Constitutional Law Commons^™

Constitution Making At The Edges Of Constituional Order, Karol Edward Soltan

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Popular Authorship And Constitution Making: Comparing And Contrasting The Drc And Kenya, James Thuo Gathii

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Could And Should America Have Made An Ottoman Republic In 1919?, Paul D. Carrington

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Expanding Participation In Constitution Making: Challenges And Opportunities, Angela M. Banks

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Quintessential Elements Of Meaningful Constitutions In Post-Conflict States, William W. Van Alstyne

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Substantive Media Regulation In Three Dimenstions, Gregory P. Magarian

Working Paper Series

Changes in the political and regulatory climates are prompting calls to revive substantive government regulation of the broadcast media, specifically the now-defunct fairness doctrine. In this article, Professor Magarian attempts to sharpen the present debate over substantive regulation by closely examining earlier defenses and criticisms of the fairness doctrine. The article assesses how supporters and opponents of the fairness doctrine have characterized three issues essential for assessing the doctrine’s wisdom and constitutionality: who is regulating; who is being regulated; and the goal of the regulatory scheme. As to the first issue, who is regulating, fairness doctrine supporters emphasize the democratic …

Speaking Against Norms: Public Discourse And The Economy Of Racialization In The Workplace, Terry Smith

American University Law Review

Free speech controversies erupt from reactions to outlier voices, and these voices are often those of subordinated citizens such as racial minorities. Employing the tools of narrative, interviews with litigants and subjects, and interdisciplinary analysis of case law, Professor Terry Smith probes whether the social inequality of government employees of color affects the rigor of the First Amendment protection afforded their speech. Professor Smith argues that all public sector employees lack sufficient protection because their speech typically does not receive the highest constitutional scrutiny and because of the Supreme Court's recent decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos, which stripped public sector …

Standing At The Crossroads: The Roberts Court In Historical Perspective, Maxwell L. Stearns

Faculty Scholarship

After eleven years, the longest period in Supreme Court history with no change in membership, the Roberts Court commenced in the year 2005 with two new justices. John Roberts replaced William Rehnquist as the seventeenth Chief Justice and Samuel Alito replaced Sandra Day O’Connor as Associate Justice. The conventional wisdom suggests that on the nine-justice Supreme Court, these two appointments have produced a single-increment move, ideologically, to the right. The two Chief Justices occupy roughly the same ideological position. In contrast, whereas O’Connor was generally viewed as occupying the Court’s centrist, or median, position, Alito has instead continued to embrace …

Should States Have Greater Standing Rights Than Ordinary Citizens?: Massachusetts V. Epa's New Standing Test For States, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In Massachusetts v. EPA, 127 S. Ct. 1438 (2007), the Supreme Court held that carbon dioxide (CO²) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) are air pollutants within the meaning of the Clean Air Act (CAA). Although its decision on the merits is important, the Court's conclusion that Massachusetts had standing to file suit because states are entitled to more lenient standing criteria may have a greater impact in the long-term on legal doctrine. In Massachusetts, the Supreme Court for the first time clearly gave greater standing rights to states than ordinary citizens. The Court, however, failed to explain to what extent …

Corruption Of Religion And The Establishment Clause, Andrew Koppelman

Faculty Working Papers

Government neutrality toward religion is based on familiar considerations: the importance of avoiding religious conflict, alienation of religious minorities, and the danger that religious considerations will introduce a dangerous irrational dogmatism into politics and make democratic compromise more difficult. This paper explores one consideration, prominent at the time of the framing, that is often overlooked: the idea that religion can be corrupted by state involvement with it. This idea is friendly to religion but, precisely for that reason, is determined to keep the state away from religion.

