Law Commons^™

The Indefinite Deflection Of Congressional Standing, Nat Stern

Scholarly Publications

Recent litigation brought or threatened against the administration of President Obama has brought to prominence the question of standing by Congress or its members to sue the President for nondefense or non-enforcement of federal law. Leading scholars in the field of congressional standing immediately expressed doubt that courts would entertain a suit seeking to compel enforcement of these provisions. This Article argues that the premise that suits of this sort can be maintained rests on a tenuous understanding of the Supreme Court's fitful treatment of standing by Congress or its members to sue the Executive.

The Court has never issued …

Taking Care Of Federal Law, Leah Litman

Articles

Article II of the Constitution vests the “executive power” in the President and directs the President to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” But do these provisions mean that only the President may execute federal law? Two lines of Supreme Court precedent suggest conflicting answers to that question. In several prominent separation-of-powers cases, the Court has suggested that only the President may execute federal law: “The Constitution requires that a President chosen by the entire Nation oversee the execution of the laws.” Therefore, the Court has reasoned, Congress may not create private rights of action that allow nonexecutive …

Obama's Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Decree, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

While agreeing that sentences for nonviolent drug offenses are too long, this Wall Street Journal op-ed piece argues that the large-scale clemency program planned by President Obama is misguided. It sets a dangerous precedent for using the clemency power beyond its traditional and intended purpose of providing a last-resort check on fairness and justice errors in individual cases, and instead uses the power to set sentencing policy. While many people will like the results of the current program, they will be less than happy when some future president uses it as precedent to promote a sentencing policy of which they …

Scotus Summary: Separation Of Powers In Zivotofsky V. Kerry, Wilson Huhn

Con Law Center Articles and Publications

Welcome to Supreme Podcast, and the summary of the decision of the Supreme Court in Zivotofsky v. Kerry.

This is a Separation of Powers case involving a dispute between the President and Congress over the recognition of a foreign country, in this case the power of the President to determine which foreign government, if any, has territorial sovereignty over the City of Jerusalem. By a vote of 6-3 the Supreme Court upheld the President’s exclusive and conclusive authority to make that determination.

The President's Wartime Detention Authority : What History Teaches Us, Anirudh Sivaram

Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award

This thesis examines the extent of the President’s wartime detention authority over citizens (in particular, detention authority pursuant to Article II of the U.S. Constitution) through a legal-historical lens. Some Presidents (Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, George W. Bush) have historically relied on Article II authority for detention, while others (Ulysses Grant, Barack Obama) have disclaimed the notion that such authority exists. Clarifying the scope and source of the Presidential detention authority over citizens bears both theoretical and real-world relevance. Theoretically, it lies at the confluence of two central American constitutional traditions – the separation of powers, and the protection of …

A Fourth Way?: Bringing Politics Back Into Recess Appointments (And The Rest Of The Separation Of Powers, Too), Josh Chafetz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

It sounds odd when stated forthrightly, but most separation-of-powers discussions are largely inattentive to politics. Formalist theories tend to assert that the distribution of powers is set in stone; in contrast, functionalist theories tend to focus on abstract considerations of comparative institutional competence or on ossifying past practice into a "historical gloss" binding the present. Both approaches generally ignore the live political context in which the branches continually compete with one another for decision-making power.

"Pragmatic formalist" hybrids, like that proposed by Ron Krotoszynski in his contribution to the Duke Law Journal's annual administrative law symposium, while broadening the …

Negotiating Federalism And The Structural Constitutionn: Navigating The Separation Of Powers Both Vertically And Horizontally, Erin Ryan

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

A Functional Theory Of Congressional Standing, Jonathan R. Nash

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court has offered scarce and inconsistent guidance on congressional standing—that is, when houses of Congress or members of Congress have Article III standing. The Court’s most recent foray into congressional standing has prompted lower courts to infuse analysis with separation-of-powers concerns in order to erect a high standard for congressional standing. It has also invited the Department of Justice to argue that Congress lacks standing to enforce subpoenas against executive branch actors.

