Constitutional Law Commons^™

Beguiled: Free Exercise Exemptions And The Siren Song Of Liberalism, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

From all the talk about our religious pluralism—how extensive, indelible, inarbitrable it is—one would expect that establishing one definition of religious liberty would be the mother of all civic disturbances. Wrong. We have a common definition of religious liberty. I can demonstrate our agreement with one exhibit: the immensely broad based denunciation of the 1990 Supreme Court decision, Employment Division v. Smith. Two counsellors at a drug rehabilitation center (Alfred Smith and Galen Black) appealed Oregon’s denial of unemployment benefits. Oregon cited the “misconduct” that led to their discharges. Their “misconduct” consisted of using the hallucinogenic drug peyote. Peyote …

Process Of Constitutional Decision Making, Kenneth F. Ripple

Journal Articles

Over the past decade, our profession has engaged in an intense debate over the proper role of judges in the interpretation of our Constitution. This is not, of course, a new controversy. It has been with us ever since Chief Justice Marshall's decision in Marbury v. Madison.' However, during this last decade, the debate has taken on new dimensions. There is a new range and depth to the inquiry. What began as a discussion largely among members of the academic bar and some members of the judiciary has become a national political issue. Yet the basic question remains: In a …

German Constitutionalism: A Prolegomenon, Donald P. Kommers

Journal Articles

This essay sets out to describe the main features of German constitutionalism, and it concludes by drawing some comparisons with the United States. The term "constitutionalism," however, suffers from the vice of vagueness. As Gerhard Casper has written, "it is neither clearly prescriptive nor clearly descriptive; its contours are difficult to discern; its historical roots are diverse and uncertain." Any attempt to explore the contours and roots of German constitutionalism in the global sense suggested by Casper's comment would be a major undertaking extending far beyond the limits of this study. As used here the term shall be limited to …

The Tempting Of America, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

THE TEMPTING OF AMERICA by Robert Bork. New York: The Free Press/Macmillan, 1990. Hdbd: pp. xiv-432.

In the concluding third of The Tempting of America Robert Bork recounts his unsuccessful fight to gain Senate confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Bork relates his war story to the rest of the book. In the first two-thirds of Tempting, he takes us on a grand tour of the Constitution's career, starting in the courts with Chief Justice John Marshall, on through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and New Deal eras. He finishes with a detailed examination of the Warren, Burger and Rehnquist Courts. …

Tribe's "Jurisprudence Of The Religion Clauses", Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

Laurence Tribe has usefully been described as a constitutional apologist for liberal political causes. His conspicuous opposition to the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court and his imaginative defenses of Roe v. Wade have fueled that image. Tribe's "jurisprudence of the religion clauses" both confounds and complicates the picture. He sees no constitutional difficulty with public education vouchers, and defends the Catholic Church against "pro-choicers" who would strip its tax-exempt status because of the Bishops' "pro-life" activities. Tribe thinks that a public school moment-of-silence can be consistent with the Constitution and carves out a considerable zone of …

Curran Versus Catholic University Of America, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

From the Introduction

America's most celebrated recent episode of ecclesiastical « dissent » reached its legal conclusion in Curran v. Catholic University of America. Fr. Curran says he will not pursue appellate review. Consequently, Judge Weisberg's ruling in favor of CUA, plus Fr. Curran's refusal to teach anything but Catholic theology, mean that the « dissenter » will pursue his academic career elsewhere. But, while conclusive, the ruling is hardly the « landmark decision » one Catholic editor termed it.

