Law Commons^™

Scrutinizing Anticompetitive State Regulations Through Constitutional And Antitrust Lenses, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

State and local regulations that anticompetitively favor certain producers to the detriment of consumers are a pervasive problem in our economy. Their existence is explicable by a variety of structural features—including asymmetry between consumer and producer interests, cost externalization, and institutional and political factors entrenching incumbent technologies. Formulating legal tools to combat such economic parochialism is challenging in the post-Lochner world, where any move toward heightened judicial review of economic regulation poses the perceived threat of a return to economic substantive due process. This Article considers and compares two potential tools for reviewing such regulations—a constitutional principle against anticompetitive parochialism …

From Commonwealth To Constitutional Limitations: Thomas Cooley's Michigan, 1805-1886, Robert Allan Olender

SJD Dissertations

In response to what he perceived as the challenges associated with republican governance in the later portions of the nineteenth century, Michigan’s Thomas McIntyre Cooley penned his treatise concerning constitutional limitations on legislative power. In it, Cooley offered a vision of government where courts would check government power and would raise constitutional barriers against the impact of improper influences on legislators. As a student of history, Cooley grounded his beliefs and doctrines in experience, not philosophical reflections. Believing that “the fruits of speculative genius in government are of little value,” Cooley submitted that governing structures and law “must be the …

Preemption And Choice-Of-Law Coordination, Erin O'Hara O'Connor, Larry E. Ribstein

Michigan Law Review

The doctrine treating federal preemption of state law has been plagued by uncertainty and confusion. Part of the problem is that courts purport to interpret congressional intent when often Congress has never considered the particular preemption question at issue. This Article suggests that courts deciding preemption cases should take seriously a commonly articulated rationale for the federalization of law: the need to coordinate applicable legal standards in order to facilitate a national market or to otherwise provide clear guidance to parties regarding the laws that apply to their conduct. In situations where federal law can serve a coordinating function but …

Legislative Intent And Legislative History In Michigan, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Determining legislative intent is one of the key roles that the judicial system plays in Michigan, and legislative history can be a useful tool for evaluating the intent of the legislature when enacting a law. However, legislative history resources can be difficult to gather and some resources may not be persuasive in Michigan courts. This article provides a brief description of the Michigan legislative process, the court’s view of using legislative history to determine legislative intent, and a list of Michigan legislative history resources.

Free Speech Federalism, Adam Winkler

Michigan Law Review

For decades, constitutional doctrine has held that the Constitution's guarantee of freedom of speech applies equally to laws adopted by the federal, state, and local governments. Nevertheless, the identity of the government actor behind a law may be a significant, if unrecognized, factor in free speech cases. This Article reports the results of a comprehensive study of core free speech cases decided by the federal courts over a 14-year period. The study finds that speech-restrictive laws adopted by the federal government are far more likely to be upheld than similar laws adopted by state and local governments. Courts applying strict …

Scrutinizing The Second Amendment, Adam Winkler

Michigan Law Review

One overlooked issue in the voluminous literature on the Second Amendment is what standard of review should apply to gun control if the Amendment is read to protect an individual right to bear arms. This lack of attention may be due to the assumption that strict scrutiny would necessarily apply because the right would be "fundamental" or because the right is located in the Bill of Rights. In this Article, Professor Winkler challenges that assumption and considers the arguments for a contrary conclusion: that the Second Amendment's individual right to bear arms is appropriately governed by a deferential, reasonableness review …

Thayerian Deference To Congress And Supreme Court Supermajority Rules: Lessons From The Past (Symposium: Congressional Power In The Shadow Of The Rehnquist Court: Strategies For The Future), Evan H. Caminker

Articles

Over the past eight years, the Supreme Court has been unusually aggressive in its exercise ofjudicial review over federal statutes challenged on federalism grounds. Eleven times the Court has invalidated provisions in federal statutes after determining that Congress exceeded the scope of its limited regulatory authority. In ten of the eleven cases, the vote was 5-4 with the identical five-Justice conservative majority (Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas) controlling the decision.

