Constitutional Law Commons^™

Executive Branch Fact Deference As A Separation Of Powers Principle, Emily A. Kile

Indiana Law Journal

This Note concludes that, although Zivotofsky I provides a basis for judicial review of the legality of the Obama Administration’s “hostilities” determination (and, by extension, other questions of statutory interpretation related to foreign affairs), that review could be blunted by judicial deference to the executive branch’s factual determinations relevant to whether the Libyan airstrikes constituted “hostilities” within the War Powers Resolution. By addressing the political question doctrine’s history and the response to Zivotofsky I, this Note will explore whether the political question doctrine—particularly in cases of statutory interpretation—has lost some of its force as a justiciability doctrine. This Note will …

“Illegal” Migration Is Speech, Daniel I. Morales

Indiana Law Journal

Noncitizens must comply with immigration laws just because citizens say so. The citizenry takes for granted its monopoly on immigration control, but the legitimacy of this arrangement has been called into question by cutting-edge political theorists. One prominent theorist argues, for example, that basic democratic principles require that noncitizens living outside the United States have a say in the formation of immigration law since they must obey it. This Article provides a legal response to these political theory developments, assimilating them, along with the facts on the ground, into an account of “illegal” migration as First Amendment speech.

If noncitizens’ …

Post-Racialism And The End Of Strict Scrutiny, David Schraub

Indiana Law Journal

In recent years, a growing social consensus has emerged around the aspiration of a “post-racial” America: one where race is no longer a fault line for social strife or, perhaps, a morally significant trait whatsoever. This ambition, however, lies in tension with the most basic constitutional principle governing our treatment of race in the public sphere: that of “strict scrutiny.” Post-racialism seeks to diminish the salience of race to near negligibility. The strict scrutiny of racial classifications, by contrast, significantly enhances the salience of race by treating it differently from virtually every other personal attribute or characteristic—including hair or eye …

Eliminating Circuit-Split Disparities In Federal Sentencing Under The Post-Booker Guidelines, Elliot Edwards

Indiana Law Journal

This Note will explore the rarely discussed consequences that result when courts of appeals freely interpret the Sentencing Guidelines. This Note will not address appellate review of sentences in general, nor will it discuss disparities caused by trial courts. Instead, the discussion below will address a very specific situation, namely when a court of appeals vacates a sentence because, in its estimation, the trial court misapplied the Guidelines. Part I will relate the history of the recent sentencing re-form movement in America, noting particularly which bodies have the authority to decide sentencing policy. Part II will then analyze the interpretive …

The Two Faces Of The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Emily Berman

Indiana Law Journal

When former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked a massive trove of information about secret intelligence-collection programs implemented under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in the summer of 2013, U.S. surveillance activities were thrust to the forefront of public debate. This debate included the question of whether and how to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (“FISA Court”), the statutorily created secret court that reviews government applications to conduct surveillance in the United States. This discussion, however, has underemphasized a critical feature of the way the FISA Court works. As this Article will show, since the terrorist attacks of …

Taking The Oceanfront Lot, Josh Eagle

Indiana Law Journal

Oceanfront landowners and states share a property boundary that runs between the wet and dry parts of the shore. This legal coastline is different from an ordinary land boundary. First, on sandy beaches, the line is constantly in flux, and it cannot be marked except momentarily. Without the help of a surveyor and a court, neither the landowner nor a citizen walking down the beach has the ability to know exactly where the line lies. This uncertainty means that, as a practical matter, ownership of some part of the beach is effectively shared. Second, the common law establishes that the …

Standing For (And Up To) Separation Of Powers, Kent H. Barnett

Indiana Law Journal

The U.S. Constitution requires federal agencies to comply with separation-of-powers (or structural) safeguards, such as by obtaining valid appointments, exercising certain limited powers, and being sufficiently subject to the President’s control. Who can best protect these safeguards? A growing number of scholars would allow only the political branches—Congress and the President—to defend them. These scholars would limit or end judicial review because private judicial challenges are aberrant to justiciability doctrine and lead courts to meddle in minor matters that rarely affect regulatory outcomes.