How could a theological and ecclesiological controversy of such magnitude be emptied of its sacred content? How could Judge …

On Checking The Artifacts Of Canaan: A Comment On Levinson's "Confrontation", Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

My friend Levinson has been prominent of late among constitutional scholars who use religious metaphors to describe the curious American political experiment. In the image he uses, we lawyers are priests in the practice of a constitutional faith; the federal constitution is our scripture, our creed, and our oath. Levinson, though, is not a television evangelist or street preacher. He is, instead, a theologian. He is unique in the honesty and thoroughness he brings to the discussion-as evidenced here by his looking at the possibility that we priests of the American constitutional faith have another faith to take into account …

West German Constitutionalism And Church-State Relations, Donald P. Kommers

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The complex structure of church-state relations in West Germany arises out of numerous provisions of the Basic Law that combine features of both separation and accommodation. The Basic Law's separationist features are expressed in various guarantees of religious liberty and in the ban on the establishment of a state church. Its accommodationist features appear in constitutional provisions on religious education as well as in articles, taken over from the Weimar Constitution, that confer upon the established churches a special juridical status enjoyed by no other nongovernmental entity. The arguably diverse goals of the religion clauses are difficult to reconcile, creating …

Probing Bork's Judicial Philosophy, Gerard V. Bradley

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Robert Bork: The Tempting of America. (New York: The Free Press, 1989. Pp. xiv, 432. $22.50.)

In the last third of The Tempting of America Robert Bork relives the painful ordeal of his lost nomination to the Supreme Court. Any sentient American then alive already knows that story: the campaign against him was full of half-truths, distortions, and just plain lies. Bork adds some confirming anecdotes, and I congratulate him for telling the tale candidly but without rancor. The loss is ours. In my opinion, Bork would have been among the two or three greatest justices of the last …

The Union At Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States Rights And The Nullification Crisis, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk. Jacksonian Democracy, States Rights and the Nullification Crisis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Pp. xi, 279. $32.50 (ISBN: 0-19-503785-5).

From the Review

In a widely reported address at Tulane University in October 1986, Attorney General Edwin Meese chastised the Supreme Court for its habitual conflation of constitutional law and the Constitution.

Meese is no intellectual, and his remarks were not intended as academic musings; thus, the speech may have been appropriately judged from a political perspective, condemned by liberals and applauded by conservatives for roughly the same reasons. Unfortunately obscured by the …

Mastery, Slavery, And Emancipation, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

Hegel's dialectic of master and slave in the Phenomenology of Mind portrays a master unable to win genuine recognition from a slave because unwilling to confer it. The dialectic implies that freedom has to be conceived as association based on mutual respect, rather than independence. This article offers a communitarian interpretation of emancipation inspired by Hegel's dialectic of master and slave. It proceeds from an account of slave society which, like Hegel's dialectic, equates slavery with the denial of social recognition. This account argues that the experience of slave society led both the masters and the slaves to conceive of …

Does Autonomy Require Informed And Specific Refusal Of Life-Sustaining Medical Treatment?, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

Any social order that prizes individual autonomy is committed to collectively informing its autonomous members. A good working definition of "autonomy" is "self-determining free choice." What distinguishes "choice" from mere appetite or desire is deliberation upon known, available options and their probable consequences, and a practical equilibrium of external pressures for and against those options.

Even the most autonomy-driven society will conclude that some of its members - e.g., infants and persons with mental disabilities - are unable to choose for themselves. Autonomy for persons who are incompetent is inapposite because they are incapable of exercising free choice. Thus constitutional …

Possible Modifications Of Roe Vs. Wade, Charles E. Rice

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Church Autonomy In The Constitutional Order - The End Of Church And State?, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

"Separation of church and state" is right up there with Mom, apple pie, and baseball in American iconography. If everyone agrees on separation of church and state, why does the relationship between religion and public life so vex, excite, and confound us? Part of the reason is that church-state separation, although it is the historical achievement of societies decisively shaped by a Christianity that was itself decisively shaped by Judaism, is a commodious concept.

But "separation of church and state" is not contentless, and our conclusive agreement on it, I submit, provides a valuable common frame of reference in an …

The Constitutional Theory Of The Fourth Amendment, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

This Article will, in large part, present its thesis regarding fourth amendment doctrine by employing, as an illustration, a recent application of the current approach by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. In United States v. Torres, the Seventh Circuit held video surveillance constitutional and further found that the judiciary had the authority to issue warrants for such a technique. Although welcomed by prosecutors and law enforcement officials, this decision highlights the absurdity of the current interpretation of the reasonableness clause. Moreover, Torres provides a vehicle through which this Article's historical interpretation can be brought into focus under the cold …

Exorcizing Everson, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

Daniel Dreisbach: Real Threat and Mere Shadow: Religious Liberty and the First Amendment. Crossway Books. 351 pp. $15.00 (paper).

