Constitutional Law Commons^™

Grounding Originalism, William Baude, Stephen E. Sachs

Faculty Scholarship

How should we interpret the Constitution? The “positive turn” in legal scholarship treats constitutional interpretation, like the interpretation of statutes or contracts, as governed by legal rules grounded in actual practice. In our legal system, that practice requires a certain form of originalism: our system’s official story is that we follow the law of the Founding, plus all lawful changes made since.

Or so we’ve argued. Yet this answer produces its own set of questions. How can practice solve our problems, when there are so many theories of law, each giving practice a different role? Why look to an official …

Brief Of Public Law Scholars As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioners, Chris Dove, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Immigration Unilateralism And American Ethnonationalism, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This paper arose from an invited symposium on "Democracy in America: The Promise and the Perils," held at Loyola University Chicago School of Law in Spring 2019. The essay places the Trump administration’s immigration and refugee policy in the context of a resurgent ethnonationalist movement in America as well as the constitutional politics of the past. In particular, it argues that Trumpism’s suspicion of foreigners who are Hispanic or Muslim, its move toward indefinite detention and separation of families, and its disdain for so-called “chain migration” are best understood as part of an assault on the political settlement of the …

Attorney General V. Miaa At Forty Years: A Critical Examination Of Gender Segregation In High School Athletics In Massachusetts, Erin E. Buzuvis

Faculty Scholarship

Forty years ago, the highest court in Massachusetts ruled in Attorney General v. Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association that the state constitution's newly-added equal rights amendment prohibited the blanket exclusion of boys from girls' athletic teams. The state’s constitutional law departed from Title IX, as well as that of other states, in providing a legal foundation for a wider selection of gender-integrated high school sports. However, most sports remain segregated by sex.

The Author opines that sport organizers in Massachusetts have missed an opportunity to provide students a more balanced menu of athletic opportunities that incorporate both sex-segregated and gender-free sports …

"I'M Leavin' It (All) Up To You": Gundy And The (Sort-Of) Resurrection Of The Subdelegation Doctrine, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

In 2000, Cass Sunstein quipped that the conventional nondelegation doctrine, which holds that there are judicially enforceable constitutional limits on the extent to which Congress can confer discretion on other actors to determine the content of federal law, “has had one good year, and 211 bad ones (and counting).”1 The “one good year,” he said, was 1935, when the Court twice held unconstitutional certain provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act that gave the president power to approve or create codes of conduct for essentially all American businesses, subject only to very vague, and often contradictory, statutory exhortations to pursue …

Revisionist History? Responding To Gun Violence Under Historical Limitations, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

In the D.C. Circuit case Heller v. District of Columbia (Heller II), Judge Kavanaugh wrote that “Heller and McDonald leave little doubt that courts are to assess gun bans and regulations based on text, history, and tradition, not by a balancing test such as strict or intermediate scrutiny.” Now Justice Kavanaugh, will he find support on the highest court for what was then a dissenting view? Chief Justice Roberts, during oral arguments for Heller I, asked “Isn’t it enough to…look at the various regulations that were available at the time…and determine how these—how this restriction and the scope of this …

Hardball And/As Anti-Hardball, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Talk of constitutional hardball is in the air. Ever since Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, liberal commentators have been pondering tactics such as impeachment, jurisdiction stripping, and especially “packing the court” to a degree that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Senate Republicans have played vigorous hardball on Supreme Court appointments in the past two Congresses, most obviously by refusing to consider Merrick Garland’s nomination, and there is a strong desire among many Democrats to respond with equal or greater vigor.

Manufactured Emergencies, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

Emergencies are presumed to be unusual affairs, but the United States has been in one state of emergency or another for the last forty years. That is a problem. The erosion of democratic norms has led to not simply the collapse of the traditional conceptual boundary between ordinary rule and emergency governance, but also the emergence of an even graver problem: the manufactured crisis. In an age characterized by extreme partisanship, institutional gridlock, and technological manipulation of information, it has become exceedingly easy and far more tempting for a President to invoke extraordinary power by ginning up exigencies. To reduce …

The “New” District Court Activism In Criminal Justice Reform, Jessica A. Roth

Articles

Historically, the debate over the judicial role has centered on the constitutional and administrative law decisions of the United States Supreme Court, with an occasional glance at the Federal Courts of Appeals. It has, moreover, been concerned solely with the “in-court” behavior of Article III appellate judges as they carry out their power and duty “to say what the law is” in the context of resolving “cases and controversies.” This Article seeks to deepen the discussion of the appropriate role of Article III judges by broadening it to trial, as well as appellate, judges; and by distinguishing between an Article …

Opening Remarks: The Federalism Dimension Of Constitutional Property, Stewart E. Sterk

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Most Revealing Word In The United States Reports, Richard Primus

