Law Commons^™

Medical Decision Making By And On Behalf Of Adolescents: Reconsidering First Principles, B. Jessie Hill

Faculty Publications

The school nurse cannot give your teenage daughter an aspirin for her headache without your permission, but that same daughter can get an abortion without even informing you. Or can she? The obligations on medical personnel providing care to adolescents are famously indeterminate.

Two common-law presumptions have long lurked in the background, but, far from elucidating matters, those presumptions have contributed to the state of confusion. The first presumption is that, absent any special rule, children lack the legal authority to consent to medical treatment on their own. A parallel and corresponding presumption is that parents have a legal entitlement …

American School Finance Litigation And The Right To Education In South Africa, Scott R. Bauries

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This paper addresses the South African Constitution's invitation to the Constitutional Court to 'consider foreign law' when interpreting its provisions. Focusing on the education provisions found in section 29 of the Constitution, I make two claims. Firstly, contrary to the developing consensus, American state supreme court jurisprudence in school funding cases makes a poor resource to aid the interpretation of the basic South African right to education, regardless of the quantum of education that the Constitutional Court decides is encompassed by the word 'basic'. Secondly, however, certain aspects of these same American decisions, particularly the space they provide for a …

Not A Free Press Court?, Lyrissa Lidsky

Faculty Publications

The last decade has been tumultuous for print and broadcast media. Daily newspaper circulation continues to fall precipitously, magazines struggle to survive, and network television audiences keep shrinking. In the meanwhile, cable news is prospering, mobile devices are contributing to increased news consumption, and many new media outlets appear to be thriving. Despite the dynamism in the media industry, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has taken up relatively few First Amendment cases directly involving the media. The Court has addressed a number of important free speech cases since 2005, but thus far the only Roberts Court decisions …

Not A Free Press Court?, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky

UF Law Faculty Publications

The last decade has been tumultuous for print and broadcast media. Daily newspaper circulation continues to fall precipitously, magazines struggle to survive, and network television audiences keep shrinking. In the meanwhile, cable news is prospering, mobile devices are contributing to increased news consumption, and many new media outlets appear to be thriving. Despite the dynamism in the media industry, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has taken up relatively few First Amendment cases directly involving the media. The Court has addressed a number of important free speech cases since 2005, but thus far the only Roberts Court decisions …

Interpretive Contestation And Legal Correctness, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Representing Injustice: Justice As An Icon Of Woman Suffrage, Kristin Collins

Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, written as part of a symposium on Judith Resnik’s and Dennis Curtis's sumptuously illustrated volume Representing Justice, I offer a historically sensitive interpretation of the figure of Justice in woman suffrage spectacle and propaganda. American suffragists were drawn to Justice as a symbol of women's claim to political and legal rights. Why? Surely one reason is that, as Resnik and Curtis demonstrate, by the early twentieth century Justice had ascended as a distinctively resonant symbol of law and law's legitimacy in a democratic polity. Precisely because Justice was a legible symbol of law's legitimacy, she was ripe …

The Education Duty, Scott R. Bauries

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A constitution is an instrument of entrustment. By adopting a democratic constitution, a polity places in the hands of its elected representatives its trust that those representatives will act to pursue the ends of the polity, rather than their own ends, and that they will do so with an eye toward the effects of adopted policies. In effect, the polity entrusts lawmaking power to its legislature with the expectation that such power will be exercised with loyalty to the public and with due care for its interests. Simply put, legislatures are fiduciaries.