No aspect of constitutional law sports a bigger profile these days than that concerning religion, or "Church and state." Academics debate it prodigiously, lawyers litigate it furiously, and judges issue opinions on the subject with clockwork regularity. But this commotion is hardly esoteric. Pat Robertson's candidacy stirred everyone's emotions precisely because each of us has a strong sense of just how religious politics should be. George Bush clumsily attested to this popular sensitivity. What sustained bomber pilot Bush …

The Constitution, Religion, And American Public Life, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

From the Introduction

Even a nonspecialist familiar with all of the contiguous disciplines - religious studies, theology, all facets of American history, the history of Christianity, sociology of knowledge, even constitutional and legal history up to World War II - would never guess what American constitutional law of church and state really is. The temptation after reading the actual cases concerning church and state is to dismiss them as stupid. Church-state is the realm of "legendary inconsistencies," as one sympathetic scholar put it.

The sorriest scene in this legal wonderland is a recurring one, and plays in the public schoolroom. …

The Article Iii Judiciary In Its Third Century, Kenneth F. Ripple

Journal Articles

Tonight we celebrate the memory of one of the great American jurists of this century, Robert A. Ainsworth, Jr. In this bicentennial year of our Constitution, it seems most appropriate that we honor the memory of Judge Ainsworth by reflecting on that part of the Constitution to which he exhibited so much devotion—article III, the judicial article.

Rule 11 In The Constitutional Case, Gary J. Saalman, Kenneth Ripple

Journal Articles

The 1983 amendments to the Rules of Civil Procedure arose from concern over the flood of litigation in recent years and its high costs to both litigants and the court system. Although the causes of this litigation explosion and the remedies are both many and complex, the pretrial stage of litigation and the standards governing attorney responsibility were considered major contributors to the problem and prime areas for reform. The drafters of the 1983 amendments sought to streamline the litigation process by increasing judicial oversight and deterring abusive or dilatory tactics by the bar. Some of the most significant changes …

The Establishment Clause: Religion And The First Amendment, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment. By Leonard W. Levy. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1986. 236 pp. $16.95.

With this book the author of seminal works on freedom of the press and the privilege against self-incrimination focuses his considerable talents upon perhaps the most nagging constitutional problem of all: church and state. Leonard Levy's sights are clearly fixed upon Ronald Reagan, William Rehnquist, and other "nonpreferentialists," whom he arraigns on charges of willfully distorting history to buttress their conservative political views on school prayer and aid to parochial schools.

Review Essay: Liberalism And The Supreme Court, Donald P. Kommers

Journal Articles

In Liberalism and American Constitutional Law, Rogers M. Smith of Yale University takes stock of the American liberal tradition and its impact on the Supreme Court's constitutional jurisprudence. It argues that the tradition's political vision lacks philosophical coherence and that our constitutional law, by reflecting this incoherence, has failed to provide the legal community with a public philosophy suited to the needs of American society in the late twentieth century.His goal is to demonstrate the superiority of "rational liberty," both as a philosophical theory and practical guide to constitutional policymaking, over three major competing versions of liberal constitutionalism. To wit: …

Law And The Experience Of Politics In Late Eighteenth-Century North Carolina: North Carolina Considers The Constitution, Walter F. Pratt

Journal Articles

In 1788, delegates assembled in North Carolina to decide whether to ratify the Constitution. A debate erupted between Federalists and Anti-federalists regarding each Article of the then-drafted Constitution. This Article analyzes the debate, and proposes that the key difference was the function of the role of the law.

