Law Commons^™

Ewing V. California: Upholding California's Three Strikes Law, Robert Clinton Peck

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Congress's Power To Preempt The States, Stephen Gardbaum

Pepperdine Law Review

In this Article, part of a symposium on federal preemption of state tort law, I build upon my earlier work on the nature of preemption to try and deepen the conceptual and constitutional foundations of the subject. I argue that this neglected dimension must be moved to center stage if preemption doctrine is to have a coherent and principled framework. In particular, the key issues are the nature, source, and limits of Congress's power to preempt the states. The result is that preemption should be understood as a discretionary power of Congress the source of which lies in the Necessary …

Back To The Basics: Looking Again To State Constitutions For Guidance On Forming A More Perfect Vice Presidency, Jamin Soderstrom

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

American Influence On Israeli Law: Freedom Of Expression, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter provides a historical overview of the American influence on Israel’s jurisprudence of freedom of expression from the 1950s to the first decade of the twenty first century. The chapter uses the format of decades, presenting representative cases for each decade, to record the process by which Israeli judges incorporated and sometimes rejected themes from the U.S. jurisprudence of freedom of expression. In the course of discussing the jurisprudential themes the chapter also highlights the historical context in which the cases were decided, from the war in Korea and McCarthyism in the 1950s, to the process of globalization which …

Foreign Precedents And The Global Canon: A Preliminary Exploration, Noga Morag-Levine, Barbara Bean

Schmooze 'tickets'

No abstract provided.

Indentifying The Canon From The Anticanon, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Schmooze 'tickets'

No abstract provided.

The Constitutional Logic Of Campaign Finance Regulation, Samuel Issacharoff

Pepperdine Law Review

This essay explores the potential implications of the creation of a distinct "election period" through the BCRA reforms to campaign finance law. The idea of a separate set of rights of expression during the immediate pre-election period is a relative newcomer to American law, but is a central feature of campaign finance law in other countries. The creation of a defined election period is the underpinning of strong restrictions on political speech in countries such as Britain, and is currently the source of tension under European law. Recent decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, most notably in Bowman …

Levinson Is To Mr. Justice "Isaiah" As St. Paul Was To The Prophet Isaiah, Richard H. Weisberg

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Variable Morality Of Constitutional (And Other) Compromises: A Comment On Sanford Levinson's Compromise And Constitutionalism, Carrie Menkel-Meadow

Pepperdine Law Review

This comment to Sanford Levinson's Brandeis lecture at Pepperdine focuses on the role and types of compromises made during several stages of constitutional processes, formative and constitutive, interpretive and on-going, as negotiated by Constitutional meaning makers (drafters and Supreme Court 'deciders'), and post hoc justifications. This essay discusses recent work on compromise as institutional design, pragmatic or principled, and regime defining and sustaining. Both the pejorative (compromise is unprincipled) and more positive (compromise accounts for the 'reality' and moral existence of different sides of an issue or polity) understandings of compromise are reviewed, in light of Professor Levinson's scholarship on …

Lessons From Lincoln: A Comment On Levinson, Steven D. Smith

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Democracy, Human Dignity, And Entrenched Evil, Mark A. Graber

Pepperdine Law Review

The following essay pays tribute to Sandy Levinson's thoughts on constitutional compromises by paying tribute to the thoughts on constitutional compromises by our common mentor, Walter Murphy. Rather than directly engage in a dialogue with Compromise and Constitutionalism, the analysis below joins the preexisting dialogue between Professors Levinson and Murphy on how to construct a decent polity among people who have deep disputes over what constitutes political decency. Walter Murphy is unfortunately largely known to legal audiences only through the work of such outstanding mentees as Sandy Levinson, Jim Fleming, Christopher Eisgruber, Andrew Koppelman, Jennifer Nedelsky, and Robert George. Walter …

Compromise And Constitutionalism, Sanford Levinson

Pepperdine Law Review

Professor Levinson explores compromises (1) that went into the making of the United States Constitution, and (2) that have occurred in the Supreme Court's constitutional interpretation. He explores these compromises in light of Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit's distinction between bad compromises and rotten compromises. "Rotten compromises" are indefensible except, perhaps, in the most exceptional of conditions. A "rotten political compromise" is one that agrees "to establish or maintain an inhuman regime, a regime of cruelty and humiliation, that is, a regime that does not treat humans as humans." Under this standard, Levinson identifies as rotten compromises the Constitution's protection of …

Introduction: Blessed Are The Compromisers?, Robert F. Cochran Jr.

