Law Commons^™

The Limits Of Enumeration, Richard A. Primus

Articles

According to a well-known principle of constitutional interpretation here identified as the “internal-limits canon,” the powers of Congress must always be construed as authorizing less legislation than a general police power would. This Article argues that the internallimits canon is unsound. Whether the powers of Congress would in practice authorize any legislation that a police power would authorize is a matter of contingency: it depends on the relationship between the powers and the social world at a given time. There is no reason why, at a given time, the powers cannot turn out to authorize any legislation that a police …

The Scope Of Precedent, Randy J. Kozel

Michigan Law Review

The scope of Supreme Court precedent is capacious. Justices of the Court commonly defer to sweeping rationales and elaborate doctrinal frameworks articulated by their predecessors. This practice infuses judicial precedent with the prescriptive power of enacted constitutional and statutory text. The lower federal courts follow suit, regularly abiding by the Supreme Court’s broad pronouncements. These phenomena cannot be explained by—and, indeed, oftentimes subvert—the classic distinction between binding holdings and dispensable dicta. This Article connects the scope of precedent with recurring and foundational debates about the proper ends of judicial interpretation. A precedent’s forward- looking effect should not depend on the …

How To Make Sense Of Supreme Court Standing Cases— – A Plea For The Right Kind Of Realism, Richard H. Fallon Jr.

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

Does The Supreme Court Ignore Standing Problems To Reach The Merits? Evidence (Or Lack Thereof) From The Roberts Court, Heather Elliott

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

Standing And The Role Of Federal Courts: Triple Error Decisions In Clapper V. Amnesty International Usa And City Of Los Angeles V. Lyons, Vicki C. Jackson

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

Governmental Sovereignty Actions, Ann Woolhandler

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

The Limits Of Child Pornography, Carissa Byrne Hessick

Indiana Law Journal

Although the First Amendment ordinarily protects the creation, distribution, and possession of visual images, the Supreme Court has declared that those protections do not apply to child pornography. But the Court has failed to clearly define child pornography as a category of speech. Providing a precise definition of the child pornography exception to the First Amendment has become increasingly important because recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the penalties associated with the creation, distribution, and possession of child pornography.

This Article proposes a clear definition of the child pornography exception. It argues that an image ought to fall …

Substantive Habeas, Kimberly A. Thomas

Articles

Substantive Habeas identifies the US. Supreme Court's recent shift in its habeas jurisprudence from procedure to the substance of habeas review and explores the implications of this change. For decades, the US. Supreme Court has attempted to control the flood of habeas corpus petitions by imposing procedural requirements on prisoners seeking to challenge constitutional error in their cases. These restrictive procedural rules have remained at the center of habeas decision making until recently. Over the past few years, instead of further constraining the procedural gateway for habeas cases, the Supreme Court has shifted its focus to the substance of habeas. …

The Ascending Role Of Crime Vctims In Plea-Bargaining And Beyond, Elizabeth N. Jones

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Gideon V. Wainwright--From A 1963 Perspective, Jerold H. Israel

Articles

Gideon v. Wainwright is more than a “landmark” Supreme Court ruling in the field of constitutional criminal procedure. As evidenced by the range of celebrators of Gideon’s Fiftieth Anniversary (extending far beyond the legal academy) and Gideon’s inclusion in the basic coverage of high school government courses, Gideon today is an icon of the American justice system. I have no quarrel with that iconic status, but I certainly did not see any such potential in Gideon when I analyzed the Court’s ruling shortly after it was announced in March of 1963. I had previously agreed to write an article for …

The Bond Court's Institutional Truce, Monica Hakimi

Articles

As many readers are aware, Bond v. United States is a quirky case. The federal government prosecuted under the implementing legislation for the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) a betrayed wife who used chemical agents to try to harm her husband’s lover. The wife argued that, as applied to her, the implementing legislation violated the Tenth Amendment. She thus raised difficult questions about the scope of the treaty power and of Congress’s authority to implement treaties through the Necessary and Proper Clause. The Bond Court avoided those questions with a clear statement rule: “we can insist on a clear indication that …

Court Of Appeals Of New York - People V. Gajadhar, Joseph Maehr

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Making The Right Call For Confrontation At Felony Sentencing, Shaakirrah R. Sanders

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Felony sentencing courts have discretion to increase punishment based on un-cross-examined testimonial statements about several categories of uncharged, dismissed, or otherwise unproven criminal conduct. Denying defendants an opportunity to cross-examine these categories of sentencing evidence undermines a core principle of natural law as adopted in the Sixth Amendment: those accused of felony crimes have the right to confront adversarial witnesses. This Article contributes to the scholarship surrounding confrontation rights at felony sentencing by cautioning against continued adherence to the most historic Supreme Court case on this issue, Williams v. New York. This Article does so for reasons beyond the unacknowledged …

The Puzzling Presumption Of Reviewability, Nicholas Bagley

Articles

The presumption in favor of judicial review of agency action is a cornerstone of administrative law, accepted by courts and commentators alike as both legally appropriate and obviously desirable. Yet the presumption is puzzling. As with any canon of statutory construction that serves a substantive end, it should find a source in history, positive law, the Constitution, or sound policy considerations. None of these, however, offers a plausible justification for the presumption. As for history, the sort of judicial review that the presumption favors - appellate-style arbitrariness review - was not only unheard of prior to the twentieth century, but …

Enacted Legislative Findings And The Deference Problem, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

