Constitutional Law Commons^™

Lilly V. Virginia: A Chance To Reconceptualize The Confrontation Right, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

In Lilly v. Virginia, the Supreme Court once again has the opportunity to grapple with the meaning of the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendmel).t. The basic facts of Lilly are simple, for they present the ageold problem of accomplice confessions. Three men, Gary Barker and Ben and Mark Lilly, went on a crime spree, during which one of them shot to death a young man they had robbed and kidnaped. Ben Lilly was charged with being the triggerman, and Barker testified to that effect at Ben's trial. Mark did not testify. But Mark had made a statement to the …

Agency, Equality, And Antidiscrimination Law , Tracy E. Higgins, Laura A. Rosenbury

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court increasingly has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause as a mandate for the state to treat citizens as if they were equal-as a limitation on the state's ability to draw distinctions on the basis of characteristics such as race and, to a lesser extent, gender. In the context of race, the Court has struck down not only race-specific policies designed to harm the historically oppressed, but race conscious policies designed to foster racial equality. Although in theory the Court has left open the possibility that benign uses of race may be constitutional under some set of facts, in …

Beyond The Hero Judge: Institutional Reform Litigation As Litigation, Margo Schlanger

Reviews

In 1955, in its second decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court suggested that federal courts might be called upon to engage in long-term oversight of once-segregated schools. Through the 1960s, southern resistance pushed federal district and appellate judges to turn that possibility into a reality. The impact of this saga on litigation practice extended beyond school desegregation, and even beyond the struggle for African-American equality; through implementation of Brown, the nation’s litigants, lawyers, and judges grew accustomed both to issuance of permanent injunctions against state and local public institutions, and to extended court oversight of compliance. …

State Immunity Waivers For Suits By The United States, Evan H. Caminker

Articles

The Supreme Court closed this millennium with a virtual celebration of state sovereignty, protecting state authority from the reach of congressional power in several significant ways. In a pair of cases, Seminole Tribe v. Florida1 and Alden v. Maine,2 the Court held that states enjoy a constitutional immunity from being sued without their consent. In Seminole Tribe, the Court opined that "the background principle of state sovereign immunity embodied in the Eleventh Amendment"3 protects states from unconsented suits in federal court. In Alden, the Court held that this principle is not merely embodied in the Eleventh Amendment but rather is …

Brief On Appeal Of Defendant-Appellant The Board Of Education Of The Kiryas Joel Union Free School District, George Shebitz, Julia R. Cohen, Nahal Motamed, Nathan Lewin, Richard W. Garnett, Anthony J. Bellia Jr.

Court Briefs

No. 81319
Louis Grumet v. George Pataki

From the Introduction

Chapter 390 is tainted only by its history. On its face, it is a neutral law that raises no serious constitutional doubt. Its objective, as described by the Appellate Division -- "to create a constitutionally valid educational program which meets the special education needs of the disabled students residing in the Village of Kiryas Joel, Orange County" -- is unquestionably legitimate. All the statutory criteria it specifies were ratified by this Court in its Kiryas Joel II opinion as "related to legitimate educational concerns." 90 N.Y. 2d at 72. What …

Are Tax "Benefits" Constitutionally Equivalent To Direct Expenditures?, Edward A. Zelinsky

Articles

In this Article, Professor Zelinsky discusses whether tax "benefits" are constitutionally equivalent to direct expenditures. He argues that, in constitutional contexts, the generic categories "tax" and "direct expenditure" are unhelpful and often misleading, in light of the diverse and overlapping nature of different tax laws and direct spending programs, the disparate perspectives from which equivalence can be assessed, and the variety of constitutional contexts in which the equivalence issue must be addressed. Professor Zelinsky thus calls for case-by-case determinations of equivalence considering particular constitutional contexts, the appropriate perspective in each of those contexts, and the specific tax and direct spending …

Rights Against Rules: The Moral Structure Of American Constitutional Law, Matthew D. Adler

Michigan Law Review

The Bill of Rights, by means of open-ended terms such as "freedom of speech," "equal protection," or "due process," refers to moral criteria, which take on constitutional status by virtue of being thus referenced. We can disagree about whether the proper methodology for judicial application of these criteria is originalist or nonoriginalist. The originalist looks, not to the true content of the moral criteria named by the Constitution, but to the framers' beliefs about that content; the nonoriginalist tries to determine what the criteria truly require, and ignores or gives less weight to the framers' views. Bracketing this disagreement, however, …

The Supreme Court As An Enforcement Agency, Harold J. Krent

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Autopoiesis And The "Relative Autonomy" Of Law, Hugh Baxter

Cardozo Law Review

Recent accounts of the relation between law and other social spheres have emphasized law's "relative autonomy." The intuition behind the "relative autonomy" formula is that law is neither wholly independent of, nor entirely reducible to, political, economic and other social processes. Sensible as this intuition is, however, the idea of "relative autonomy" by itself remains purely negative. It excludes two unpalatable extremes-pure formalism and pure instrumentalism-but it does not by itself characterize, in positive theoretical terms, the relation between law and other social discourses or practices.

