Constitutional Law Commons^™

Meditations On Carl Schmitt, Mark Tushnet

Georgia Law Review

A spectre is haunting Professor Levinson - the spectre of Carl Schmitt. The German--or should it be Nazi? - constitutional theorist flits in and out of Professor Levinson's discussion. Professor Levinson has done yeoman work in bringing Schmitt's perspective to the attention of constitutional theorists. My comments offer my own reaction to what I take to be Schmitt's points, and in doing so may confirm Professor Levinson's assessment of Schmitt's importance today. I start with the sentence Professor Levinson quotes: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception. Professor Levinson focuses on the first part of the sentence, because, in …

The Deepening Crisis Of American Constitutionalism, Sanford Levinson

Georgia Law Review

Events since my Sibley Lecture in March 2005 have only underscored the importance of the general topic "Constitutional Norms and Permanent Emergencies"-whatever the adequacy of my own analysis. Probably the most prominent example is the controversy generated by disclosure of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance of phone calls of American citizens, undertaken without a scintilla of judicial approval, and by the Bush Administration's defense of the surveillance in spite of legislation, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), that seems quite clearly to make it illegal.' Also noteworthy, however, is the Bush Administration's continued assertions that it simply does not …

The Paradox Of Omnipotence: Courts, Constitutions, And Commitments, David S. Law

Georgia Law Review

Sovereigns, like individuals, must sometimes make commitments that limit their freedom of action in order to accomplish their goals. Scholars have observed that constitutional arrangements can, by restricting a sovereign's power, enable the sovereign to make such commitments. The opposite, however, can also be true: constitutional arrangements can and do impede sovereign commitment by entrenching inalienable governmental powers and immunities. This Article explores the nature and origins of the commitment problems that sovereigns face, and the role of courts in solving such problems. It begins by setting forth an analytical distinction between effective and persuasive commitments. Effective commitments are made …

Federal Constitutional Restraints On Tax Competition Among The American States, Walter Hellerstein

Scholarly Works

This article examines the judicially developed rules limiting interstate tax competition in the United States and the constitutional framework out of which they arise.

The Law Of Yards, James C. Smith

Scholarly Works

Property law regimes have a significant impact on the ability of individuals to engage in freedom of expression. Some property rules advance freedom of expression, and other rules retard freedom of expression. This Article examines the inhibiting effects on expression of public land use regulations. The focus is on two types of aesthetic regulations: (1) landscape regulations, including weed ordinances, that regulate yards; and (2) architectural regulations that regulate the exterior appearance of houses. Such regulations sometimes go too far in curtailing a homeowner's freedom of expression. Property owners' expressive conduct should be recognized as “symbolic speech” under the First …

Small Emergencies, Kim L. Scheppele

Georgia Law Review

In this Comment, I argue that the "normal" American constitutional order can be seen as thoroughly shot through with emergency law and that this constant sense of emergency has fundamentally shaped the possibilities of American constitutionalism. America is now-and has been since the First World War-virtually always in a state of emergency, one way or another. Sometimes these states of emergency have been local, other times they have been federal, and still other times they have been international. Sometimes these states of emergency have been political; other times they have been economic or social. Sometimes these states of emergency have …

Time To Look Abroad? The Legal Regulation Of Emergency Powers, William E. Scheuerman

Georgia Law Review

The starting point for Professor Levinson's thought-provoking ruminations on emergency power and constitutionalism is his deep skepticism about the Bush Administration's legal response to 9/11.1 In the context of the "war on terror," Professor Levinson accurately recounts, the Administration has claimed the right to override both longstanding domestic and international legal commitments.2 Even strict prohibitions on torture, it seems, are not exempt from the President's constitutionally based prerogative as "Commander in Chief to keep the nation out of harm's way, and only he apparently possesses the rightful authority to determine the fate of accused terrorists. Although many constitutional lawyers will …

Regulating Section 527 Organizations, Gregg D. Polsky, Guy-Uriel E. Charles

Scholarly Works

In this Essay, we consider whether the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has the authority to regulate independent 527 organizations (e.g., Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, Moveon.org, etc.) as political committees under the Federal Election Campaign Act. This issue, which was hotly debated during the last election cycle when it was considered and ultimately tabled by the FEC, is an extremely complex one that requires a deep understanding of election, tax, administrative, and constitutional law. After considering how these areas of law intersect, we conclude that the FEC lacks the authority to regulate independent 527 organizations as political committees.

