Constitutional Law Commons^™

Restitution Regimes In Post-Communist Eastern Europe: A Legal Analysis, Sophia Von Rundstedt

LLM Theses and Essays

When the Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe collapsed at the end of the last decade, the opposition, which had been united in their goal to defeat Communism, quickly disintegrated into a variety of factions. One of their tasks was to decide on enacting a constitution, in order to stabilize and entrench the new democratic institutions. Apart from establishing the legal framework for democracy, politicians had to develop strategies to convert the state-run economy into a free-market economy. Such a transition required as a first step the privatization of state property. Legal reform of property rights raises the question: …

Recent Developments, An Appeal By Any Other Name: Congress's Empty Victory Over Habeas Rights--Felker V. Turpin, 116 S. Ct. 2333 (1996), Scott Moss

Publications

No abstract provided.

Necessary And Proper, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this article, the author maintains that, if the courts are to hold Congress to the exercise of its enumerated powers, then they must come to grips with the congressional power: "To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof." While the Necessary and Proper Clause has long been used to greatly expand congressional power, he argues that, to the contrary, it provides a two-part standard against which all national …

Of Pitcairn's Island And American Constitutional Theory, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

Few tales from human experience are more compelling than that of the mutiny on the Bounty and its extraordinary aftermath. On April 28, 1789, crew members of the Bounty, led by Fletcher Christian, seized the ship and its commanding officer, William Bligh. After being set adrift with eighteen sympathizers in the Bounty's launch, Bligh navigated to landfall across 3600 miles of ocean in "the greatest open-boat voyage in the history of the sea." Christian, in the meantime, recognized that only the gallows awaited him in England and so laid plans to start a new and hidden life in the South …

Two- And Three-Dimensional Property Rights, Emily Sherwin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Brief Of Lone Wolf, Principal Chief Of The Kiowas, To The Supreme Court Of The American Indian Nations, S. James Anaya

Publications

No abstract provided.

Real Revolution, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

Federal Reserve: History, Purposes And Functions - An Analysis, Mukunda Lakshamanarao

LLM Theses and Essays

On December 23, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Federal Reserve Act. With this law, Congress established a central banking system which would enable the world’s most powerful industrial nation to manage its money and credit more effectively than ever before. The political and legislative struggle to create the Federal Reserve System was long and often bitter, and this final product in 1913 was the result of a carefully crafted and somewhat tenuous political compromise between national and regional powers. Since its founding, the Federal Reserve System has evolved to meet the needs of a changing financial system …

Bearing Arms In Washington State, Hugh D. Spitzer

Articles

Article I, Section 24 of the Washington State Constitution directly affects two "hot topics" today: first, the increase in the carrying of weapons by the citizenry (particularly concealed weapons, with or without permits) and, second, the increase in "citizen militias" in various parts of the state. Article I, Section 24 also presents interesting issues from a pure state-constitutional-law standpoint, because it represents one of the striking characteristics of state constitutions: these basic documents of civil society for each state represent centuries of buildup and accretion. State constitutional provisions can often be analyzed in terms of layering. In preparing a state …

The First Amendment Comes Of Age: The Emergence Of Free Speech In Twentieth-Century America, G. Edward White

Michigan Law Review

As the number of issues perceived as having First Amendment implications continues to grow, and the coterie of potential beneficiaries of First Amendment protection continues to widen - including not only the traditional oppressed mavericks and despised dissenters but some rich and powerful members from the circles of political and economic orthodoxy - alarms have been sounded. Another period of stocktaking for free speech theory appears to be dawning, and some recent commentators have proposed a retrenchment from the long twentieth- century progression of increasingly speech-protective interpretations of the First Amendment. At the heart of the retrenchment literature lies the …

Comment On The First Slave (And Why He Matters) By Jonathan Bush, Peter Kolchin

Cardozo Law Review

In his Article The First Slave (And Why He Matters), Professor Jonathan Bush returns to a persistent question in the history of the colonial Chesapeake: the status of blacks in the seventeenth century. He frames this question, however, in a new way. Rather than seeking to determine whether or not blacks were slaves before the codification of slave law-a largely unanswerable question that revolves, at least in part, around what one means by "slaves"-he asks, how could the English have imposed slavery on blacks in America when slavery was non-existent in England and under English law? In response, he …

