Constitutional Law Commons^™

Guns, Originalism, And Cultural Cognition, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

In a legal regime whose canonical text is Marbury v. Madison, it should be unremarkable that the Supreme Court's actions are bounded rather severely by public opinion. What makes the proposition remarkable – enough to be well worth Barry Friedman's time – is also what makes Marbury remarkable: namely, that judges so often go out of their way to deny it. Though not unheard of, it is rare for a judge to advertise that the content of a constitutional rule she is announcing is motivated by public opinion. Such an admission would be self-defeating, since it invites the charge …

The So-Called Right To Privacy, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

The constitutional right to privacy has been a conservative bugaboo ever since Justice Douglas introduced it into the United States Reports in Griswold v. Connecticut. Reference to the "so-called" right to privacy has become code for the view that the right is doctrinally recognized but not in fact constitutionally enshrined. This Article argues that the constitutional right to privacy is no more. The two rights most associated historically with the right to privacy are abortion and intimate sexual conduct, yet Gonzales v. Carhart and Lawrence v. Texas made clear that neither of these rights is presently justified by its …

The Politics Of Nature: Climate Change, Environmental Law, And Democracy, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholars’ discussions of climate change assume that the issue is one mainly of engineering incentives, and that “environmental values” are too weak, vague, or both to spur political action to address the emerging crisis. This Article gives reason to believe otherwise. The major natural resource and environmental statutes, from the acts creating national forests and parks to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, have emerged from precisely the activity that discussions of climate change neglect: democratic argument over the value of the natural world and its role in competing ideas of citizenship, national purpose, and the role and …

Proportionality: An Assault On Human Rights: A Reply, Madhav Khosla

Faculty Scholarship

In a recent article in I•CON, Stavros Tsakyrakis presents a passionate critique of the proportionality test. Tsakyrakis regards proportionality as an illusory attempt to infuse objectivity into rights adjudication. Moreover, he posits that it necessitates weighing public interests against individual rights. Proportionality has emerged, globally, as the leading framework for evaluating rights violations. It serves as the uniform standard of rights review in jurisdictions as diverse as Israel, Germany, Canada, and South Africa. Remarkably, recent opinions by Justice Stephen Breyer of the United States Supreme Court indicate that the approach is gaining currency within America's constitutional jurisprudence. Considering proportionality's …

Faithful Agent, Integrative, And Welfarist Interpretation, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

We are in the midst of a series of lively debates about how to interpret enacted laws such as written constitutions and statutes. In constitutional law, there is a spirited clash between "originalists" and "nonoriginalists". In the statutory arena, we have a three-way battle between "textualists," "intentionalists", and "pragmatists." A common feature of these contending schools is an insistence on a single, correct approach to interpretation. In this respect, however, each of these rival theories deviates from the Practice of interpretation. Real world interpreters – to a person – deploy a variety of interpretative methods when they seek to resolve …

Skelos V. Paterson: The Surprisingly Strong Case For The Governor's Surprising Power To Appoint A Lieutenant Governor, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

On July 8, 2009, Governor David Paterson surprised New York's legal and political world by announcing his intention to appoint Richard Ravitch to fill the vacancy in the office of lieutenant governor. No New York governor had ever appointed a lieutenant governor before. Paterson's action was widely denounced as unauthorized and unconstitutional. Four months later, observers were even more astonished when the Court of Appeals in Skelos v. Paterson upheld the governor's action. This article explains why the governor and Court of Appeals were right to conclude that the governor had statutory and constitutional authority for his action. Indeed, the …

Making Social Rights Conditional: Lessons From India, Madhav Khosla

Faculty Scholarship

Recent years have witnessed important advancements in the discussion on social rights. The South African experience with social rights has revealed how such rights can be protected without providing for an individualized remedy. Comparative constitutional lawyers now debate the promise of the South African approach, and the possibility of weak-form judicial review in social rights cases. This article considers the Indian experience with social rights, and explains how it exhibits a new form of social rights adjudication. This is the adjudication of a conditional social right; an approach that displays a rare private law model of public law adjudication. This …