In this Article, I examine the nature of …

Free Speech And Parity: A Theory Of Public Employee Rights, Randy J. Kozel

Journal Articles

More than four decades have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court revolutionized the First Amendment rights of the public workforce. In the ensuing years the Court has embarked upon an ambitious quest to protect expressive liberties while facilitating orderly and efficient government. Yet it has never articulated an adequate theoretical framework to guide its jurisprudence. This Article suggests a conceptual reorientation of the modern doctrine. The proposal flows naturally from the Court’s rejection of its former view that one who accepts a government job has no constitutional right to complain about its conditions. As a result of that rejection, the …

Intervention Of Right In Judicial Proceedings To Review Informal Federal Rulemaking, Michael Ray Harris

Hofstra Law Review

The codification of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938 (the “Federal Rules”) created not only a more transactional approach to litigation, but also the flexible party structure that was necessary for “public law litigation” to flourish. Indeed, many argue that intervention by non-parties in public law cases is essential to ensure that the court can hear from and protect the wide range of interests likely to be impacted by its decision. This Article seeks to make a case for limiting intervention as of right in a specific subset of public law proceedings –– those brought to review the …

Teaching Elements Of Election Law Beyond The Disciplinary Borders Of "Election Law", Frances R. Hill

Articles

No abstract provided.

Why Crime Severity Analysis Is Not Reasonable: A Comment, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Jeffrey Bellin’s article, Crime Severity Distinctions and the Fourth Amendment: Reassessing Reasonableness in a Changing World, argues that the severity of the crime under investigation ought to be taken into account in assessing both the reasonableness of searches and whether a government action is a search in the first place. In pursuit of this objective, his article provides the best attempt to date at dealing with the difficult issue of separating serious from not-so serious crimes (he ends up with three categories—grave, serious and minor. He then makes the enticing argument that calibrating the degree of Fourth Amendment protection according …

Inextricably Political: Race, Membership, And Tribal Sovereignty, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

Courts address equal protection questions about the distinct legal treatment of American Indian tribes in the following dichotomous way: are classifications concerning American Indians "racial or political?" If the classification is political (i.e., based on federally recognized tribal status or membership in a federally recognized tribe) then courts will not subject it to heightened scrutiny. If the classification is racial rather than political, then courts may apply heightened scrutiny. This Article challenges the dichotomy itself. The legal categories "tribe" and "tribal member" are themselves political, and reflect the ways in which tribes and tribal members have been racialized by U.S. …

The Market As A Legal Concept, Justin Deystone

Publications

In the wake of the recent financial crisis of 2008, and in the run-up to what some are calling a perfect fiscal storm, there is no shortage of commentary on the need for fundamental market reform. Though there are certainly disagreements about where the real problems are and what to do, almost all the commentary remains wedded to an old and entirely false image of “free competition.” Of course, there is hardly consensus about whether markets require the heavy hand of regulative control, or are better left to regulate themselves, but a belief in the distinction between these two images …

Cost-Benefit Federalism: Reconciling Collective Action Federalism And Libertarian Federalism In The Obamacare Litigation And Beyond, Abigail Moncrieff

Faculty Scholarship

The lawsuits challenging Obamacare's individual mandate have exposed a rift in federalism theory. On one side of the divide is a view that the national government ought to intervene - and ought to be constitutionally permitted to intervene - whenever the states are "separately incompetent" to regulate. This is the view that Robert Cooter and Neil Siegel recently theorized as "collective action federalism." On the other side of the divide is a view that federalism exists for reasons other than efficiency of regulation and particularly that the Founders created the federal structure for the protection of individual liberty. According to …

Images In/Of Law, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

The proliferation of images in and of law lends itself to surprisingly complex problems of epistemology and power. Understanding through images is innate; most of us easily understand images without thinking. But arriving at mutually agreeable understandings of images is also difficult. Translating images into shared words leads to multiple problems inherent in translation and that pose problems for justice. Despite our saturated imagistic culture, we have not established methods to pursue that translation process with confidence. This article explains how images are intuitively understood and yet collectively inscrutable, posing unique problems for resolving legal conflicts that demand common and …

Making Popular Constitutionalism Work, Thomas G. Donnelly

Law Faculty Publications

Popular constitutionalism defies easy definition. Its leading theorists fail to offer a common reading of constitutional history, a common methodology, or even a common set of remedies. Given these diverse approaches, it is little wonder that one recurring complaint among popular constitutionalism's critics is that the theory itself is incoherent. This criticism is overstated. Even as there are various strands of popular constitutionalism, its leading theorists do share one key attribute, a populist sensibility-a common belief that the American people (and their elected representatives) should play an ongoing role in shaping contemporary constitutional meaning. The question remains how best to …