Abolitionist Feminism, Moral Slavery, And The Constitution: “On The Same Platform Of Human Rights”, David A.J. Richards

Cardozo Law Review

The analogy between race and gender plays an increasingly important role in the interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, interpretive arguments about the analogy make little or no reference to the abolitionist historical background of the Reconstruction Amendments in general and the Fourteenth Amendment in particular. This might make some sense if the only legitimate interpretive appeal to history were Raoul Berger's version of originalism, namely, the specific denoted things (including persons and practices) to which the relevant drafters and ratifiers of the pertinent constitutional text would or would not have applied the language in …

Pretrial Publicity In Criminal Cases Of National Notoriety: Constructing A Remedy For The Remediless Wrong , Robert Hardaway, Douglas B. Tumminello

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Fictions And Meritocratic Success Stories, Robin West

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Slavery Of Emancipation, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

The Thirteenth Amendment abolishes the institution of slavery rather than freeing individual slaves. Yet it quickly came to stand for little more than granting universal rights to make labor contracts and to leave service. This article develops a distinction between abolishing an institution and reclassifying individuals within it. Drawing on the comparative history of slavery, it shows that the institution of slavery has generally included mechanisms for the manumission of slaves and their passage into a liminal status combining self-ownership with social subordination and relative isolation. A critical account of the Antelope litigation shows that proponents of mass manumission still …

The Slavery Of Emancipation, Guyora Binder

Cardozo Law Review

The Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution commands that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist." What has been the effect of this command?

It will serve my present purpose to offer the following toosimple answer to this complex question: the Thirteenth Amendment secured little more than the manumission of slaves already practically freed by the friction of war. It guaranteed, in Confederate General Robert Richardson's now well-known phrase, "nothing but freedom."

Supposing this answer to be true, a further question presents itself: Did the Thirteenth Amendment's effect fulfill its command? Did universal manumission abolish slavery?

A full answer to …

Comments On James Oakes, “The Compromising Expedient”, Robert A. Burt

Cardozo Law Review

Professor Oakes's excellent paper convincingly characterizes the 1787 Constitution as a reactionary abandonment of the antislavery ethos of the 1776 Revolution that had appeared to set the new country on a course toward the abolition of slavery. "What," he asks, "accounts for the Constitution's failure to promote the cause already pushed so far by the Revolution?" If we could answer this question, we might not only explain the reactionary falling away from the Revolution, but also shed light on the historically parallel phenomena that Oakes identifies at the end of his paper-the abandonment of the emancipatory impulse from the Civil …

Comment On Earl Maltz, Kenneth M. Stampp

Cardozo Law Review

Professor Earl Maltz has written an excellent brief account of Benjamin R. Curtis's judicial record as it relates to slavery, including his dissenting argument in the famous Dred Scott case. He found Curtis to be a perfect example of mid-nineteenth century Northern conservative Whigs-the "Cotton Whigs," as their antislavery critics called them. They disliked slavery, but, in equal measure, they disliked those who agitated against it. Both Southern proslavery extremists and Northern abolitionists appalled them, for both groups endangered the Union. Conservative Whig President Millard Fillmore would not have appointed Curtis to the Supreme Court if he had shared the …

The Fifteenth Amendment And "Political Rights", Akhil Reed Amar

Cardozo Law Review

Professor Xi Wang has offered us an altogether exemplary paper on black suffrage. Rather than trying to criticize it, I shall attempt to extend it by picking up where he left off. My main text is the Fifteenth Amendment. I would like to suggest that the best interpretation of the Fifteenth Amendment would read it as encompassing a cluster of political rights; the Amendment protects not only the right to vote, but also the right to hold office, the right to be voted for, the right to vote in a legislature, the right to serve on a jury, and even …

