Constitutional Law Commons^™

Transforming The Privately Owned Shopping Center Into A Public Forum: Pruneyard Shopping Center V. Robins, James M. Mccauley

University of Richmond Law Review

A recent Supreme Court decision has affirmed a state's choice to provide its citizens access to privately owned shopping centers for the purpose of exercising free speech and petition rights. The United States Supreme Court in Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins held that state consitutional provisions permitting individuals to exercise free speech and petition rights on private shopping center property do not violate the shopping center owner's property rights under the fifth and fourteenth amendments or his free speech rights under the first and fourteenth amendments. There exists a delicate balance between the competing in- terests of the shopping center …

A Comment On The Burger Court And "Judicial Activism", Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

Federalism As A Fundamental Value: National League Of Cities In Perspective, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

Commentary: Rummel V. Estelle: Mockingbirds Among The Brethren, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

In this commentary Professor Lasson discusses the Supreme Court's decision in Rummel v. Estelle and reveals a poignant personal memorandum that reflects the analysis of human values necessarily performed by whichever Justice cast the deciding vote.

The Supreme Court And Press Fashions, Robert Mason

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Torts, Christina B. Whitman

Articles

In this Article, I analyze the significance of the overlap between state tort law remedies and remedies under section 1983. I conclude that the dissatisfaction with section 1983 cannot fairly be attributed to the fact that it has been read to provide a remedy that "supplements" state law. I argue that most of the anxiety over constitutional damage actions under section 1983 can be understood - and resolved - only by focusing on two other questions. The first of these concerns the appropriate reach of the Constitution. Ambivalence about section 1983 reflects, in part, a fear that the federal Constitution …

The Equal Protection Clause In The Supreme Court 1873-1903, Richard S. Kay

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Fifth Amendment And The Inference Of Guilt From Silence: Griffin V. California After Fifteen Years, Donald B. Ayer

Michigan Law Review

This Article will begin with an examination of the historic (and present) purposes underlying the fifth amendment privilege against self-incrimination, upon which any justification of the no-comment rule must ultimately rest. It will explore the danger that these purposes may be thwarted not only when defendants are actually compelled to be witnesses against themselves, but also when significant burdens are placed on defendants who choose not to testify. In Griffin, the Court reasoned that comment on the defendant's silence amounted to such an impermissible burden. But the Court failed to examine the weight of this burden. This failure makes …

The Equal Protection Clause In The Supreme Court, 1873-1903, Richard Kay

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Public Figures And Malice: Recent Supreme Court Decisions Restricting The Constitutional Privilege, Ann M. Annase, Scott A. Milburn

University of Richmond Law Review

Historically, Americans have placed great importance on both their good name and their right to free speech. "As ingrained as both of these ideals are in the very fabric of our society, they sometimes run counter to each other." The Supreme Court has tried to balance these conflicting ideals in libel cases involving the first amendment's protection of freedom of the press. In the 1964 case of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the Court held that the first amendment's constitutional privilege extends to those publishing defamatory statements concerning official conduct, and that a plaintiff in such a case could …

Federalism And Social Change, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

A familiar passage in Professors Hart and Wechsler's casebook likens the relationship between federal and state law to that which exists between statutes and the common law. The underlying idea is that federal law rests upon a substructure of state law. "It builds upon legal relationships established by the states, altering or supplanting them only so far as necessary for [its] special purpose."' A similar relationship exists between state and federal judicial systems. State courts are courts of general jurisdiction, assumed to have authority to adjudicate controversies unless Congress has displaced them by conferring exclusive jurisdiction on federal courts. Federal …

The Burger Court, 1969-1979: Continuity And Contras, William F. Swindler

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Fourth Amendment Standing And Expectations Of Privacy: Rakas V. Illinois And New Directions For Some Old Concepts, Richard A. Williamson

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Roe V. Wade And The Lesson Of The Pre-Roe Case Law, Richard Gregory Morgan

Michigan Law Review

The politically unsettled and judicially confused law of abortion in 1971 and 1972, when the Court twice heard arguments and deliberated Roe, should have warned it not to decide the case. By doing so; the Court thrust itself into a political debate and stunted the development of a thoughtful lower-court case law. If the Court did perceive the warnings but continued toward a decision anyway, perhaps trusting that its own considerable wits would devise an answer the lower courts had not, the result suggests that the judicial system's axioms deserve more respect than they received. This Article, by showing …

Rewriting Roe V. Wade, Donald H. Regan

Articles

Roe v. Wade is one of the most controversial cases the Supreme Court has decided. The result in the case - the establishment of a constitutional right to abortion - was controversial enough. Beyond that, even people who approve of the result have been dissatisfied with the Court's opinion. Others before me have attempted to explain how a better opinion could have been written. It seems to me, however, that the most promising argument in support of the result of Roe has not yet been made. This essay contains my suggestions for "rewriting" Roe v. Wade

Rites Of Passage: Race, The Supreme Court, And The Constitution, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Confrontation, Peter K. Westen

Michigan Law Review

The Supreme Court seems to be setting the stage for a long-awaited examination of the confrontation clause. It has been ten years since the Court endeavored in Dutton v. Evans to reconcile the evidentiary rules of hearsay with the constitutional commands of confrontation. Dutton came at the tail end of a string of confrontation cases that the Court had resolved without apparent difficulty. Not surprisingly, the Court approached Dutton in the evident belief that it could resolve the constitutional problems of hearsay once and for all. Instead, after oral argument in 1969 and a rehearing in 1970, the Court found …

Justice Stevens: The First Three Terms, George C. Lamb, Iii, Charles L. Schlumberger, D. J. Simonetti, James D. Spratt Jr., Joel R. Tew, Douglas W. Ey, Jr. Special Projects Editor