The Originalist Case Against Congressional Supermajority Voting Rules, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

Controversy over the Senate’s filibuster practice dominates modern discussion of American legislative government. With increasing frequency, commentators have urged that the upper chamber’s requirement of sixty votes to close debate on pending matters violates a majority-rulebased norm of constitutional law. Proponents of this view, however, tend to gloss over a more basic question: Does the Constitution’s Rules of Proceedings Clause permit the houses of Congress to adopt internal parliamentary requirements under which a bill is deemed “passed” only if it receives supermajority support? This question is important. Indeed, the House already has such a rule in place, and any challenge …

Transtemporal Separation Of Powers In The Law Of Precedent, Randy Beck

Scholarly Works

The rule of stare decisis creates a presumption that a court’s ruling on a legal question remains binding in later decisions by the same court or hierarchically inferior courts. This presumption promotes stability in the law and protects reliance interests. Decisions that narrowly construe or overrule prior opinions can therefore seem like unprincipled threats to the rule of law.

This article seeks to highlight some countervailing themes in the case law, showing that stability and the protection of reliance interests are not the exclusive concerns underlying the law of precedent. The relevant doctrine attempts to balance these objectives with competing …

An Essay On Originalism And The 'Individual Mandate': Rounding Out The Government’S Case For Constitutionality, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

The Supreme Court now has under advisement the landmark federal health care law case. Much attention has focused on the law’s minimum coverage provision—or so-called “individual mandate” — and, in particular, its constitutionality under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause. In a separate and much lengthier article, I offer two main observations about the arguments made to the Court on that issue. First, I show that the challengers of the minimum coverage provision emphasized originalist reasoning in their briefs and oral arguments, while the federal government did not. Second, I explain why — contrary to the impression …

Big Brother Or Little Brother? Surrendering Seizure Privacy For The Benefits Of Communication Technology, José F. Anderson

All Faculty Scholarship

Over two centuries have passed since Benjamin Franklin quipped that we should defend privacy over security if people wanted either privacy or security. Although his axiom did not become a rule of law in its original form, its principles found voice in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution's Bill of Rights. To a lesser extent, provisions against the quartering of troops in private homes found in the Third Amendment also support the idea that what a government can require you to do, or who you must have behind the doors of your home, is an area of grave …

Could This Train Make It Through: The Law And Strategy Of The Gold Train Case, Charles Tiefer, Jonathan W. Cuneo, Annie Reiner

All Faculty Scholarship

In 1944-45, the Nazis seized personal belongings of the Hungarian Jewish population and dispatched some of the most valuable of them on a train. The United States Army took control of this "Gold Train" and gave reassurances that it would keep the valuables safe. However, the items were plundered by individual soldiers, including officers, and diverted to various uses. After decades of dormancy, a Presidential Commission exposed the facts, but the government still did not right the wrong — until there was litigation.

The "Gold Train" case (Rosner v. United States) represents a measure of justice for the victimized community …

Constitutional Gaps In Bankruptcy, S. Todd Brown

Journal Articles

Federal bankruptcy law incorporates a broad range of commercial and related matters that are otherwise left to the States under the Constitution, follows an efficiency-centered process model that may implicate due process, and relies upon a judicial structure that appears to be inconsistent with Article III. In spite of the crushing volume of bankruptcy cases and proceedings each year in which the resolution of one or more of these questions may be relevant, the Supreme Court has had few opportunities to tackle them directly. Indeed, after more than two centuries, the Court has provided precious few insights into the limits …

Predictive Policing And Reasonable Suspicion, Andrew Ferguson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Predictive policing is a new law enforcement strategy to reduce crime by predicting criminal activity before it happens. Using sophisticated computer algorithms to forecast future events from past crime patterns, predictive policing has become the centerpiece of a new smart-policing strategy in several major cities. The initial results have been strikingly successful in reducing crime.This article addresses the Fourth Amendment consequences of this police innovation, analyzing the effect of predictive policing on the concept of reasonable suspicion. This article examines predictive policing in the context of the larger constitutional framework of “prediction” and the Fourth Amendment. Many aspects of current …

