Constitutional Law Commons^™

Disorder In The Court: The Death Penalty And The Constitution, Robert A. Burt

Michigan Law Review

This article has two purposes. Its first aim is to trace the significance of these shifting characterizations of American society in the Justices' successive approaches to the death penalty by retelling the story of the Court's capital punishment jurisprudence. Its second purpose is to suggest that belief in implacable social hostility destroys the coherence of the judicial role in constitutional adjudication. America may indeed be an irreconcilably polarized society; I cannot dispositively prove or disprove the proposition. I mean only to claim that in constitutional adjudication a judge is obliged to act as if this proposition were false; and, moreover, …

When Honesty Is "Simply…Impractical" For The Supreme Court: How The Constitution Came To Require Busing For School Racial Balance, Lino A. Graglia

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Swann's Way: The School Busing Case and the Supreme Court by Bernard Schwartz

Toleration And The Constitution, Judith L. Hudson

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Toleration and the Constitution by David A.J. Richards

No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment And The Bill Of Rights, Mark A. Grannis

Michigan Law Review

A Review of No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights by Michael Kent Curtis

The Rise Of Modern Judicial Review: From Constitutional Interpretation To Judge-Made Law, Ward A. Greenberg

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Rise of Modern Judicial Review: From Constitutional Interpretation to Judge-Made Law by Christopher Wolfe

Intergenerationalism And Constitutional Law, Ira C. Lupu

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Constitutional Law by Geoffrey R. Stone, Louis M. Seidman, Cass R. Sunstein and Mark V. Tushnet and Constitutional Law: Cases -- Comments -- Questions by William B. Lockhart, Yale Kamisar, Jesse H. Choper, and Steven H. Shiffrin

Commerce Clause Restraints On State Taxation: Purposeful Economic Protectionism And Beyond, Walter Hellerstein

Michigan Law Review

Few questions in recent years have spawned as much controversy and as little academic interest as the scope of commerce clause restraints on state tax power. The Supreme Court has handed down an extraordinary number of significant decisions addressed to the limitations the commerce clause imposes on state taxation. Yet these decisions have barely caught the eye of the nation's leading law reviews or constitutional scholars. Even those observers who have recognized the Court's renaissance of interest in the dormant commerce clause have largely confined their attention to state regulation, as distinguished from state taxation, of interstate commerce. If there …

Population Changes And Constitutional Amendments: Federalism Versus Democracy, Peter Suber

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

To amend the federal Constitution, we need the assent of two-thirds of each house of Congress and three-fourths of the states. This Article focuses on the three-fourths requirement for the states. This threshold is particularly high, and it suggests that constitutional amendment is very difficult. In fact, amendment is difficult in different degrees for different constituencies, depending not on their numbers but on where they live.

Two Firsts: A Comparative Study Of The American And The Polish Constitutions, Rett R. Ludwikowski

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article is only an introductory study to further inquiry. It focuses on the first two constitutions in the world: the American Constitution of 1787 and the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791. Furthermore, the emphasis of this essay will be disposed of in a different manner than in the above mentioned studies. The author's purpose is not to add another article to the numerous works already devoted to American Constitutional development; instead, the following remarks will emphasize Polish constitutional history, and treat the American constitutional experience as a background for comparison.

Siamese Essays: (I) Cts Corp. V. Dynamics Corp. Of America And Dormant Commerce Clause Doctrine; (Ii) Extraterritorial State Legislation, Donald H. Regan

Articles

What follows is two essays, related as Siamese twins. Both essays developed from a single conception. They are distinct, but they remain connected by a shared subtopic. The first essay is about CTS Corp. v. Dynamics Corp. of America1 as a contribution to dormant commerce clause doctrine. The second essay is about the constitutional principle that states may not legislate extraterritorially, which I shall refer to as the "extraterritoriality principle." The shared subtopic is the extraterritoriality problem in CTS. (There is an extraterritoriality problem in CTS, even though the Court does not discuss it in those terms.) I could have …

Constructing A Constitution: 'Orginal Intention' In The Slave Cases, James Boyd White

