Constitutional Law Commons^™

The Interpretation-Construction Distinction In Patent Law, Tun-Jen Chiang, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The ambiguity of claim language is generally considered to be the most important problem in patent law today. Linguistic ambiguity is believed to cause tremendous uncertainty about patent rights. Scholars and judges have accordingly devoted enormous attention to developing better linguistic tools to help courts understand patent claims.

In this article, we explain why this diagnosis is fundamentally wrong. Claims are not often ambiguous, and linguistic ambiguity is not a major cause of the uncertainty in patent law today. We shall explain what really causes the uncertainty in patent rights, how the erroneous diagnosis of linguistic ambiguity has led the …

Make Me Walk, Make Me Talk, Do Whatever You Please: Barbie And Exceptions, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Barbie represents an aspiration to an ideal and also a never-ending mutability. Barbie is the perfect woman, and she is also grotesque, plasticized hyperreality, presenting a femininity exaggerated to the point of caricature. Barbie’s marketplace success, combined with (and likely related to) her overlapping and contradictory meanings, also allow her to embody some key exceptions to copyright and trademark law. Though Mattel’s lawsuits were not responsible for the initial recognition of those exceptions, they illuminate key principles and contrasts in American law. Mattel attempted to use both copyright and trademark to control the meaning of Barbie, reflecting a trend towards …

The Dormant Second Amendment: Exploring The Rise, Fall, And Potential Resurrection Of Independent State Militias, Michael J. Golden

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The term “militia” is polarizing, misunderstood, misapplied, and generally difficult for modern Americans to digest. That is not surprising, given the depth and breadth of American militia history and militias’ substantial evolution over four centuries.

Historically, militia simply refers to a broad-based civic duty to protect one’s fellow citizens from internal and external dangers and is not limited to activities involving firearms. Reestablishing militia’s true meaning and purpose—and reinvigorating independent state militias in the United States to effect that purpose—has the potential to address states’ emerging financial and security gaps and to produce multiple other significant benefits, including recalibrating federalism. …

Originalism And The Unwritten Constitution, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In his book, America’s Unwritten Constitution, Akhil Reed Amar contends that to properly engage the written Constitution, scholars and laymen alike must look to extratextual sources: among them America’s founding documents, institutional practices, and ethos, all of which constitute Amar’s “unwritten Constitution.” In this article, the author argues that contemporary originalist constitutional theory is consistent with reliance on extraconstitutional sources in certain circumstances. He establishes a framework for revaluating the use of extratextual sources. That framework categorizes extratextual sources and explains their relevance to constitutional interpretation (the meaning of the text) and constitutional construction (elaboration of constitutional doctrine and …

Why Jeremy Waldron Really Agrees With Me, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Herewith a response to Jeremy Waldron's review of my book, On Constitutional Disobedience. I conclude that Waldron actually agrees with all of my key claims.

Originalism And Constitutional Construction, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Constitutional interpretation is the activity that discovers the communicative content or linguistic meaning of the constitutional text. Constitutional construction is the activity that determines the legal effect given the text, including doctrines of constitutional law and decisions of constitutional cases or issues by judges and other officials. The interpretation-construction distinction, frequently invoked by contemporary constitutional theorists and rooted in American legal theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, marks the difference between these two activities.

This article advances two central claims about constitutional construction. First, constitutional construction is ubiquitous in constitutional practice. The central warrant for this claim is conceptual: …

Undue Burdens In Texas, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

No abstract provided.

A Structuralist Approach To The Two State Action Doctrines, Justin Deystone

Publications

By all accounts, the constitutional and antitrust state-action doctrines are strangers. Courts and scholars see the constitutional state-action doctrine as about the applicability of constitutional rights in private disputes, and the antitrust state-action doctrine as a judicial negotiation between the scope of the Sherman Act and the demands of federalism. In this conventional view, the only thing the doctrines share in common is that they are both an awful mess. This Article challenges the conventional wisdom and argues that the two state-action doctrines are fundamentally connected, and when viewed in a certain light, not even that messy. It is not …

Guns And Membership In The American Polity, Pratheepan Gulasekaram

Publications

No abstract provided.

Cosmic Constitutional Theory: Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right To Self-Governance, Karen Skinner

Publications

No abstract provided.