Injury to congressional litigants should be defined by reference to Congress’s constitutional functions. Those functions include gathering relevant information, casting votes, and (even when no vote …

State (Un)Separated Powers And Commandeering, Aaron P. Brecher

Res Gestae

This Essay argues that the Court’s line between state judges and other state officials is not as clean as the case law suggests. Specifically, early state constitutions, as well as the British constitutional order prevailing before the U.S. Constitution was enacted—which did not separate powers as rigidly as the U.S. Constitution—combine to undermine the distinction. Taking this line of analysis seriously is not to deny that commandeering state executive or legislative officials raises federalism concerns. But paying more careful attention to early state conceptions of the separation of powers furthers federalist goals in another way: it engenders respect for the …

Spokeo V. Robins And The Constitutional Foundations Of Statutory Standing, Maxwell Stearns

Faculty Scholarship

In Spokeo v. Robins, the Supreme Court granted certiorari to address the following question: Does Congress have the power to confer standing upon an individual claiming that a privately owned website violated its federal statutory obligation to take specified steps designed to promote accuracy in aggregating and reporting his personal and financial data even if the resulting false disclosures did not produce concrete harm? This somewhat arcane standing issue involves congressional power to broaden the scope of the first of three constitutional standing requirements: injury in fact, causation, and redressability. Although the case does not directly address the prudential …

Negotiating Federalism And The Structural Constitution: Navigating The Separation Of Powers Both Vertically And Horizontally, Erin Ryan

Scholarly Publications

This essay explores the emerging literature on the negotiation of structural constitutional governance, to which Professor Aziz Huq has made an important contribution in The Negotiated Structural Constitution, 114 Colum. L. Rev. 1595 (2014). In the piece, Professor Huq reviews the negotiation of constitutional entitlements and challenges the conventional wisdom about the limits of political bargaining as a means of allocating authority among the three branches of government. He argues that constitutional ambiguities in the horizontal allocation of power are sometimes best resolved through legislative-executive negotiation, just as uncertain grants of constitutional authority are already negotiated between state and federal …

Inferiority Complex: Should State Courts Follow Lower Federal Court Precedent On The Meaning Of Federal Law?, Amanda Frost

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The conventional wisdom is that state courts need not follow lower federal court precedent when interpreting federal law. Upon closer inspection, however, the question of how state courts should treat lower federal court precedent is not so clear. Although most state courts now take the conventional approach, a few contend that they are obligated to follow the lower federal courts, and two federal courts of appeals have declared that their decisions are binding on state courts. The Constitution’s text and structure send mixed messages about the relationship between state and lower federal courts, and the Supreme Court has never squarely …

Delegation, Accommodation, And The Permeability Of Constitutional And Ordinary Law, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

To some, the very idea of the constitutional law of the administrative state is an oxymoron. On this view, core features of the national administrative state — broad delegations and the combination of legislative, executive, and judicial power within administrative agencies, particularly agencies that are headed by unelected executive officials only removable on narrow grounds — are fundamentally at odds with both constitutional separation of powers principles and due process. To others, no such conflict between contemporary administrative governance and the Constitution exists, and assertions of the administrative state’s unconstitutionality rest on basic misunderstandings of what separation of powers and …

Prior Sexual Misconduct Evidence In State Courts: Constitutional And Common Law Challenges, Michael L. Smith

Faculty Articles

Prosecuting sex crimes is a sensitive, challenging process, and many who commit these crimes end up going unpunished. While a defendant may have a history of prior sexual misconduct, the rules of evidence in most states and at the federal level generally prohibit the introduction of prior misconduct to show a defendant's propensity to commit a present crime. In response, the federal government and numerous state legislatures have adopted rules of evidence that permit the introduction of prior sexual misconduct in cases where a defendant is charged with a sexual crime.

