Constitutional Law Commons^™

Structuring The Ballot Initiative: Procedures That Do And Don't Work, Richard B. Collins, Dale Oesterle

Publications

No abstract provided.

Overview Of The Role Of Precedent In The Legal System Of The United States, Ana Elena Fierro

LLM Theses and Essays

Traditionally, legal systems have been classified as either Common Law or Civil Law; scholars distinguish these systems based on their origins, as well their attitudes towards stare decisis. Common law considers precedent as a source of binding rules, while civil law does not. However, some scholars consider the methods for legal reasoning to be almost the same in every legal system. These scholars maintain that regardless of the source of law in a particular country, once a judge determines that the facts of one case are similar to those regulated by a certain rule, the judge will apply that particular …

The Six Companies And The Geary Act: A Case Study In Nineteenth-Century Civil Disobedience And Civil Rights Litigation, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

In 1892, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association in San Francisco urged the resident Chinese community to ignore a federal law. The United States Congress had just passed the Geary Act, which required all Chinese laborers living in the United States to register with the collector of internal revenue. Under the act, those who did not register would face arrest and likely deportation. The Benevolent Association, also known as the Six Companies," claimed that the act violated both the constitutional right to due process and treaty obligations with China. To combat the legislation, the association enlisted the assistance of the Chinese …

National Socialism And Constitutional Law: Carl Schmitt, Otto Koellreutter, And The Debate Over The Nature Of The Nazi State, 1993-1937, Peter Caldwell

Cardozo Law Review

On January 30, 1933, President von Hindenburg named Adolf Hitler chancellor of the German Republic. One year later, the conservative (and by then National Socialist) constitutional lawyer, Carl Schmitt noted that Hitler's chancellorship was an event that had "already led beyond the Weimar Constitution." But where had the seizure of power led? What was the nature of the new constitution of the German Empire? As historian David Schoenbaum has noted, 1933 was a kind of "constitutional no man's land"; it was unclear how the principles enumerated in the Nazi Party Program of 1920 would translate into the reality of the …

On War And Justice, Jeffrey C. Tuomala

Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Rehabilitating Federalism, Erwin Chemerinsky

Michigan Law Review

A Review of To Make a Nation: The Rediscovery of American Federalism by Samuel H. Beer

Executive Detention In Time Of War, Richard A. Posner

Michigan Law Review

A Review of In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention Without Trial in Wartime Britain by A.W. Brian Simpson

Taking The Fifth: Reconsidering The Origins Of The Constitutional Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, Eben Moglen

Michigan Law Review

The purpose of this essay is to cast doubt on two basic elements of the received historical wisdom concerning the privilege as it applies to British North America and the early United States. First, early American criminal procedure reflected less tenderness toward the silence of the criminal accused than the received wisdom has claimed. The system could more reasonably be said to have depended on self-incrimination than to have eschewed it, and this dependence increased rather than decreased during the provincial period for reasons intimately connected with the economic and social context of the criminal trial in colonial America.

Second, …

Graveyard Robbery In The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act Of 1993: A Modern Look At The Constitutionality Of Retroactive Taxes, 27 J. Marshall L. Rev. 775 (1994), Andrew G. Schultz

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Machiavellian Jurisprudence: The United States Supreme Court's Doctrinal Approach To Political Speech Under The First Amendment, Garth Molander

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Initiative Enigmas, Richard Collins

Publications

No abstract provided.

Writing Supreme Court Biography: A Single Lens View Of A Nine-Sided Image, Stephen Wermiel

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Voice In Government: The People, Emily Calhoun

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Constitution Of Reasons, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Cass Sunstein's book, The Partial Constitution, brings together a number of his constitutional law essays from the last ten years. During that time, Sunstein has argued, powerfully, for the unconstitutionality of regulatory constraints on access to abortion; for the constitutionality of and the need for regulation of violent pornography; for the constitutionality of limits on both campaign spending and congressional control over public broadcasting; for the deep consistency, conventional wisdom to the contrary notwithstanding, of the Court's repudiation of Lochner in 1937 with its 1974 decision in Roe v. Wade; for the view that we should accord far less deference …

Two Social Movements, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Two social movements in the last fifty years have had a profound impact on our understanding of law and the role of the courts in our system of government. One is the civil rights movement. The demand for greater racial and gender equality and other civil rights has changed the face of the law in countless ways. For example, it has called into question – or at least required a fundamental revision in – the traditional understanding that the courts should interpret the Constitution and laws in accordance with their original meaning. Decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education …

Models Of The Opinion Function Of The Attorney General: A Normative, Descriptive, And Historical Prolegomenon, John O. Mcginnis

Cardozo Law Review

The judiciary is not the only branch of government that offers authoritative constructions of the Constitution and other federal laws. Since the beginning of the Republic, the executive branch has made formal pronouncements on constitutional and statutory issues of such a substantial scope and variety that they rival the opinions of the Supreme Court. A public recording of the executive branch's most authoritative legal voice is contained in forty-three volumes of published opinions of the Attorney General and sixteen volumes of published opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel ("OLC")-the office to which the Attorney General now delegates the great …

The Unitary Executive In A Unified Theory Of Constituional Law: The Problem Of Interpretation, Geoffrey P. Miller

Cardozo Law Review

Among theoretical issues in the area of federal separation of powers, the status of the Unitary Executive may be the most controversial: To what extent does the Constitution establish the President as a national chief executive with ultimate authority over activities of national administration? In this paper, I propose a model of the Unitary Executive which differs in some respects from prior work, including my own work on independent agencies, which I now view as incomplete. The model is grounded in a unified theory of constitutional law-i.e., a theory that includes issues both of rights and of structure within a …

Ways To Think About The Unitary Executive: A Comment On Approaches To Government Structure, Michael Fitts

Cardozo Law Review

Over the past few years public law debates have invariably focused on the relative significance of legal institutions as expressed in formal legislative and administrative structures versus everyday politics in the resolution of policy questions. This emphasis has been particularly evident in the examination of the appropriate structure and distribution of responsibility for administrative decision making, in general, and presidential authority versus agency autonomy, in particular.

