Law Commons^™

Foreword: A Century Since Suffrage: How Did We Get Here? Where Will We Go? How Will We Get There?, Rona Kaufman

Law Faculty Publications

One hundred years have passed since (white) women attained the right to vote. In the century since the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, American women have transitioned from an existence as mere objects of history to becoming active subjects of history. In 2019 and 2020, many programs and conferences were organized to celebrate the achievements of America's women and commemorate the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage. The Section on Women in Legal Education hosted a program at the January 2020 American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Annual Meeting titled, “A Century Since Suffrage: How Did We Get Here? Where Will We …

What’S In A Name? Strict Scrutiny And The Right To A Public Trial, Stephen Smith

Faculty Publications

The right to a public trial has only rarely been addressed by the Supreme Court, but in Waller v. Georgia, the Court set forth a test for determining when it is appropriate to close a courtroom to the public, despite the general public trial command. The language of the Waller test suggests great rigor. This essay proposes a reconsideration of the test for courtroom closures, rethinking whether traditional strict scrutiny thinking is appropriate in this constitutional and practical context. That said, this essay does not argue with Waller’s broad outlines. Courts making closure decisions should consider reasons and …

Let's Make Some "Scents" Of Our Fourth Amendment Rights: The Discriminatory Truths Behind Using The Mere Smell Of Burnt Marijuana As Probable Cause To Search A Vehicle, Alessandra Dumenigo

St. Thomas Law Review

This Comment addresses the negative effects that have resulted and will continue to result if police officers are encouraged by jurisprudence to conduct a warrantless search of an entire vehicle based on the smell of burnt marijuana. Warrantless searches of an entire vehicle based merely on the smell of burnt marijuana grant officers unlimited power that will likely result in police misconduct, an increase in racially profiled traffic stops, and a distrust between police officers and the Black community amid the nationwide outrage over the death of George Floyd. Part II of this Comment discusses the history of the Fourth …

A Reign Of Error: Property Rights And Stare Decisis, Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

Mistakes matter in law, even the smallest ones. What would happen if a small but substantively meaningful typographical error appeared in the earliest published version of a U.S. Supreme Court opinion and remained uncorrected for several decades in versions of the decision published by the two leading commercial companies and in several online databases? And what would happen if judges, legal commentators, and practitioners wrote opinions, articles, and other legal materials that incorporated and built on that mistake? In answering these questions, this Article traces the widespread, exponential replication of an error (first appearing in 1928) in numerous subsequent cases …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents and Special Thanks.

The Structure Of Intermediate Review, R. Randall Kelso

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Today, there are two well-established versions of intermediate review: stand- ard intermediate review, used for cases like gender discrimination or content-neutral regulations of speech in a public forum, and a heightened intermediate review standard used for content-based, subject-matter regulations of commercial speech under Central Hudson. Yet, in actual use, four other kinds of intermediate review tests have been formulated by the Court in some cases. These four should be viewed as “mutations” of the two kinds of intermediate review proper to apply. This Article discusses both the well-established versions of intermediate review, and the four variations on intermediate review applied …

Vaccination And The Child’S Right To An Open Future, Elias Feldman

Lewis & Clark Law Review

States commonly require the vaccination of children through their parens pa- triae and police powers. But many states also allow parents to opt for non- medical exemptions from these vaccination requirements, contributing to the emergence of a national vaccine hesitancy crisis. By permitting parents not to vaccinate their children, do states that grant these exemptions violate children’s rights? This Article posits that children may indeed have a right to be vac- cinated and thus protected against contracting a disease for which there is a scientifically proven vaccine. This Article examines this question through the lens of Joel Feinberg’s theory of …

Tainted Precedent, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

When Guns Threaten The Public Sphere: A New Account Of Public Safety Regulation Under Heller, Joseph Blocher, Reva B. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Government regulates guns, it is widely assumed, because of the death and injuries guns can inflict. This standard account is radically incomplete—and in ways that dramatically skew constitutional analysis of gun rights. As we show in an account of the armed protesters who invaded the Michigan legislature in 2020, guns can be used not only to injure but also to intimidate. The government must regulate guns to prevent physical injuries and weapons threats in order to protect public safety and the public sphere on which a constitutional democracy depends.

For centuries the Anglo-American common law has regulated weapons not only …

Second Amendment Equilibria, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

Equilibrium-adjustment theory, first articulated by Professor Orin Kerr for Fourth Amendment cases, holds promise for rationalizing Second Amendment doctrine going forward. Like the Fourth Amendment, the Second Amendment suggests an initial equilibrium—or actually, multiple equilibria—between government power to possess, use, and control the implements of violence and private power to do the same. And, like Fourth Amendment doctrine, Second Amendment doctrine must contend with both technological and societal change. These changes—e.g., more deadly and accurate weapons, more public acceptance of concealed carry—can upset whatever initial balance of gun rights and regulation there may have been in the initial state. Although …

Judges As Superheroes: The Danger Of Confusing Constitutional Decisions With Cosmic Battles, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

In Search Of The Presumption Of Regularity, Aram A. Gavoor, Steven Platt

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The presumption of regularity is an imprecise quasi-deference principle that federal courts apply in varying ways to presume federal officers and employees lawfully and consistently discharge their official duties. The presumption gained national significance during the Trump Administration in several key cases in which it was implicated, but never described by the Supreme Court. While the literature and judicial opinions have invoked the presumption, there has been sparse scholarly accounting for its contours, value, and legitimacy. This Article is the first to trace the contemporary domain of the presumption and its applications from its pre-Founding Era source and normatively-recognized 1926 …

Should Justices Be Historians? Justice Scalia’S Opinion In District Of Columbia V. Heller, Todd B. Adams

University of San Francisco Law Review

No abstract provided.