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Special Project undertakes an examination of Justice Stevens' Supreme Court opinions in an effort to identify his philosophical orientations, to evaluate the consistency of his views, and to determine the extent to which he has developed workable analytical methods. To achieve these goals, Justice Stevens' opinions are examined in three contexts: first, the area of federal-state relations,including commerce clause and supremacy clause questions; second, the individual rights area, emphasizing criminal constitutional and first amendment issues, and problems of fifth and fourteenth amendment analysis; and third, questions concerning the proper role of the Supreme Court in the constitutional scheme. Even …

Presidential Power And Administrative Rulemaking, Harold H. Bruff

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Body Of John Merryman: Ex Parte Merryman, A Case Of Executive-Judicial Conflict Over The Suspension Of Habeas Corpus, Eric Paul Anderson

All Master's Theses

At the outbreak of the Civil War the Federal military arrested certain people whose loyalty was suspect. One victim, John Merryman, attempted to free himself by petitioning for a writ of habeas corpus. However, President Lincoln authorized the military to suspend the writ in such cases. The matter came before Chief Justice Taney who disputed the president's authority to suspend the writ and ruled in Merryman's favor. This thesis recounts the history of the habeas corpus process in Anglo-American law and its inclusion in the Constitution, Merryman's role in the first hostilities, his arrest, and the attempt to free him. …

The Due Process Mandate And The Constitutionality Of Admiralty Arrests And Attachments Pursuant To Supplemental Rules B And C, Jon L. Goodman

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In the past decade, the area of procedural due process, including traditional doctrines of in rem and quasi in rem jurisdiction, has undergone a constitutional facelift. As a result, two of admiralty's most extraordinary features--maritime attachment and garnishment and actions in rem--have been questioned from a constitutional standpoint.

The United States Supreme Court inaugurated the new era with its decision in Sniadach v. Family Finance Corp. In that case, the Court first began changing its procedural due process philosophy by broadening its conception of constitutionally protected forms of property. Having narrowly addressed itself to the question of what constitute constitutionally …

Aussergesetzliche Masstabe In Der Rechtspreching Des Supreme Court Der Vereinigten Staaten, Donald P. Kommers, Kenneth Ripple

Journal Articles

Zweck der folgenden Ausführungen ist die Darlegung der Bedeutung außergesetz licher Urteilsmaßstäbe in der amerikanischen Verfassungsrechtsprechung. Dabei sollen vor allem diejenigen Urteilskriterien untersucht werden, die den größten Einfluß auf das amerikanische Verfassungsrecht haben dürften; sie sollen im Kontext des gegen wärtigen case law untersucht werden.

Book Review, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

Private Speech And The Private Forum: Givhan V. Western Line School District, Frederick Schauer

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Speech And Speech - Obscenity And Obscenity: An Exercise In The Interpretation Of Constitutional Language, Frederick Schauer

Faculty Publications

Commentators have criticized the Supreme Court's use of the "two-level" theory of speech to place obscenity beyond the pale of the first amendment. They charge the Court with shirking the task of balancing first amendment values and the states' interests in regulating obscene material. Professor Schauer meets this criticism by examining the meaning of the word "speech" in the context of the purposes of the first amendment and the Constitution as a whole. He concludes that "speech"does not include a category.of obscenity'that performs the function of a surrogate sexual act and is lacking in communicative content. The Court's treatment of …

Taking Supreme Court Opinions Seriously, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Taking Supreme Court opinions seriously emerged as a topic of discussion at a lunch I attended last year with several Supreme Court law clerks. Somehow we came round to a particular three-judge district court case which I confidently opined was "certain" to be reversed on the basis of principles announced in prior opinions. The clerks were models of politeness and circumspection; never once did they even intimate that the judgment would (by divided vote) be affirmed. But shortly after I had announced my views of that case, one of the clerks began to prod me, asking whether I simply took …

Forfeiture By Guilty Plea--A Reply, Peter Westen

Michigan Law Review

I will begin by describing what I think Professor Saltzburg and I both mean by a ''legal theory." I then apply that standard to test the validity of the two theories at issue here, first Professor Saltzburg's, then mine. I next discuss a third theory that is independent of both Professor Saltzburg's and mine, viz., that whether a constitutional claim survives a guilty plea depends on whether it is ''jurisdictional." Finally, I comment generally on the concept of forfeiture and its influence on the way one conceives of constitutional rights.

Pleas Of Guilty And The Loss Of Constitutional Rights: The Current Price Of Pleading Guilty, Stephen A. Saltzburg

Michigan Law Review

This Article proposes the same basic rule as Westen's to explain the Supreme Court's decisions, but for very different reasons which require several modifications of the Westen rule. I argue that all the guilty-plea cases, properly viewed, are consistent with, and therefore can be read as evidence of, a theory more easily applied than articulated by the Court: that some constitutional rights are largely premised on notions of litigation avoidance, that their "avoidance" rationales must be respected, and that these rights therefore prevent governments from establishing procedural rules that force criminal defendants to go to trial-to choose more rather than …

The Eighteenth-Century Background Of John Marshall's Constitutional Jurisprudence, William E. Nelson

Michigan Law Review

This analysis of Marshall's constitutional jurisprudence avoids the pitfalls of previous theories. It does not see the Federalist political program as the source of Marshall's constitutional doctrines and thus does not need to explain how Marshall qualified his political principles or how he convinced non-Federalist judges to accept them. Instead, this essay argues that legal, not political, principles underlay Marshall's jurisprudence, but it attempts to understand those principles in a manner consistent with the unavoidable twentieth-century assumption that law is a body of flexible rules responsive to social reality rather than a series of immutable, unambiguous doctrines derived from a …

Separation Of Powers And The Scope Of Federal Equitable Remedies, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.