While commentators have written in great detail about federal …

A Taxonomy Of Discretion: Refining The Legality Debate About Obama’S Executive Actions On Immigration, Michael Kagan

Scholarly Works

Broad executive action has been the Obama Administration’s signature contribution to American immigration policy, setting off a furious debate about whether the President has acted outside his constitutional powers. But the legal debate about the scope of the President’s authority to change immigration policy has not fully recognized what is actually innovative about the Obama policies, and thus has not focused on those areas where he has taken executive discretion into uncharted territory. This essay aims to add new focus to the debate about Pres. Obama’s executive actions by defining five different types of presidential discretion: Congressionally-authorized discretion, non-enforcement discretion, …

Agora: Reflections On Zivotofsky V. Kerry : Historical Gloss, The Recognition Power, And Judicial Review, Curtis A. Bradley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Modern-Day Nullification: Marijuana And The Persistence Of Federalism In An Age Of Overlapping Regulatory Jurisdiction, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Agora: Reflections On Zivotofsky V. Kerry, Curtis A. Bradley, Carlos M. Vazquez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reducing Secrecy: Balancing Legitimate Government Interests With Public Accountability, Nadine Strossen

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Reconceptualizing Non-Article Iii Tribunals, Jaime Dodge

Scholarly Works

The Supreme Court’s Article III doctrine is built upon an explicit assumption that Article III must accommodate non-Article III tribunals in order to allow Congress to “innovate” by creating new procedural structures to further its substantive regulatory goals. In this Article, I challenge that fundamental assumption. I argue that each of the types of non-Article III innovation and the underlying procedural goals cited by the Court can be obtained through our Article III courts. The Article then demonstrates that these are not theoretical or hypothetical solutions, but instead are existing structures already in place within Article III. Demonstrating that the …

Federal Court Rulemaking And Litigation Reform: An Institutional Approach, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

All Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this article is to advance understanding of the role that federal court rulemaking has played in litigation reform. For that purpose, we created original data sets that include (1) information about every member of the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules who served from 1960 to 2013, and (2) every proposal for amending the Federal Rules that the Advisory Committee approved for consideration by the Standing Committee during the same period and that had implications for private enforcement. We show that, beginning in 1971, when a succession of Chief Justices appointed by Republican Presidents have chosen committee members, …

When The Bough Breaks: The U.S. Tax Court's Branch Difficulties, Leandra Lederman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This essay highlights the confusion over which of the three branches of government (if any) is home to the U.S. Tax Court, which hears over 95% of litigated federal tax cases. This uncertainty recently resulted in a separation of powers challenge to the Tax Court. There is a pressing need for the Tax Court’s status to be resolved, to decrease its insularity and increase transparency and accountability.

Constitutionalism Outside The Courts, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is a chapter to be included in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on the U.S. Constitution. Using the actions of Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus during the Little Rock crisis of 1957 and the U.S. Supreme Court’s subsequent decision in Cooper v. Aaron as a lens, it explores constitutional interpretation and enforcement by extrajudicial institutions. I explore the critique of Cooper’s notion of judicial supremacy by departmentalists like Walter Murphy, empirical scholars skeptical of judicial efficacy like Gerald Rosenberg, and popular constitutionalists like Larry Kramer and Mark Tushnet. I also consider four distinct institutional forms of extrajudicial constitutional interpretation and …

Brief Of Federal Courts Scholars As Amici Curiae In Support Of The Petitioner, Willaim Araiza, Howard M. Wasserman, Lawrence Sager, Stephen I. Vladeck, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Behavioral War Powers, Ganesh Sitaraman, David Zionts

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A decade of war has meant a decade of writing on war powers. From the authority to start a war, to restrictions on fighting wars, to the authority to end a war, constitutional lawyers and scholars have explored the classic issues (war initiation, prosecution, and termination) through the classic prisms (text, history, and function) for a new generation of national security challenges. Despite the volume of writing on war powers and the urgency of the debates in the context of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, war powers debates are widely seen as stagnant. We introduce a new set of perspectives …