This Article examines an attempt in recent German social thought to specify theoretically the …

L'Indépendance Judiciaire Et La Cour Suprême: Reconstruction Historique Douteuse Et Théorie Constitutionnelle De Complaisance, Jean Leclair, Yves-Marie Morissette

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

The recent decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Reference re: Remuneration of Judges in the Provincial Court of Prince Edward Island has given judicial independence a surprising interpretation. A majority of the Court stated that this principle requires legislative bodies to establish independent procedures for setting judicial salaries. The Court maintained that the basis of judicial independence is to be found in the preamble of the Constitution Act, 1867, rather than the express provisions of the constitutional text. The authors argue in Part I of this article that the Court transformed fundamentally and without reason traditional conceptions …

After Legal Indeterminacy: Carl Schmitt And The National Socialist Legal Order, 1933-1936, William E. Scheuerman

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Balancing The Scales: The 1996 Telecommunications Act And Eleventh Amendment Immunity, Cynthia L. Bauerly

Federal Communications Law Journal

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 explicitly created a role for federal courts in the interconnection process. However, parties' ability to seek federal review of interconnection agreements is no longer as straightforward as the language of the Act implies. The Supreme Court's unnecessarily novel and narrow reading of Eleventh Amendment immunity in Seminole Tribe v. Florida renders unenforceable the federal review provisions of the Act against state regulatory commissions. While some interconnection agreements may find their way into federal court, for example, where a party seeking to interconnect sues an incumbent provider instead of the state commission, enforcement of a federal …

Raines V. Byrd: A Death Knell For The Congressional Suit?, Adam L. Blank

Mercer Law Review

In Raines v. Byrd, the Supreme Court of the United States denied standing to six members of Congress who challenged the constitutionality of the Line Item Veto Act. In its first consideration of congressional standing in nearly two decades, the Court held that a perceived diminution in institutional voting strength did not create a sufficiently particularized injury in fact to satisfy the Article III "case or controversy" requirement.

Off Broadway: The Supreme Court's Criminal Law Decisions In The 1996 Term Take Second Stage In An Historic Term, William E. Hellerstein

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Note To Our Readers, The Editors

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Does New York's Death Penalty Statute Violate The New York Constitution?, Honorable Stewart F. Hancock Jr., Christopher Quinn, Richard Klein

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rights Against Rules: The Moral Structure Of American Constitutional Law, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Constitutional rights are conventionally thought to be "personal" rights. The successful constitutional litigant is thought to have a valid claim that some constitutional wrong has or would be been done "to her"; the case of "overbreadth," where a litigant prevails even though her own conduct is permissibly regulated, is thought to be unique to the First Amendment. This "personal" or "as-applied" view of constitutional adjudication has been consistently and pervasively endorsed by the Supreme Court, and is standardly adopted by legal scholars.

In this Article, I argue that the conventional view is incorrect. Constitutional rights, I claim, are rights against …

Stop ... Go Directly To Jail, Do Not Pass Go, And Do Not Ask For A Notary, 31 J. Marshall L. Rev. 879 (1998), R. Jason Richards

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Thou Shalt Not Sue The Church: Denying Court Access To Ministerial Employees, Shawna Meyer Eikenberry

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Full Faith And Credit And The Equity Conflict, Polly J. Price

Faculty Articles

As this Article relates, the current problem with interstate en­forcement of injunctions and other equitable decrees is illustrated by the Court's confusion in Baker. The Court reached the correct result in the case before it, but the basic problems of "equity con­flict" remain unresolved. Both the Court's opinion and the two con­currences were unsatisfactory because the Court failed to address the key underlying issue of whether or to what extent courts may rely on state law to enjoin extraterritorial conduct. Had the Court focused on this issue, I argue, it could have based its decision upon a more appealing rationale. …

Race, Angst And Capital Punishment: The Burger Court's Existential Struggle, Katherine R. Kruse