Imagining The Past And Remembering The Future: The Supreme Court's History Of The Establishment Clause, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

Our Framers through the Establishment Clause sought to prevent the government from preferring one religious sect to another. However, the Supreme Court in Everson v. Board of Education abandoned that meaning of nonestablishment and created a general prohibition on all nondiscriminatory aid to religion, a decision later reinforced in Lemon v. Kurtzman. This Article discusses the Founder’s worldview and looks at other Establishment Clause cases to illustrate that the historical evidence is inconsistent with Everson. Rather, the founders intended to assure that religion would be aided only on a nondiscriminatory, or sect-neutral, basis and does not stand for …

Liberty And Community In Constitutional Law: The Abortion Cases In Comparative Perspective, Donald P. Kommers

Journal Articles

In the mid-1970s the high courts of several western democracies handed down constitutional decisions concerning the legal regulation of abortion. All of the courts sustained their abortion statutes except the United States and West Germany, which moved in opposite directions. The US Supreme Court voided the conservative abortion statutes of various states while West Germany's highest court nullified an abortion statute that took a liberal stance on abortion. The extended opinions of the American and German courts and their contrasting grounds for decision make them fitting candidates for a comparative analysis of abortion jurisprudence. The abortion issue illustrates the tension …

Constitutional Law - Moore V. U.S. House Of Representatives: A Possible Expansion Of Congressmen's Standing To Sue, David T. Link, Jeffrey L. Elverman, Thomas E. Lange

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In Moore v. U.S. House of Representatives,I the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit addressed the question of whether individual congressmen have standing to sue the Congress. In Moore, members of the House of Representatives sought declaratory relief to invalidate the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA).2 The congressmen contended that TEFRA originated in the Senate in violation of the origination clause of the United States Constitution, 3 which requires that bills for raising revenue originate in the House of Representatives. Although the District of Columbia Circuit ultimately denied relief on the …

The Supreme Court And The Constitution: The Continuing Debate On Judicial Review, Donald P. Kommers

Journal Articles

The three books reviewed in this essay are recent contributions to the growing literature of constitutional theory (Michael J. Perry, The Constitution, the Courts, and Human Rights (New Ha- ven: Yale University Press, 1982); Sotirios A. Barber, On What the Constitution Means (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); and John Agresto, The Supreme Court and Constitutional Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). They explore important questions about the role of the Supreme Court and the meaning of the Constitution.

Withdrawing Jurisdiction From Federal Courts, Charles E. Rice

Journal Articles

Courts today accept two incorrect assumptions when interpreting the federal constitution. First, they assume that the judiciary is the sole branch with the definitive power in interpreting the Constitution. Second, they assume that the Supreme Court's decisions on constitutional interpretation are the law of the land and equal to the language of the Constitution itself. This Article proposes that Congress ought to exercise its removal power of appellate jurisdiction from the federal courts in certain areas of law to limit the Supreme Court’s power in creating law that expands the Constitution, which is mistakenly viewed today with equal stature as …

The Responsibilities Of The United Kingdom Parliament And Government Under The Australian Constitution, John M. Finnis

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Arguing that the United Kingdom retained constitutioanl duties to Australia following that country's independence.

Comparative Constitutional Law: Casebooks For A Developing Discipline, Donald P. Kommers

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Comparative constitutional law is a developing area of legal scholarship. One sign of this development is the recent appearance of two casebooks, both published in 1979. Comparative Constitutional Law: Cases and Materials by Mauro Cappelletti and William Cohen, focuses primarily on the procedural rights of defendants from the United States and nine European jurisdictions. Comparative Constitutional Law. Cases and Commentaries by Walter F. Murphy and Joseph Tanenhaus, examines the constitutional interpretation of a large number of substantive issues in six contemporary constitutional democracies. Reviewing the two books together provides an opportunity not only to compare them as teaching tools but …

Article V And The Proposed Federal Constitutional Convention Procedures Bills, Kenneth F. Ripple

Journal Articles

Article V of the United States Constitution sets forth the respective powers of the states and Congress in the amendment process. At first blush, the amendment process outlined in article V appears uncomplicated and straightforward. Congress can propose amendments and determine whether ratification will be accomplished by state legislatures or state conventions. Three-fourths of the state legislatures or state conventions must ratify a proposed amendment before it becomes part of the Constitution. The history of the amendment process confirms the apparent simplicity of that provision of article V which empowers Congress to propose amendments. To date, all twenty-six amendments have …