Constitutional Law Commons^™

The Future And The First Amendment, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

It is my honor and pleasure to deliver this year's Sullivan Lecture. I have an especially warm feeling toward this Law School. Two years ago, at the invitation of your Professor Distelhorst, I participated in the Capital Law School program for teaching American law to Japanese lawyers. For five stimulating weeks I enjoyed the intellectual and social company· of Japanese attorneys, while teaching them the outlines of American constitutional law. Twice a week, in the evening, for three continuous hours, and after a full work day, these dedicated lawyers would willingly become students again and suffer patiently through my highly …

The Committee On The Constitutional System Proposals: Coherence And Dominance, Philip Chase Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

I have been a fellow traveler of the Committee on the Constitutional System virtually since its inception; indeed, I believe I was present when Mr. Cutler first made the speech at the University of Texas that became, "To Form a Government." During all this time I have never been able to quite free myself from the conviction that his concerns were absolutely right and fundamental to our era. Nor have I been able to persuade myself that the reforms that he recommends justify a departure from the framers' conception. I suppose this is why I was selected to give a …

The Confirmation Process: Law Or Politics?, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I argued (and still believe) that Judge Robert Bork possessed surpassing qualifications for an appointment to the Supreme Court. Subsequently, I became persuaded that my submission was incomplete. Additional argument was necessary to establish that my testimony, if accepted, imposed a constitutional duty on senators to vote for confirmation. To my surprise, further reflection convinces me that no such argument is possible.

Stare Decisis And Constitutional Adjudication, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Despite endless literature urging that constitutional adjudication be severed from explorations into the understandings at the creation of the Constitution, original understanding continues to play a prominent role in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence. For the Court, originalism seemingly provides a legitimate ground for decisionmaking; for the people, it provides assurances against judicial usurpation of power properly belonging to other branches of government, or retained by the people themselves.

But difficulties with originalism emerge once the existing constitutional order is actually examined. The Supreme Court's repeated invocations of the Framers' understanding notwithstanding, a significant portion of our constitutional order cannot reasonably …

The Ninth Amendment And The Unwritten Constitution: The Problems Of Constitutional Interpretation, Andrzej Rapaczynski

Faculty Scholarship

This article is about two things; one general, the other specific. The general point is about the nature of interpretation and of the constraints that the text places on interpretation. The specific is about the ninth amendment.

My general claim about interpretation is that no textual provision by itself seriously constrains how it is going to be interpreted. This, I argue, is true not just about the open-ended provisions like the ninth amendment, but quite generally, about all textual provisions. The fact that no text by itself constrains interpretation, however, does not mean that interpretation is unconstrained; only that constraints …

The First Amendment And The Ideal Of Civic Courage: The Brandeis Opinion In Whitney V. California, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

"[T]he working class and the employing class have nothing in common ....” So began the Preamble to the Constitution of the I.W.W., the Industrial Workers of the World. "Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the World organize as a class, take possession of the earth, and the machinery of production and abolish the wage system." Nicknamed the Wobblies, this group advocated a form of militant unionism built around the ideal of One Big Union embracing all industries. The I.W.W. enjoyed its strongest appeal among the miners, loggers, agricultural laborers, and construction workers of …

Lessons Of The Iran-Contra Affair: Are They Being Taught?, Philip C. Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

The issues I am going to talk about today vary from the very straightforward to the somewhat complicated. One thing ties them together – my dismay at how little the fundamental constitutional issues of the Iran-contra affair seem to have been brought to the surface, either by the hearings, or by the commentary in the press, or even by the schools that led us to this affair in the first place.

I want to talk about three issues which represent the failure of civics education in this country. The three questions are: 1) what is wrong with pursuing secret …

Formal And Functional Approaches To Separation-Of-Powers Questions – A Foolish Inconsistency?, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Is it possible to give contemporary shape to the principles of constitutional structure we know as "separation of powers"? That question was sharply presented once again on the final day of the Supreme Court's most recent Term, when it decided two cases raising separation-of-powers issues. In Bowsher v. Synar, the subject of this symposium, the Court found constitutional fault in Congress's asserted expansion of its own powers at the expense of the President's article II authority. Commodity Future Trading Commission v. Schor, far less widely noted, upheld against constitutional challenge Congress's assignment to an administrative adjudicator of the …

The Teaching Function Of The First Amendment, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

In this important book, Professor Bollinger seeks to understand and remedy the inadequacy he perceives in the way our legal culture deals with extremist speech. He argues that the high level of protection the first amendment has been construed to require serves a social function that has not been fully recognized or carefully evaluated. His thesis is that the contemporary social function of the idea of freedom of speech is to help the society develop a general capacity for tolerance, a capacity that determines how we respond to many forms of conduct as well as speech. Once this function is …

The Court's Role In Congressional Federalism: A Play With (At Least) Three Acts, Philip C. Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

The constitutional drama that climaxed in the Garcia case can be usefully understood, by a theatrical metaphor, as a play in three acts. In the first act, the principal characters are introduced and the problematic nature of their relationship established; the way the characters understand their problems creates their problems. In the second act an attempt made to overcome the conflict of the first act serves only to intensify the struggle and even threatens values widely shared by the players. In the third act, a futile effort is made to resolve the tensions that now appear almost inevitable among such …

Church-State Relations And Religious Convictions, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Since the title of my talk is hardly self-explanatory, I want to begin by outlining my topic. My overall concern is with the proper place of religious convictions in lawmaking in our society. My special focus is on the place of religious convictions in the political resolution of churchstate issues.