Miranda And Reasonableness, Peter B. Rutledge

Scholarly Works

Last term's decisions in Yarborough v. Alvarado and Missouri v. Seibert shed important light on the state of the Miranda doctrine in the Supreme Court. In Yarborough, a slim majority held that a state appellate court's failure to consider a defendant's age and history of contact with law enforcement in its “custody” determination was not “contrary to” or an “unreasonable application of” clearly established Supreme Court case law. In Seibert, a fractured majority affirmed the Missouri Supreme Court's decision to exclude a defendant's confession where police officers strategically withheld a suspect's Miranda rights at the outset of a …

Abu Ghraib, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

This article posits a theoretical framework within which to analyze various aspects of post-September 11 detention policy - including the widespread prisoner abuse that has been documented in the leaks and official releases that began with publication of photos made at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Examined are the actions of civilian executive officials charged with setting policy, of judicial officers who evaluated it, and military personnel who implemented it. Abuse has been attributed to failures of training or planning. The article concentrates on a different failure, the failure of law to keep lawlessness in check. On September 11, law's map …

Causing Constitutional Harm: How Tort Law Can Help Determine Harmless Error In Criminal Trials, Jason M. Solomon

Scholarly Works

This Article proceeds in four parts. Part II is a brief overview of harmless-error doctrine in the context of habeas challenges to state criminal convictions, focusing on the nature of the inquiry and the doctrinal deadlock described above. Part III is an empirical analysis of the post-Brecht cases in the federal courts of appeals. To search for a way out of the doctrinal deadlock, I started with a relatively straightforward question: what has happened to harmless-error analysis since Brecht? To answer this question, I reviewed and, with the help of a research assistant, coded all of the 315 …

Data Matching, Data Mining, And Due Process, Daniel J. Steinbock

Georgia Law Review

The Article concerns the governmental use of computerized data matching (comparison of records) and data mining (profiling),which increasingly are aimed at locating potential terrorists. The most striking aspect of virtually all anti-terrorist data matching and data mining decisions is the total absence of even the most rudimentary procedures for notice, hearing, or other opportunities for meaningful participation before, or even after, the deprivation is imposed. The Article evaluates under Fourth Amendment and due process standards a variety of law enforcement activities data matching or data mining might instigate. After reviewing these activities' potential effects on private, governmental, and accuracy interests, …

Video Games As A Protected Form Of Expression, Paul E. Salamanca

Georgia Law Review

Video games, like motion pictures, failed to qualify for First Amendment protection until well after they emerged as a medium. Today, a number of courts have held that such games constitute a form of expression and do not fall into any recognized category of unprotected speech. Nevertheless, a number of commentators have called for limited constitutional protection for video games, predicating their arguments on a variety of grounds, including the alleged deleterious effects of such games on children. This Article responds to these commentators and defends recent decisions extending protection to video games.

Identifying State Actors In Constitutional Litigation: Reviving The Role Of Substantive Context, Michael L. Wells

Scholarly Works

While most section 1983 suits are brought against local governments and officials, an increasing number of plaintiffs target private persons and businesses who have collaborated with government in one way or another. In such cases, plaintiffs claim that private entities have acted "under color of state law" in violation of the plaintiffs' rights. They must establish that the defendants are nonetheless "state actors" in order to prevail on the constitutional claims they raise. The broad range of cases includes, among others, efforts to obtain relief against creditors who use self-help remedies, litigation directed at persons who have cooperated with state …

An End Of Term Exam: October Term 2003 At The Supreme Court Of The United States, Peter B. Rutledge, Nicole L. Angarella

Scholarly Works

The goal of this Essay is to provide a resource of digestible proportions that any Court watcher (judge, lawyer, professor, student) can use to inform himself or herself about current developments at the Court. While the Essay discusses how the current Term compares to past ones, it does not do so simply as an exercise in dry social science. Instead, it highlights those trends of interest to both the scholar and the practitioner. Likewise, while the Essay discusses particular cases, it does not simply summarize facts and holdings. Instead, it places those doctrinal developments in a larger context, analyzes them, …