The Treatment Of Isolationist Minorities, Gabriel Rauterberg

Faculty Scholarship

This Note examines what may be the most radical challenge posed by religious subcultures to the liberal politics of modern industrial nations – that of isolationist, nonliberal ( or even illiberal) religious minorities. These subcultures do not seek to integrate with mainstream society or gain power within it, but to withdraw in order to maintain norms widely discrepant from those that are socially dominant. They often seek to place restrictions upon their own members' freedom or activities, in part to maintain the group's differences from the greater society. These cultures, characterized by features as distinctive as collective property ownership, pacificism, …

Direct Voting By Property Owners, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Direct voting by property owners is a widespread but controversial tool for resolving disputes over local collective goods. Direct voting has powerful advantages, in that it can harness the superior knowledge of many local minds, resolve controversies in a way that is perceived to be legitimate, and eliminate corrupt dealmaking. But it also has serious pitfalls, if local voters are poorly informed, or if they ignore external effects on other communities, or if the process is distorted by majoritarian or minoritarian bias. To capitalize on the advantages of local voting, and minimize the risks, this Article proposes that direct voting …

Ordinary Administrative Law As Constitutional Common Law, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

Henry Monaghan famously argued that much of constitutional interpretation takes the form of what he termed constitutional common law, a body of doctrines and rules that are constitutionally inspired but not constitutionally required and that can be altered or reversed by Congress. This Essay argues that a fair amount of ordinary administrative law qualifies as constitutional common law: Constitutional concerns permeate core administrative law doctrines and requirements, yet Congress enjoys broad power to alter ordinary administrative law notwithstanding its constitutional aspect. Unfortunately, the constitutional common law character of much of ordinary administrative law is rarely acknowledged by courts. A striking …

Supremacy Clause Textualism, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Whatever its status in the statutory interpretation "wars," originalism-driven textualism has assumed an increasingly prominent role in constitutional interpretation, at least within the academy. The focus of this Article is on one such form, namely, "Supremacy Clause textualism", that is, recent textualist claims about the implications of the Supremacy Clause of Article VI. This Article addresses two such claims.

First, in important articles, Professor Bradford Clark argues that the clause is "at the epicenter of [our] constitutional structure" and it "recognizes only the 'Constitution,' 'Laws,' and 'Treaties' of the United States as 'the supreme Law of the Land."' Displacement of …

Who Judges? Who Cares? History Now And Then, Barbara Aronstein Black

Faculty Scholarship

There are two strands of history: Call them strand A and strand B. A: "How independent are those who judge?" B: "Where is the judicial power located?" At a high enough level of abstraction the strands merge (as, at a high enough level of abstraction, what does not?). The issue then becomes whether in a given society all judging is in the hands of independent judges. And the point is that there are two ways of avoiding the decision of cases by independent judges, corresponding, naturally, to the two strands of history:

[A] Through the judges: Punish them, reward them, …

Meditaciones Postmodernas Sobre El Castigo: Acerca De Los Límites De La Razón Y De Las Virtudes De La Aleatoriedad (Una Polémica Y Un Manifiesto Para El Siglo Xxi), Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Abstract in Spanish
Durante la Modernidad, el discurso sobre la pena ha girado circularmente en torno a tres grupos de interrogantes. El primero, surgido de la propia Ilustración, preguntaba: ¿En qué basa el soberano su derecho de penar? Nietzsche con mayor determinación, pero también otros, argumentaron que la propia pregunta implicaba ya su respuesta. Con el nacimiento de las ciencias sociales, este escepticismo hizo surgir un segundo conjunto de interrogantes: ¿Cuál es, entonces, la verdadera función de la pena? ¿Qué es lo que hacemos cuando penamos? Una serie de críticas ulteriores – de metanarrativas, funcionalistas o de objetividad científica – …

Profiling And Consent: Stops, Searches And Seizures After Soto, Jeffrey Fagan, Amanda Geller

Faculty Scholarship

Following Soto v State (1999), New Jersey was among the first states to enter into a comprehensive Consent Decree with the U.S. Department of Justice to end racially selective enforcement on the state’s highways. The Consent Decree led to extensive reforms in the training and supervision of state police troopers, and the design of information technology to monitor the activities of the State Police. Compliance was assessed in part on the State’s progress toward the elimination of racial disparities in the patterns of highway stops and searches. We assess compliance by analyzing data on 257,000 vehicle stops on the New …