Terry Firma: Background Democracy And Constitutional Foundations, Frank I. Michelman

Michigan Law Review

Ages ago, I had the excellent luck to fall into a collaboration with Terrance Sandalow to produce a casebook now long forgotten. There could have been no more bracing or beneficial learning experience for a fledgling legal scholar (meaning me). What brought us together indeed was luck from my standpoint, but it was enterprise, too - the brokerage of an alert West Publishing Company editor picking up on a casual remark of mine as he made one of his regular sweeps through Harvard Law School. A novice law professor, I mentioned to him how much I admired a new essay …

The Constitution, The Legislature, And Unfair Surprise: Toward A Reliance-Based Approach To The Contract Clause, Robert A. Graham

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that the Court should return to a reliance-based approach to Contract Clause challenges, fashioned loosely along the same lines as the HRID. Although it does not advocate that the Court revivify the rules created by the early decisions, the Note proposes that the Court look to the private parties' expectations and, more specifically, to the reasonableness of those expectations in deciding the clause's applicability to a particular case. Part I provides a brief history of the Contract Clause and its development. This Part follows the clause from the Constitutional Convention through the 1980s to illustrate the Court's …

Interpreting Codes, Bruce W. Frier

Michigan Law Review

Large systematically codified bodies of law, such as the European codes or the UCC, gradually effect, or at least encourage, a different kind of legal culture, in which, as such codes are integrated within a national legal heritage, general clauses and principles become more salient within an expanded interpretive community. Because of the open texture of their rules, codes foster an altered legal posture; ancient judicial vigilance against the intrusive legislation may give way to a new ethos of cooperation in the development of law. To be sure, it remains uncertain whether the resulting law will be, in fact, "better," …

Erisa Preemption: Judicial Flexibility And Statutory Rigidity, Leon E. Irish, Harrison J. Cohen

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article attempts to describe the ways in which, and the reasons why section 514(a) has caused the courts and Congress so much difficulty. Part I reviews the legislative history of section 514(a), with emphasis on the ambivalence Congress has shown toward its 1974 draftsmanship. Part II attempts to provide a coherent description of the case law that has developed under section 514(a). Part III completes the legislative history by examining the two instances in which experience compelled Congress to revise section 514. Finally, Part IV discusses examples of problems courts have faced when crafting a federal common law of …

The Distrust Of Politics, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

In this Article, Dean Sandalow considers the justifications advanced by those who favor the removal of certain political issues from the political process by extending the reach of judicial review. He begins by examining the distrust of politics in a different context, discussing the proposals made by the Progressives for reforming municipal government, as a vehicle to expose the assumptions underlying the current debate. His comparison of the two historical settings reveals many similarities between the Progressives' reform proposals and the contemporary justiflcations.[or the displacement of politics with constitutional law. Dean Sandalow concludes that the distrust of politics rests not …

Michigan's Environmental Protection Act Of 1970: A Progress Report, Joseph L. Sax, Roger L. Conner

Michigan Law Review

The Michigan Environmental Protection Act of 1970 (EPA) represents a departure from the long-standing tradition under which control of environmental quality has been left almost exclusively in the hands of regulatory agencies: it gives to ordinary citizens an opportunity to take the initiative in environmental law enforcement.

Constitutional And Statutory Bases Of Governors' Emergency Powers, F. David Trickey

Michigan Law Review

The primary source of executive emergency power is the state constitution, although statutes often codify the constitutional executive emergency authority and occasionally delegate additional legislative police powers to the governor. Most governors are authorized to respond to public emergencies with a variety of extraordinary emergency measures. This study of state constitutional and statutory emergency power provisions has been undertaken in an attempt to evaluate the sources and scope of governors' emergency powers, as well as the limitations upon those powers. Its primary focus will be upon the extreme breadth of executive emergency authority and, in particular, upon the power to …

Reapportionment In The Supreme Court And Congress: Constitutional Struggle For Fair Representation, Robert G. Dixon Jr.

Michigan Law Review

Fair representation is the ultimate goal. At the time of the Reapportionment Decisions, much change was overdue in some states, and at least some change was overdue in most states. We are a democratic people and our institutions presuppose according population a dominant role in formulas of representation. However, by its exclusive focus on bare numbers, the Court may have transformed one of the most intricate, fascinating, and elusive problems of democracy into a simple exercise of applying elementary arithmetic to census data. In so doing, the Court may have disabled itself from effectively considering the more subtle issues …

Some Comments On The Reapportionment Cases, Paul G. Kauper

Michigan Law Review

Any appraisal of the Supreme Court's decisions in the legislative reapportionment cases must necessarily distinguish between the basic policy ingredients and social consequences of the decisions on the one hand, and the question whether the results were reached by a proper exercise of judicial power on the other. Respecting the first of these considerations, I have no difficulty identifying the social advantages accruing from these decisions. Because of the stress on the population principle, the decisions will afford a greater voice to urban interests, will make the legislative process more responsive to current needs of particular concern to urban dwellers, …

Corwin: Liberty Against Government, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of LIBERTY AGAINST GOVERNMENT. By Edward S, Corwin .

