Constitutional Law Commons^™

An Introductory Essay: Old Principles For An (Allegedly) Brave New World, Harry F. Tepker

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Carpenter V. United States And The Fourth Amendment: The Best Way Forward, Stephen E. Henderson

Faculty Articles

We finally have a federal ‘test case.’ In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court is poised to set the direction of the Fourth Amendment in the digital age. The case squarely presents how the twentieth-century third party doctrine will fare in contemporary times, and the stakes could not be higher. This Article reviews the Carpenter case and how it fits within the greater discussion of the Fourth Amendment third party doctrine and location surveillance, and I express a hope that the Court will be both a bit ambitious and a good measure cautious. As for ambition, the Court …

Changing Governance Models By Applying Blockchain Computing, Steve Young

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Enforcing Constitutional Rights Through Computer Code, Steve Young

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Lawmaking and enforcement has advanced since Hammurabi first wrote out his legal code thousands of years ago. Today, the American legal system relies on legislatively-enacted federal, state, county, and municipal legal codes, agency-created regulations, the judge-made common law, and various law enforcement entities. This can be a confusing and complex system of rules and their explanations with varying degrees of enforcement. Blockchain technology is an automatic and efficient alternative to written codes that must be humanly-enforced. There has been limited scholarly interest in the implications of a legal application of blockchain technology to a political system but there have been …

Deepfake Videos: When Seeing Isn't Believing, Holly Kathleen Hall

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Videos, known as deepfakes, use readily available software to create a work that shows people saying and doing things they may never have uttered or engaged in. The technology making the videos appear very authentic is advancing at such a rate that people may not be able to detect if the videos are fact or fiction. Given the hasty acceptance of other forms of fake news in society, deepfake videos have the ability to affect the nature of information the public receives about candidates and policies. This study examines the potential use of deepfake videos in the democratic process, analyzes …

A Dream Still Deferred: The Unlawful Use Of Student Fees For Instructional Technology In An Alabama Public School Causing A Disparate Impact For Minority Children, Taurus Myhand

Scholarly Works

In framing the United States Constitution, the public education mandate was reserved for the states to strengthen, not weaken, the efforts of the governments to provide an education for the people. However, there are far too many instances where equal access to educational opportunities is still a dream deferred for many racial and ethnic minority children that are enrolled in public school systems throughout the United States. That is particularly the case for racial and ethnic minority students at one public school system in Alabama. This Note explores the constitutional issues raised by Pike Road School System’s use of mandatory …

Religious Liberty Versus Rights Of Others, Arnold H. Loewy

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Logic Of Speech And Religion Rights In The Public Workplace, Scott R. Bauries

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Can government function if its employees have individual rights that override their workplace duties? Intuitively, the answer is no, and the doctrine of public employee speech has mostly reflected this assumption. The Supreme Court has spoken authoritatively on these limitations on public employee speech, most recently in Garrett v. Ceballos and Lane v. Franks, but its jurisprudence on public employee religious expression has been less authoritative and more conflicting. Recent events pitting public employees' personal religious exercise against public rights and limitations on government necessitate the question at the beginning of this paragraph.

Devil Take The Hindmost: Reform Considerations For States With A Constitutional Right To Bail, Jordan Gross

Faculty Law Review Articles

This Article submits that any meaningful discussion of bail reform at the state level must be jurisdiction-specific, and it must account for the practical, historical, and philosophical aspects of the state constitutional right to bailability. Part II of this Article is an overview of the origins and history of English and American bail law. Part III describes the role and regulation of commercial bail bonding in the United States. Part IV traces the history and current state of bail reform in the United States. Part V considers legal and practical barriers to reform unique to right-to-bail states, particularly jurisdictions without …

Harmonizing Federal Tax Law And The State Legalization Of Marijuana, Daniel Rowe

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

No abstract provided.

To Speak Or Not To Speak, That Is Your Liberty: Janus V. Afscme, David Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Some Supreme Court precedents go through extensive death spasms before being interred. Lochner v. New York, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce come to mind. Others like Chisholm v. Georgia and Minersville School District v. Gobitis incurred a swift and summary execution. Still others, overtaken by subsequent cases, remain wraith-like presences among the Court’s past acts: Beauharnais v. Illinois and Buck v. Bell, for example, remain “on the books.”

The Political Question Doctrines, John Harrison

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Political Question Doctrines, John Harrison

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Artis V. District Of Columbia—What Did The Court Actually Say?, Doron M. Kalir

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

On January 22, 2018, the Supreme Court issued Artis v. District of Columbia. A true "clash of the titans," this 5-4 decision featured colorful comments on both sides, claims of "absurdities," uncited use of Alice in Wonderland vocabulary ("curiouser," anyone?), and an especially harsh accusation by the dissent that "we’ve wandered so far from the idea of a federal government of limited and enumerated powers that we’ve begun to lose sight of what it looked like in the first place."

One might assume that the issue in question was a complex constitutional provision, or a dense, technical federal code …

Free Speech Hypocrisy: Campus Free Speech Conflicts And The Sub-Legal First Amendment, Christina E. Wells

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Developing A Taxonomy Of Lies Under The First Amendment, Alan K. Chen, Justin Marceau

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Government Lies And The Press Clause, Helen L. Norton

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Law Of Deception: A Research Agenda, Gregory Klass

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Taxpayers For Public Education V. Douglas County School District: The School Choice Movement Soldiers On, Bryce Carlson

University of Colorado Law Review

For nearly a decade, the school choice movement in Colorado has hung in the balance as the fate of the Douglas County School District Choice Scholarship Program worked its way through the courts, even reaching the United States Supreme Court in the process. The main issue at stake was whether Article IX, § 7 of the Colorado Constitution, which prevents public institutions from making any appropriation to a "church or sectarian society," barred students from using a school district scholarship to attend a private religiously affiliated school.

