Constitutional Law Commons^™

Popular Constitutionalism And The State Attorneys General, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

In her article Dead or Alive: Originalism as Popular Constitutionalism in Heller, Professor Reva Siegel argued that the Supreme Court’s opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller relied on originalism to enforce understandings of the Second Amendment that were forged in the late twentieth century through popular constitutionalism. In this Response, Professor Joseph Blocher argues that those understandings reappeared in McDonald v. City of Chicago, in part through the efforts of thirty-eight state attorneys general (SAGs) who filed an amicus brief urging the Court to incorporate the Second Amendment against the states. The SAGs invoked federalism, but their arguments …

Amicus Brief Of Antitrust Professors And Scholars, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church And School V. Eeoc, Barak D. Richman, Harry First

Faculty Scholarship

Professional associations of clergy have invoked the ministerial exception to claim immunity from the antitrust laws. In claiming immunity, these clergy feel entitled to construct cartel-like arrangements that, absent such immunity, would violate section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1 (2006). The question presented in this case characterizes the ministerial exception as a bar to most “employment-related lawsuits brought against religious organizations by employees performing religious functions.” Such a characterization leaves open the possibility that “religious organizations” could include professional associations of clergy, in addition to churches, religious schools, or other employers of clergy, and “employment-related lawsuits” …

Four Constitutional Limits That The Minimum Coverage Provision Respects, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Opponents of the minimum coverage provision in the Affordable Care Act charge that if Congress can require most people to obtain health insurance or pay a certain amount of money, then Congress can impose whatever mandates it wishes—or, at least, whatever purchase mandates it wishes. This Essay refutes that claim by identifying four limits on the Commerce Clause that the minimum coverage provision honors. Congress may not use its commerce power: (1) to regulate noneconomic subject matter; (2) to impose a regulation that violates constitutional rights, including the right to bodily integrity; (3) to regulate at all, including by imposing …

What State Constitutional Law Can Tell Us About The Federal Constitution, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

Courts and scholars have long sought to illuminate the relationship between state and federal constitutional law. Yet their attention, like the relationship itself, has largely been one-sided: State courts have consistently adopted federal constitutional law as their own, and scholars have attempted to illuminate why this is, and why it should or should not be so. By contrast, federal courts tend not to look to state constitutional law, even for persuasive authority. Nor have scholars argued at any length that federal courts can or should look to state constitutional law for guidance in answering the many constitutional questions common to …

Reasoning About The Irrational: The Roberts Court And The Future Of Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

Commentary on the future direction of the Roberts Court generally falls along lines that correlate with the commentators' political views on the desirability of the Court's recent decisions. A more informative approach is to look for opinions suggesting changes in the presuppositions with which the Justices approach constitutional decision making. In footnote 27 in his opinion for the Court in the District of Columbia v. Heller Second Amendment decision, Justice Scalia suggested a fundamental revision of the Court's assumptions about the role of judicial doctrine, and the concept of rationality, in constitutional law. Justice Scalia would eliminate the normative aspects …

Case For Calling An Article V Convention, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Constitutionalizing Local Politics, Joseph Blocher, Ilan Graff

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Crisis In The Legal Profession: Don’T Mourn, Organize!, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Roberts’ Rules: The Assertiveness Of Rules-Based Jurisprudence, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Conflicted Assumptions Of Modern Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

Contribution to Symposium - The Nature of Judicial Authority: A Reflection on Philip Hamburger's Law and Judicial Duty

Constitutional Limitations On Land Use Controls, Environmental Regulations And Governmental Exactions (2011 Edition), Garrett Power

Faculty Scholarship

This electronic book is published in a searchable PDF format as a part of the E-scholarship Repository of the University of Maryland School of Law. It is an “open content” casebook intended for classroom use in courses in Land Use Control, Environmental Law and Constitutional Law. It consists of cases carefully selected from the two hundred years of American constitutional history which address the clash between public sovereignty and private property. It considers both the personal right to liberty and the personal right in property. The text consists of non-copyrighted material and readers are free to use it or re-mix …

