Law Commons^™

Constitutional Limitations On Land Use Controls, Environmental Regulations And Governmental Exactions (2010 Ed.), Garrett Power

Faculty Scholarship

This electronic book is published in a searchable PDF format as a part of the E-scholarship Repository of the University of Maryland School of Law. It is an “open content” casebook intended for classroom use in courses in Land Use Control, Environmental Law and Constitutional Law. It consists of cases carefully selected from the two hundred years of American constitutional history which address the clash between public sovereignty and private property. It considers both the personal right to liberty and the personal right in property. The text consists of non-copyrighted material and readers are free to use it or re-mix …

When Statutory Regimes Collide:Will Wisconsin Right To Life And Citizens United Invalidate Federal Tax Regulation Of Campaign Activity?, Miriam Galston

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life (2007) and Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010), the United States Supreme Court dramatically reduced the ability of Congress to regulate campaign finance activities of corporations and others active in elections. Many of the same activities are still subject to restrictions by the Internal Revenue Code, which regulates the type and amount of political campaign activities that certain nonprofits exempt under federal tax law can engage in.

In the wake of the campaign finance decisions, the constitutionality of the tax law’s restrictions on campaign activity is now being challenged in …

One New President, One New Patriarch, And A Generous Disregard For The Constitution:, Robert C. Blitt

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The government of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC)--the country's predominant religious group--recently underwent back-to-back changes in each institution's respective leadership. This coincidence of timing affords a unique opportunity to reassess the status of constitutional secularism and church-state relations in the Russian Federation. Following a discussion of the presidential and patriarchal elections that occurred between March 2008 and January 2009, the Article surveys recent developments in Russia as they relate to the nation's constitutional obligations. In the face of this analysis, the Article argues that the government and the ROC alike continue to willfully undermine the constitutional principles of …

Deconstructing Transnationalism: Conceptualizing Metanationalism As A Putative Model Of Evolving Jurisprudence, Paul Enriquez

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Article builds upon Philip C. Jessup's revolutionary scholarship to pave new pathways for interdisciplinary research and expand the normative constitutional framework of universal human problems. To that end, this Article ties American constitutional theory to the new era of international globalization and provides context that facilitates the discussion of racial and ethnic diversity in education from a domestic and international perspective. By arguing for compelling treatment of diversity in elementary and secondary learning institutions, this Article introduces a new theory of constitutional interpretation vis-&-vis international law. This theory, called metanationalism, rejects Harold Koh's theory of transnationalism and demonstrates that …

Testing Democracy: Marriage Equality, Citizen-Lawmaking And Constitutional Structure, Francisco Valdes

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Shadow Of State Secrets, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The shadow of state secrets casts itself longer than previously acknowledged. Between 2001 and 2009 the government asserted state secrets in more than 100 cases, while in scores more litigants appealed to the doctrine in anticipation of government intervention. Contractor cases ranged from breach of contract, patent disputes, and trade secrets, to fraud and employment termination. Wrongful death, personal injury, and negligence suits kept pace, extending beyond product liability to include infrastructure and services, as well as conduct of war. In excess of fifty telecommunications suits linked to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program emerged 2006-2009, with the government acting, variously, …

Commandeering The People: Why The Individual Health Insurance Mandate Is Unconstitutional, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” includes what is called an “individual responsibility requirement” or mandate that all persons buy health insurance from a private company and a separate “penalty” enforcing this requirement. In this paper, I do not critique the individual mandate on originalist grounds. Instead, I explain why the individual mandate is unconstitutional under the existing doctrine by which the Supreme Court construes the Commerce and Necessary and Proper Clauses and the tax power. There are three principal claims.

First (Part II), since the New Deal, the Supreme Court has developed a doctrine allowing the regulation of …

On Not Being “Not An Originalist”, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Further Reflections On Not Being “Not An Originalist”, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Catholicism And Constitutional Law: More Than Privacy In The Penumbras, Bill Piatt

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

The Limits Of Advocacy, Amanda Frost

Duke Law Journal

Party control over case presentation is regularly cited as a defining characteristic of the American adversarial system. Accordingly, American judges are strongly discouraged from engaging in so-called "issue creation"-that is, raising legal claims and arguments that the parties have overlooked or ignored-on the ground that doing so is antithetical to an adversarial legal culture that values litigant autonomy and prohibits agenda setting by judges. And yet, despite the rhetoric, federal judges regularly inject new legal issues into ongoing cases. Landmark Supreme Court decisions such as Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins and Mapp v. Ohio were decided on grounds never raised …