Foreign States And The Constitution, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

This article does not advocate judicial abstention from deciding the constitutional claims of foreign sovereigns. Rather, the argument is that constitutional claims against the actions of the federal political branches must fail on the merits because of the relationship of foreign states to the federal structure. When, on the other hand, a claim does not directly confront or conflict with the political branches' foreign policy, the federal courts should adjudicate the merits of foreign state claims by applying constitutional jurisprudence to sustain or reject the claim. Part III of this article elaborates upon the relationship between the thesis in Part …

State-Local Relations And Constitutional Law, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

A persistent theme in the literature on state-local relations has been the plenary power of state governments and the legal powerlessness of local governments. The "black letter" rules of state-local relations are that the state governments enjoy complete hegemony over their political subdivisions, that local governments are mere "creatures" of the states, with only those powers that the states delegate to them, and there is no such thing as an "inherent right" of local self-government.

Bargaining In The Shadow Of Eminent Domain: Valuing And Apportioning Condemnation Awards Between Landlord And Tenant, Victor P. Goldberg, Thomas W. Merrill, Daniel Unumb

Faculty Scholarship

Who has a constitutionally protected "property" interest when the government condemns land subject to a lease? Is it the landlord? The tenant? Or do both parties have property rights that entitle them to compensation? Further, how should the size of the total condemnation award be determined? Should we value the property rights of the landlord and the tenant separately and sum? Or should we value the entire parcel as if it were an undivided fee simple and apportion the award between the landlord and the tenant? If the condemnation award is based on the value of a fee simple and …

Constitutional Decisions And The Supreme Law, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

What status do Supreme Court decisions have for officials in the political branches of our government? Six months ago, Attorney General Edwin Meese III rekindled controversy over this enduring and troublesome question when he claimed in a widely reported lecture that Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Constitution are not the supreme law of the land, and are properly subject to forms of opposition by other governmental officials. The general reaction to the speech was that it was meant to reduce the perceived authority of Supreme Court opinions, and a close reading of the speech certainly leaves this impression. Yet, even …

Dworkin: A New Link In The Chain, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

This book brings together nineteen of the articles published by Professor Dworkin over the last eight years, mostly in the New York Review of Books, but also in learned journals and collections. Three articles, none of them of major importance, have not been published before: Can a Liberal State Support Art? (pp. 221-36), On Interpretation and Objectivity (pp. 167-80), and Civil Disobedience and Nuclear Protest (pp. 104-18). Several pieces published during the last few years are not included, of which the most important is an article on equality.

Banning The Bomb: Law And Its Limits, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

We can all agree with the contributors to this volume that nuclear weapons present the threat of unimaginable devastation that could bring an end to civilization and even to life on this planet. The grim calculations and stark images come back again and again, but they cannot be repeated too often: over 50,000 weapons in the United States and Soviet arsenals, each with a destructive force dwarfing the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; radiation effects producing indescribable suffering and death; environmental damage that defies quantification or prediction; the specter of nuclear winter rendering the earth uninhabitable. No rational being can …

The Concept Of Religion In State Constitutions, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

A year and a half ago an article of mine was published on religion as a concept in constitutional law. The article concerned how courts should approach decisions about whether a belief, practice, organization, or classification is religious. The article did not address, except in passing, what the constitutional standards under the free exercise and establishment clauses should be if something that is religious is aided or inhibited in some way. Since in most cases arising under the religion clauses, the presence of something religious is not itself disputed, my article concerned only a small slice of religion cases.

My …

Comment On Professor Van Alstyne's Paper, Henry P. Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

My major difficulty with Professor Van Alstyne's paper is its incomplete character. In the end, he makes only two points: first, judges are authorized to apply "this Constitution," not to do justice; and second, judges should not lie about what they are doing. The danger is that after a while the first point sounds somewhat empty, while the actual content of the second point seems entirely parasitic on the first.

Economics Of Public Use, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The fifth amendment to the United States Constitution, as well as most state constitutions, provides that private property shall not be taken "for public use" unless just compensation is paid. American courts have long construed this to mean that some showing of "publicness" is a condition precedent to a legitimate exercise of the power of eminent domain. Thus, when a proposed condemnation of property lacks the appropriate public quality, the taking is deemed to be unconstitutional and can be enjoined. In practice, however, most observers today think the public use limitation is a dead letter. Three recent decisions, upholding takings …

The Role Of The President And Omb In Informal Rulemaking, Peter L. Strauss, Cass R. Sunstein

Faculty Scholarship

Regulatory reform has been a subject of frequent discussion in the last decade, especially in the context of presidential efforts to assert control over the rulemaking process. Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan have all attempted to increase presidential authority over regulation. In particular, President Reagan has issued two executive orders that give the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) considerable power over the rulemaking activities of executive agencies.