Property Rights: Fiercely Contested, Strongly Guarded, And Continually Defended. How The Supreme Court's Decision In Cedar Point Emphasized The Court's Devotion To Private Property Rights, Sarah Haddon

American University Law Review

In 1975, California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board (the “Board”) enacted a regulation allowing union organizers to access agricultural employers’ private properties “for the purpose of meeting and talking with employees and soliciting their support” (the “access regulation”). The access regulation does not require the union organizers to obtain consent before entering employers’ properties; instead, union organizers must only file a “written notice of intention to take access.” The notice provides the union organizers access to an employer’s property for three hours a day up to 120 days each year during the hour before the workday, during lunch, and after the …

Presidents And The U.S. Constitution: The Executive’S Role In Interpreting The Supreme Law Of The Land, Mitchell Scacchi

Honors Theses and Capstones

In 1832, President Andrew Jackson issued a veto message claiming the same duty as the Supreme Court to interpret the U.S. Constitution. Do modern presidents exercise the principal role in interpreting the U.S. Constitution that President Jackson claimed was their duty, and, if so, in what ways do they choose to articulate their interpretations? The hypothesis is that modern presidents have exercised a principal role in interpreting the U.S. Constitution similar to the interpretative duty expressed by President Jackson, and they perform this duty, in part, through the issuance of veto messages and signing statements. After a content analysis of …

Free Speech And Democracy: A Primer For Twenty-First Century Reformers, Toni M. Massaro, Helen Norton

Publications

Left unfettered, the twenty-first-century speech environment threatens to undermine critical pieces of the democratic project. Speech operates today in ways unimaginable not only to the First Amendment’s eighteenth-century writers but also to its twentieth-century champions. Key among these changes is that speech is cheaper and more abundant than ever before, and can be exploited — by both government and powerful private actors alike — as a tool for controlling others’ speech and frustrating meaningful public discourse and democratic outcomes.

The Court’s longstanding First Amendment doctrine rests on a model of how speech works that is no longer accurate. This invites …

Constitutional Foundations For Public Health Practice: Key Terms And Principles, Fazal Khan, Marice Ashe

Scholarly Works

This chapter introduces the structure of the government in the United States and the concept of “separation of powers" among the federal, state, and local governments. It introduces core legal principles from the U.S. Constitution that frame the authority of the government to enact and enforce laws to protect and promote the public's health. These Constitutional principles are essential for the health advocate and leader to understand because every federal, state, and local law must comply with them. The core principles include the enumerated powers of the federal government and the broad plenary powers of state and local governments—which we …

Oversight Riders, Kevin Stack, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Congress has a constitutionally critical duty to gather information about how the executive branch implements the powers Congress has granted it and the funds Congress has appropriated. Yet in recent years the executive branch has systematically thwarted Congress’s powers and duties of oversight. Congressional subpoenas for testimony and documents have met with blanket refusals to comply, frequently backed by advice from the Department of Justice that executive privilege justifies withholding the information. Even when Congress holds an official in contempt for failure to comply with a congressional subpoena, the Department of Justice often does not initiate criminal sanctions. As a …

Government Falsehoods, Democratic Harm, And The Constitution, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Pandemic, Protest, And Agency: Jury Service And Equal Protection In A Future Defined By Covid-19, Patrick C. Brayer

Faculty Works

This essay calls for an expansive view of Fourteenth Amendment equal protection against the discriminatory empanelment of juries grounded upon a culture of systemic racism. For an individual juror fundamental elements of survival during a pandemic are access to health care, safe transportation, and connective technology. Yet, structural and systemic racism precludes many potential jurors of color from securing these necessary supports, thus denying them the ability to be recognized on juror source list or accommodated for jury service. Jury service is a direct and impactful act of citizen agency over the justice system, and the systemic exclusion of individuals …

Originalism From The Soft Southern Strategy To The New Right: The Constitutional Politics Of Sam Ervin Jr, Logan E. Sawyer Iii

Scholarly Works

Although originalism’s emergence as an important theory of constitutional interpretation is usually attributed to efforts by the Reagan administration, the role the theory played in the South’s determined resistance to civil rights legislation in the 1960s actually helped create the Reagan coalition in the first place. North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin Jr., the constitutional theorist of the Southern Caucus, developed and deployed originalism because he saw its potential to stymie civil rights legislation and stabilize a Democratic coalition under significant stress. Ervin failed in those efforts, but his turn to originalism had lasting effects. The theory helped Ervin and other …