If the religion-protective argument for disestablishment is to be useful today, it cannot …

Is Nominal Use An Answer To The Free Speech & Right Of Publicity Quandary?: Lessons From America’S National Pastime, Raymond Shih Ray Ku

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Hazelwood V. Kuhlmeier And The University: Why The High School Standard Is Here To Stay, Christopher N. Lavigne

Fordham Urban Law Journal

In Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the Supreme Court evaluated the administrative control of a high school newspaper and held that public school officials could control speech in school-sponsored activities if they did so for legitimate pedagogical reasons. While the Court reserved the question of whether this standard should be applicable at the university level, various federal circuit courts have since applied this speech-restrictive standard to student speech at colleges and universities. In light of these circuit court opinions, there has been considerable debate about whether and to what extent the Hazelwood framework should apply to college and university students. …

Returning To Hazelwood's Core: A New Approach To Restrictions On School-Sponsored Speech, Emily Gold Waldman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The Article begins by discussing the Hazelwood decision in depth. It then discusses the various contexts in which courts have applied Hazelwood and the circuit split that has developed over how broadly Hazelwood should reach. Next, it describes the circuit split over whether Hazelwood permits viewpoint-based speech restrictions, highlighting the different speech contexts in which the circuits have reached divergent conclusions. The Article then argues that the overextension of Hazelwood links the two splits. This Part also discusses why Hazelwood is uniquely suited to the student speech context and why other doctrines-namely, the Pickering-Connick framework for teachers' classroom speech and …

Parents Involved And The Meaning Of Brown: An Old Debate Renewed, Jonathon L. Entin

Seattle University Law Review

This Article examines some of the jurisprudential roots of the racial discrimination debate, tracing the issue back to Brown and its immediate aftermath but finding the seeds of the disagreement in the ambiguities of the first Justice Harlan's celebrated dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson. The tensions between the two approaches did not matter in Plessy because segregation was impermissible under either theory, but the two approaches pointed in opposite directions in Parents Involved. Part II offers an overview of the Seattle and Louisville policies that were struck down in Parents Involved. Part III examines the various …

Parents Involved And The Meaning Of Brown: An Old Debate Renewed, Jonathan L. Entin

Faculty Publications

In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 the Supreme Court debated the meaning of Brown v. Board of Education. This essay, prepared for a symposium on Parents Involved, traces the roots of the debate between color-blindness and anti-subordination to Brown itself and efforts to desegregate public schools in the wake of that decision but shows that the debate goes back at least as far as the tensions reflected in the first Justice Harlan's celebrated dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Footnote Eleven For The New Millennium: Ecological Perspective Arguments In Support Of Compelling Interest, Malik Edwards

Seattle University Law Review

This Article proceeds in three Parts. Part II considers the historical and social context that led to the ultimate successful strategy in Brown. Although times may have changed, my ultimate argument is that contexts matters; as such, to fully understand Brown, we must understand the strategy behind it and the road that takes us from Plessy to Brown<,/em>. Part III considers the trends that led to Brown's undoing. While Brown I offers no remedy and Brown II provides that schools should be desegregated “with all deliberate speed,” one must understand the societal shifts that occurred, fundamentally changing the …

Children, Kin And Court: Designing Third Party Custody Policy To Protect Children, Third Parties And Parents, Josh Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Metaphors And Modalities: Meditations On Bobbitt’S Theory Of The Constitution, Ian C. Bartrum

Scholarly Works

This article builds on Philip Bobbitt's remarkable work in constitutional theory, which posits a practice-based constitution based in six accepted "modalities" of argument. I attempt to supplement Bobbitt's theory - which has a static and exclusive quality to it - with an account of interpretive evolution based in Max Black's interaction theory of metaphors. I suggest that we can (and do) create constitutional metaphors by deliberately overlapping Bobbitt's modalities of argument, and that through these creative acts we can grow the practice of American constitutionalism. I then present case studies of this metaphoric process at work in three fields of …

Supreme Court Reversals: Exploring The Seventh Court, Stephen Wermiel

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Inside The Box - When Exercising Peremptory Challenges, Attorneys Should Keep In Mind The Three-Step Framework Of Batson/Wheeler, Angela J. Davis

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Free Speech And The Case For Constitutional Exceptionalism, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

Excerpts from the Article

Embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the evocative proposition that [e]veryone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. But beneath that level of abstraction there is anything but universal agreement.

