Constitutional Law Commons^™

Compliance Theory And The Inter-American Court Of Human Rights, Morse Hyun-Myung Tan

ExpressO

This essay fills a gap by exploring compliance theory in international law to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. After introducing the topic and setting the context, it delves into the question of why nations follow international law. Interacting with prominent theoretical models (including the managerial model, fairness and legitimacy, transnational legal process, self-interest, and a comparative perspective with Europe), it arrives at a critical synthesis in the conclusion.

The Supreme Court And The Trusts: Antitrust And The Foundations Of Modern American Business Regulation From Knight To Swift, Donald J. Smythe

ExpressO

The period from 1870-1920 was a turning point in modern history. It was during this time that the contours of the modern industrial state were formed. A “Great Merger Movement” occurred right in the middle of this period across most of the industrialized nations of the world. The trend toward industrial concentration, which was known at the time as the “trust problem,” generated considerable public alarm. Some have argued that it was caused by antitrust policy and the Supreme Court’s early antitrust decisions. Indeed, the idea has become the conventional wisdom among some antitrust scholars, especially those connected with the …

The Case For The Legislative Override, Nicholas Stephanopoulos

ExpressO

What is the optimal arrangement of judicial review? Most scholars who have addressed this question have assumed that there are only two important alternatives: judicial supremacy and parliamentary sovereignty. The literature has neglected the conceptual space that exists between these two poles, in particular the innovative legislative override model. This Article describes and evaluates the experiences of the two countries that have adopted the override, Canada and Israel. It also introduces a refined override model that promises to protect fundamental rights while promoting democratic decision-making. Finally, the Article explains which institutional and political contexts are hospitable to the override and …

Substantive Due Process As A Source Of Constitutional Protection For Nonpolitical Speech, Gregory P. Magarian

ExpressO

Present First Amendment doctrine presumptively protects anything within the descriptive category “expression” from government regulation, subject to balancing against countervailing government interests. As government actions during the present war on terrorism have made all too clear, that doctrine allows intolerable suppression of political debate and dissent – the expressive activity most integral to our constitutional design. At the same time, present doctrine fails to give a clear account of why the Constitution protects expressive autonomy and when that protection properly should yield to government interests, leading to an inconsistent and unsatisfying free speech regime. In this article, Professor Magarian advocates …

Overcoming Poletown: County Of Wayne V. Hathcock, Economic Development Takings, And The Future Of Public Use, Ilya Somin

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

County of Wayne v. Hathcock is an important step forward in public use takings law. The Michigan Supreme Court was right to overturn its notorious 1981 Poletown decision and forbid condemnations that transfer property to private parties solely on the grounds that the new owners will contribute to “economic development.” Poletown was the best known and most widely criticized decision justifying a nearly unlimited condemnation power.

As the Poletown case dramatically demonstrates, the economic development rationale is a virtual blank check for eminent domain abuse for the benefit of private parties. Poletown upheld a condemnation as a result of which …

A Brief History Of The Fifth Amendment Guarantee Against Double Jeopardy, David S. Rudstein

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Surprisingly Strong Case For Tailoring Constitutional Principles, Mark D. Rosen

All Faculty Scholarship

Many constitutional principles apply to more than one level of government. This is true not only of Bill of Rights guarantees that have been incorporated against the States, but of many constitutional principles whose source lies outside of the Bill of Rights. The conventional wisdom is that such multi-level constitutional principles apply identically to all levels of government. The Article's thesis is that this One-Size-Fits-All approach is problematic because the different levels of government - federal, state, and local - sometimes are sufficiently different that a given constitutional principle may apply differently to each level. This Article critically examines an …

A Positive Theory Of The War Powers Constitution, Jide O. Nzelibe

ExpressO

This Article explores the division of war-making authority between the President and Congress through the prism of positive political theory. For the most part, the scholarly treatment of the war-powers debate has been normative with various commentators offering various textual or functional accounts of what the proper allocation of war-making authority should be. This Article provides a positive account of the war-making powers by focusing on the domestic political constraints that the political branches face in the context of an imminent international crisis. This Article argues that the presidential decision to seek congressional authorization is determined by a two-level strategic …

Reclaiming The Public Forum: Courts Must Stand Firm Against Governmental Efforts To Displace Dissidence, Christopher B. Ford

ExpressO

Recognizing that the right to free speech for dissidents is increasingly at risk in the United States, this submission catalogs manifold methods the government has employed to constrain free speech and urges that courts not only serve as a bulwark against further erosion of public expression of dissent but endeavor to restore access to the public forum that recently has been lost. The submission surveys the background of the right to free expression and provides details and examples of the government’s increasing tendency to suppress dissident speech by deploying heavily armed police in demonstrations, committing violent acts against peaceful protesters, …

What Is A Tragedy Of The Commons? Overfishing And The Campaign Spending Problem, Shi-Ling Hsu

