Constitutional Law Commons^™

The Metes And Bounds Of State Sovereign Immunity, Scott Dodson

Faculty Publications

What are the constitutional parameters of state sovereign immunity? The Court has made clear that certain provisions of Article I contain no authority for overriding state sovereign immunity, while at least one other provision, the Fourteenth Amendment, permits Congress to abrogate the states’ sovereign immunity. How is this constitutional line drawn? It is temporally bound? In other words, are only certain Amendments enacted after the Eleventh Amendment free from absolute subservience to state sovereign immunity? Or, does it divide the original Constitution and its Amendments, meaning that state sovereign immunity permeates the original Constitution but does not infiltrate certain Amendments, …

Crisis And Constitutionalism, Michael J. Gerhardt

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Lesbians, Gay Men, And The Canadian Charter Of Rights And Freedoms, Brenda Cossman

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

The legacy of the first twenty years of the Charter for lesbians and gay men is a contradictory one of victories and defeats. At the level of doctrine, strategy, and politics, both the victories and defeats have been precarious and contradictory. While gaining formal equality rights, lesbians and gay men have not been able to secure rights to sexual freedom. And while formal equality has displaced the heteronormativity that denied legal recognition and subjectivity to lesbians and gay men, this formal equality has come at a cost. Lesbians and gay men are being reconstituted in law: some are being newly …

The Ideal Victim, The Hysterical Complainant, And The Disclosure Of Confidential Records: The Implications Of The Charter For Sexual Assault Law, Lise Gotell

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This article explores the current state of Canadian law on the production and disclosure of complainants' records to reflect upon the implications of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms for Canadian sexual assault law and jurisprudence. Some scholars assert that the Supreme Court's decision in R. v. Mills, upholding section 278 of the Criminal Code governing access to complainants' records, constitutes an erosion of accuseds' rights and an unjustified compromise of constitutional standards. By contrast, this article demonstrates that R. v. Mills is a highly contradictory decision that can be read as creating an interpretation of section 278 that …

Justified Limits On Free Expression: The Collapse Of The General Approach To Limits On Charter Rights, Richard Moon

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

The author argues that the apparent collapse or erosion of the Oakes test reflects the problem of fitting a right such as freedom of expression, which is social and relational in character, into a structure of constitutional adjudication, which is built on an individualist conception of rights. In the leading Canadian freedom of expression cases, the task for the courts under section I is not simply to strike the proper balance between competing interests, but rather to resolve the single but complex question of whether the expression contributes to, or undermines, human agency or autonomous judgment. In these cases, the …

Exchanging Constitutions: Constitutional Bricolage In Canada, David Schneiderman

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Judicial recourse to constitutional law sources from abroad has been likened to the process of bricolage--coined by anthropologist Claude Lévi- Strauss, this refers to the "borrowing from materials readily at hand." Building on the idea of constitutional borrowing, this paper aims to take account of the role dominant political culture plays in constitutional interpretation, in particular, the values associated with economic globalization. If resort to comparative constitutional sources is on the rise, dominant political culture will likely have the effect of limiting the stock of tools available to judges. The author argues that, in an age of economic globalization, the …

Constitutional Law, Robin Jean Davis, Louis J. Palmer Jr.

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

United States V. Drayton: Supreme Court Upholds Standards For Police Conduct During Bus Searches, Andera K. Mitchell

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Mandatory Motherhood And Frustrated Fatherhood: The Supreme Court's Preservation Of Gender Discrimination In American Citizenship Law, Erin Chlopak

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Constitutionalism As A Political Culture, Annen Junji, Lee H. Rousso

Washington International Law Journal

Translator's Forward: These are not happy times in Japan. Its economy, at one time the most dynamic on the planet, has been in the dumps for over a decade. The population is both aging and declining. A "lost generation" of young Japanese has come of age amid diminished, and diminishing, expectations. The government, controlled as always by the Liberal Democratic Party ("LDP"), is rigid, bloated, corrupt, and deeply in debt. And there is no real reason to believe that the next decade will bring improvement in any of these areas. Not surprisingly, as Japan's economic juggernaut has faltered, the tone …

Marbury Ascendant: The Rehnquist Court And The Power To "Say What The Law Is", Timothy Zick

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Conceptualizing Constitutional Litigation As Anti-Government Expression: A Speech-Centered Theory Of Court Access, Robert L. Tsai

American University Law Review

This Article proposes a speech-based right of court access. First, it finds the traditional due process approach to be analytically incoherent and of limited practical value. Second, it contends that history, constitutional structure, and theory all support conceiving of the right of access as the modern analogue to the right to petition government for redress. Third, the Article explores the ways in which the civil rights plaintiff's lawsuit tracks the behavior of the traditional dissident. Fourth, by way of a case study, the essay argues that recent restrictions - notably, a congressional limitation on the amount of fees counsel for …

Conflicts Of Interest And The Constitution, David Orentlicher

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Unsheathing Alexander's Sword: Lapides V. Board Of Regents Of The University System Of Georgia, Eric S. Johnson

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Proposed Amendments To Fed. R. Crim. P. 26: An Exchange: Remote Testimony - A Prosecutor's Perspective, Lynn Helland

