to the conduct of government.

This Article examines how the administrative constitution has changed over time and how that …

The First Amendment And The World, Timothy Zick

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

City Of Fernley V. State, Dep’T Of Tax, 132 Nev. Adv. Op. 4 (January 14, 2016), Daniel Ormsby

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court determined that the Local Government Tax Distribution Account under NRS § 330.660 was general legislation, survived rational basis scrutiny, and therefore was not unconstitutional under Article 4, Sections 20 and 21 of the Nevada Constitution.

The Constitutional Nature Of The United States Tax Court, Brant J. Hellwig

Scholarly Articles

Is the United States Tax Court part of the Executive Branch of government? One would expect that question would be capable of being definitively answered without considerable difficulty. And as recently expressed by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, that indeed is the case. In the course of addressing a challenge to the President's ability to remove a judge of the Tax Court for cause on separation of powers grounds, the D.C. Circuit rejected the premise that the removal power implicates two branches of government: "the Tax Court exercises Executive authority as part of the Executive …

Good Ole Rocky Top: Rocky Top Tennessee, Brian Krumm, Liz Natal

College of Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Power To Tax, Erik M. Jensen

Faculty Publications

The Power to Tax, chapter 1 in The Powers of the U.S. Congress: Where Constitutional Authority Begins and Ends, Brien Hallett, editor: Copyright © 2016 by ABC-CLIO LLC

This is a chapter in a book intended largely for an undergraduate audience. The chapter outlines the key terms necessary for understanding the congressional power to tax under the U.S. Constitution; the history and development of our understanding of that power; and the limitations (or possible limitations) on the power.

Tears In Heaven: Religiously And Culturally Sensitive Laws For Preventing The Next Pandemic, Eloisa Rodriguez-Dod, Aileen M. Marty, Elena Marty-Nelson

Faculty Publications

In February 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a “public health emergency of international concern” due to the increased clusters of microcephaly, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, and other neurological disorders in areas affected by the Zika virus. That declaration came in the wake of the West Africa Ebola crisis. Back to back declarations by WHO of the highest threat level for an international public health emergency underscores how quickly pathogens can now spread and cause devastation across borders. It also highlights the need to implement lessons learned from each pandemic crisis without delay. These crises demonstrate that laws to curtail the …

Is The Uniform Faithful Presidential Electors Act Constitutional?, Robert J. Delahunty

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

My topic is both timely and perennial: The Electoral College. More specifically, I will first discuss the constitutional problem known as the “Faithless Elector” and, then, I will attempt to solve such problem. My proposed solution is the Uniform Faithful Presidential Electors Act (UFPEA), a statute that several states have adopted.

Expanding The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Schools (K-12) And The Regulation Of Cyberbullying, Philip Lee

Journal Articles

Cyberbullying has received increasing societal attention in the aftermath of the tragic suicides of some of its youngest and most vulnerable victims — 15-year-old Phoebe Prince from Massachusetts, 13-year-old Ryan Halligan from Vermont, 12-year-old Sarah Lynn Butler from Arkansas, 15-year-old Grace McComas from Maryland, and 12-year-old Rebecca Ann Sedwick from Florida.

In this Article, I hope to provide states and their schools better guidance on how to effectively regulate cyberbullying that originates off campus. Specifically, I aim to make four unique contributions to the conversation.

First and foremost, I argue that cyberbullying is so harmful in and of itself that …

Raisins And Resilience: Elaborating Home's Compensation Analysis With An Eye To Coastal Climate Change Adaptation, Joshua Ulan Galperin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The State of New Jersey, the Borough of Harvey Cedars, and the United States Army Corps of Engineers were all preparing for an event like Hurricane Sandy years before the 2012 super-storm made landfall along the Mid-Atlantic coast. The governments began, for instance, a major dune restoration project in 2005 in order to protect the New Jersey coast from massive storm surges that could destroy homes and businesses. To carry out the effort, the local governments sought to purchase the right to build along the seaward portion of property owners' land, and would then construct roughly twenty-foot-high, thirty-foot-wide dunes. If …

The Road To Adopting And Implementing Systemic Disclosure Changes In The Dallas County District Attorney’S Office, Susan Hawk, Patricia J. Cummings

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Discovery and Brady are currently two of the most discussed and debated topics in our criminal justice system. Americans have become more and more aware of the number of individuals convicted and incarcerated for crimes they did not commit. In 2007, in a very bold and innovative move, the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office created the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) to reexamine questionable convictions to determine if a particular defendant was in fact guilty.

Expanding Standing To Develop Democracy: Third Party Public Interest Standing As A Tool For Emerging Democracies, Aparna Polavarapu

Faculty Publications

Standing doctrine can play an outsized role in marginalized groups' ability to protect their constitutional rights. The cultural and political dynamics in developing countries routinely undermine the proper functions of the democratic system and make it unlikely that those parties most directly deprived of their rights will be heard by elected legislatures or be able to directly access courts. The vindication of their rights and the rule of law itself depend on the ability of others to litigate on their behalf. Thus, this article argues for the expansion of standing doctrine to protect the democratic ideal in emerging democracies. Using …

The Inequality Of America's Death Penalty: A Crossroads For Capital Punishment At The Intersection Of The Eighth And Fourteenth Amendments, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

We live in a divided society, from gated communities to cell blocks congested with disproportionate numbers of young African-American men. There are rich and poor, privileged and homeless, Democrats and Republicans, wealthy zip codes and stubbornly impoverished ones. There are committed "Black Lives Matter" protesters, and there are those who—invoking "Blue Lives Matter" demonstrate in support of America‘s hardworking police officers. In her new article, "Matters of Strata: Race, Gender, and Class Structures in Capital Cases," George Washington University law professor Phyllis Goldfarb highlights the stratification of our society and offers a compelling critique of America‘s death penalty regime—one, she …

What We Know And Need To Know About Civil Gideon, Tonya L. Brito, David J. Pate Jr., Daanika Gordon, Amanda Ward

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Discretionary Dockets, Randy J. Kozel, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

Journal Articles

The Supreme Court’s workload and its method for selecting cases have drawn increasing critical scrutiny. Similarly, and separately, recent commentary has focused on the disparate approaches the Court has taken to resolving cases on its (historically small) docket. In this Essay we draw these two lines of inquiry together to argue that the Court’s case selection should align with its approach to constitutional adjudication. In doing so, we discuss four modes of constitutional decisionmaking and then examine the interplay between those modes, the Court’s management of its docket, and its sense of institutional role. The Court, we argue, has neither …