On The Difficulties Of Generalization – Pcaob In The Footsteps Of Myers, Humphrey’S Executor, Morrison And Freytag, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

In considering what to write for this welcome occasion, I was struck by a certain resonance among Paul's scholarship – at least that of which I was first aware, and which I have often used to impress on students the problems of due process analysis – the important post he now holds, and a story our joint mentor, Walter Gellhorn, liked to tell on himself. In the wake of the Supreme Court's paradigm-shifting opinion in Goldberg v. Kelly, with its confident pronouncement of eight procedural elements that, it reasoned, minimal due process must always require of administrative procedures, Paul made …

Boumediene, Munaf, And The Supreme Court's Misreading Of The Insular Cases , Andrew Kent

Faculty Scholarship

In 2008, the Supreme Court embraced both global constitutionalism - the view that the Constitution provides judicially enforceable rights to non-citizens outside the sovereign territory of the United States - and what I call human-rights universalism - the view that the Constitution protects military enemies during armed conflict. Boumediene v. Bush found a constitutional right to habeas corpus for non-citizens detained as enemy combatants at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, while Munaf v. Geren - decided the same day as Boumediene and involving U.S. citizens detained in Iraq during the war there - hinted that the Due Process …

Forum, Federalism, And Free Markets: An Empirical Study Of Judicial Behavior Under The Dormant Commerce Clause Doctrine, Mehmet K. Konar-Steenberg, Anne F. Peterson

Faculty Scholarship

This study examines judicial behavior under the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine by drawing on an original database of 459 state and Federal appellate cases decided between 1970 and 2009. The authors use logit regression to show that state judges are more likely to uphold state and local laws against dormant Commerce Clause attack than their Federal judicial counterparts, a result that is consistent with the interstate rivalry issues animating the doctrine. The study also finds that Republican-dominated judicial panels at the state level are more likely to side with tax challengers invoking the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine than are Democratic …

Original Habeas Redux, Lee B. Kovarsky

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores what is perhaps the Supreme Court’s most exotic appellate power— its authority to issue (inaptly-named) “original” writs of habeas corpus. Although I have been working on Original Habeas Redux for some time, the Troy Davis case has recently thrust this topic into the national spotlight. In Davis (2009), the Supreme Court exercised, for the first time in over forty years, its power to transfer an original habeas petition to a district court for merits adjudication. Having collected and tabulated two decades of new data, I argue that Davis is not a blip in an otherwise constant state …

Apoplectic About Hyperlexis, William Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Justice Stevens And Constitutional Adjudication: The Law Beyond The Rules., William D. Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Historical Roots Of Citizens United Vs. Fec: How Anarchists And Academics Accidentally Created Corporate Speech Rights, The General Essay, Zephyr Teachout

Faculty Scholarship

This paper looks at how the early rhetoric around the First Amendment enabled later development of corporate political speech rights.

Private Rights In Public Lands: The Chicago Lakefront, Montgomery Ward, And The Public Dedication Doctrine, Joseph D. Kearney, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

When one thinks of how the law protects public rights in open spaces, the public trust doctrine comes to mind. This is especially true in Chicago. The modem public trust doctrine was born in the landmark decision in Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. Illinois, growing out of struggles over the use of land along the margin of Lake Michigan in that city. Yet Chicago's premier park – Grant Park, sitting on that land in the center of downtown Chicago – owes its existence to a different legal doctrine. This other doctrine, developed by American courts in the nineteenth century, …

How Constitutional Theory Matters, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

It is impossible to understand the present moment in progressive constitutionalism without engaging a stock narrative given iconic articulation more than a decade ago by originalist scholar Randy Barnett. According to this narrative, conservatives in the 1980s, prodded by Edwin Meese III's Justice Department, rallied around originalism, and particularly "original intentions" originalism, as a politically congenial and intellectually satisfying approach to constitutional interpretation. They were defeated in the courts of academic and political opinion due in part to a series of unanswerable criticisms from liberal legal scholars such as Paul Brest and H. Jefferson Powell, and in part to the …

