Constitutional Law Commons^™

Temporary Eminent Domain, Amnon Lehavi

Buffalo Law Review

Times of emergency call for drastic measures. These steps may include the physical takeover of privately-owned assets by the government for a certain period of time and for various purposes, aimedat addressing the state of emergency. When will such acts amount to a taking, and what compensation should be paid to the property owner? How do temporary physical appropriations during times of emergencydiverge, if at all, from temporary takeovers in more ordinary times?

The doctrinal and theoretical analysis of potential temporary takings has been done mostly in the context of non-physical government intervention with private property, such as when a …

Law School News: A Juneteenth Message From The Dean, Gregory W. Bowman

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Petitions From The Grave: Why Federal Executions Are A Violation Of The Suspension Clause, Taran Wessells

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

This Note will address the intersection of wrongful convictions, the federal death penalty, and habeas corpus to conclude that the federal death penalty is an unconstitutional violation of the Suspension Clause of the United States Constitution. Part I of this Note will establish that Congress may not suspend the writ of habeas corpus outside of wartime. Then, Part II will show that wrongfully convicted prisoners therefore have a constitutional right to a habeas petition if they discover new, exonerating evidence. Part III will argue that because executed prisoners cannot file a habeas petition for release, executing wrongfully convicted prisoners is …

The President And Individual Rights, Mark Tushnet

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

The Emerging Lessons Of Trump V. Hawaii, Shalini Bhargava Ray

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

In the years since the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Hawaii, federal district courts have adjudicated dozens of rights-based challenges to executive action in immigration law. Plaintiffs, including U.S. citizens, civil rights organizations, and immigrants themselves, have alleged violations of the First Amendment and the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause with some regularity based on President Trump’s animus toward immigrants. This Article assesses Hawaii’s impact on these challenges to immigration policy, and it offers two observations. First, Hawaii has amplified federal courts’ practice of privileging administrative law claims over constitutional ones. For example, courts considering …

The Original Meaning Of The Habeas Corpus Suspension Clause, The Right Of Natural Liberty, And Executive Discretion, John Harrison

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

The Habeas Corpus Suspension Clause of Article I, Section 9, is primarily a limit on Congress’s authority to authorize detention by the executive. It is not mainly concerned with the remedial writ of habeas corpus, but rather with the primary right of natural liberty. Suspensions of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus are statutes that vest very broad discretion in the executive to decide which individuals to hold in custody. Detention of combatants under the law of war need not rest on a valid suspension, whether the combatant is an alien or a citizen of the United States. …

Destructive Federal Decentralization, David Fontana

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

This Article—written for a symposium hosted by the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal—focuses on the efforts by the Trump administration to relocate federal officials outside of Washington to reduce the capacity of the federal government. Federalism and the separation of powers are usually the twin pillars of structural constitutional law. Locating federal officials outside of Washington— federal decentralization—has been an additional tool of diffusing power that has started to gain some scholarly attention. These debates largely focus on structural constitutional law as constructive—as improving the capacity and operation of the federal and state governments. The power …

Who Constrains Presidential Exercise Of Delegated Powers?, Rebecca L. Brown

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

Building on the work of administrative law scholars who have identified and illuminated the several components of the problem over the years, this Article will seek to show what has happened when a cluster of separate circumstances have come together to create a new and serious threat to individual liberty when the President exercises expansive delegated authority. Several doctrinal components lead to this confluence: First, the moribund “intelligible principle” test has evolved to provide little or no constraint on this or any other delegation. Second, a delegation to the President, specifically, is not subject to the procedural requirements of the …

Christian Accounts Of Religious Liberty: Two Views Of Conscience, Joel Harrison

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Catholicism, Liberalism, And Populism, Andrea Pin, Luca P. Vanoni

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

For Facebook’S Sake: Getting Conversant With Human Rights, Deborah Pearlstein

Online Publications

Each time I read a new article or interview with an American lawyer or legal scholar reacting to the recent decision by the Facebook Oversight Board (FOB) to invoke international human rights law in sustaining Facebook’s suspension of Donald Trump – I feel seized by the impulse to respond with an unsolicited public primer on what international human rights law (IHRL) is. It is not an unfamiliar feeling. On the contrary, the impulse (which I experience as uncomfortably paternalistic) has emerged repeatedly in the past, say, 20 years, during any one of countless exchanges with lawyers or academics who have …