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Although the Supreme Court has declined, for now, to endorse the Judicial Conference proposal to add a Rule 26(b) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to permit live video testimony under limited circumstances, I agree with Professor Friedman that the matter is far from over. This is both because the potential benefits to be realized from the use of remote video testimony are too large to ignore and because, on closer inspection, any Confrontation Clause concerns that might underlie the Court's hesitation to adopt the proposal are not warranted. My purpose in writing is to summarize some of the …

Presidentialism In The Southern African States And Constitutional Restraint On Presidential Power, Muna Ndulo

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Almandi V. Minister Of Defense, Aharon Barak, Dorit Beinisch, Izhak Englard

Translated Opinions

Facts: This petition was submitted during IDF operations against the terrorist infrastructure in the areas of the Palestinian Authority. (“Operation Defensive Wall.”) It concerns the situation in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, in which armed Palestinians had fortified themselves. In the church compound there were also unarmed Palestinians civilians, as well as clergymen. The clergymen, who were not in the same part of the compound as the Palestinians, received food, though the Palestinians did not. Petitioners requested that food be allowed into the compound. They asserted that preventing food from entering the compound was a violation of international …

A Grand Theory Of Constitutional Law, Erwin Chemerinsky

Michigan Law Review

Jeb Rubenfeld's book is nothing if not ambitious. In just 250 pages, Rubenfeld seeks to: justify the authority of the Constitution, establish the legitimacy of judicial review, resolve the countermajoritarian difficulty, offer a method of constitutional interpretation and judicial review, uphold the constitutionality of affirmative action, and explain the legitimacy of judicial protection of privacy, including abortion rights. Scattered throughout the book, he offers philosophical insights as to the meaning of life, discussing a central issue for all of us: dealing with time. Rubenfeld's book is elegant, relying on history, continental philosophy, game theory, and even Supreme Court cases, to …

Casting New Light On An Old Subject: Death Penalty Abolitionism For A New Millennium, Wayne A. Logan

Michigan Law Review

For opponents of capital punishment, these would appear promising times. Not since 1972, when the Supreme Court invalidated the death penalty as then administered, has there been such palpable concern over its use, reflected in the lowest levels of public opinion support evidenced in some time. This concern is mirrored in the American Bar Association's recently recommended moratorium on use of the death penalty, the consideration of or actual imposition of moratoria in several states, and even increasing doubts voiced by high-profile political conservatives. An array of troubling empirical realities has accompanied this shift: persistent evidence of racial bias in …

The Charter And Health Care: Guaranteeing Timely Access To Health Care For Canadians, Patrick Monahan, Stanley H. Hartt

Commissioned Reports, Studies and Public Policy Documents

No abstract provided.

The Paths To Legal Equality: A Reply To Dean Sullivan, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

How Is Constitutional Law Made?, Tracey E. George, Robert J. Pushaw Jr.

Michigan Law Review

Bismarck famously remarked: "Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made." This witticism applies with peculiar force to constitutional law. Judges and commentators examine the sausage (the Supreme Court's doctrine), but ignore the messy details of its production. Maxwell Stearns has demonstrated, with brilliant originality, that the Court fashions constitutional law through process-based rules of decision such as outcome voting, stare decisis, and justiciability. Employing "social choice" economic theory, Professor Stearns argues that the Court, like all multimember decisionmaking bodies, strives to formulate rules that promote both rationality and fairness (p. 4). Viewed through the lens …

Barely Opening, Then Slamming Shut, Science's "Black Box" In Law: A Response To Beecher-Monas's Heuristics, David S. Caudill

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Signs Of The Times: Dale V. Boy Scouts Of America And The Changing Meaning Of Nondiscrimination, Andrew Koppelman

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Respecting Pandora's Box, Erica Beecher-Monas

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Concept Of Equality In Civil Procedure, William B. Rubenstein

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Do Attorneys Really Matter? The Empirical And Legal Case For The Right Of Counsel At Bail, Douglas L. Colbert, Ray Paternoster, Shawn Bushway

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The National Security Process And A Lawyer’S Duty: Remarks To The Senior Judge Advocate Symposium, James E. Baker

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

September 11 changed so much about our lives and how we perceive national security. Harold Lasswell, in an earlier context, described the sharing of danger throughout society as the “socialization of danger,” which he wrote was a permanent characteristic of modern violence; but not for America until September 11. The socialization of danger has made ordinary citizens participants in the national security process in a way not previously experienced. In addition, it has brought relatively unknown federal agencies, like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control, to the forefront of national security planning and response. And …

Applying The War Powers Resolution To The War On Terrorism: Hearing Before The S. Comm. On The Judiciary, 107th Cong., Apr. 17, 2002 (Statement Of Jane E. Stromseth, Prof. Of Law, Geo. U. L. Center), Jane E. Stromseth

Testimony Before Congress

No abstract provided.

Center For The Defense Of The Individual V. Minister Of Defense, Aharon Barak, Dorit Beinisch, Theodor Or

Translated Opinions

Facts: This petition was submitted during IDF operations against the terrorist infrastructure in the areas of the Palestinian Authority. (“Operation Defensive Wall.”) Petitioners argued that respondent was not using the special rescue unit of the IDF Homefront Command to search for all persons that may be buried alive under ruins in the Jenin refugee camp.

Held: The Supreme Court held that both law and morality mandated that the rescue unit enter the Jenin refugee camp. As this unit had entered the camp, as per respondents reply, the goal of the petition had been fulfilled.