Other Publications

The question how our Constitution is to be interpreted is a living one for us today, both in the scholarly and in the political domains. Professors argue about "interpretivism" and "originalism" in law journals, they study hermeneutics and deconstruction to determine whether or not interpretation is possible at all, and if so on what premises, and they struggle to create theories that will tell us both what we do in fact and what we ought to do. Politicians and public figures (including Attorney General Edwin Meese) talk in the newspapers and elsewhere about the authority of the "original intention of …

Preventative Pretrial Detention And The Failure Of Interest-Balancing Approaches To Due Process, Albert W. Alschuler

Michigan Law Review

This article, echoing Highmore's treatise of 1783, maintains that neither a legitimate nor a very important governmental interest can justify preventive detention in the absence of significant proof of past wrongdoing or an inability to control one's behavior. Both the Supreme Court's neglect of this issue and Congress' similar neglect in the preventive detention provisions of the Federal Bail Reform Act of 1984 reveal the extent to which cost-benefit analysis has captured American law and threatened core concepts of individual dignity.

The article does not oppose all forms of preventive pretrial detention. To the contrary, it recognizes that the detention …

The Rise And Fall Of The "Doctrine" Of Separation Of Powers, Philip B. Kurland

Michigan Law Review

As the Constitution of the United States nears its two hundredth anniversary, there is a frenzy of celebration. However awesome the accomplishment, I submit that it is no slander to recognize that the 1787 document was born of prudent compromise rather than principle, that it derived more from experience than from doctrine, and that it was received with an ambivalence in no small part attributable to its ambiguities. Indeed, its most stalwart supporters doubted its capacity for a long life. It should not be surprising, then, that even today there is disagreement over whether the Constitution of 1787 is now …

Government Responsibility For Constitutional Torts, Christina B. Whitman

Articles

This essay is about the language used to decide when governments should be held responsible for constitutional torts.' Debate about what is required of government officials, and what is required of government itself, is scarcely new. What is new, at least to American jurisprudence, is litigation against government units (rather than government officials) for constitutional injuries. 2 The extension of liability to institutional defendants introduces special problems for the language of responsibility. In a suit against an individual official it is easy to describe the wrong as the consequence of individual behavior that is inconsistent with community norms; the language …

Fifth Amendment Privilege For Producing Corporate Documents, Nancy J. King

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that a person should be able to assert her fifth amendment privilege against self-incrimination when her act of producing corporate documents pursuant to a subpoena causes her to make testimonial admissions that are incriminating. Part I briefly examines the two approaches the Supreme Court has used to decide claims of self-incrimination for records production. First, it explains the Court's traditional entity doctrine which, by focusing on the nature of the documents and the capacity in which they are held, has prohibited records producers from invoking the fifth amendment privilege against self-incrimination if the records produced are those …

Community, Citizenship, And The Search For National Identity, Frederick Schauer

Michigan Law Review

As a test of this proposition, I want to explore the issue of alienage restrictions. Under what circumstances is it justifiable to draw lines based on whether a person is a citizen? Lines drawn on the basis of citizenship are a useful test of how seriously we take the idea of the nation as a relevant community and, more tangentially, of how seriously we take the idea of community itself. To the extent that we are skeptical of such lines, our concerns are to that extent individual-oriented, primarily focused on the adverse consequences of excluding some people from benefits or …

At-Large Elections And Vote Dilution: An Empirical Study, Richard A. Walawender

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The 1982 amendments to the Act, however, have remained a subject of controversy. Opponents of the Act misperceive municipal at-large electoral systems, believing they provide as much minority representation as single-member district systems. This Note addresses that misperception with data showing that at large schemes provide significantly less minority representation than other schemes. The various standards used by federal courts in reviewing the constitutionality of at-large election systems are outlined in Part I. Part II sets forth an analysis of Congress's response to the judicial ambivalence toward at-large elections- the 1982 amendments to section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. …

Expert Services And The Indigent Criminal Defendant: The Constitutional Madate Of Ake V. Oklahoma, John M. West

Michigan Law Review

This Note attempts to define the boundaries of the indigent criminal defendant's constitutional right to expert assistance, in the light of Ake v. Oklahoma. Part I briefly reviews the Ake decision and examines its constitutional background. Part II inquires into Ake's implications for experts other than psychiatrists and in contexts other than the insanity defense, arguing that the principles that guided the Ake decision have validity well beyond the facts of that case. Part III asks whether the Ake doctrine should be limited to capital cases. Rejecting such a limitation, it concludes that the right to expert assistance …