From Privacy To Liberty: Sharing After Lawrence, Thomas P. Crocker

Studio for Law and Culture

From Privacy to Liberty addresses the failure of the Constitution to protect shared social aspects of ordinary life. Under the Supreme Court’s third-party doctrine, if I reveal information to another person, I no longer have an expectation of privacy, and thus, I no longer have Fourth Amendment protection in that information. This much-maligned doctrine has been criticized by many, and defended only once recently in the pages of the Michigan Law Review. The effect of this doctrine is to leave most aspects of ordinary life shared in the company of others constitutionally unprotected. For example, revealing one’s location to …

Blackboard Jungle: Delinquency, Psychiatry, And The Bio-Politics Of Brown, Anders Walker

Studio for Law and Culture

In 1955, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released a controversial film about juvenile delinquency entitled Blackboard Jungle. Georgia Governor Ernest Vandiver subsequently used the film as a metaphor for what would happen to southern schools were Brown enforced, marking the beginnings of a much larger campaign to articulate southern resistance to integration in popular terms. Taking Blackboard Jungle as a starting point, this article recovers the intersection between discourses of delinquency and desegregation at mid-century, showing how civil rights groups and segregationists alike both drew from mass culture and social psychiatry to advance their constitutional agendas. It concludes by showing that even as …

Heller High Water? The Future Of Originalism, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Has originalism won? It's easy to think so, judging from some of the reaction to the Supreme Court's recent decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. The Heller Court held that the District of Columbia could neither ban possession of handguns nor require that all other firearms be either unloaded and disassembled or guarded by a trigger lock. In finding for the first time in the Court's history that a gun control law violated the Second Amendment, Justice Scalia's opinion for the 5-4 majority appeared to be a sterling exemplar of originalism, the method of constitutional interpretation that he …

Davis V. Fec: The Roberts Court's Continuing Attack On Campaign Finance Reform, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In Davis v. FEC, decided on the last day of the October 2007 Term, a closely divided Supreme Court invalidated the so-called Millionaires' Amendment, which was a provision added to the Federal Election Campaign Act ("FECA") as part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act ("BCRA") of 2002 to make it easier for Senate and House candidates to raise private contributions when they run against an opponent who uses a substantial amount of personal wealth to pay for his or her campaign. From the reform perspective, the loss of the Millionaires' Amendment was not of great moment. The Amendment was …

Presidential Popular Constitutionalism, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

This Article adds a new dimension to the most important and influential strand of recent constitutional theory: popular or democratic constitutionalism, the investigation into how the U.S. Constitution is interpreted (1) as a set of defining national commitments and practices, not necessarily anchored in the text of the document, and (2) by citizens and elected politicians outside the judiciary. Wide-ranging and ground-breaking scholarship in this area has neglected the role of the President as a popular constitutional interpreter, articulating and revising normative accounts of the nation that interact dynamically with citizens' constitutional understandings. This Article sets out a "grammar" of …

Selling Originalism, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Justice Scalia has described an originalist approach to interpretation as a prerequisite to faithful application of a written Constitution. If, says he, constitutional judicial review is implicit in the notion that the Constitution is paramount law, as has been settled in this country at least since Marbury v. Madison, then that review must be guided by the ordinary tools of legislative interpretation. In a democracy, serious legislative interpretation requires that judges keep faith with the meaning of the text as understood at the time of enactment, not as desired by those judges or by anyone else who does not, …

Administrative Detention Of Terrorists: Why Detain, And Detain Whom?, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

This article aims to reframe the administrative detention debate, not to resolve it. In doing so, however, it aspires to advance the discussion by highlighting the critical substantive choices embedded in calls for legal procedural reform and by pointing the way toward appropriately tailored legislative options. It argues that the current debate’s focus on procedural and institutional questions of how to detain suspected terrorists has been allowed to overshadow the questions of why administratively detain, and whom to detain. Not only are the answers to these questions at least as important as the procedural rules in safeguarding and balancing liberty …

The Warren Court, Legalism And Democracy: Sketch For A Critique In A Style Learned From Morton Horwitz, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Morton Horwitz's Transformation books developed a critical approach that elaborates the underlying premises of legal doctrine and compares them to suppressed or ignored alternative perspectives. However, Horwitz's Warren Court book is largely an appreciation of the Court's doctrine that accepts at face value its underlying premises and the judges' claim to vindicate democratic values. In this essay, I speculate on what a Transformation-style critique of the Warren Court might look like and suggest that the Court is vulnerable to criticisms analogous to those the Transformation books make of earlier doctrine. I suggest that book ignores an alternative perspective on social …