Black Suffrage And The Redefinition Of American Freedom, 1860-1870, Xi Wang

Cardozo Law Review

One of the most important outcomes of the Civil War was the establishment of a new constitutional order. Under this new order, African Americans, a people whose essential human rights had been denied under the old constitutional order, were constitutionally emancipated from slavery and recognized as American citizens. They received the privileges and immunities that white Americans had automatically assumed. Male black Americans also received the right to vote. This new order, as embraced by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, was a truly remarkable achievement of Reconstruction. What is additionally significant is that these Amendments became …

Comment On Donald Nieman's Paper, Randall Kennedy

Cardozo Law Review

I have two responses to Professor Neiman's paper. One emphasizes a point he makes. The other disagrees a bit with his reading of the promise of Reconstruction.

The Unlikely Hero Of Dred Scott: Benjamin Robbins Curtis And The Constitutional Law Of Slavery, Earl M. Maltz

Cardozo Law Review

The standard account portrays Dred Scott v. Sandford as a story of villains and heroes. The villains are the members of the majority, led by Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, who concluded that descendants of slaves could never become citizens of the Union and that Congress could not outlaw slavery in the territories. The heroes, on the other hand, are the two dissenters, John McLean and Benjamin Robbins Curtis, who rejected these conclusions and determined that Scott should be deemed a free man. McLean's opinion, however, was not tightly reasoned and was rather clearly designed to advance his presidential ambitions; …

Bondage, Freedom & The Constitution, Eric Foner

Cardozo Law Review

Linking the papers on this most interesting panel are questions that center on the meaning of freedom. What is freedom? Who has the power to define what freedom is? What are the consequences of slavery and its abolition for Americans' understandings of freedom? In one way or another, these papers, as well as many others in this conference, illuminate these questions.

Madisonian Multiculturalism, Alexandra Natapoff

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Toward A "Due Foundation" For The Separation Of Powers: The Federalist Papers As Political Narrative, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

During the past quarter century, lawyers have become strangely comfortable with descriptions of our government's structure that would, to an untutored ear, speak contradiction. We are quite satisfied to say that governmental powers are separate and shared, departments distinct and overlapping, functions autonomous and interdependent. We have settled into these contradictions as we would a roomy chair: talking this way is no longer controversial but taken for granted, uttered with a knowing wink, perceived as the starting point of sophisticated analysis. A not "entirely separate," but "entirely free," set of departments is the only way we can think about the …

To Accomplish Fairness And Justice: Substantive Due Process, 30 J. Marshall L. Rev. 95 (1996), James W. Hilliard

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Denial Of A State Constitutional Right To Bail In Juvenile Proceedings: The Need For Reassessment In Washington State, Kathleen A. Baldi

Seattle University Law Review

Article I, section 20 of the Washington Constitution states that "[a]ll persons charged with crimes shall be bailable by sufficient sureties, except for capital offenses when the proof is evident, or the presumption great." Despite seemingly unequivocal language that this constitutional provision is applicable to "all persons," the Washington Supreme Court, in Estes v. Hopp, declared that juveniles do not have a constitutional right to bail. The Estes court engaged in little constitutional analysis, but instead, reasoned that juvenile proceedings are civil in nature and that article 1, section 20 applies only in criminal proceedings. Central to the Estes …

California's Proposition 187 - Does It Mean What It Says - Does It Say What It Means - A Textual And Constitutional Analysis, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Democracy And Feminism , Tracy E. Higgins

Faculty Scholarship

Although feminist legal theory has had an important impact on most areas of legal doctrine and theory over the last two decades, its contribution to the debate over constitutional interpretation has been comparatively small. In this Article, Professor Higgins explores reasons for the limited dialogue between mainstream constitutional theory and feminist theory concerning questions of democracy, constitutionalism, and judicial review. She argues that mainstream constitutional theory tends to take for granted the capacity of the individual to make choices, leaving the social construction of those choices largely unexamined. In contrast, feminist legal theory's emphasis on the importance of constraints on …

What's In A Name - Nothing Good If It's Friday: The Seventh Circuit Invalidates Good Friday Public School Holiday, 29 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1031 (1996), Joanne Yasus

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.