Articles

The most prominent issue in NFIB v. Sebelius was whether Congress’s regulatory power under the Commerce Clause stops at a point marked by a distinction between “activity” and “inactivity.” According to the law’s challengers, prior decisions about the scope of the commerce power already reflected the importance of the distinction between action and inaction. In all of the previous cases in which exercises of the commerce power had been sustained, the challengers argued, that power had been used to regulate activity. Never had Congress tried to regulate mere inactivity. In NFIB, four Justices rejected that contention, writing that such …

Kisor, Gundy, Mead, Chevron, Skidmore, Hearst, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Kisor v. Wilkie, in which the Court narrowly declined to overrule Auer deference while distinctly constraining its reach, shares with United States v. Mead Corp. and Skidmore v. Swift & Co. — so prominently mentioned in its opinions—the characteristic of being about an administrative action that, at root, is soft law, guidance. Quite appropriately, it did not address Chevron deference, although readers of the opinions, with Justices’ prior opinions in mind, will have no problem foreseeing a similar confrontation in the coming Term of Court, or perhaps the one to follow.

The Reality Of Indian Regulation, Devesh Kapur, Madhav Khosla

Faculty Scholarship

In this introductory chapter, we have chosen to resist exploring some of the general themes associated with regulation, from its capacity to respond to market failures and market limitations, to the ways to make it accountable. Instead, we have chosen to turn to certain features of Indian regulation that are distinctive. Our basic premise is that, for all the legal ambiguities and institutional weaknesses, studying the Indian regulatory state is unavoidable, and may even be the inevitable starting point for numerous other issues, from economic growth to inequality to democratic accountability. This premise is only strengthened by the fact that, …

Constitutional Reform In Japan: Prospects, Process, And Implications, Nobuhisa Ishizuka

Faculty Scholarship

Japan's constitution has remained unchanged for over 70 years since its adoption. With Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's re-election as the leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP) in 2018, the issue of constitutional revision has gained renewed attention. On March 13, 2019 the Center for Japanese Legal Studies at Columbia Law School co-hosted, with the Council on Foreign Relations, a full-day conference on "Constitutional Reform in Japan: Prospect, Process, and Implications." Three panels of distinguished experts examined the domestic political landscape in Japan, provided comparative legal perspectives, and considered the political, strategic, and social implications of proposed …

Constitutional Reform In Japan, Nobuhisa Ishizuka

Faculty Scholarship

Over seventy years ago it would have seemed inconceivable in the aftermath of a calamitous war that a complete reorientation of Japan into a pacifist society, modeled on Western principles of individual rights and democracy, would succeed in upending a deeply entrenched political order with roots dating back centuries.

The post-war Japanese constitution lies at the heart of this transformation. Drafted, negotiated and promulgated a mere fourteen months after Japan's formal surrender, it has remained a model of stability amidst transformational changes in the domestic and international political landscape. In the seventy-plus years since its adoption, it has not been …

The Present Crisis In American Bail, Kellen R. Funk

Faculty Scholarship

More than fifty years after a predicted coming federal courts crisis in bail, district courts have begun granting major systemic injunctions against money bail systems. This Essay surveys the constitutional theories and circuit splits that are forming through these litigations. The major point of controversy is the level of federal court scrutiny triggered by allegedly unconstitutional bail regimes, an inquiry complicated by ambiguous Supreme Court precedents on (1) post-conviction fines, (2) preventive detention at the federal level, and (3) the adequacy of probable cause hearings. The Essay argues that the application of strict scrutiny makes the best sense of these …

Fair And Impartial Adjudication, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Any legal system that purports to respect the rule of law must ensure the fair and impartial adjudication of disputes under the law. Classic accounts of the rule of law assume that courts should resolve such disputes. However, this is too narrow. All forms of adjudication, not just by courts, need to be fair and impartial. In any event, no one could claim that courts or entities by that name are always fair and impartial. All legal systems need a guarantee of fair and impartial adjudication that applies to all forms of dispute resolution under law.

A dispute arising under …

Jurisdiction Stripping Circa 2020: What The Dialogue (Still) Has To Teach Us, Henry P. Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Since its publication in 1953, Henry Hart’s famous article, The Power of Congress to Limit the Jurisdiction of Federal Courts: An Exercise in Dialectic, subsequently referred to as simply “The Dialogue,” has served as the leading scholarly treatment of congressional control over the federal courts. Now in its seventh decade, much has changed since Hart first wrote. This Article examines what lessons The Dialogue still holds for its readers circa 2020.

Reconstituting The Future: An Equality Amendment, Catherine A. Mackinnon, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

A new constitutional amendment embodying a substantive intersectional equality analysis aims to rectify the founding U.S. treatment of race and sex and additional hierarchical social inequalities. Historical and doctrinal context and critique show why this step is urgently needed. A draft of the amendment is offered.