Attorney General's Remarks, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law, November 15, 1992, William P. Barr

Cardozo Law Review

While the modem Attorney General is active in a broad array of policy decisions and legal matters, this evening we are concerned only with what was once the core of the Attorney General's duties: legal interpretation within the executive branch. First, I would like to trace the evolution of the office of Attorney General from part-time legal advisor for the new government to head of a major department involved in making policy across a broad range of subjects. Second, I want to discuss the Attorney General's role in interpreting the law, both in rendering legal advice to the executive branch …

On Misreading John Bingham And The Fourteenth Amendment, Richard L. Aynes

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Nearly fifty years ago, Professor Charles Fairman published his seminal article, Does the Fourteenth Amendment Incorporate the Bill of Rights? According to Fairman, it does not. Fairman's analysis of the congressional debates and other historical data on the Fourteenth Amendment led him to conclude that the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Amendment does not make the Bill of Rights applicable to the states. Instead, Fairman argued that the intent of the Amendment's framers is most nearly realized by the use of the Due Process Clause to enforce against the states only those rights “ ‘implicit in the concept of …

The Political Process As Final Solution, Charles M. Freeland

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Is There A Twenty-Seventh Amendment - The Unconstitutionality Of A New 203-Year-Old Amendment, 26 J. Marshall L. Rev. 977 (1993), Christopher M. Kennedy

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Federalist Papers: The Framers Construct An Orrery, Harold H. Bruff

Publications

No abstract provided.

Natural Law Ambiguities, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I share with Fred Schauer the relatively unpopular belief that the positivist insistence that we keep separate the legal "is" from the legal "ought" is a logical prerequisite to meaningful legal criticism, and therefore, in the constitutional context, is a logical prerequisite to meaningful criticism of the Constitution. As Schauer argues, despite the modern inclination to associate positivism with conservatism, the positivist "separation thesis," properly understood, facilitates legal criticism and legal reform, not reactionary acquiescence. If we want to improve law, we must resist the urge to see it through the proverbial rose-colored glasses; we must be clear that a …

Prospective Overruling And The Revival Of ‘Unconstitutional' Statutes, William Michael Treanor, Gene B. Sperling

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court's decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey reshaped the law of abortion in this country. The Court overturned two of its previous decisions invalidating state restrictions on abortions, Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, and it abandoned the trimester analytic framework established in Roe v. Wade. At the time Casey was handed down, twenty states had restrictive abortion statutes on the books that were in conflict with Akron or Thornburgh and which were unenforced. In six of these states, courts had held the statutes unconstitutional. Almost …

Historical Framework For Reviving Constitutional Protection For Property And Contract Rights , James L. Kainen

Faculty Scholarship

Post-New Deal constitutionalism is in search of a theory that justifies judicial intervention on behalf of individual rights while simultaneously avoiding the charge of "Lochnerism."' The dominant historical view dismisses post-bellum substantive due process as an anomalous development in the American constitutional tradition. Under this approach, Lochner represents unbounded protection for economic rights that permitted the judiciary to read laissez faire, pro-business policy preferences into the constitutional text. Today's revisionists have mounted a substantial challenge to the dismissive views of traditionalists. Indeed, some claim Lochner reached the right result, but for the wrong reason. The revisionists characterize substantive due process …

Confirming The Constitution: The Role Of The Senate Judiciary Committee, Stephen Wermiel

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

The Aspirational Constitution, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Firmly embedded in every theory of judicial decisionmaking lies an important set of assumptions about the way government is supposed to work. Sometimes these theories about government are made explicit. More often they are not. Moreover, deeply embedded in every theory of government is a theory of human nature. Although these assumptions about human nature generally remain latent within the larger theory, because they provide the underpinnings for our ideas about the way government is supposed to work, they drive our notions about judicial decisionmaking. For example, the theory of government reflected in the United States Constitution reveals what one …

Negotiated Sovereignty: Intergovernmental Agreements With American Indian Tribes As Models For Expanding First Nations’ Self-Government, David H. Getches

Publications

Constitutional issues related to First Nations sovereignty have dominated Aboriginal affairs in Canada for a considerable period. The constitutional entrenchment of Aboriginal self-government has, however, received a setback with the recent failure of the Charlottetown Accord in October of 1992. Nonetheless, day-to-day issues must be accommodated, even while this more fundamental constitutional question remains unresolved. This paper illustrates the American experience with negotiated intergovernmental agreements between tribes and individual states. These agreements have, for example, resolved jurisdictional disputes over taxation, solid waste disposal, and law enforcement between state governments and tribal authorities. The author suggests that these intergovernmental agreements in …

A New Birth Of Constitutionalism: Genetic Influences And Genetic Defects, Louis Henkin

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.