This Article defends the right of private parties to assert justiciable structural causes of action, arguing that …

Commonality And The Constitution: A Framework For Federal And State Court Class Actions, Joseph A. Seiner

Indiana Law Journal

In Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 131 S. Ct. 2541 (2011), the Supreme Court concluded that the allegations of pay discrimination in a case brought by over one million female employees lacked sufficient commonality to warrant class certification under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(a). Though the case was expressly decided under the Federal Rules, some well-known employer groups have begun to advance the argument that Wal-Mart was decided on constitutional grounds. These advocates maintain that the Supreme Court’s decision creates a commonality standard for all class-action plaintiffs—regardless of whether those litigants bring their claims in federal or state court. …

North Carolina State Board Of Dental Examiners V. Ftc: Aligning Antitrust Law With Commerce Clause Jurisprudence Through A Natural Shift Of State-Federal Balance Of Power, Marie Forney

Indiana Law Journal

The Supreme Court’s holding in North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners v. FTC (NC Dental)1 in February 2015 demonstrates a natural shift in the balance of power from the states to the national government. As the country’s interstate and international economy has become more integrated, federal authority has likewise expanded.2 And although the federalism dichotomy has undergone periodic back-and-forth “swings” since the nation’s founding, the end result has been a net increase in federal power. NC Dental exemplifies this trend toward increasing national au-thority through the organic development of interstate commerce.

To Loose The Bonds: The Deceptive Promise Of Freedom From Pretrial Immigration Detention, Denise L. Gilman

Indiana Law Journal

Each year, the United States government detains more than 60,000 migrants who are eligible for release during immigration court proceedings that will determine their right to stay in the United States. Detention or release should be adjudicated through a custody determination process focused on the question of whether a mi-grant poses a flight risk or danger to the community. Yet, because the process skips the critical inquiry into the need for detention before setting monetary bond require-ments for release that are difficult to fulfill, freedom remains elusive.

The custody determination process is a cornerstone in the U.S. immigration de-tention edifice …

The Government’S Lies And The Constitution, Helen L. Norton

Indiana Law Journal

The government’s lies can be devastating. This is the case, for example, of its lies told to resist legal and political accountability for its misconduct; to inflict economic and reputational harm; or to enable the exercise of its powers to imprison, to deploy lethal force, and to commit precious national resources. On the other hand, the government’s lies can sometimes be helpful: consider lies told to thwart a military adversary or to identify wrongdoing through undercover police work. The substantial harms threatened by some government lies invite a search for ways to punish and prevent them. At the same time, …

Content-Based Copyright Denial, Ned Snow

Indiana Law Journal

No principle of First Amendment law is more firmly established than the principle that government may not restrict speech based on its content. It would seem to follow, then, that Congress may not withhold copyright protection for disfavored categories of content, such as violent video games or pornography. This Article argues otherwise. This Article is the first to recognize a distinction in the scope of coverage between the First Amendment and the Copyright Clause. It claims that speech protection from government censorship does not imply speech protection from private copying. Crucially, I argue that this distinction in the scope of …

Why The State Cannot “Abolish Marriage”: A Partial Defense Of Legal Marriage, Gregg P. Strauss

Indiana Law Journal

Does a liberal state have a legitimate interest in defining the terms of intimate relationships? Recently, several scholars have answered this question with a no and concluded that the state should abolish marriage, along with all other categories of intimate status. While politically infeasible, these proposals offer a powerful thought experiment. In this Article, I use this thought experiment to argue that the law cannot avoid relying on intimate-status norms and has legitimate reasons to retain an intimate status like marriage.

The argument has three parts. The primary lesson of the thought experiment is that the state cannot abolish intimate …

Banning The Bing: Why Extreme Solitary Confinement Is Cruel And Far Too Usual Punishment, Elizabeth Bennion

Indiana Law Journal

The United States engages in extreme practices of solitary confinement that maximize isolation and sensory deprivation of prisoners. The length is often indefinite and can stretch for weeks, months, years, or decades. Under these conditions, both healthy prisoners and those with preexisting mental-health issues often severely deteriorate both mentally and physically. New science and data provide increased insight into why and how human beings (and other social animals) deteriorate and suffer in such environments. The science establishes that meaningful social contacts and some level of opportunity for sensory enrichment are minimum human necessities. When those necessities are denied, the high …

