Constitutional Law Commons^™

Evolving Values, Animus, And Same-Sex Marriage, Daniel O. Conkle

Indiana Law Journal

In this Essay, I contend that a Fourteenth Amendment right to same-sex marriage will emerge, and properly so, when the Supreme Court determines that justice so requires and when, in the words of Professor Alexander Bickel, the Court’s recognition of this right will “in a rather immediate foreseeable future . . . gain general assent.” I suggest that we are fast approaching that juncture, and I go on to analyze three possible justifications for such a ruling: first, substantive due process; second, heightened scrutiny equal protection; and third, rational basis equal protection coupled with a finding of illicit “animus.” I …

Is The Full Faith And Credit Clause Still "Irrelevant" To Same-Sex Marriage?: Toward A Reconsideration Of The Conventional Wisdom, Steve Sanders

Indiana Law Journal

Essays on the Implications of Windsor and Perry

Review For Release: Juvenile Offenders, State Parole Practices, And The Eighth Amendment, Sarah F. Russell

Indiana Law Journal

State parole boards have historically operated free from constitutional constraints when making decisions about whether to release prisoners. Recent Supreme Court decisions subject states to a new constitutional requirement to provide a “meaningful opportunity to obtain release” for at least some categories of juvenile offenders. Using original data collected through a survey, this Article provides the first comprehensive description of existing parole board release procedures nationwide and explores whether these practices comply with the Court’s Eighth Amendment mandate.

The Court’s recent decisions in Graham v. Florida and Miller v. Alabama prohibit sentences of life without the possibility of release (LWOP) …

Misreading And Mobility In Constitutional Texts: A Nineteenth Century Case, Iza Hussin

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article explores the case of the adoption of Southeast Asia's first constitution (Johor, 1895) to articulate a fundamental problem of translation-the ambiguity and multiplicity of law's language. Closer attention to this problem helps raise a number of possibilities for rethinking the relationship between law, language, and mobility: firstly, polyphony, dissonance, and divergence in law's language reveals a plethora of political possibilities, audiences, and actors in the making of law; secondly, these ambiguities and multiplicities are integral to law's mobility; thirdly, rather than transmissions of law from center to periphery, law moves in circulations that are iterative, contingent, and patterned. …

Charles A. Beard & The Columbia School Of Political Economy: Revisiting The Intellectual Roots Of The Beardian Thesis, Ajay K. Mehrotra

Articles by Maurer Faculty

A century after it was first published, Charles A. Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution remains a significant and controversial part of constitutional scholarship and history. Just as Beard sought to historicize the Founders as they drafted and adopted the Constitution, this article attempts to historicize Beard as he researched and wrote his classic text on the Constitution. Because Beard was both a graduate student and professor at Columbia University before and while he researched and wrote his book, this article explores the particular influence that Columbia University’s institutional and intellectual climate may have had on Beard and the …

Discrimination In Baby Making: The Unconstitutional Treatment Of Prospective Parents Through Surrogacy, Andrea B. Carroll

Indiana Law Journal

Roundtable on Regulating Assisted Reproductive Technology 2012

Hierarchies Of Discrimination In Baby Making: A Response To Professor Carroll, Radhika Rao

Indiana Law Journal

Roundtable on Regulating Assisted Reproductive Technology 2012

"We The People," Constitutional Accountability, And Outsourcing Government, Kimberly N. Brown

Indiana Law Journal

The ubiquitous outsourcing of federal functions to private contractors, although benign in the main, raises the most fundamental of constitutional questions: What institutions and actors comprise the “federal government” itself? From Abu Ghraib to Blackwater, a string of scandals has heightened public awareness that highly sensitive federal powers and responsibilities are routinely entrusted to government contractors. At the same time, the American populace seems vaguely aware that, when it comes to ensuring accountability for errors and abuses of power, contractors occupy a special space. The fact is that myriad structural and procedural means for holding traditionally government actors accountable do …

Review Of Prigg V. Pennsylvania: Slavery, The Supreme Court, And The Ambivalent Constitution, Susan David Demaine

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In 1842, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, resolving a dispute about fugitive slave rendition that had raged between the states for decades. H. Robert Baker’s analysis of the decision and the events that led up to it is the first book-length work to investigate Prigg and its place in American history. Baker traces the development of fugitive slave laws and recounts the heart-wrenching story that lies behind Prigg to shed light on the Supreme Court’s decision and the gradual clarification of American federalism.