Our Twenty-First Century Constitution, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Accommodating our Eighteenth Century Constitution to the government that Congress has shaped in the intervening two and a quarter centuries, Professor Strauss argues, requires accepting the difference between the President’s role as “Commander in Chief” of the Nation’s military, and his right to seek written opinions from those Congress has empowered to administer domestic laws under his oversight. Thus, the question for today is not whether the PCAOB offends Eighteenth Century ideas about government structure, but the question asked by Professors Bruff, Lawson, and Pildes – whether the relationships between PCAOB and SEC, SEC and President meet the constitutional necessity …

The Constitutional Legitimacy Of Freestanding Federalism, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

In Federalism and the Generality Problem in Constitutional Interpretation, Professor John Manning takes aim at the Rehnquist Court's practice of invoking freestanding, textually unspecified principles of federalism as a basis for limiting congressional power. Manning identifies this practice at work in a number of decisions he terms "the 'new federalism' cases" – in particular, the clear statement requirement of Gregory v. Ashcroft; the anticommandeering rule of New York v. United States and Printz v. United States; and the protection of state sovereign immunity in state court of Alden v. Maine. Despite their diverse subject matter, Manning …

A Convenient Constitution? Extraterritoriality After Boumediene, Christina Duffy Ponsa-Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

Questions concerning the extraterritorial applicability of the Constitution have come to the fore during the "war on terror." In Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court held that noncitizens detained in Guantánamo have the right to challenge their detention in federal court. To reach this conclusion, the Court used the "impracticable and anomalous" test, also known as the 'functional" approach because of its reliance on pragmatic or consequentialist considerations. The test first appeared in a concurring opinion over fifty years ago; in Boumediene, it garnered the votes of a majority.

This Article argues that the Boumediene Court was right …

Constitutional Limits On Punitive Damages Awards: An Analysis Of Supreme Court Precedent, Dorothy S. Lund

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last fifteen years, the Supreme Court has formulated new constitutional principles to constrain punitive damages awards imposed by state courts, invoking its authority under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This intervention has been controversial from the start, generating dissents from several Justices asserting that the actions of the Court are unwarranted and amount to unjustified judicial activism. Over the ensuing years lower courts and commentators have criticized the Court’s prescription of procedural and substantive limitations, finding them to be vague and unnecessarily restrictive of state common law prerogatives. Some observers with an economic orientation have …

The Un Charter – A Global Constitution?, Michael W. Doyle

Faculty Scholarship

Is the UN Charter a constitution? Answering that question depends on what we mean by a constitution and to what alternative we are contrasting a constitution.

If the relevant contrast is to the U.S. Constitution – the constitution of a sovereign state – the answer is clearly no. The United Nations was not intended to create a world state. As the Charter's preamble announces, it was created for ambitious but specific purposes: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” to “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights,” to “establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising …

Deep Secrecy, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers a new way of thinking and talking about government secrecy. In the vast literature on the topic, little attention has been paid to the structure of government secrets, as distinct from their substance or function. Yet these secrets differ systematically depending on how many people know of their existence, what sorts of people know, how much they know, and how soon they know. When a small group of similarly situated officials conceals from outsiders the fact that it is concealing something, the result is a deep secret. When members of the general public understand they are being …

The Interdependent Relationship Between Internal And External Separation Of Powers, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

It has been the best of times and the worst of times for internal separation of powers. Over the past few years, internal checks on executive power have been a central topic of legal academic debate – rarely have details of public administrative structure received so much attention. To some extent, this sudden popularity reflects growing interest in questions of institutional design. Unfortunately, however, another reason for this attention is the prominent erosion and impotence of such internal constraints under the recent administration of President George W. Bush.

Rulemaking And The American Constitution, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

A Constitution that strongly separates legislative from executive activity makes it difficult to reconcile executive adoption of regulations (that is, departmentally adopted texts resembling statutes and having the force of law, if valid) with the proposition that the President is not ‘to be a lawmaker’. Such activity is, of course, an essential of government in the era of the regulatory state. United States courts readily accept the delegation to responsible agencies of authority to engage in it, what we call ‘rulemaking’, so long as it occurs in a framework that permits them to assess the legality of any particular exercise. …