May I See Your Id? How Voter Identification Laws Disenfranchise Native Americans' Fundamental Right To Vote, Sally Harrison

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

Towards A New Democratic Africa: The African Charter On Democracy, Elections And Governance, Stacy-Ann Elvy

Other Publications

The African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (“ADC”) recently entered into force on February 15, 2012. The main goal of the ADC is the encouragement and promotion of democracy and human rights on the African continent. The ADC is the first binding regional instrument adopted by member states of the African Union (“AU”) that attempts to comprehensively address all of the elements necessary for the establishment of liberal democracies. The ADC also contains a number of expansive provisions regarding unconstitutional changes of government. For instance, the ADC is the first legal instrument adopted by member states of the AU …

Full Disclosure: Cognitive Bias, Informants, And Search Warrant Scrutiny, Mary Bowman

Faculty Articles

This article posits that cognitive biases play a significant role in the gap between the rhetoric regarding Fourth Amendment protection and actual practices regarding search warrant scrutiny, particularly for search warrants based on informants’ tips. Specifically, this article examines the ways in which implicit bias, tunnel vision, priming, and hindsight bias can affect search warrants. These biases can affect each stage of the search warrant process, including targeting decisions, the drafting process, the magistrate’s decision whether to grant the warrant, and post-search review by trial and appellate courts. These biases create room for informant falsehoods to go unchecked, with a …

Shifting Borders And The Boundaries Of Rights: Examining The Safe Third Country Agreement Between Canada And The United States, Efrat Arbel

All Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the Canadian Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal decisions assessing the Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the United States (STCA). It examines how each court’s treatment of the location and operation of the Canada-US border influences the results obtained. The article suggests that both in its treatment of the STCA and in its constitutional analysis, the Federal Court decision conceives of the border as a moving barrier capable of shifting outside Canada’s formal territorial boundaries. The effect of this decision is to bring refugee claimants outside state soil within the fold of Canadian constitutional …

Social Justice And The Charter: Comparison And Choice, Margot Young

All Faculty Publications

At a time of radical inequality, the changes sought by social justice advocacy are urgently needed. Yet repeatedly, courts fail to respond adequately to this challenge. A core issue plagues social justice jurisprudence under sections 7 and 15: the difficulty inevitable in the contemplation and expression of the social and political forms in which oppression and social injustice occur. This problem manifests doctrinally in ways specific to the rights at issue. In section 15 cases, the casting of comparator groups has been deeply problematic, and in both section 15 and section 7 cases, the courts fail to deliver a nuanced …

The Other Section 7, Margot Young

All Faculty Publications

The somewhat rudimentary notions of liberty, life and security of the person that are corralled by traditional section 7 jurisprudence are not the sole indicator of what the section potentially ought to, and indeed may ultimately, protect and ensure. It is now fairly well established that the rights section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects apply well outside the sphere of criminal law. Two strands of expansion exist, one less controversial than the other. First, it is relatively clear that section 7 encompasses executive administration of the law. The second path of expansion allows section 7 …

Nineteenth-Century Women's Rights Advocates On Abortion, Linda Gordon

Seattle University Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Twelve-Person Federal Civil Jury In Exile, Thomas D. Rowe Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sentencias Trascendentales Del Tribunal Supremo De Los Estados Unidos. Pasos Hacia La Igualdad Del Matrimonio Para Parejas Del Mismo Sexo, Julie A. Davies

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

In 2013, the United States Supreme Court decided two major cases on marriage equality – U.S. v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry. These cases paved the way for the Court’s eventual decision in 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, that the Constitution requires that states permit same-sex marriage. This article analyzes those precedents for an audience of Spanish-speaking legal professionals and academics seeking to understand the basis for the Court’s decisions.

Imagining A Same-Sex Marriage Decision Based On Dignity: Considering Human Experience In Constitutional Law, Danieli Evans

Articles

California’s Proposition 8 allows same sex couples to join through civil unions, which grant the legal benefits afforded to married couples but denies them the official label of “marriage.” The lower court eschewed the question of whether Proposition 8 burdens any fundamental right by concluding there is not even a rational basis (the minimum standard for the constitutionality of any law) for this law, as its sole effect is to deny same sex couples the designation of marriage.