How Parents Are Made: A Response To Discrimination In Baby Making: The Unconstitutional Treatment Of Prospective Parents Through Surrogacy, Kimberly M. Mutcherson

Indiana Law Journal

Roundtable on Regulating Assisted Reproductive Technology 2012

The Future Of Societal Constitutionalism In The Age Of Acceleration, Riccardo Prandini

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The aim of this article is to reframe the debate on societal constitutionalism and constitutionalization from a spatial to a temporal framework. This analytical shift is due to the dramatic acceleration of societal processes, which are increasingly crossing the spatial boundaries of nation-states and of all the other social structures embedded in peculiar places. This high-speed society is characterized by the so-called temporalization of complexity, which influences every aspect of social life and, in particular, the "validity" of law. On the basis of this theoretical background, I would like to show that changing the form of observation from a spatial …

Jurisgenerative Constitutionalism: Procedural Principles For Managing Global Legal Pluralism, Paul Schiff Berman

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Global Legal Pluralism recognizes the inevitability (and sometimes even the desirability) of multiple legal and quasi-legal systems purporting to regulate the same act or actor. However, the resulting pluralism-just as inevitably-creates conflicts among norms that are potentially intractable. Thus, legal systems must address how best to respond to the realities of pluralism. This inquiry has constitutional dimensions because it goes to the constitutive character of communities and their relationships with other communities, be they international, transnational, national, subnational, or epistemic.

One response to pluralism is jurispathic: "kill off" all competing laws by declaring that one set of norms-and only one-shall …

Societal Constitutionalism, Social Movements, And Constitutionalism From Below, Gavin W. Anderson

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Within constitutional theory, in comparison to other fields of scholarship, the significance of transnational social movements has been relatively unexamined in the literature. Societal constitutionalism, grounded in the sociological method and open to reexamining received understandings of constitutionalism, would appear conducive to undertaking this enterprise. However, the general absence of social movements from the societal constitutionalism literature is not coincidental, and reflects a shared commitment with more conventional approaches to an institutional conception of constitutionalism, and a belief in the latter's necessary benevolence and Western origin. These assumptions reflect the limited focus of contemporary analyses of globalization and constitutionalism upon …

Expanding Constitutionalism, Gunther Teubner, Anna Beckers

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Transnational Societal Constitutionalism Symposium, Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin Italy, May 17-19, 2012

The Cosmopolitan Turn In Constitutionalism: An Integrated Conception Of Public Law, Mattias Kumm

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

If the point of constitutionalism is to define the legal framework within which collective self-government can legitimately take place, constitutionalism has to take a cosmopolitan turn: it has to occupy itself with the global legitimacy conditions for the exercise of state sovereignty. Contrary to widely made implicit assumptions in constitutional theory and practice, constitutional legitimacy is not self-standing. Whether a national constitution and the political practices authorized by it are legitimate does not depend only on the appropriate democratic quality and rights-respecting nature of domestic legal practices. Instead, national constitutional legitimacy depends, in part, on how the national constitution is …

On The Politics Of Societal Constitutionalism, Emilios Christodoulidis

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This paper is an internal critique of the theory of societal constitutionalism as developed by Gunther Teubner, with a specific emphasis on the constitutional and the political dimensions of the theory. As critique it focuses on the arguably unacknowledged dangers of co-option: the danger that constitutionalization, as an ongoing process, undercuts what we typically associate with the constitutional, which is its framing function; that this problem is accentuated when it comes to the transnational; and that its reflexivity runs the danger of market capture, in which case it remains only nominally political. The danger of market capture for societal constitutionalism …

Transnational Corporations' Outward Expression Of Inward Self-Constitution: The Enforcement Of Human Rights By Apple, Inc., Larry Cata Backer

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Societal constitutionalism presents us with alternatives to state-centered constitutional theory. But this alternative does not so much displace as extend conventional constitutional theory as a set of static premises that structure the organization of legitimate governance units. Constitutional theory, in either its conventional or societal forms, engages in both a descriptive and a normative project-the former looking to the incarnation of an abstraction and the later to the development of a set of presumptions and principles through which this incarnation can be judged. Constitutional theory is conventionally applied to states-that is, to those manifestations of organized power constituted by a …

We And Cyberlaw: The Spatial Unity Of Constitutional Orders, Hans Lindahl

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This paper scrutinizes the fundamental assumption governing Gunther Teubner's theory of societal constitutionalism, namely that societal constitutions are ultimately about the regulation of inclusion and exclusion in global function systems. While endorsing the central role of inclusion/exclusion in constitutions, societal or otherwise, I argue that inclusion and exclusion are primordial categories of collective action, rather than functional categories. As a result, the self-closure which gives rise to a legal collective is spatial as much as it is temporal, and subjective no less than material. Inasmuch as legal orders must establish who ought to do what, where, and when, this entails, …

Private Governance Of Knowledge: Societally-Crafted Intellectual Properties Regimes, Dan Wielsch

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The evolutionary challenge global society faces is the decentralized development of legal rules that multilaterally protect social autonomies from violating each other. At the national level, democratic constitutions provide for the resolution of conflicts between different normative worlds, although the focus here is certainly on the protection of autonomies from political encroachment. However, political constitutions make sure that legal orders consider a plurality of normative perspectives. In contrast, international lawmaking can exclusively link to a specific social rationality, lacking any impartial forum for normative reconciliation. This is of special importance for the governance of intellectual resources. The incorporation of international …