ExpressO

Over the thirty-seven years since its publication, Garden Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" has clearly become one of the most influential writings of all time. The tragedy of the commons is one of those rare scholarly ideas that has had an enormous impact in academia and is also commonly used outside of academia. In legal scholarship, the tragedy of the commons has been used to characterize a wide variety of resource problems, including intellectual property rights, overcrowding of telecommunications spectra, air and water pollution, and of course, the classic environmental commons problem, overfishing. But I suggest this embarrassment of citation …

Awakening An Empire Of Liberty: Exploring The Roots Of Socratic Inquiry And Political Nihilism In American Democracy, Maurice R. Dyson

ExpressO

This book review timely examines Cornel West’s latest sequel to his 1992 best seller, Race Matters. In Democracy Matters, West unflinchingly examines the waning of democratic energies and nihilistic practices of private and public sector in our present age of democracy. This review takes a critical examination of the logic underpinning West’s arguments, his nomenclature of various nihilism plaguing our society, the sometimes clumsy employment of literary devices and his thesis regarding the ‘niggerization’ of America after 9/11 that can serve as a basis for unifying collective action against imperialism. West makes a compelling argument that the public needs to …

Congressional Oversight Of Counterterrorism And Its Reform, Robert F. Blomquist

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Interstate Recognition Of Same-Sex Marriages And Civil Unions: A Handbook For Judges, Andrew Koppelman

Public Law and Legal Theory Papers

Same-sex marriage is here. Massachusetts now recognizes such marriages, and increasing numbers of same-sex couples have married. Other states have virtually the same status: Vermont recognizes "civil unions," and California recognizes "domestic partnerships," that have virtually all the rights of marriage. Are these statuses exportable? Will same-sex unions be recognized in other states? The answer should not be mysterious. There is a well developed body of law on the question of whether and when to recognize extraterritorial marriages that are contrary to the forum's public policy. Assuming that courts decide to follow that law, the answer is, it depends. This …

Does Obscenity Cause Moral Harm?, Andrew Koppelman

Public Law and Legal Theory Papers

This essay will reconsider the fundamentals of obscenity law: the harm that the law addresses and the means by which the law tries to prevent that harm. Strangely, even though an enormous amount of scholarship examines this doctrine, these fundamentals have not been adequately addressed. The harm that the doctrine seeks to prevent is not offense to unwilling viewers. It is not incitement to violence against women. It is not promotion of sexism. Rather, it is moral harm - a concept that modern scholarship finds hard to grasp. Liberals have not even understood the concept of moral harm, and so …

Morals-Based Justifications For Lawmaking: Before And After Lawrence V. Texas, 88 Minn. Law Rev. 1233, Suzanne B. Goldberg

ExpressO

Morals-Based Justifications for Lawmaking: Before and After Lawrence v. Texas looks in depth at the dissonance between the Supreme Court’s rhetorical support for morals-based lawmaking and the Court’s jurisprudence. In taking this approach, the article responds to a central post-Lawrence question regarding the sufficiency of a government’s moral agenda as a justification for restricting individual rights. It turns out, on close review of the cases going back to the mid-1800s, that the Court has almost never relied explicitly on a morals rationale to sustain an allegedly rights-infringing government action.

The article develops several explanations for this avoidance of explicit morals …

The Pledge As Sacred Political Ritual, Sheldon Nahmod

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Foreword: The New Frontier Of State Constitutional Law, James A. Gardner, Jim Rossi

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is Morrison Dead? Assessing A Supreme Drug (Law) Overdose, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

There was little doubt that the federal government would prevail in Gonzales v. Raich. What was, perhaps, unexpected was so expansive a repudiation of enforceable judicial limitations on federal power. In upholding the constitutionality of the Controlled Substances Act as applied to the non-commercial intrastate possession and consumption of marijuana for medical purposes as authorized under California law, the Supreme Court hollowed out the core of contemporary commerce clause jurisprudence. Insofar as United States v. Morrison had stood for the propositions that only intrastate economic activities could be aggregated for purposes of the "substantial effects" test, that attenuated connections between …

Designing Federalism In Burma, David C. Williams, Lian H. Sakhong

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

This volume is designed to serve as a concise introduction to certain constitutional ideas that may be relevant to Burma. It contains three documents: one essay by Lian Sakhong, and two lectures that I delivered to the SCSC, over several days in November 2003 and August 2004. All three contain common themes. First, sometimes ideas can show us a way through problems that we had thought were impenetrable. Second, Burma’s problems have grown in part from some misunderstandings of certain ideas. In particular, many in Burma have imagined that governance can really occur only at the center: people look to …

A Constitutional Defence Of The Federal Ban On Human Cloning For Research Purposes, Jocelyn Downie, Jennifer Llewellyn, Françoise Baylis

