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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Anti-Innovation Supreme Court: Major Questions, Delegation, Chevron And More, Jack M. Beermann
The Anti-Innovation Supreme Court: Major Questions, Delegation, Chevron And More, Jack M. Beermann
Faculty Scholarship
The Supreme Court of the United States has generally been a very aggressive enforcer of legal limitations on governmental power. In various periods in its history, the Court has gone far beyond enforcing clearly expressed and easily ascertainable constitutional and statutory provisions and has suppressed innovation by the other branches that do not necessarily transgress widely held social norms. Novel assertions of legislative power, novel interpretations of federal statutes, statutes that are in tension with well-established common law rules and state laws adopted by only a few states are suspect simply because they are novel or rub up against tradition. …
Political Equality, Gender, And Democratic Legitimation In Dobbs, Aliza Forman-Rabinovici, Olatunde C.A. Johnson
Political Equality, Gender, And Democratic Legitimation In Dobbs, Aliza Forman-Rabinovici, Olatunde C.A. Johnson
Faculty Scholarship
This Article examines the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, demonstrating how the Court deploys new arguments about women’s political equality — alongside long-standing arguments about federalism and judicial minimalism — to legitimate the overruling of Roe v. Wade. In contending that abortion rights are better determined by legislatures, the Dobbs Court advances a thin conceptual account of democracy and political equality that ignores a range of anti-democratic features of the political process that shape abortion policy — such as partisan politics and gerrymandering — as well the absence of women in the …
The Right To Counsel In A Neoliberal Age, Zohra Ahmed
The Right To Counsel In A Neoliberal Age, Zohra Ahmed
Faculty Scholarship
Legal scholarship tends to obscure how changes in criminal process relate to broader changes in the political and economic terrain. This Article offers a modest corrective to this tendency. By studying the U.S. Supreme Court’s right to counsel jurisprudence, as it has developed since the mid-70s, I show the pervasive impact of the concurrent rise of neoliberalism on relationships between defendants and their attorneys. Since 1975, the Court has emphasized two concerns in its rulings regarding the right to counsel: choice and autonomy. These, of course, are nominally good things for defendants to have. But by paying close attention to …
Equality Is A Brokered Idea, Robert L. Tsai
Equality Is A Brokered Idea, Robert L. Tsai
Faculty Scholarship
This essay examines the Supreme Court's stunning decision in the census case, Department of Commerce v. New York. I characterize Chief Justice John Roberts' decision to side with the liberals as an example of pursuing the ends of equality by other means – this time, through the rule of reason. Although the appeal was limited in scope, the stakes for political and racial equality were sky high. In blocking the administration from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, 5 members of the Court found the justification the administration gave to be a pretext. In this instance, that lie …
Beyond The Bosses' Constitution: The First Amendment And Class Entrenchment, Jedediah S. Purdy
Beyond The Bosses' Constitution: The First Amendment And Class Entrenchment, Jedediah S. Purdy
Faculty Scholarship
The Supreme Court’s “weaponized” First Amendment has been its strongest antiregulatory tool in recent decades, slashing campaign-finance regulation, public-sector union financing, and pharmaceutical regulation, and threatening a broader remit. Along with others, I have previously criticized these developments as a “new Lochnerism.” In this Essay, part of a Columbia Law Review Symposium, I press beyond these criticisms to diagnose the ideological outlook of these opinions and to propose an alternative. The leading decisions of the antiregulatory First Amendment often associate free speech with a vision of market efficiency; but, I argue, closer to their heart is antistatist fear of entrenchment …
Reading Intellectual Property Law Reform Through The Lens Of Constitutional Equality, Jessica Silbey
Reading Intellectual Property Law Reform Through The Lens Of Constitutional Equality, Jessica Silbey
Faculty Scholarship
In reviewing three books, Robert Spoo's Without Copyright, Bill Herman's The Fight for Digital Rights, and Aram Sinnreich's The Piracy Crusade, for Tulsa Law Review's annual book review volume, this paper explores new themes and structures in Supreme Court cases about intellectual property. Studying the new histories and processes described in the books under review helps reveal constitutional equality frameworks in Supreme Court cases about intellectual property usually understood as cases about congressional deference and property rights. This article explains how many of these Supreme Court cases about IP reflect a range of equality modalities - e.g., …
Presidential Power, Historical Practice, And Legal Constraint, Curtis A. Bradley, Trevor W. Morrison
Presidential Power, Historical Practice, And Legal Constraint, Curtis A. Bradley, Trevor W. Morrison
Faculty Scholarship
The scope of the President’s legal authority is determined in part by historical practice. This Essay aims to better understand how such practice-based law might operate as a constraint on the presidency. Some scholars have suggested that presidential authority has become “unbounded” by law, and is now governed only or primarily by politics. At the same time, there has been growing skepticism about the ability of the familiar political checks on presidential power to work in any systematic or reliable fashion. Skepticism about law’s potential to constrain in this context is heightened by the customary nature of much of what …