Transnational Normative Orders: The Constitutionalism Of Intra- And Trans-Normative Law, Poul F. Kjaer

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

No weakening, but rather an expansion, of statehood can be observed in the contemporary world. This does not, on the other hand, imply that extensive forms of constitutional ordering do not exist outside the realm of states. Instead, the evolution of world society has been characterized by a protracted dual movement where the expansion and densification of statehood and autonomous forms of transnational ordering gradually emerged in a mutually constitutive fashion. One implication of this is that neither the concept of the state nor the concept of nonstate transnational entities is adequately capable of delineating the object of constitutional analysis. …

Social Movements As Constituent Power: The Italian Struggle For The Commons, Saki Bailey, Ugo Mattei

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The Italian commons (beni comuni) movement is a powerful example of the way in which social movements are emerging as the new pouvoir constituant serving not only to enforce the protections and guarantees of national constitutions but also, in the context of the declining power of the nation-state, as a counter hegemonic force against the neoliberal economic constitutionalism of the international economic institutions. The common goods social movement in Italy was born out of the concerted action of a number of civil society groups combatting neoliberal privatizations. This commons movement, as will be argued in this paper, is an instance …

Fundamental Rights, Private Law, And Societal Constitution: On The Logic Of The So-Called Horizontal Effect, Florian Roedl

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The paper raises the issue of a normative justification of the horizontal effect of fundamental rights in private law. Justification in this sense means that the reasons given are neither functional nor instrumental, but that the reasons are supposed to be subject to the intrinsic logic of private law. In traditional doctrine, the reason usually given to confer horizontal effect to fundamental rights is a deferral to the constitution: The constitutional text decides whether and how fundamental rights apply to private legal relationships. This answer implies that fundamental rights are either logically or normatively alien to private law, that they …

Occupy The System! Societal Constitutionalism And Transnational Corporate Accounting, Moritz Renner

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Today's most pressing constitutional question is posed by a global economic system whose expansive tendencies seem no longer controllable. In addressing this question, the theory of Societal Constitutionalism apparently shifts established ideological coordinates by developing a theory of the self-constitutionalization of social spheres. It seeks to combine the virtues of grassroots democracy with the sophistication of systemic social theory. Thus, its normative claim can be formulated as an oxymoron: "Occupy the System!" The claim is an oxymoron because it points to the apparent impossibility of critical social theory in a functionally differentiated society: How can a functional system such as …

Constitutionalization Of Nongovernmental Certification Programs, Jaye Ellis

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Certification programs created by nonstate actors such as the Forest Stewardship Council and Marine Stewardship Council are innovative and potentially highly effective governance initiatives. This article works from the premise that these Councils can be understood as political authorities promulgating law. These Councils, and other actors like them, are generally analyzed from the point of view of governance, which triggers questions about their effectiveness and legitimacy. The approach adopted here shifts the focus to questions of their authority and the validity of the rules, standards, and decision-making processes that they have put in place. The Councils have put in motion …

Defining Fetal Life: An Establishment Clause Analysis Of Religiously Motivated Informed Consent Provisions, Justin R. Olson

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

A Sociology Of Constituent Power: The Political Code Of Transnational Societal Constitutions, Christopher Thornhill

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article proceeds from a critical sociological revision of classical constitutional theory. In particular, it argues for a sociological reconstruction of the central concepts of constitutional theory: constituent power and rights. These concepts, it is proposed, first evolved as an internal reflexive dimension of the modern political system, which acted originally to stabilize the political system as a relatively autonomous aggregate of actors, adapted to the differentiated interfaces of a modern society.

This revision of classical constitutional theory provides a basis for a distinctive account of transnational constitutional pluralism or societal constitutionalism. The article argues that the construction of transnational …

The Sins Of Hosanna-Tabor, Leslie Griffin

Indiana Law Journal

The Supreme Court has lost sight of individual religious freedom. In Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, the Court for the first time recognized the ministerial exception, a court-created doctrine that holds that the First Amendment requires the dismissal of many employment discrimination cases against religious employers. The Court ruled unanimously that Cheryl Perich, an elementary school teacher who was fired after she tried to return to school from disability leave, could not pursue an antidiscrimination lawsuit against her employer.

This Article criticizes Hosanna-Tabor as a profound misinterpretation of the First Amendment. The Court mistakenly protected religious institutions’ …

Is The Antidiscrimination Project Being Ended?, Michael J. Zimmer

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

Rights Of Belonging For Women, Rebecca E. Zietlow

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

Affirmative Action And Academic Freedom: Why The Supreme Court Should Continue Deferring To Faculty Judgments About The Value Of Educational Diversity, Steve Sanders

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.