Lower Court Constitutionalism: Circuit Court Discretion In A Complex Adaptive System, Doni Gewirtzman

Articles & Chapters

While federal circuit courts play an essential role in defining what the Constitution means, one would never know it from looking at most constitutional scholarship. The bulk of constitutional theory sees judge-made constitutional law through a distorted lens, one that focuses solely on the Supreme Court with virtually no attention paid to other parts of the judicial hierarchy. On the rare occasions when circuit courts appear on the radar screen, they are treated either as megaphones for communicating the Supreme Court’s directives or as tools for implementing the theorist’s own interpretive agenda. Both approaches would homogenize the way circuit courts …

Historical Gloss And The Separation Of Powers, Curtis A. Bradley, Trevor W. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

Arguments based on historical practice are a mainstay of debates about the constitutional separation of powers. Surprisingly, however, there has been little sustained academic attention to the proper role of historical practice in this context. The scant existing scholarship is either limited to specific subject areas or focused primarily on judicial doctrine without addressing the use of historical practice in broader conceptual or theoretical terms. To the extent that the issue has been discussed, most accounts of how historical practice should inform the separation of powers require “acquiescence” by the branch of government whose prerogatives the practice implicates, something that …

Secrets, Lies, And Disclosure, Helen Norton

Publications

This symposium essay suggests that we can sometimes understand those who resist campaign disclosure or disclaimer requirements as interested in keeping a secret and occasionally even in telling a sort of lie about the source or intensity of support for a particular candidate or cause. Such secrets and lies threaten listeners’ autonomy interests when the speaker seeks to keep such secrets (and sometimes seeks to tell such lies) to enhance her ability to influence her listeners’ decisions. For these reasons, I suggest greater attention to the reasons speakers seek to keep secrets (or occasionally tell such lies) in assessing the …

Limiting Principles And Empowering Practices In American Indian Religious Freedoms, Kristen A. Carpenter

Publications

Employment Division v. Smith was a watershed moment in First Amendment law, with the Supreme Court holding that neutral statutes of general applicability could not burden the free exercise of religion. Congress's subsequent attempts, including the passage of Religious Freedom Restoration Act and Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, to revive legal protections for religious practice through the legislative and administrative process have received tremendous attention from legal scholars. Lost in this conversation, however, have been the American Indians at the center of the Smith case. Indeed, for them, the decision criminalizing the possession of their peyote sacrament was …

An Original Take On Originalism, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The argument that Professor Orin Kerr proffers in An Equilibrium-Adjustment Theory of the Fourth Amendment' is simple: Fourth Amendment law ought to be structured to ensure that the balance of power between government and citizenry remains constant. This equilibrium-adjustment theory is elegant and, because it rests on a relatively "neutral" historical foundation, might be attractive to judges and scholars from different perspectives. Contrary to Kerr's assertion, however, it does not easily explain many of the Court's cases, nor does it help address the most difficult Fourth Amendment issues facing the Court today. The historical foundations on which it rests are …

Teaching Comparative Perspectives In The Domestic Constitutional Law Class: A Step-By-Step Primer, Mark S. Kende

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

A Critical Appraisal Of The Department Of Justice's New Approach To Medical Marijuana, Robert A. Mikos

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The Obama Administration has embarked upon a much-heralded shift in federal policy toward medical marijuana. Eschewing the hard-ball tactics favored by earlier Administrations, Attorney General Eric Holder announced in October 2009 that the Department of Justice (DOJ) would stop enforcing the federal marijuana ban against persons who comply with state medical marijuana laws. Given the significance of the medical marijuana issue in both criminal law and federalism circles, this Article sets out to provide the first in-depth analysis of the changes wrought by the DOJ’s new Non Enforcement Policy (NEP). In a nutshell, it suggests that early enthusiasm for the …