From Choice To Reproductive Justice: De-Constitutionalizing Abortion Rights, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Essay argues that the right to abortion constitutionalized in Roe v. Wade is by some measure at odds with a capacious understanding of the demands of reproductive justice. No matter its rationale, the constitutional right to abortion is fundamentally a negative right that rhetorically keeps the state out of the domain of family life. As such, the decision privatizes not only the abortion decision, but also parenting, by rendering the decision to carry a pregnancy to term a choice. It thereby legitimates a minimalist state response to the problems of pregnant women who carry their pregnancies to term and …

Freedom Of Speech And Contempt By Scandalizing The Court In Singapore, Jack Tsen-Ta Lee

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The offence of scandalizing the court, a form of contempt of court, is regarded as obsolete in the United Kingdom. However, it continues to be imposed in other Commonwealth nations and remains very much alive in Singapore, having been applied in a crop of cases between 2006 and 2009. This short commentary examines one of these cases, Attorney-General v Hertzberg and others [2009] 1 Singapore Law Reports 1103, which has generated worldwide interest as it arose out of articles published in the Wall Street Journal Asia. In Hertzberg, the High Court of Singapore held that utterances by an alleged contemnor …

The "Principal" Reason Why The Pcaob Is Unconstitutional, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

The Constitution creates very few federal offices. It creates the House and Senate, the Speaker of the House and the President pro tempore of the Senate, the President, the Vice President, and the Supreme Court--and that is it. The Constitution clearly contemplates that there will be other federal “Officers,” who the President must commission and who Congress may impeach and remove, but the document does not itself create those positions. Instead, it provides general authorization to Congress (in conjunction with the President's presentment power and the Vice President's modest voting authority) to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and …

Living Originalism, Thomas B. Colby, Peter J. Smith

Duke Law Journal

Originalists routinely argue that originalism is the only coherent and legitimate theory of constitutional interpretation. This Article endeavors to undermine those claims by demonstrating that, despite the suggestion of originalist rhetoric, originalism is not a single, coherent, unified theory of constitutional interpretation, but is rather a disparate collection of distinct constitutional theories that share little more than a misleading reliance on a common label. Originalists generally agree only on certain very broad precepts that serve as the fundamental underlying principles of constitutional interpretation: specifically, that the "writtenness" of the Constitution necessitates a fixed constitutional meaning, and that courts that see …

Federal Forfeiture And Money Laundering: Undue Deference To Legal Fictions And The Canadian Crossroads, Max M. Nelson

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

No abstract provided.

The National Class As Extraterritorial Legislation, Jeffrey Haylock

Dalhousie Law Journal

This article argues that provincially constituted multijurisdictional class actions violate the constitutional law of extraterritoriality. It begins with a brief overview of the lawof adjudicativejurisdiction, then provides a longer overviewof the separate body of law that imposes extraterritorial limits on substantive provincial legislation. The author then demonstrates the substantive characterof classaction legislation, which necessarily entails the applicability of the law ofextraterritoriality However, much of the relevant jurisprudence, as well as some of the relevant academic literature, has ignored this important issue.Application ofthe lawofextraterritoriality does, indeed, raise serious constitutional concerns, as the article's central section demonstrates. The desirable efficiencies of national …

In Defense Of Ideology: A Principled Approach To The Supreme Court Confirmation Process, Lori A. Ringhand

Scholarly Works

In this paper, Professor Ringhand offers a principled defense of an ideological approach to the Supreme Court justice confirmation process. In constructing her argument, she does three things. First, she explores how the insights provided by recent empirical legal scholarship have created a need to re-think the role of the Supreme Court and, consequently, the process by which we select Supreme Court justices. In doing so, Professor Ringhand explains how these insights have called into question much of our conventional constitutional narrative, and how this failure of the conventional narrative has in turn undermined traditional objections to an ideologically-based confirmation …

On The Limits Of Supremacy: Medical Marijuana And The States' Overlooked Power To Legalize Federal Crime, Robert A. Mikos

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Using the conflict over medical marijuana as a timely case study, this Article explores the overlooked and underappreciated power of states to legalize conduct Congress bans. Though Congress has banned marijuana outright, and though that ban has survived constitutional scrutiny, state laws legalizing medical use of marijuana constitute the de facto governing law in thirteen states. This Article argues that these state laws and (most) related regulations have not been, and, more interestingly, cannot be preempted by Congress, given constraints imposed on Congress's preemption power by the anti-commandeering rule, properly understood. Just as importantly, these state laws matter, in a …

The Fog Of Certainty, Robert B. Ahdieh

Faculty Scholarship

In a recent essay in the Yale Law Journal, constitutional law scholar Michael Stokes Paulsen argues that “[t]he force of international law, as a body of law, upon the United States is . . . largely an illusion.” Rather than law, he suggests, international law is mere “policy and politics.”