Duty To Defend And The Rule Of Law, Gregory F. Zoeller

Indiana Law Journal

This Article challenges Eric Holder’s and William Pryor’s views and explains the proper role of a state attorney general when a party challenges a state statute. In short, an attorney general owes the state and its citizens, as sovereign, a duty to defend its statutes against constitutional attack except when controlling precedent so overwhelmingly shows that the statute is unconstitutional that no good-faith argument can be made in its defense. To exercise discretion more broadly, and selectively to pick and choose which statutes to defend, only erodes the rule of law. (introduction)

Scrutinizing Federal Electoral Qualifications, Derek T. Muller

Indiana Law Journal

Candidates for federal office must meet several constitutional qualifications. Sometimes, whether a candidate meets those qualifications is a matter of dispute. Courts and litigants often assume that a state has the power to include or exclude candidates from the ballot on the basis of the state’s own scrutiny of candidates’ qualifications. Courts and litigants also often assume that the matter is not left to the states but to Congress or another political actor. But those contradictory assumptions have never been examined, until now.

This Article compiles the mandates of the Constitution, the precedents of Congress, the practices of states administering …

Furtive Encryption: Power, Trusts, And The Constitutional Cost Of Collective Surveillance, Jeffrey L. Vagle

Indiana Law Journal

Recent revelations of heretofore secret U.S. government surveillance programs have sparked national conversations about their constitutionality and the delicate balance between security and civil liberties in a constitutional democracy. Among the revealed policies asserted by the National Security Agency (NSA) is a provision found in the “minimization procedures” required under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. This provision allows the NSA to collect and keep indefinitely any encrypted information collected from domestic communications—including the communications of U.S. citizens. That is, according to the U.S. government, the mere fact that a U.S. citizen has encrypted her electronic …

Do Corporations Have Religious Beliefs?, Jason Iuliano

Indiana Law Journal

Despite two hundred years of jurisprudence on the topic of corporate personhood, the Supreme Court has failed to endorse a philosophically defensible theory of the corporation. In this Article, I attempt to fill that void. Drawing upon the extensive philosophical literature on personhood and group agency, I argue that corporations qualify as persons in their own right. This leads me to answer the titular question with an emphatic yes. Contrary to how it first seems, that conclusion does not warrant granting expansive constitutional rights to corporations. It actually suggests the opposite. Using the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate as a …

The Limits Of Child Pornography, Carissa Byrne Hessick

Indiana Law Journal

Although the First Amendment ordinarily protects the creation, distribution, and possession of visual images, the Supreme Court has declared that those protections do not apply to child pornography. But the Court has failed to clearly define child pornography as a category of speech. Providing a precise definition of the child pornography exception to the First Amendment has become increasingly important because recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the penalties associated with the creation, distribution, and possession of child pornography.

This Article proposes a clear definition of the child pornography exception. It argues that an image ought to fall …

Free Exercise After The Arab Spring: Protecting Egypt’S Religious Minorities Under The Country’S New Constitution, James Michael Nossett

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Abortion And The “Woman Question”: Forty Years Of Debate, Reva B. Siegel

Indiana Law Journal

This paper was presented as the Addison C. Harris Lecture at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Bloomington, Indiana, September 27, 2012.

Unpopular Constitutionalism, Mila Versteeg

Indiana Law Journal

Constitutions are commonly thought to express nations’ highest values. They are often proclaimed in the name of “We the People” and are regarded—by scholars and the general public alike—as an expression of the people’s views and values. This Article shows empirically that this widely held image of constitutions does not correspond with the reality of constitution making around the world. The Article contrasts the constitutional-rights choices of ninety countries between 1981 and 2010 with data from nearly one-half million survey responses on cultural, religious, and social values conducted over the same period. It finds, surprisingly, that in this period, the …

Further Standing Lessons, Heather Elliott

Indiana Law Journal

Professor Elliott wrote a piece for the Indiana Law Journal in 2012 (available here). In this article, she updates her analysis and explores the implications of both the health-care and marriage equality cases on the Court’s standing doctrine.

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) …

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 …

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