Elected-Official-Affiliated Nonprofits: Closing The Public Integrity Gap, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Recent years have witnessed the growing use by elected officials, particularly state and local chief executives, of affiliated nonprofit organizations to advance their policy goals. Some of these organizations engage in public advocacy to advance a governor’s or mayor’s legislative program. Others operate more like conventional charities, raising philanthropic support for a range of governmental social welfare programs. Elected officials fundraise for these organizations, which are often staffed by close associates of those elected officials, and the organizations’ public communications frequently feature prominently the name or likeness of their elected-official sponsor. As these organizations do not engage in electioneering, they …

The Long History Of Feminist Legal Theory, Tracy Thomas

Con Law Center Articles and Publications

This chapter challenges the conventional idea that feminist legal theory began in the 1970s. The advent of legal feminism is usually placed in the second wave feminist movement, birthed by the political activism of the women’s liberation movement and nurtured by the intellectual leadership of women scholars newly entering legal academia. However, legal feminism has a much longer history, going back more than a century earlier. While the term “feminist” was not used in the United States until the 1910s, the foundations of feminist legal theory were first conceptualized as early as 1848 and developed over the next one hundred …

From After-School Detention To The Detention Center: How Unconstitutional School-Disruption Laws Place Children At Risk Of Prosecution For “Speech Crimes”, Frank Lomonte, Ann Marie Tamburro

Lewis & Clark Law Review

As unrest erupts across the country over issues of police violence and race, how and when police use their authority inside schools is receiving renewed scrutiny. Students of color are uniquely at risk of being subject to overzealous arrest as a result of a confluence of dangerous factors: Young people are constantly surveilled throughout the school day, constitutional search-and-seizure protections are diminished, and police have the benefit of not just the criminal laws that would apply in the “real world,” but a host of vague and subjective “speech crimes” for which they can justify detention, search, and arrest. This Article …

Congressional Surveillance, Aaron R. Copper

American University Law Review

In recent years, Congress has increasingly used electronic surveillance in high profile investigations. Reactions to what this Article calls “congressional surveillance” indicate a deep unease among both legal scholars and the broader public about the nature of Congress’s surveillance authority and its normative implications. Despite our ongoing preoccupation with government surveillance, congressional surveillance remains largely unexplored. There is virtually no discussion of how congressional surveillance is treated under key statutory and Fourth Amendment constraints; no consideration of the process or political limits of congressional surveillance; and little scrutiny of congressional surveillance as a tool within the separation of powers.

This …

National Legal Paradigms For Public Health Emergency Responses, James G. Hodge Jr.

American University Law Review

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed significant weaknesses of the U.S. federalist system in controlling major infectious disease threats. At the root of American failures to adequately respond is a battle over public health primacy in emergency preparedness and response. Which level of government—federal or state—should actually “call the shots” to quell national emergencies? Constitutional principles of cooperative federalism suggest both levels of government are responsible. Yet real-time applications of these principles, coupled with dubious national leadership, contributed to horrific public health outcomes across America. No one seeks a repeat performance of U.S. COVID-19 response efforts to forthcoming major health threats. …

Digital Disease Surveillance, Alan Z. Rozenshtein

American University Law Review

The fight against future pandemics will likely involve digital disease surveillance: the use of digital technology to enhance traditional public-health techniques like contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine. But legal scholarship on digital disease surveillance is still in its infancy. This Article fills that gap.

Part I explains the role that digital disease surveillance could have played in responding to coronavirus, and the role it likely will play in future infectious disease outbreaks. Part II explains how the “special needs” exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement permits almost any rationally designed disease surveillance program. Part III suggests safeguards beyond what …

When Thoughts And Prayers Are Not Enough: Why Age-Based Restrictions On Purchasing Firearms Pass Constitutional Muster, Madeline P. Fuller

American University Law Review

After the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that took the lives of seventeen students and staff members and injured countless others, the community debated how this event could have been prevented. There were security failures on the part of the school and police—unlocked doors, passive deputies and a security guard, and a broken PA system—all of which may have lessened the casualties had they been operating properly. However, these security measures might not have been tested and found lacking if another preventative measure had already taken place: prohibiting the young shooter from legally purchasing a weapon.

Florida …

Transparency And The First, Mark Fenster

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Resilience Of Substantive Rights And The False Hope Of Procedural Rights: The Case Of The Second Amendment And The Seventh Amendment, Renée Lettow Lerner

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

At first glance, there seem to be strong affinities between the Second Amendment and the Seventh Amendment. Both the right to keep and bear arms and the right to civil jury trial potentially empower ordinary citizens. Both could check elites.

But there are crucial differences between these rights. I focus on two of them here. The first is relatively straightforward; it concerns individual accountability—or the lack thereof—and the ability to understand responsibilities. Gun owners and users generally have individual responsibility for their actions, and the ability to understand their responsibilities. In contrast, by design civil jurors lack individual responsibility. And …