We appreciate the lower court’s caution not to extend our fundamentalrights jurisprudence beyond precedent. However, we are positioned to elaborate fundamental constitutional …

Unequal Treatment Of Religious Exercises Under Rfra: Explaining The Outliers In The Hhs Mandate Cases, Mark L. Rienzi

Scholarly Articles

Ongoing conflict over the contraceptive mandate promulgated by the Department of Health and Human Services ("HHS") has resulted in more than two dozen lawsuits by profit-making businesses and their owners seeking protection under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act ("RFRA"). To date, the businesses and their owners are winning handily, having obtained preliminary relief in seventeen of the cases, and being denied relief in only six. Last month, in fact, a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals took the extraordinary step of reconsidering and reversing its own prior ruling and granting a preliminary injunction to a business seeking RFRA's …

God And The Profits: Is There Religious Liberty For Money-Makers?, Mark L. Rienzi

Scholarly Articles

Is there a religious way to pump gas, sell groceries, or advertise for a craft store? Litigation over the HHS contraceptive mandate has raised the question whether a for-profit business and its owner can engage in religious exercise under federal law. The federal government has argued, and some courts have found, that the activities of a profit-making business are ineligible for religious freedom protection.

This article offers a comprehensive look at the relationship between profit-making and religious liberty, arguing that the act of earning money does not preclude profit-making businesses and their owners from engaging in protected religious exercise.

Many …

Neutral No More: Secondary Effects Analysis And The Quiet Demise Of The Content-Neutrality Test, Mark L. Rienzi

Scholarly Articles

When the Supreme Court introduced the “secondary effects” doctrine to allow for zoning of adult businesses, critics fell into two camps. Some, like Justice Brennan, predicted dire consequences for the First Amendment, particularly if the doctrine were used in political speech cases. Others, like Professor Laurence Tribe, predicted secondary effects analysis would be limited to sexually explicit speech, and would not threaten the First Amendment. The modern consensus is that the doctrine has, in fact, been limited to cases about sex.

Recent cases demonstrate, however, that the impact of the secondary effects doctrine on the First Amendment has been broader …

You Have The Right To Remain Silent: Does The U.S. Constitution Require Public Affirmation Of Same-Sex Marriage?, Robert A. Destro

Scholarly Articles

The political and legal campaign for marriage equality rests on the proposition that the Constitution of the United States requires communal recognition of committed, same-sex relationships. The text, structure, and history of the amended Constitution, however, support precisely the opposite conclusion: i.e., that neither the United States nor any state may compel any community, association, or individual to affirm (by word, deed, or policy) the hotly disputed propositions about human sexuality that lie at the core of the debate. Nor can it plausibly be argued that any part of the Constitution requires any person, association, or polity to remain discreetly …

Real Judicial Restraint, Joel Alicea

Scholarly Articles

The conservative legal movement has long stood simultaneously for originalism and judicial restraint. But in the past few years, the tension between a commitment to interpreting the Constitution as its authors intended and deferring to the will of legislators and the executive has become painfully clear. Does originalism demand judicial restraint, or is the Constitution undermined by such restraint?

Reconciling Positivism And Realism: Kelsen And Habermas On Democracy And Human Rights, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is well known that Hans Kelsen and Jürgen Habermas invoke realist arguments drawn from social science in defending an international, democratic human rights regime against Carl Schmitt’s attack on the rule of law. However, despite embracing the realist spirit of Kelsen’s legal positivism, Habermas criticizes Kelsen for neglecting to connect the rule of law with a concept of procedural justice (Part I). I argue, to the contrary (Part II), that Kelsen does connect these terms, albeit in a manner that may be best described as functional, rather than conceptual. Indeed, whereas Habermas tends to emphasize a conceptual connection between …

Brown V. Entertainment Merchants Association: "Modern Warfare" On First Amendment Protection Of Violent Video Games, Jessica Fisher

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Defining, Punishing, And Membership In The Community Of Nations: Material Support And Conspiracy Charges In Military Commissions, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

State Action Problems, Christian Turner

Scholarly Works

The state action doctrine is a mess. Explanations for why federal courts sometimes treat the private actions of private parties as public actions subject to the Constitution, like the Supreme Court did in Shelley v. Kraemer, are either vastly overinclusive or fail to explain our law and values. A better approach is to understand the state action doctrine in institutional terms. I introduce a two-step, institutionally focused state action theory that is a natural consequence of a broader public/private theory of legal systems. In the first step, a court identifies a “state action problem,” meaning a privately made law that …

Presidential Power, Historical Practice, And Legal Constraint, Curtis A. Bradley, Trevor W. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

The scope of the President’s legal authority is determined in part by historical practice. This Essay aims to better understand how such practice-based law might operate as a constraint on the presidency. Some scholars have suggested that presidential authority has become “unbounded” by law, and is now governed only or primarily by politics. At the same time, there has been growing skepticism about the ability of the familiar political checks on presidential power to work in any systematic or reliable fashion. Skepticism about law’s potential to constrain in this context is heightened by the customary nature of much of what …