The Constitution As Mirror: Tribe's Constitutional Choices, Richard A. Posner

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Constitutional Choices by Laurence H. Tribe

Liberalism And American Constitutional Law, Eric Brunstad

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Liberalism and American Constitutional Law by Rogers M. Smith

Cloning And The Constitution: An Inquiry Into Governmental Policymaking And Genetic Experimentation, Barry J. Swanson

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Cloning And the Constitution: An Inquiry Into Governmental Policymaking and Genetic Experimentation by Ira H. Carmen

State Constitutional Law: Federalism In The Common Law Tradition, Ellen A. Peters

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Developments in State Constitutional Law edited by Bradley D. McGraw

Hyperspace, Girardeau A. Spann

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Supreme Court and Constitutional Democracy by John Agresto

Police Interrogation And Confessions, Yale Kamisar

Book Chapters

In the police interrogation room, where, until the second third of the century, police practices were unscrutinized and virtually unregulated, constitutional ideals collide with the grim realities of law enforcement.

Philosophy And The Constitution, Donald H. Regan

Book Chapters

The Constitution is one of the great achievements of political philosophy; and it may be the only political achievement of philosophy in our society. The Framers of the Constitution and the leading participants in the debates on ratification shared a culture more thoroughly than did any later American political elite. They shared a knowledge (often distorted, but shared nevertheless) of ancient philosophy and history, of English common law, of recent English political theory, and of the European Enlightenment.They were the American branch of the Enlightenment,and salient among their membership credentials was their belief that reasoned thought about politics could guide …

The Federal Rules Of Criminal Procedure, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

After the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (1938) established a uniform set of procedures for the trial of civil cases in federal courts, Congress authorized the supreme court to make rules for the trial of federal criminal cases as well. With two Justices dissenting, the Supreme Court adopted the rules in 1944 and submitted them to Congress, which, by silence, approved them.

Boycott, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

A boycott is a group refusal to deal. Such concerted action is an effective way for society’s less powerful members,such as unorganized workers or racial minorities, to seek fair treatment in employment, public accommodations,and public services. But as the Supreme Court recognized in Eastern States Retail Lumber Dealers’ Association v.United States (1914): ‘‘An act harmless when done by one may become a public wrong when done by many acting in concert, for it then takes on the form of a conspiracy.’’

Burden Of Proof, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

Although the Constitution does not mention burden of proof, certain principles are widely accepted as having constitutional status. The first and most significant of these is the rule that in a criminal case the government must prove its case ‘‘beyond a REASONABLE DOUBT.’’ This is the universal COMMON LAW rule, and was said by the Supreme Court in IN RE WINSHIP (1970) to be an element of DUE PROCESS. This standard is commonly contrasted with proof ‘‘by a preponderance of the evidence’’ or ‘‘by clear and convincing evidence.’’ The standard of proof is in practice not easily susceptible to further …

Compulsory Process, Right To, Peter K. Westen

Book Chapters

The first state to adopt a constitution following the Declaration of Independence (New Jersey, 1776) guaranteed all criminal defendants the same ‘‘privileges of witnesses’’ as their prosecutors. Fifteen years later, in enumerating the constitutional rights of accused persons, the framers of the federal Bill of Rights bifurcated what New Jersey called the ‘‘privileges of witnesses’’ into two distinct but related rights: the Sixth Amendment right of the accused ‘‘to be confronted with the witnesses against him,’’ and his companion Sixth Amendment right to ‘‘compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor.’’ The distinction between witnesses ‘‘against’’ the accused and witnesses …

A Mandatory Right To Counsel For The Material Witness, Susan Kling

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Note argues that a uniform statute establishing a mandatory right to counsel should be adopted, at both the state and federal levels, to afford to the material witness protection that the Constitution fails to provide. Part I describes the general scope of the problem and concludes that neither the federal government, the individual states, nor the United States Constitution provides the material witness with a mandatory right to counsel. Part II argues that the material witness should have a statutorily mandated right to counsel. A mandatory right to counsel should be extended to the material witness both for the …