Corporations, Corruption, And Complexity: Campaign Finance After Citizens United, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Few campaign finance cases have drawn more public attention than the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC. The Court's invalidation of a sixty-year-old federal law – and comparable laws in two dozen states – banning corporations from engaging in independent spending in support of or opposition to candidates strongly affirms the right of corporations to engage in electoral advocacy. Critics – and most, albeit not all, of both the popular and academic commentary on the decision has been critical – have condemned the idea that corporations enjoy the same rights to spend on elections as natural persons. …

All Things In Proportion - American Rights Review And The Problem Of Balancing, Jud Mathews, Alec Stone Sweet

Faculty Scholarship

This paper describes and evaluates the evolution of rights doctrines in the United States, focusing on the problem of balancing as a mode of rights adjudication. In the current Supreme Court, deep conflict over whether, when, and how courts balance is omnipresent. Elsewhere, we find that the world’s most powerful constitutional courts have embraced a stable, analytical procedure for balancing, known as proportionality. Today, proportionality analysis (PA) constitutes the defining doctrinal core of a transnational, rights-based constitutionalism. This Article critically examines alleged American exceptionalism, from the standpoint of comparative constitutional law and practice. Part II provides an overview of how …

Nonbelievers, Nelson Tebbe

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Citizens United, Stevens And Humanitarian Law Project: First Amendment Rules And Standards In Three Acts, William D. Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Redressing Deprivations Of Rights Secured By State Constitutions Outside The Shadow Of The Supreme Court's Constitutional Remedies Jurisprudence, Gary S. Gildin

Faculty Scholarship

The second generation of state constitutionalism is now emerging. With the methodology of autonomous state constitutional protection more clearly defined, courts and legislatures are turning to the task of determining when, and from whom, they should award damages to citizens deprived of their state constitutional rights. State courts, as well as legislatures contemplating statutes authorizing damage actions, will be tempted to borrow United States Supreme Court interpretations of 42 U.S.C. §1983 in shaping civil relief for infringement of state constitutional rights. This article argues that the Supreme Court’s Section 1983 remedies doctrine is a product of statutory, structural and institutional …

Brief Of Constitutional Law Professors As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioner, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Transforming Property Into Speech, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Retail Rebellion And The Second Amendment, Darrell A. H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

When, if ever, is there a Second Amendment right to kill a cop? This piece seeks to answer that question. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment codifies a natural right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. That right to self-defense extends to both private and public threats, including self-defense against agents of a tyrannical government. Moreover, the right is individual. Individuals -- not just communities -- have the right to protect themselves from public violence. Individuals -- not just militias -- have the right to defend themselves against tyranny. In McDonald …

Linguistic Colonialism: Law, Independence, And Language Rights In Puerto Rico, Andrea Freeman

Faculty Scholarship

Part I reviews and analyzes courts' attempts to reconcile the conflict between the statutory English-language requirement for federal jurors, Puerto Rico's almost entirely Spanish-speaking population, and the Sixth Amendment's constitutional mandate. This part consists of three sub-parts: a description of Puerto Rico's linguistic landscape in comparison with that of the United States, a history of fair cross section challenges pertaining to the District of Puerto Rico, and a comparative look at fair cross section challenges in the Ninth Circuit. Part II examines the tension between language and constitutional rights through the lens of one case, Diffenderfer v. Gomez-Colon. In this …

Prophylactic Rules And State Constitutionalism, Arthur Leavens

Faculty Scholarship

When the post-Warren Supreme Court began trimming back individual rights, some state courts responded by interpreting analogous or cognate state constitutional provisions to find broader protections, prompting a vigorous debate concerning the legitimacy and interpretive methodology of such state constitutionalism. How can two constitutional provisions, sharing the same language and history, mean different things? This Article looks at that question in the context of so-called prophylactic rules—those specific constitutional rules meant to guide the implementation of broader federal constitutional principles. Miranda ’s warning-and-waiver construct is probably the best known prophylactic rule, but such rules abound, particularly in criminal procedure.

This …