The constitutionality of federal legislation sometimes turns on the presence and sufficiency of congressional findings of predicate facts, such as the effects of conduct on interstate commerce, state discrimination justifying the abrogation of sovereign immunity, or market failures justifying intrusions on free speech. Sometimes a congressional committee makes these findings in legislative history. Other times, Congress recites its findings in a statutory preamble, thus enacting its findings as law. Surprisingly, the Supreme Court has not distinguished between enacted and unenacted findings in deciding how much deference to accord congressional findings. This is striking because the difference between enactedness and unenactedness …

The Puzzling Presumption Of Reviewability, Nicholas Bagley

Articles

The presumption in favor of judicial review of agency action is a cornerstone of administrative law, accepted by courts and commentators alike as both legally appropriate and obviously desirable. Yet the presumption is puzzling. As with any canon of statutory construction that serves a substantive end, it should find a source in history, positive law, the Constitution, or sound policy considerations. None of these, however, offers a plausible justification for the presumption. As for history, the sort of judicial review that the presumption favors - appellate-style arbitrariness review - was not only unheard of prior to the twentieth century, but …

Gideon V. Wainwright A Half Century Later, Yale Kamisar

Reviews

When he was nearing the end of his distinguished career, one of my former law professors observed that a dramatic story of a specific case "has the same advantages that a play or a novel has over a general discussion of ethics or political theory." Ms. Houppert illustrates this point in her very first chapter.

Reading Blackstone In The Twenty-First Century And The Twenty-First Century Through Blackstone, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

If the Supreme Court mythologizes Blackstone, it is equally true that Blackstone himself was engaged in something of a mythmaking project. Far from a neutral reporter, Blackstone has some stories to tell, in particular the story of the hero law. The problems associated with using the Commentaries as a transparent window on eighteenth-century American legal norms, however, do not make Blackstone’s text irrelevant today. The chapter concludes with my brief reading of the Commentaries as a critical mirror of some twenty-first-century legal and social structures. That analysis draws on a long-term project, in which I am making my way through …

Gender-Conscious Confrontation: The Accuser-Obligation Approach Revisited, Michael El-Zein

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The Supreme Court’s recent Confrontation Clause decisions have had a dramatic effect on domestic violence prosecution throughout the United States, sparking debate about possible solutions to an increasingly difficult trial process for prosecutors and the survivors they represent. In this Note, I revisit and reinterpret the suggestion by Professor Sherman J. Clark in his article, An Accuser-Obligation Approach to the Confrontation Clause,1 that we should view the Confrontation Clause primarily as an obligation of the accuser rather than a right of the accused. Specifically, I reevaluate Clark’s proposition using a gendered lens, ultimately suggesting a novel solution to the problem …

Конституционно-Правовая Концепция Луиса Брандайза (1856–1941), Leonid G. Berlyavskiy

Leonid G. Berlyavskiy

the article is devoted to the research of the constitutional legal concept by Louis Brandeis – the outstanding American man of law, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He is considered as one of four greatest judges in XX century. Brandeis was possible to become successful in asserting the workers social and labor rights that directly have not been fi xed in the United States Constitution. The “Brandeis Brief” became the essential contribution to USA procedural law. Brandeis was a supporter of the “Living Constitution” conception that is based on the idea of social changes, evolutions of the …

Viva Conditional Federal Spending!, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

From the rise of the New Deal through the constitutional litigation over the Affordable Care Act (ACA), conditional federal spending has been a major target for those who have sought to limit the scope of federal power. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, as the Supreme Court narrowed Congress's power to regulate private primary conduct and state conduct in the last twenty years,' conditional spending looked like the way Congress might be able to circumvent the limitations imposed by the Court's decisions. Thus, members of Congress quickly sought to blunt the impact of the Court's decision to …

The Jurisprudence Of Union, Gil Seinfeld

Articles

The primary goal of this Article is to demonstrate that the interest in national unity does important, independent work in the law of vertical federalism. We have long been accustomed to treating union as a constitutionally operative value in cases involving the duties states owe one another (i.e. horizontal federalism cases), but in cases involving the relationship between the federal government and the states, the interest in union is routinely ignored. This Article shows that, across a wide range of cases relating to the allocation of power between the federal government and the states, the states are constrained by a …

Judicial Takings: Musings On Stop The Beach, James E. Krier

Articles

Judicial takings weren’t much talked about until a few years ago, when the Stop the Beach case made them suddenly salient. The case arose from a Florida statute, enacted in 1961, that authorizes public restoration of eroded beaches by adding sand to widen them seaward. Under the statute, the state has title to any new dry land resulting from restored beaches, meaning that waterfront owners whose land had previously extended to the mean high-tide line end up with public beaches between their land and the water. This, the owners claimed, resulted in a taking of their property, more particularly their …

Election Law's Lochnerian Turn, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

This panel has been asked to consider whether "the Constitution [is] responsible for electoral dysfunction."' My answer is no. The electoral process undeniably falls well short of our aspirations, but it strikes me that we should look to the Supreme Court for an accounting before blaming the Constitution for the deeply unsatisfactory condition in which we find ourselves.

The Doctrine Of Stare Decisis In United States Supreme Court Opinions, Peter J. Aschenbrenner

Peter J. Aschenbrenner

OCL surveys United States Supreme Court cases from 1791 to 1900 for deployment of the phrase stare decisis in opinions and published arguments before the Court. The people, as Madison conceded, make their own precedents; they do this by approving (or not disapproving) official action (in the recent past); in turn, these officials look back to official action taken at time/s more or less remote from the present for their precedents.