Scholarly Works

This article chronicles the Burger Court's inability to fashion a suitable remedy for racism in the discretionary system of capital sentencing. The article discusses the Court's initial response, “remedial paralysis,” which is evident, not only in McGautha v. California, where the Court refused to find that the Due Process Clause was violated by standardless death sentencing, but also in Furman v. Georgia, where the Court decided to abolish the death penalty. The article further explores the Court's reinstatement of the death penalty, and two of the Court's forays into “bad faith” denial that sustained the death penalty, particularly the Court's …

Deconstructing Homo[Genous] Americanus: The White Ethnic Immigrant Narrative And Its Exclusionary Effect, Sylvia R. Lazos

Scholarly Works

This Article examines why the assumption of sameness is so pervasive in our society, and why the very idea of diversity is so resisted. The assumption and the corollary mandate to be the same are embedded in American cultural ideology, in how Americans think of themselves, in the stories that we tell regarding who we are and where we come from, in how we construct our values and norms, and in how Americans make sense of our chaotic social world. The assumption and mandate of sameness not only influence American culture, they also guide judges' thinking and decision-making in key …

Understanding Mahon In Historical Context, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Despite its enormous influence on constitutional law, Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon is just such an opinion; the primary purpose of the author’s article Jam for Justice Holmes: Reassessing the Significance of Mahon is to clarify Holmes's intent by placing the opinion in historical context and in the context of Holmes's other opinions. While other scholars have also sought to place Mahon in context, his account differs in large part because of its recognition, as part of the background of Mahon, of a separate line of cases involving businesses affected with a public interest.

The author argues that at …

Schoolhouses, Courthouses, And Statehouses: Educational Finance, Constitutional Structure, And The Separation Of Powers Doctrine, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

State Of Ohio V. Richard D. Chilton And State Of Ohio V. John W. Terry: The Suppression Hearing And Trial Transcripts, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

This appendix to Deciding the Stop and Frisk Cases: A Look Inside the Supreme Court’s Conference, 72 St. John’s L. Rev. 749 (1998), includes Biographical Information on the Participants in the Case; and transcripts of the complete pretrial and trial proceedings in the 1964 criminal prosecutions of Richard Chilton and John Terry, arranged by Prof. Barrett to create the organization reflected in the Table of Contents at the beginning of the appendix. Footnotes were added to provide citations and, in a few instances, to clarify the text. Bracketed material was added to correct obvious slips of the tongue or the …

Jam For Justice Holmes: Reassessing The Significance Of Mahon, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

When courts and commentators discuss Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, they use the same word with remarkable regularity: famous. Mahon has achieved this fame in part because it was the occasion for conflict between judicial giants, and because the result seems ironic. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.--the great Lochner dissenter and a jurist generally considered a champion of judicial deference to legislatures in the sphere of economic decision-making--wrote the opinion striking down a Pennsylvania statute barring coal mining that could cause the surface to cave-in. Sharply dissenting from Holmes's opinion was his consistent ally on the Court, Justice Louis …

Breard And The Federal Power To Require Compliance With Icj Orders Of Provisional Measures, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Among the puzzling aspects of the Breard episode was the Clinton administration's claim that the decision whether or not to comply with the Order of the International Court of Justice requiring the postponement of Breard's execution lay exclusively in the hands of the Governor of Virginia. The ICJ's Order provided that"[t]he United States should take all measures at its disposal to ensure that Angel Francisco Breard is not executed pending the final decision in these proceedings." The Clinton administration argued that the Order was not binding, but it also took the position that, even if the order were binding, …

Night And Day: Coeur D’Alene, Breard, And The Unraveling Of The Prospective-Retrospective Distinction In Eleventh Amendment Doctrine, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court's decision in Edelman v. Jordan has been read to establish a distinction between suits seeking prospective relief from a state official's violation of federal law (which are not barred by the Eleventh Amendment under Ex parte Young) and suits seeking retrospective relief from the state (which are barred by the Eleventh Amendment, even if the officer is the defendant). Commentators and the lower courts have long had difficulty understanding and applying the distinction. Until recently, the principal effect of the Edelman line of cases has been to bar suits seeking damages and similar monetary relief from …

Judicial Exclusivity And Political Instability, Neal Devins, Louis Fisher

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Confrontation: The Search For Basic Principles, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the accused in a criminal prosecution the right "to be confronted with the Witnesses against him."' The Confrontation Clause clearly applies to those witnesses who testify against the accused at trial. Moreover, it is clear enough that confrontation ordinarily includes the accused's right to have those witnesses brought "face-toface," in the time-honored phrase, when they testify.2 But confrontation is much more than this "face-to-face" right. It also comprehends the right to have witnesses give their testimony under oath and to subject them to crossexamination. 3 Indeed, the Supreme Court has treated the accused's …