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Parliament's prohibition on cloning in the Assisted Human Reproduction Act has led to divergent views on the validity of the legislation. This article responds to an article in volume 29, no. 2 of this journal by Barbara Billingsley and Timothy Caulfield, who suggested that the federal ban would likely not survive a Charter challenge. Billingsley and Caulfield argued that scientific experiments are expressive acts, deserving of protection under section 2(b) of the Charter, which guarantees freedom of expression. In their view, both the breadth of the legislative objective and the proportionality of the measure would preclude the courts from finding …

True Integration: Advancing Brown's Goal Of Educational Equity In The Wake Of Grutter, Lia Epperson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Reconciling Data Privacy And The First Amendment, Neil M. Richards

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article challenges the First Amendment critique of data privacy regulation–the claim that data privacy rules restrict the dissemination of truthful information and thus violate the First Amendment. The critique, which is ascendant in privacy discourse, warps legislative and judicial processes by constitutionalizing information policy. Rejection of the First Amendment critique is justified on three grounds. First, the critique mistakenly equates privacy regulation with speech regulation. Building on scholarship examining the boundaries of First Amendment protection, this article suggests that speech restrictions in a wide variety of commercial contexts have never been thought to trigger heightened First Amendment scrutiny, refuting …

The Academic Expert Before Congress: Observations And Lessons From Bill Van Alstyne's Testimony, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Judicial Federalism And The Future Of Federal Environmental Regulation, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

This article assesses the current and likely impact of the Supreme Court's federalism cases on federal environmental regulation. As a result of this assessment, the article seeks to make four points: (1) Thus far, the Supreme Court's federalism cases have had a limited impact on federal regulation, as federal courts have not used these cases as a basis for limiting the reach of federal regulatory authority. (2) Notwithstanding this limited impact, the underlying logic of the Supreme Court's cases does pose a challenge for federal regulation, particularly in the Commerce Clause context. (3) The thrust of the federalism cases makes …

The Paperless Chase: Electronic Voting And Democratic Values, Daniel P. Tokaji

The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Working Paper Series

The 2000 election ignited a fierce controversy over the machinery used for voting. Civil rights advocates have called for the replacement of outdated paper-based voting equipment, like the infamous “hanging chad” punch card. Yet the introduction of paperless technology, especially electronic “touchscreen” machines, has induced widespread concern that software might be rigged to alter election results. This article examines the debate over electronic voting, which raises fundamental questions about the democratic values that should guide the administration of elections. It frames the debate by defining four equality norms embodied in federal voting rights laws and the Constitution. Electronic voting has …

Constitutional Law—State Employees Have Private Cause Of Action Against Employers Under Family And Medical Leave Act—Nevada Department Of Human Resources V. Hibbs, 538 U.S. 721 (2003)., Gabriel H. Teninbaum

ExpressO

The Eleventh Amendment of the United States Constitution provides that non-consenting states are not subject to suit in federal court. Congress may, however, abrogate the states’ sovereign immunity by enacting legislation to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs, the Supreme Court of the United States considered whether Congress acted within its constitutional authority by abrogating sovereign immunity under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which allows private causes of action against state employers to enforce the FMLA’s family-leave provision. The Court held abrogation was proper under the FMLA and state …

Conceptualizing Blakely, Douglas A. Berman

The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Working Paper Series

The Supreme Court’s decision in Blakely v. Washington has generated impassioned judicial and academic criticisms, perhaps because the “earthquake” ruling seems to announce a destructive rule in search of a sound principle. Read broadly, the jury trial rule articulated in Blakely might be thought to cast constitutional doubt on any and all judicial fact-finding at sentencing. Yet judicial fact-finding at sentencing has a long history, and such fact-finding has been an integral component of modern sentencing reforms and seems critical to the operation of guideline sentencing. The caustic reaction to Blakely reflects the fact that the decision has sowed confusion …

The Collection Due Process Rights: A Misstep Or A Step In The Right Direction?, Leslie Book

Working Paper Series

This article defends one of the more controversial parts of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 (RRA 98) the collection due process (CDP) provisions. CDP gives taxpayers the right to independent administrative and judicial review of IRS decisions to use its awesome administrative collection powers, powers that have long made the IRS a feared creditor.

Prior to CDP’s enactment, the IRS had the power to collect taxes from taxpayers without judicial review of administrative collection determinations. This power, atypical for creditors which often must get judicial approval for summary collection action, led many observers to …

Thinking Outside The Pandora's Box: Why The Dmca Is Unconstitutional Under Article I §8 Of The U.S. Constitution, Joshua L. Schwartz

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Judicial Power & Civil Rights Reconsidered, David E. Bernstein, Ilya Somin

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

Michael Klarman's "From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality" is an important contribution to the scholarly literature on both the history of the civil rights struggle and judicial power more generally. Klarman argues that for much of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court was very reluctant to rule in favor of African American civil rights claimants, and had little impact when it did.

Klarman is right to reject traditional accounts that greatly exaggerated the Supreme Court's willingness and ability to protect minorities. However, he overstates his case. The Court's views on the …