International Norms In Constitutional Law, Michael Wells

Scholarly Works

Whether the Supreme Court should look to international law in deciding constitutional issue depends largely on what is meant by "looking to" international law. Some international norms are legally binding on American courts, either because we have agreed to follow them by adopting treaties or because they form part of the federal common law. I certainly agree that the Supreme Court, like the rest of us, ought to obey these aspects of international law. But the role of international norms in American courts has recently attracted attention for a different reason. In Lawrence v. Texas the Supreme Court, overruling Bowers …

The Use Of International Sources In Constitutional Opinion, Daniel M. Bodansky

Scholarly Works

My argument for the use of international materials to interpret the Constitutional will proceed in four parts. First, I will argue that international law has a venerable history in constitutional interpretation. Second, I will argue that American courts and foreign courts are engaged in a common legal enterprise and could learn from one another. Third, I will argue that the text of certain constitutional provisions invites the use of international materials. Finally, I will argue that taking international opinion into account has strong pragmatic justifications.

Fifteen Famous Supreme Court Cases From Georgia, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

John Inscoe, UGA professor of history and editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia, invited Hosch Professor Dan T. Coenen to contribute a series of essays on the most significant U.S. Supreme Court cases that originated in the state of Georgia. This article, which proposes an unranked top 15 list, is built on this work.

Can Treasury Overrule The Supreme Court?, Gregg D. Polsky

Scholarly Works

This article considers whether the Treasury's check-the-box regulations, which have been widely praised by tax practitioners, are valid. These regulations generally allow any unincorporated entity to elect whether it will be treated as a corporation or a partnership for tax purposes. When these regulations were first proposed, there was some debate as to whether such an elective regime was foreclosed by the statutory scheme, which requires that "associations" be taxed as corporations. This article argues that the focus of this debate was misplaced because, even assuming that the statutory scheme itself was sufficiently ambiguous as to permit an elective regime, …

If The Shoe Fits: Kasky V. Nike And Whether Corporate Statements About Business Operations Should Be Deemed Commercial Speech, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

This Note argues that the Kasky court was correct to recognize that today's commercial speech encompasses communications beyond traditional advertisements about products or services. Corporations are aware that a sizeable number of consumers rely on their statements about their business operations when making investment and purchasing decisions. In order to ensure the accuracy of these statements, and thereby protect the integrity of the market, this speech is properly considered commercial speech.

Apprendi And Federalism, Peter B. Rutledge

Scholarly Works

Since the emergence of the Apprendi majority and its newly minted (and evolving) constitutional limits on criminal punishment, many commentators have begun to address its implications for the horizontal relations between the branches of government — between legislators and courts, between judges and juries, and between judges and prosecutors. Less widely addressed, though equally (if not more) important, has been the Apprendi doctrine’s implications for vertical relations, particularly federalism.

This essay seeks to begin to fill that lacuna in the literature. Part I explains how Apprendi undermines principles of federalism, a curious tension because several of Apprendi’s strongest defenders, particularly …

Defining Democracy: The Supreme Court's Campaign Finance Dilemma, Lori A. Ringhand

Scholarly Works

On December 10, 2003 the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in McConnell v. FEC. In McConnell, the Court was asked to determine the constitutionality of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act ("BCRA"). A divided Court, in a deeply fractured decision in which six justices wrote individual opinions, upheld the major provisions of the legislation. Yet despite the almost 300 pages of reasoning provided by the Court, and a voluminous record developed by the district court, the Justices could not agree on what purportedly is the central issue in campaign finance law: whether the challenged regulations were necessary …

Guantánamo, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

This article addresses not only offshore detainees at Guantánamo and elsewhere, but also the two Americans and one Qatari held in the United States as enemy combatants. It focuses on the critical issues in U.S. litigation - extraterritoriality and deference - yet also examines the scope of detention and the propriety of proposed special tribunals. After demonstrating that in the wake of September 11, 2001, no U.S. constitutional precedent governed these issues, the article then looks to norms drawn from international humanitarian and human rights law to aid decision. The Supreme Court increasingly consults such external norms as persuasive authority; …