Protecting The Right Of Citizens To Aggregate Small Claims Against Businesses, Paul D. Carrington
Protecting The Right Of Citizens To Aggregate Small Claims Against Businesses, Paul D. Carrington
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Defining Corruption And Constitutionalizing Democracy, Deborah Hellman
Defining Corruption And Constitutionalizing Democracy, Deborah Hellman
Faculty Scholarship
The central front in the battle over campaign finance laws is the definition of corruption. The Supreme Court has allowed restrictions on giving and spending money in connection with elections only when they serve to avoid corruption or its appearance. The constitutionality of such laws, therefore, depends on how the Court defines corruption. Over the years, campaign finance cases have conceived of corruption in both broad and narrow terms, with the most recent cases defining it especially narrowly. While supporters and critics of campaign finance laws have argued for and against these different formulations, both sides have missed the more …
On The Constitutionality Of Health Care Reform, Barak D. Richman
On The Constitutionality Of Health Care Reform, Barak D. Richman
Faculty Scholarship
This commentary describes the legal challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Self-Execution And Treaty Duality, Curtis A. Bradley
Self-Execution And Treaty Duality, Curtis A. Bradley
Faculty Scholarship
The Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution states that, along with the Constitution and laws of the United States, treaties made by the United States are part of the "supreme Law of the Land." At least since the Supreme Court's 1829 decision in Foster v. Neilson, however, it has been understood that treaty provisions are enforceable in U.S. courts only if they are "self-executing." The legitimacy and implications of this self-execution requirement have generated substantial controversy and uncertainty among both courts and commentators. This Article attempts to clear up some of the conceptual confusion relating to the self-execution doctrine and, …
Revenge Of Mullaney V. Wilbur: United States V. Booker And The Reassertion Of Judicial Limits On Legislative Power To Define Crimes, The, Ian Weinstein
Faculty Scholarship
This article offers a historically grounded account of the twists and turns in the Supreme Court's sentencing jurisprudence from the end of World War II to the Court's stunning rejection of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. The doctrinal shifts that have roiled this area of the law can best be understood as the Court's effort to respond to the changing political and social landscape of crime in America. In the mid 1970's, legislative activity in the criminal law was largely focused on Model Penal Code influenced recodification. In that era, the Supreme Court took power from an ascendant judiciary and gave …
Law, Politics, And Judicial Review: A Comment On Hasen, Guy-Uriel Charles
Law, Politics, And Judicial Review: A Comment On Hasen, Guy-Uriel Charles
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Contested Right To Vote, Richard Briffault
The Contested Right To Vote, Richard Briffault
Faculty Scholarship
For those who believe the United States is a representative democracy with a government elected by the people, the events of late 2000must have been more than a little disconcerting. In the election for our most important public office – our only truly national office – the candidate who received the most popular votes was declared the loser while his second place opponent, who had received some 540,000 fewer votes, was the winner. This result turned on the outcome in Florida, where approximately 150,000 ballots cast were found not to contain valid votes. Further, due to flaws in ballot design, …
Bush V. Gore As An Equal Protection Case, Richard Briffault
Bush V. Gore As An Equal Protection Case, Richard Briffault
Faculty Scholarship
In Bush v. Gore, the United States Supreme Court applied the Equal Protection Clause to the mechanics of state election administration. The Court invalidated the manual recount of the so-called undervote – that is, ballots that vote-counting machinery had found contained no indication of a vote for President – which the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to determine the winner of Florida's vote for presidential electors in the 2000 presidential election. The United States Supreme Court reasoned that the principles it had previously articulated in applying the Equal Protection Clause to the vote were violated by the Florida court's …
Nixon V. Shrink Missouri Government Pac: The Beginning Of The End Of The Buckley Era?, Richard Briffault
Nixon V. Shrink Missouri Government Pac: The Beginning Of The End Of The Buckley Era?, Richard Briffault
Faculty Scholarship
In Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, the Supreme Court emphatically reaffirmed a key element of the campaign finance doctrine first articulated in Buckley v. Valeo a quarter-century earlier that governments may, consistent with the First Amendment, impose limitations on the size of contributions to election campaigns. Shrink Missouri was significant because the Eighth Circuit decision reversed by the Supreme Court had sought to strengthen the constitutional protection provided to contributions and had invalidated limitations on donations to Missouri state candidates that were actually higher than the limits on donations to federal candidates that the Supreme Court had previously …