This book review argues that the dissonance between countries need not be challenged in pursuit of uniformity. Indeed, in those cases in which the differences reflect an appropriate balance of competing goods, it should be celebrated. Constitutional exceptionalism recognizes and celebrates each country's attempt to optimize the general welfare of that country by balancing competing goods in a manner consistent with …

Arbitrary Detention: Whither - Or Wither? - Section 9, Steve Coughlan

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

It is a remarkable fact that more than 25 years after the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms came into effect, we still have no section 9 jurisprudence. It is not that there have been no decisions at all concerning the right not to be arbitrarily detained, of course, but taken in total they do not come anywhere near setting out an analytical framework. This stands in contrast to most other legal rights in the Charter. Section 7 jurisprudence has established the two-step approach to take in assessing claims under that section, including a three-step test for determining whether a …

The End Of Constitutional Exemptions, Steve Coughlan

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In R. v. Ferguson (reported ante p. 197) the Supreme Court decided that constitutional exemptions are not available as a remedy when a mandatory minimum sentence is said to violate section 12 of the Charter. This is a well reasoned and sensible decision. As mandatory minimum sentences are the context in which the possibility of the constitutional exemption as a Charter remedy has most frequently arisen, as a practical matter Ferguson largely disposes of the issue. Nonetheless, a further clarification at some point that constitutional exemptions are not available in any context, for other violations of section 12 or of …

Enhanced Protections For Geographical Indications Under Trips: Potential Conflicts Under The U.S. Constitutional And Statutory Regimes, David Snyder

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

The Assumptions Behind The Assumptions In The War On Terror: Risk Assessment As An Example Of Foundational Disagreement In Counterterrorism Policy, Kenneth Anderson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This 2007 article (based around an invited conference talk at Wayne State in early 2007) addresses risk assessment and cost benefit analysis as mechanisms in counterterrorism policy. It argues that although policy is often best pursued by agreeing to set aside deep foundational differences, in order to obtain a strategic plan for an activity such as counterterrorism, foundational differences must be addressed in order that policy not merely devolve into a policy minimalism that is always and damagingly tactical, never strategic, in order to avoid domestic democratic political conflict. The article takes risk assessment in counterterrorism, using cost benefit analysis, …

Risky Business: Massachusetts V. Epa, Risk-Based Harm, And Standing In The D.C. Circuit, Amanda Leiter

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

First Amendment Decisions From The October 2006 Term, Erwin Chemerinsky, Marci A. Hamilton

Articles

No abstract provided.

Interpreting The Fourteenth Amendment: Two Don'ts And Three Dos, Garrett Epps

All Faculty Scholarship

A sophisticated reading of the legislative record of the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment can provide courts and scholars with some general interpretive principles to guide their application of the Amendment to current legal problems. The author argues that two common legal conceptions about the Amendment are, in fact, misconceptions. The first is that the Amendment was chiefly concerned with the immediate situation of freed slaves in the former slave states. Instead, he argues, the legislative record suggests that the framers were broadly concerned with the rights not only of freed slaves but also of foreign-born immigrants in the North …

Suspension And The Extrajudicial Constitution, Trevor W. Morrison

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

What happens when Congress suspends the writ of habeas corpus? Everyone agrees that suspending habeas makes that particular - and particularly important - judicial remedy unavailable for those detained by the government. But does suspension also affect the underlying legality of the detention? That is, in addition to making the habeas remedy unavailable, does suspension convert an otherwise unlawful detention into a lawful one? Some, including Justice Scalia in the 2004 case Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Professor David Shapiro in an important recent article, answer yes.

This Article answers no. I previously offered that same answer in a symposium essay; …

Market Triumphalism, Electoral Pathologies, And The Abiding Wisdom Of First Amendment Access Rights, Gregory P. Magarian

Working Paper Series

Forty years ago, Professor Jerome Barron made the classic case that the First Amendment requires not merely protection of speech against government interference but provision of access to the means of mass communication. The Supreme Court in the ensuing decades has largely rejected Barron’s approach. In this article, Professor Magarian defends Barron’s case for access rights against the two theoretical critiques that have underwritten its doctrinal rejection. The libertarian critique attacks the normative underpinnings of access rights, maintaining that the First Amendment insulates market-driven distributions of expressive opportunities. Professor Magarian demonstrates that politically progressive and conservative libertarian critics of access …