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

The End Of "One Hand": The Egyptian Constitutional Declaration And The Rift Between The "People" And The Supreme Council Of The Armed Forces, Kristen A. Stilt

Faculty Working Papers

By some point in the fall of 2011, Egyptians in large numbers no longer viewed the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) as the guardian of the revolution and even considered it the revolution's antagonist. "The army and the people are one" was a common slogan in the early days following Mubarak's ouster on February 11, 2011, but the situation had changed dramatically by the landmark date of October 9, when the military used violence against its own citizens, killing approximately twenty-five Christians at a protest outside Maspero, the headquarters of the Egyptian state television. Violence against protestors continued …

A Tort Statute, With Aliens And Pirates, Eugene Kontorovich

Faculty Working Papers

The pirates of the Caribbean are back. Not in another fantastical film but in the litigation over the reach of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). For the first time since they dealt with the legal issues raised by a wave of maritime predation in the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century, Supreme Court justices are seriously discussing piracy. This crime has emerged as the test case for evaluating the major controversies about the reach of the statute -- namely, extraterritorial application and the existence of corporate liability. At oral argument in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Shell, justices of all persuasions …

The Structural Constitutional Principle Of Republican Legitimacy, Mark D. Rosen

All Faculty Scholarship

Representative democracy does not spontaneously occur by citizens gathering to choose laws. Instead, republicanism takes place within an extensive legal framework that determines who gets to vote, how campaigns are conducted, what conditions must be met for representatives to make valid law, and many other things. Many of the “rules-of-the-road” that operationalize republicanism have been subject to constitutional challenges in recent decades. For example, lawsuits have been brought against “partisan gerrymandering” (which has led to most congressional districts not being party-competitive, but instead being safely Republican or Democratic) and against onerous voter identification requirements (which reduce the voting rates of …

The Constitutional Bounding Of Adjudication: A Fuller(Ian) Explanation For The Supreme Court's Mass Tort Jurisprudence, Donald G. Gifford

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, I argue that the Supreme Court is implicitly piecing together a constitutionally mandated model of bounded adjudication governing mass torts, using decisions that facially rest on disparate constitutional provisions. This model constitutionally restricts common law courts from adjudicating the rights, liabilities, and interests of persons who are neither present before the court nor capable of being defined with a reasonable degree of specificity. I find evidence for this model in the Court’s separate decisions rejecting tort-based climate change claims, global settlements of massive asbestos litigation, and punitive damages awards justified as extra-compensatory damages. These new forms of …

Constitutional Limits On The Right Of Government Investigators To Interview And Examine Alleged Victims Of Child Abuse Or Neglect, Teri Dobbins Baxter

Scholarly Works

Investigating allegations of child abuse or neglect presents unique challenges, particularly if parents or guardians are the alleged perpetrators. Those accused of harming the children are in a position to prevent the victims from getting access to the help they need to escape their abuser(s). The courts have not clearly defined the federal constitutional boundaries of searches and seizures in this context. The Supreme Court, in particular, has not weighed in on the constitutionality of warrantless searches and seizures in connection with abuse and neglect investigations. This lack of Supreme Court guidance has led to unpredictable and sometimes conflicting opinions …

El Constjtucionalismo Latinoamericano: Una Perspectiva Norteamericana In Cádiz, 1812: El Encuentro De España Y América En Sus Sueños De Libertad Y Justicia (Jurídica) (Spanish Edition), Robert S. Barker

Barker Books

"Latin American Constitutionalism: A North American Perspective" is a chapter in a Spanish edition of international and comparative constitutional law papers. Description provided by the publisher:

"Magnífica coedición de editorial Rasche y la Academia Interamericana de Derecho Internacional y Comparado, coordinada por el Presidente de esta, el Dr. Raúl Lozano. En esta cuidada obra prestigiosos juristas iberoamericanos analizan exhaustivamente la influencia que tuvo la Constitución de Cádiz de 1812 en los diversos ordenamientos constitucionales de esos territorios. Como indica el propio Dr. Lozano en la Presentación, en opinión de un importante número de destacados constitucionalistas, la Carta de Cádiz es …

Juror Privacy In The Sixth Amendment Balance, Melanie Wilson

Scholarly Works

Some eight million citizens report for jury duty every year. Arguably, jury duty is one of the most significant opportunities to participate in the democratic process. For the accused, the jury acts as an indispensable safeguard against government overreaching. One might expect, therefore, that our justice system would treat putative jurors with care and tact. The opposite is true. During voir dire, potential jurors are required to share insights into their own lives, quirks, proclivities, and beliefs. Litigants have probed jurors’ sexual orientation, criminal histories, criminal victimization, health, family relations, and beyond. A few scholars have chided the system for …

Constitutional Newspeak: Learning To Love The Affordable Care Act Decision, A. Christopher Bryant