For all the certainty with which this argument is advanced, it cannot survive close scrutiny. At its foundation, Professor Paulsen’s essay rests on a pair of fundamental misconceptions of the nature of law. Law is not reduced to mere policy, to begin, simply because it can be undone. Were that …

Not Your Mother's Remedy: A Civil Action Response To The Westboro Baptist Church's Military Funeral Demonstrations, Chelsea Brown

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

What’S The Constitution Got To Do With It? Regulating Marriage In Pakistan, Karin Carmit Yefet

Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy

[...] the supreme law of the land seems to embody a blatant contradiction. The Pakistani Constitution extends protection to an impressive catalog of fundamental rights, placing Pakistan in line with some of the most western-minded constitutional regimes in the world.3 At the same time, in contrast to the American-style constitutional commitment to separate church and state,4 the Pakistani regime is constitutionally committed to integrate the two, in the sense that all laws must conform to the injunctions of Islam as a condition of their constitutional validity.5 So the same Constitution that protects western fundamental rights also elevates Islamic law, a …

Free Speech And National Security, Geoffrey R. Stone

Indiana Law Journal

Symposium: An Ocean Apart? Freedom of Expression in Europe and the United States. This Article was originally written in French and delivered as a conference paper at a symposium held by the Center for American Law of the University of Paris II (Panthèon-Assas) on January 18-19, 2008.

Obama's Moral Capitalism: Resuscitating The American Dream, Mitchell F. Crusto

University of Miami Law Review

No abstract provided.

Emotional Common Sense As Constitutional Law, Terry A. Maroney

Vanderbilt Law Review

n Gonzales v. Carhart the Supreme Court invoked post- abortion regret to justify a ban on a particular abortion procedure. The Court was proudly folk-psychological, representing its observations about women's emotional experiences as "self-evident." That such observations could drive critical legal determinations was, apparently, even more self-evident, as it received no mention at all. Far from being sui generis, Carhart reflects a previously unidentified norm permeating constitutional jurisprudence: reliance on what this Article coins "emotional common sense." Emotional common sense is what one unreflectively thinks she knows about emotions. A species of common sense, it seems obvious and universal to …

Not Very Collegial: Exploring Bans On Illegal Immigrant Admissions To State Colleges And Universities, Marcia A. Yablon-Zug, Danielle R. Holley-Walker

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Use And Abuse Of Foreign Law In Constitutional Interpretation, Ganesh Sitaraman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article provides an exhaustive typology of the uses of foreign law in order to provide insight into whether foreign law can be appropriately used in constitutional interpretation, when it can be used, and what the stakes and parameters are in each case. In doing so, the article addresses two significant problems in the debate on foreign law. First, much of the commentary has focused on the justifications for using foreign law and the principled or practical arguments against using foreign law. But the focus on the why of foreign law has obscured the more basic question about the ways …

Emotional Common Sense As Constitutional Law, Terry A. Maroney

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In Gonzales v. Carhart the Supreme Court invoked post-abortion regret to justify a ban on a particular abortion procedure. The Court was proudly folk-psychological, representing its observations about women's emotional experiences as "self-evident." That such observations could drive critical legal determinations was, apparently, even more self-evident, as it received no mention at all. Far from being sui generis, Carhart reflects a previously unidentified norm permeating constitutional jurisprudence: reliance on what this Article coins "emotional common sense." Emotional common sense is what one unreflectively thinks she knows about the emotions. A species of common sense, it seems obvious and universal to …

A Proposed Transjudicial Approach To S. 15(2) Charter Adjudication, Vanita Goela

Dalhousie Law Journal

Canada and India are both pluralistic democracies with diverse populations. Both countries have drafted constitutional provisions which enshrine equality rights and permit affirmative action. In India, various disadvantaged groups receive special protection from the Constitution of India, such as the Other Backward Classes (OBC). The Supreme Court of India has held that States and the Central government must identify the "creamy layer" within the OBC category so that reservations target members who are most in need. Otherwise, the OBC category is overinclusive. The creamy layer includes those who are socially and economically advanced and who no longer require the benefits …

There Were Great Men Before Agamemnon, William R. Casto

Vanderbilt Law Review

John Marshall is the Agamemnon of Supreme Court history. He is universally considered the Court's greatest Justice, and rightly so. But there were great Justices before Marshall. One of those great Justices was James Iredell. No Justice in the Court's history has provided a more detailed or sophisticated explanation and justification of the doctrine of judicial review. Iredell needs a bard, and this Essay is my ode to his memory.