In this article, we set forth our views on the role of presidential supervision in the regulatory process, with particular attention to the questions raised by the recent executive orders.

Constitutional Fact Review, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Bose Corp. v. Consumers Union of United States held that the clearly erroneous standard of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 52(a) does not prescribe the scope of appellate review of a finding of actual malice in defamation cases governed by New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. Rather, as a matter of "federal constitutional law," appellate courts "must exercise independent judgment and determine whether the record establishes actual malice with convincing clarity." Thus, in addition to the familiar judicial duty to "say what the law is," the first amendment imposes a special duty with respect to law application: both …

Property Rules, Liability Rules, And Adverse Possession, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The law of adverse possession tends to be regarded as a quiet backwater. Both judicial opinions and leading treatises treat the legal doctrine as settled. The theory underlying the doctrine, although routinely discussed in the opening weeks of first-year property courses, is only rarely aired in the law reviews any more. Indeed, the most frequently cited articles on adverse possession date from the 1930s and earlier. Perhaps most tellingly, adverse possession seems to have completely escaped the attention of the modem law and economics movement – almost a sure sign of obscurity in today's legal-academic world.

Nevertheless, two recent events …

The Pathological Perspective And The First Amendment, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Constitutions are designed to control, or at least influence, future events – political events, adjudicative events, to some extent even interactions between private parties. Yet the future is unknowable, largely unpredictable, and inevitably variable. At any moment there exists a short-run future, a long-run future, and a future in between. The future is virtually certain to contain some progress, some regression, some stability, some volatility. How is a constitution supposed to operate upon this vast panoply?

That is a question that ought to loom large in the deliberations of persons who propose and ratify new constitutions and new constitutional amendments. …

The Development Of The Law Of Seditious Libel And The Control Of The Press, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

This article presents a new account of the development of the law of seditious libel from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth. It also outlines a new version of the relationship between the government and the press during that period. The article argues that it was the gradual erosion, during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of the legal foundations of the government's policies toward the press that eventually made necessary a new policy based on the law of libel. In the midsixteenth century, the Crown possessed a wide variety of means for dealing with the printed press, …

Distrust Of Democracy, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The current rediscovery of state constitutions has had a singular and curious feature: it has been focused largely on state constitutional provisions that are analogous, if not identical, to provisions of the United States Constitution. Scholars and jurists have devoted their attention to state protections of speech, state equal protection clauses, state privileges against self-incrimination, and state proscriptions of cruel and unusual punishments, and have developed interpretations of these texts that diverge from those adopted by the United States Supreme Court in construing comparable federal constitutional provisions. These attempts to play state variations on federal constitutional themes have not been …

From Sovereignty To Process: The Jurisprudence Of Federalism After Garcia, Andrzej Rapaczynski

Faculty Scholarship

On February 19, 1985, the Supreme Court, in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, overruled its 1976 decision in National League of Cities v. Usery. Although the continued vitality of National League of Cities had been in question in recent years, the Court's abrupt repudiation of the very principle announced in that case is an event of considerable significance, beyond showing, one more time, that the rule of stare decisis has a limited application in the Court's modern constitutional adjudication. Garcia's importance lies, above all, in revealing the absence of anything approaching a well elaborated theory of federalism that …

Criminal Coercion And Freedom Of Speech, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This essay about constitutional limits on criminal coercion concerns a piece of a larger puzzle; how freedom of expression impinges on crimes that involve communication. The essay has two interrelated purposes. One is to reach some rather specific conclusions about the kinds of coercive threats that enjoy constitutional protection and to suggest how legislative formulations of criminal coercion can minimize coverage of such threats. The second purpose, more general and theoretical, is to show how the boundaries of freedom of expression can be understood and how courts can employ those boundaries to arrive at specific tests of constitutional protection. The …

Religion As A Concept In Constitutional Law, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Because federal and state constitutions forbid government from infringing upon religious liberty or supporting religion, courts must sometimes decide whether a claim, activity, organization, purpose, or classification is religious. In most cases arising under these religion clauses, the religiousness of an activity or organization will be obvious. However; when the presence of religion is seriously controverted, the threshold question, "defining religion," becomes important. Most courts have prudently eschewed theoretical generalizations in approaching that question. Academic commentators have struggled to startlingly diverse proposals.

This Article suggests that in both free exercise and establishment cases, courts should decide whether something is religious …

Third Party Standing, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Traditional constitutional theory posits a narrow conception of the issues that a litigant properly may assert. A litigant may invoke only his own constitutional rights or immunities; he may challenge a statute only in the terms in which it is applied to him; and, in the application process, courts have broad power to construe the relevant statutory language so as to avoid constitutional difficulties. The Yazoo case is perhaps the best known example of judicial adherence to these canons. There, a railroad claimed that a statute mandating speedy settlement of "all claims for lost or damaged freight" contravened the fourteenth …