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In his classic dystopian novel, 1984, George Orwell imagines a world in which language is regularly contorted to mean its opposite - as in the waging of war by the Ministry of Peace and infliction of torture by the Ministry of Love. A core claim of Orwell's was that such abuse of language - which in his novel he labeled "Newspeak"-would ultimately channel thought. Whatever the merits of this claim as a theory of linguistics, constitutional developments too recent to be called history demonstrate that as a practical matter Orwell was on to something. The Court's June 28 decision both …

Judge Posner’S 'Practical' Theory Of Standing: Closer To Justice Breyer’S Approach To Standing Than Justice Scalia’S, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In American Bottom Conservancy v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit questioned three different grounds articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court for the constitutional doctrine of standing in federal courts and instead argued that the “solidest grounds” for the doctrine of standing are “practical.” In part because of his self-described “pragmatic” approach to legal reasoning, Judge Posner’s maverick views may have led Republican presidents to pass him over for being nominated to the Supreme Court in favor of less brilliant but more predictable conservative judges. Judge Posner’s pragmatic or practical approach to standing …

Originalism And Loving V. Virginia, Steven G. Calabresi, Andrea Matthews

Faculty Working Papers

This article makes an originalist argument in defense of the Supreme Court's holding in Loving v. Virginia that antimiscegenation laws are unconstitutional. This article builds on past work by Professor Michael McConnell defending Brown v. Board of Education on originalist grounds and by Professor Calabresi defending strict scrutiny for gender classifications on originalist grounds. Professor Calabresi's work in this area was defended and praise recently by Slate magazine online. The article shows that Loving v. Virginia is defensible using the public meaning originalism advocated for by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. This article shows that the issue in Loving …

Discretion, Delegation, And Defining In The Constitution's Law Of Nations Clause, Eugene Kontorovich

Faculty Working Papers

Never in the nation's history has the scope and meaning of Congress's power to "Define and Punish. . . Offenses Against the Law of Nations" mattered as much. The once obscure power has in recent years been exercised in broad and controversial ways, ranging from civil human rights litigation under the Alien Tort Statue (ATS) to military commissions trials in Guantanamo Bay. Yet it has not yet been recognized that these issues both involve the Offenses Clauses, and indeed raise common constitutional questions.First, can Congress only "Define" offenses that clearly already exist in international law, or does it have discretion …

Respect And Contempt In Constitutional Law, Or, Is Jack Balkin Heartbreaking?, Andrew M. Koppelman

Faculty Working Papers

How many constitutions have we? Part of what we hope for from constitutional law is that we be united, despite our political differences, by a unifying political charter. John Rawls speaks for many when he writes that a well-ordered society "is a society all of whose members accept, and know that the others accept, the same principles (the same conception) of justice."

Jack Balkin argues that we have to give up on the Rawlsian aspiration, and learn to live in a world where, at a fundamental level, our fellow citizens are strange to us. They believe in different principles than …

Derrick Bell’S Community-Based Classroom, Joy Radice

Scholarly Works

In Derrick Bell’s Community-based Classroom, I argue that Derrick Bell enhanced his participatory pedagogical approach to teaching constitutional law by intentionally creating community within the law school classroom — a community that humanized the students’ educational experience. This essay explores three ways in which he created community: through his participatory, student-centered course structure; his social classroom environment; and his interactive self-assessments. Over the past few years, legal education has come under indictment in the media for not adequately training lawyers for practice. Bell’s community-based classroom responds to this indictment, fusing both theory and practice in teaching doctrinal constitutional law courses …

Under The Lens Of The Constitution: The Ndaa's Detainee Provisions And The Fifth Amendment's Guarantee Of Equal Protection, Stephen Consuegra

St. Thomas Law Review

The crux of this article discusses Congress's passage of the unequal detainee provisions under the NDAA and its equal protection issues under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. Part II begins with a discussion on the impetus for congressional passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force ("AUMF") and its development under the laws of war. Next, Part III analyzes United States Supreme Court precedent that previously interpreted the scope of presidential power under the AUMF and explores its implications for purposes of understanding the NDAA's detainee provisions. Part IV follows with a discussion on the NDAA's detainee provisions, …

Obamacare's (3) Day(S) In Court, Abigail Moncrieff

Faculty Scholarship

Before the oral arguments in late March, the vast majority of legal scholars felt confident that the Supreme Court of the United States would uphold the individual mandate against the constitutional challenge that twenty-six states have levied against it. Since the oral argument, that confidence has been severely shaken. This article asks why legal scholars were so confident before the argument and what has made us so concerned since the argument. The article posits that certain fundamental characteristics of health insurance - particularly its unusual role in steering healthcare consumption decisions, which distinguishes health insurance from standard kinds of indemnity …

Mission Creep In National Security Law, Fletcher N. Baldwin Jr., Daniel Ryan Kosloskey

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Constitutional Inevitability Of Same-Sex Marriage, Laurence H. Tribe

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.