Race-Conscious Affirmative Action By Tax Exempt 501(C)(3) Corporations After Grutter And Gratz, David A. Brennen

Scholarly Works

Part I of this Article examines how the Equal Protection Clause limits the government's ability to engage in race-based affirmative action. Part I focuses on how constitutional law analysis has evolved in light of the Supreme Court's recent decisions in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger. Part II provides a brief description of tax law's public policy limitation. This part shows how the IRS, though not required to do so, has generally followed Equal Protection Clause jurisprudence when applying the public policy limitation to race-based activity by private tax exempt 501(c)(3) institutions. Part III discusses how the Supreme …

The (Un)Favorable Judgment Of History: Deportation Hearings, The Palmer Raids, And The Meaning Of History, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

As Americans respond to the events of September 11, 2001, they are being forced to contemplate their place in American history-past, present, and future. This has become particularly stark in the fight over secret deportation hearings. Following September 11, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that the deportation hearings of "special interest" aliens would be closed to the public. Applying Richmond Newspapers's two-pronged logic-and-experience test, the Third and Sixth Circuits subsequently split over the constitutionality of the blanket closure. At the heart of their disagreement was the scarce history of deportation hearings and whether such hearings had been closed in the …

The Heart Of Federalism: Pretext Review Of Means-End Relationships, J. Randy Beck

Scholarly Works

Section I of this article seeks to correct a common scholarly misconception regarding the sort of pretext review envisioned by McCulloch v. Maryland. All students of McCulloch understand the decision to call for judicial review of the means-end relationship underlying a federal statute. But McCulloch also indicated that the Court would strike down legislation "should Congress, under the pretext of executing its powers, pass laws for the accomplishment of objects not entrusted to the government." Various constitutional scholars construe this pretext passage to contemplate a second inquiry--separate from the Court's scrutiny of means-end relationships--into whether the legislative motive behind a …

The Rehnquist Court, Structural Due Process, And Semisubstantive Constitutional Review, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

Semisubstantive review, as I use that label, entails four key features. First, the subject matter of judicial inquiry is not the process applied in adjudicating a discrete dispute; rather, the matter at hand is the constitutionality of a statute or other generalized expression of legal policy. Second, some procedural omission by the lawmaker -- rather than an incurably substantive flaw in the end product of its work -- lays the groundwork for a judicial intervention that invalidates the challenged rule or negates how that rule otherwise would operate. It may be, for example, that a federal statute read as a …

Congressional Power Over Presidential Elections: Lessons From The Past And Reforms For The Future, Dan T. Coenen, Edward J. Larson

Scholarly Works

Presidential election controversies are nothing new. They have plagued our republic since 1801, when the fourth election for the office ended in a muddle that nearly deprived the rightful winner of the presidency. Each controversy has led to calls for reform. In every instance, the cryptic and troublesome constitutional text has hampered congressional efforts to correct the problems. Simply stated, the Constitution offers little explicit guidance on when and how Congress can regulate the selection of the President. In this Article, we explore the implications of this textual deficiency, looking both at what Congress has done in the past and …

Federalism In Environmental Protection, Peter A. Appel

Scholarly Works

In the last seven years, the Supreme Court has decided several cases that potentially alter the balance between the states and the federal government. Although these decisions have generated much controversy, in some ways they only address some important federalism questions at the periphery. Professor Appel examines four areas of environmental law that the recent decisions either only inform or do not address at all: cleanup of hazardous waste sites; the effect of state enforcement actions on citizen enforcement brought under federal environmental laws; the effect of state enforcement actions on federal enforcement actions; and the management of federal lands …

Charities And The Constitution: Evaluating The Role Of Constitutional Principles In Determining The Scope Of Tax Law's Public Policy Limitation For Charities, David A. Brennen

Scholarly Works

This Article expands the discussion of whether tax-exempt charities, for constitutional law purposes, should be treated as government actors, as private actors or as something in between. While government actors are subject to constitutional law restrictions concerning discrimination and free speech, private non-government actors are not generally subject to these same restrictions. Although tax-exempt charities are often thought of as sovereigns and, thus, government-like, the fact remains that charities are private entities created to serve public purposes. As private entities, charities - like all other private entities - are not necessarily bound by constitutional law principles. Still, the many “public” …