Showcase Panel I: What Is Regulation For?, Richard Epstein, Philip A. Hamburger, Kathryn Kovacs, John D. Michaels, Britt Grant

Faculty Scholarship

2018 National Lawyers Convention Transcripts

“The administrative state, with roots over a century old, was founded on the premise that Congress lacked the expertise to deal with the many complex issues facing government in a fast-changing country, and that it was unhelpfully mired in and influenced by politics, leading to bad outcomes when it did act. The alternative was to establish administrative agencies, each with assigned areas of responsibility, housing learned experts qualified to make policy decisions, deliberately insulated from political accountability. The Administrative Procedure Act (APA), passed in 1946, both governs the manner in which agencies may adopt and …

Appellate Jurisdiction And The Emoluments Litigation, Adam N. Steinman

Faculty Scholarship

This article — part of a symposium on federal appellate procedure — addresses questions of appellate jurisdiction that have played an important role in litigation challenging Donald Trump’s conduct under the Constitution’s Emoluments Clauses. When federal trial judges in the District of Columbia and Maryland rejected Trump’s early attempts to dismiss two of these cases, Trump sought immediate relief from the federal courts of appeals rather than allowing the litigation to proceed in the district courts. The lack of a traditional final judgment, however, prompted difficult jurisdictional issues for the D.C. Circuit and the Fourth Circuit.

In both cases, the …

Law Is Not Enough, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

In this Carhart Memorial Lecture, Professor Neil Siegel seeks to explain why, over the past several years, many Americans of diverse ideological commitments have been emphasizing the importance of constitutional norms. It is because they understand that law is not enough to sustain the American constitutional project. Why is law not enough? Because the vitally important purposes that Americans ascribe to the U.S. Constitution require more than legal fidelity for their vindication. Constitutional norms are constitutional in the sense that they are closely tied to the purposes, or spirit, of the Constitution. They are constitutional in the sense that it …

The Single-Subject Rule: A State Constitutional Dilemma, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Critics of the proliferation of omnibus legislation in Congress have pointed to the constitutions of the American states as providing an alternative, and potentially superior, model for lawmaking. Forty-three state constitutions include some sort of “single-subject” rule, that is, the requirement that each act of the legislature be limited to a single subject. Many of these provisions date back to the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and, collectively, they have been the subject of literally thousands of court decisions. Nor is the rule a relic from a bygone era; one recent study found the rule at stake in 102 …

Symposium: This Case Is Moot, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Adam Samaha

Faculty Scholarship

Forget guns for a moment. Imagine that, once upon a time, Boca Raton had a rule that prohibited its residents from transporting their golf clubs to driving ranges outside the city. Boca’s finest golfers challenged the constitutionality of the rule in court. Now imagine that the city thought twice and repealed the rule and that Florida then passed a statute authorizing people to transport their clubs to the driving ranges of their choice. The golfers could live happily ever after.

Separation Of Powers In Comparative Perspective: How Much Protection For The Rule Of Law?, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter discusses the separation of powers. The point about traditions, or shared social norms, is a central one for this chapter. At a time of growing pessimism about the fate of democracy worldwide, adherence to norms of political behaviour may have an importance transcending formal provisions for the allocation of governmental power. As such, this chapter first presents a brief account of ‘separation of powers’ under American presidentialism; then the contrasting system of Westminster parliamentarianism; third, the increasingly prevalent mixed regimes, often semi-presidential, that can be described as ‘constrained parliamentarism’; and, finally, international institutions. As the chapter shows, in …

The Elephant Problem, Richard Primus

Reviews

In their new book, "A Great Power of Attorney": Understanding the Fiduciary Constitution, Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman argue that, as a matter of original meaning, the Constitution should be understood as analogous to a power of attorney, that interpretive devices applicable to powers of attorney should therefore be used in constitutional interpretation, and that interpreting the Constitution that way would produce results congenial to modern libertarian preferences, such as the unconstitutionality of the Affordable Care Act and the invalidity, on nondelegation grounds, of much of the federal administrative state. But the book fails to carry any of its central …

Getting Past The Imperial Presidency, Deborah Pearlstein

Articles

In an age in which the “imperial presidency” seems to have reached its apex, perhaps most alarmingly surrounding the use of military force, conventional wisdom remains fixed that constitutional and international law play a negligible role in constraining executive branch decision-making in this realm. Yet as this Article explains, the factual case that supports the conventional view, based largely on highly selected incidents of presidential behavior, is meaningless in any standard empirical sense. Indeed, the canonical listing of presidential decisions to use force without prior authorization feeds a compliance-centered focus on the study of legal constraint rooted in long-since abandoned …

Paypal Or Plastic, Don't Matter The Court Won't Have It: Why The Case For Removing "In God We Trust" From The Dollar May Still Gain Traction Under The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Olivia Firmand

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

The Right To Be An Asshole: The Need For Increased First Amendment Public Employment Protections In The Age Of Social Media, Alexis Martinez

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Examining The Unconstitutionality Of Dilution By Tarnishment After Tam, Ryder Hogan

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.