Administrative Law-Developments: 1940-1945 (A Service For Returning Veterans), E. Blythe Stason

Michigan Law Review

No period in American history has ushered in more sweeping changes in the legal structure than has the last decade and a half. No area of the law has witnessed more rapid development than has administrative law. A sketch of the progress of administrative law during the five-year period 1940 to 1945 reveals an important refining of the "quasi judicial" procedures--procedures which, because of their swift and topsy-turvy growth, can well use a little refining.

The purpose of the following survey is two-fold; first, to outline the more significant developments of the last half decade, relating the new materials to …

Criminal Law And Procedure-Federal Courts - Substitution By Supreme Court Of Its Inferences Of Fact For Those Of The State Court, John S. Pennell

Michigan Law Review

The recent cases of Avery v. Alabama and Chambers v. Florida raise the interesting question of the conclusiveness of a fact finding of a state court upon the United States Supreme Court in a criminal trial when the accused claims that one of his constitutional rights has been impaired, and the holding of the state court is to the effect that on the facts presented such right has not been impaired. The case may arise in the United States Supreme Court in either of two ways. It may come up on appeal from a lower federal court denying a petition …

Circuit Courts And The Nisi Prius System: The Making Of An Appellate Court, William Wirt Blume

Michigan Law Review

Judicial systems organized under the influence of the English tradition have exhibited a tendency to pass through four stages of development. (1) In the first stage the highest court (not taking into consideration legislative bodies) has final appellate jurisdiction and a superior original jurisdiction, civil and criminal. The court is composed of three or more judges who sit in bank for the trial of cases. The judges may sit at a central place or go on circuit throughout the territory. (2) In the second stage the highest court has both original and appellate jurisdiction but does not undertake to try …

Curbing The Supreme Court-State Experiences And Federal Proposals, Katherine B. Fite, Louis Baruch Rubinstein

Michigan Law Review

The avalanche of proposals introduced in the last session of Congress seeking to curb the power of the Supreme Court to declare legislative acts unconstitutional and President Roosevelt's recent message to Congress on the judiciary have focused attention on the problem of the function of that Court in our governmental system.

This article does not take sides in the controversy. Its purpose is merely to review the developments in the four states, Colorado, Ohio, North Dakota and Nebraska, which by amendments to their constitutions have sought to place curbs on their supreme courts, and also to classify the proposals which …

Legislation In Vague Or General Terms, Ralph W. Aigler

Articles

FOR some reason, probably in part the increasing complexity of our life and relationships, but more largely, perhaps, the growing tendency to regulate everybody and everything by positive law, the courts have been called upon with increasing frequency to pass upon the effectiveness of statutes and ordinances phrased in indefinite terms. In a very interesting and valuable paper, Professor Freund has pointed out the weakness and strength, on the one hand, of legislation in general terms, and on the other hand, legislation in which the rule of conduct is attempted to be laid down with precision. His interest apparently lay …

Growth And Development Of The Police Power Of The State, Collins Denny Jr

Michigan Law Review

The police power of the state is one of the most difficult phases of our law to understand, and it is even more difficult to define it and to place it within any bounds. In speaking of this power the court has recently said: "It extends not only to regulations which promote the public health, morals, and safety, but to those which promote the public convenience or the general prosperity. * * * It is the most essential of powers, at times the most insistent, and always one of the least limitable of the powers of government."' The term is …

Extension Of Judicial Review In New York, Edward S. Corwin

Michigan Law Review

There are several reasons why it should be worth while to investigate the operation of the most unique of American governmental institutions in the most important state of the Union. For one thing, in the person of Chancellor KZN" New York furnished one of the founders of American Constitutional Law, while at the same time it was KzNT's fame that early gave New York decisions the importance they still retain in great part in the field of citation and precedent. Again it was YNT'S influence that inclined the fresh shoot of constitutional jurisprudence in New York in a conservative direction, …