No Time To Waste: Can A State Prevent Nuclear Waste Transportation Within Its Borders Once Yucca Mountain Becomes Operational?, Ryan Franklin

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

Following the drop of the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, the United States seriously began contemplating the use of atomic energy not just as a weapon, but as an efficient energy source. President Eisenhower delivered his “Atoms for Peace” speech in front of the United Nations eight years later, effectively launching a massive American campaign to build numerous nuclear power plants to generate enough clean energy to power the entire nation. As these plants were being constructed, however, policymakers and lawmakers who were champions of this endeavor failed to consider the problem of nuclear waste generated …

June 9, 2021: We Need A Nov. 3 National Commission, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “We Need a Nov. 3 National Commission“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

We Never Needed A Jan. 6 Commission. We Need A Nov. 3 Commission. This Is Why, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

Collected biweekly contributions to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site.

Abortion Rights In The Supreme Court: A Tale Of Three Wedges, Jennifer S. Hendricks

ConLawNOW

In May 2021, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in a case designed to overrule Roe v. Wade. The assumption is that six justices are inclined to repudiate Roe, and that some of those six would like to go further, declaring a constitutional right to life that would prevent the abortion issue from going “back to the states” at all. The question for the next year is not whether Roe will be overruled—it already was, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey—but how far the Court will go. This essay describes the arc of the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence in …

Fellow Citizens, James W. Fox Jr.

ConLawNOW

This article explores the idea of equal citizenship central to the reconstructed Constitution that originated in the crucible of African American experience and framed by the Black abolitionist movement of the antebellum North. It identifies some of the key concepts of this mid-nineteenth-century African American Constitutionalism embodied in the phrase used at the time of “Emancipate, Enfranchise, Educate.” These became the core principles of Black Reconstruction as Black leaders and their white allies sought to secure civil freedom, free labor, equal suffrage and political power, and access to education and economic and social advancement. The essay addresses primary source materials …

June 6, 2021: Putting The Hallowed Secular Talmud Aside For The Moment, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “Putting the Hallowed Secular Talmud Aside for the Moment“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Beyond “Children Are Different”: The Revolution In Juvenile Intake And Sentencing, Josh Gupta-Kagan

Washington Law Review

For more than 120 years, juvenile justice law has not substantively defined the core questions in most delinquency cases—when should the state prosecute children rather than divert them from the court system (the intake decision), and what should the state do with children once they are convicted (the sentencing decision)? Instead, the law has granted certain legal actors wide discretion over these decisions, namely prosecutors at intake and judges at sentencing. This Article identifies and analyzes an essential reform trend changing that reality: legislation, enacted in at least eight states in the 2010s, to limit when children can be prosecuted …

A Firm Pillar Of Local Justice: The Failures Of The New York Town And Village Justice Courts Supporting Statewide Adoption Of The District Court Model, Noah Sexton

Journal of Law and Policy

Town and village justice courts have been the center of municipal law, both civil and criminal, since the mid-nineteenth century. However, in the modern world, they have become corrupt, poorly managed institutions, creating issues involving procedural integrity and civil rights. In order to remedy these failures and modernize the New York State Unified Court System, state legislators must look to the district court model as it currently exists in Nassau and Eastern Suffolk Counties. The district court model offers several benefits, including the imposition of educational and experiential requirements for judges, the creation of internal and external oversight institutions, the …

“A Dollar Ain’T Much If You’Ve Got It”: Freeing Modern-Day Poll Taxes From Anderson-Burdick, Lydia Saltzbart

Journal of Law and Policy

How much should it cost to vote in the United States? The answer is clear from the Supreme Court’s landmark opinion in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections—nothing. Yet more than fifty years later, many U.S. voters must jump over financial hurdles to access the franchise. These hurdles have withstood judicial review because the Court has drifted away from Harper and has instead applied the more deferential Anderson-Burdick analysis to modern poll tax claims—requiring voters to demonstrate how severely the cost burdens them. As a result, direct and indirect financial burdens on the vote have proliferated. Millions of voters …