The Colorado Supreme Court in 2015 ruled that the Choice Scholarship Program indeed …

Removing State Constitution Badges Of Inferiority, Allan W. Vestal

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Our state constitutions contain archaic, ineffective, and unnecessary provisions that assign badges of inferiority to some citizens. Using Thomas Jefferson’s standard for when constitutional imperfections justify amendment, this Article identifies two groups of clauses. The first are provisions that were substantially exclusionary as enacted and relate to unconstitutional practices. Included are provisions relating to religious tests for public office, segregated schools, bars to marriage equality, and religious tests for witness competency. The second group are provisions that were symbolically exclusionary as enacted and are redolent of a prejudiced history. Examples involve the use of gendered language, clauses which make inappropriate …

The Impact Of St Catherine's Milling, Karen Drake

Articles & Book Chapters

St Catherine’s Milling may seem like a peculiar choice as one of the three constitutional cases that helped to define Canada as a nation, given that most of the legal principles affirmed by Lord Watson, writing for the Privy Council, have been overruled. This paper identifies the principles from St Catherine’s Milling which are still good law, and argues that the logic that underlies and shapes those principles is the logic of the doctrine of discovery and the principle of terra nullius.

Jurists have articulated different versions of the doctrine of discovery and disagreed about its precise requirements. At …

The Once And (Maybe) Future Klein Principle, William Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Behavior Of Jewish Judges: A Theoretical Study Of Religious Decision-Making, Mark Goldfeder, Michael J. Broyde

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Formal And Informal Amendment Of The United States Constitution, Richard Kay

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Structural Integrity And A Call For Adaptive And Incremental Agency Design Policy, Hannah Clendening

Indiana Law Journal

INTRODUCTION

I. UNDERSTANDING AND RATIONALIZING COMPETING DESIGN OBJECTIVES

A. CONGRESSIONAL INTENT AND THE CFPB’S FORMATION

B. D.C. CIRCUIT’S REASONING IN PHH CORP. V. CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION BUREAU

C. BASIC TENETS OF LEADING ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN THEORIES

D. ANOTHER LOOMING CONSIDERATION: AGENCY CAPTURE

II. A NEED FOR ADAPTIVE AND INCREMENTAL APPROACHES TO AGENCY DESIGN

CONCLUSION

Reciprocal Immunity, Colin Miller

Indiana Law Journal

This essay advances a reciprocal rights theory. It argues that the Constitution precludes statutes and rules from providing nonreciprocal benefits to the State when the lack of reciprocity interferes with the defendant’s ability to secure a fair trial, unless reciprocity would implicate a significant state interest. Therefore, unless a significant State interest is involved, a grant of immunity to a prosecution witness should trigger reciprocal immunity to a directly contradictory defense witness.

The Fortification Of Inequality: Constitutional Doctrine And The Political Economy, Kate Andrias

Indiana Law Journal

As Parts I and II of this Essay elaborate, the examination yields three observations of relevance to constitutional law more generally: First, judge-made constitutional doctrine, though by no means the primary cause of rising inequality, has played an important role in reinforcing and exacerbating it. Judges have acquiesced to legislatively structured economic inequality, while also restricting the ability of legislatures to remedy it. Second, while economic inequality has become a cause célèbre only in the last few years, much of the constitutional doctrine that has contributed to its flourishing is longstanding. Moreover, for several decades, even the Court’s more liberal …

Ordinariness As Equality, Elise C. Boddie

Indiana Law Journal

This Essay argues for an equality norm of racial ordinariness. Ordinariness here refers to the state of being treated as a full, complex person and a rightful recipient of human concern. As a norm, its purpose is to focus constitutional attention on common, everyday interactions as sources of racial indignity. It also seeks to sensitize courts and other constitutional actors to the infinite varieties and grittier dimensions of discrimination through the “understandings of everyday folk.”

Part I explains why ordinariness matters and the importance of everyday interactions to achieving ordinariness. It discusses these points through the lens of a true …

The Limits On Congress's Power To Do Nothing: A Preliminary Inquiry, William P. Marshall

Indiana Law Journal

As Part I of this Essay will show, arguments for limiting Congress’s authority to do nothing are not readily found in history, text, or constitutional structure. Part I concludes, however, that the need for establishing some constitutional limits on congressional inaction is nevertheless compelling because of the seriousness of the dangers involved. Accordingly, Part II goes on to advance an approach that would limit Congress’s power to do nothing in certain circumstances. Specifically, Part II proposes an approach that would limit Congress’s power to do nothing based on the type of power that Congress is (or is not) exercising. Congress …

Political Norms, Constitutional Conventions, And President Donald Trump, Neil S. Siegel

Indiana Law Journal

I will argue that what is most troubling about the conduct of President Trump during and since the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign is not any potential violations of the U.S. Constitution or federal law. There likely have been some such violations, and there may be more. But what is most troubling about President Trump is his disregard of political norms that had previously constrained presidential candidates and Presidents, and his flouting of nonlegal but obligatory “constitutional conventions” that had previously guided and disciplined occupants of the White House. These norms and conventions, although not “in” the Constitution, play a pivotal …