June 3, 2021: The Hallowed Secular Talmud, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “The Hallowed Secular Talmud“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Fundamental Rights Or Hand-Me-Down Restrictions: The Specter Of Sumptuary Law In Clothing Expression Doctrines Of The U.K., The U.S., & Canada, Taran Harmon-Walker

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Invoke Your Right To Remain Silent After You Confess: Self-Reporting Regulations And Potential Conflicts With International Law Prohibiting Compulsory Self-Incrimination, Patrick Testa

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Bird's-Eye View: A Comparative Examination Of Drone Regulation Through The Lens Of Privacy Protection, Allison Mcgregor

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Catalytic Courts And Enforcement Of Constitutional Education Funding Provisions, Hugh Spitzer, Andy Omara

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

It is well-recognized that it is easier for judges to enforce constitutional “negative rights” provisions than positive social and economic rights. This article focuses on the challenges of enforcing one specific positive right: the constitutional right of children to attend adequately funded schools. Our article tests on-the-ground judicial implementation of education funding provisions against the general theoretical framework of judicial interaction with the political branches developed by Katharine Young. We analyze how, in multi-year, multi-decision litigation, constitutional court judges in the three jurisdictions we studied actively experimented with the challenging task of forcing, or enticing, reluctant legislative and executive branches …

Moral Truth And Constitutional Conservatism, Gerard V. Bradley

Louisiana Law Review

Conservative constitutionalism is committed to "originalism," that is, to interpreting the Constitution according to its original public understanding. This defining commitment of constitutional interpretation is sound. For decades, however, constitutional conservatives have diluted it with a methodology of restraint, a normative approach to the judicial task marked by an overriding aversion to critical moral reasoning. In any event, the methodology eclipsed originalism and the partnership with moral truth that originalism actually entails. Conservative constitutionalism is presently a mélange of mostly unsound arguments against the worst depredations of Casey's Mystery Passage. The reason for the methodological moral reticence is easy to …

Does Justice Have A Syntax?, Steven L. Winter

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Climate Change, Competition & Conflict Along The River Nile: The Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam & Shifting Customary International Water Law, Salma Shitia

Fordham Environmental Law Review

Decade-long negotiations between the Arab Republic of Egypt and the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia surround the decision to build the hydroelectric power plant along the River Nile. For much of Ethiopia, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam represents a beacon of prosperity. For countless Egyptians, the structure embodies a potential catastrophe. Grounded in threats of displacement for Egyptian agricultural communities, some have compared the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam crisis to disasters culminating in mass migration.

This battle for natural resource access has intensified as climate change exacerbates the region’s dire conditions. Specifically, exhaustible resource allocation amid climate change indicates that …

A Paper Tiger? Prosecutorial Regulators In China’S Civil Environmental Public Interest Litigations, Chunyan Ding, Huina Xiao

Fordham Environmental Law Review

In July 2015, China’s national legislature brought in prosecutor-led civil environmental public interest litigation (“EPIL”) for thirteen selected provincial areas of the country. After a two-year legal experiment, this prosecutor-led civil EPIL system was then established nationwide in July 2017. Yet, can it be said that prosecutorial regulators in China are in fact a paper tiger? Drawing upon content analysis of the 655 prosecutor-led civil EPILs and in-depth interviews with twelve frontline prosecutors and judges, this article examines the dynamics of regulatory practice and the motivation of the Chinese prosecutorial organs to engage in environmental regulation through litigation. Based upon …

The Yoga Analogy: Scaling-Up The U.S.’S Renewable Energy Sector Mindfully With New Technologies, Evolving Standards, Public Buy-In, Data Sharing, And Innovation Clusters, Kimberly E. Diamond

Fordham Environmental Law Review

This paper focuses on innovative renewable energy devices, exploring how scientifically-based industry standards that continuously evolve with engineering design technology, the public’s buy-in and feeling of connectedness with groundbreaking devices, and innovation clusters that accelerate device development through data sharing and public-private partnerships can all help advance the U.S.’s domestic renewable energy industry.

Part I analyzes challenges inherent to scaling- up novel renewable energy technologies while simultaneously developing the industry standards regulating them. Part II uses the Block Island Wind Farm, an offshore wind demonstration project, and Pavegen’s globally-deployed arrays of piezoelectric smart flooring tiles as examples illustrating the importance …