Constitutional Law Commons^™

A Critical Appraisal Of The Department Of Justice's New Approach To Medical Marijuana, Robert A. Mikos

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The Obama Administration has embarked upon a much-heralded shift in federal policy toward medical marijuana. Eschewing the hard-ball tactics favored by earlier Administrations, Attorney General Eric Holder announced in October 2009 that the Department of Justice (DOJ) would stop enforcing the federal marijuana ban against persons who comply with state medical marijuana laws. Given the significance of the medical marijuana issue in both criminal law and federalism circles, this Article sets out to provide the first in-depth analysis of the changes wrought by the DOJ’s new Non Enforcement Policy (NEP). In a nutshell, it suggests that early enthusiasm for the …

Notes On Borrowing And Convergence, Robert L. Tsai, Nelson Tebbe

Faculty Scholarship

This is a response to Jennifer E. Laurin, "Trawling for Herring: Lessons in Doctrinal Borrowing and Convergence," 111 Colum. L. Rev. 670 (2011), which analyzes the Supreme Court's resort to tort-based concepts to limit the reach of the Fourth Amendment's exclusionary rule. We press three points. First, there are differences between a general and specific critique of constitutional borrowing. Second, the idea of convergence as a distinct phenomenon from borrowing has explanatory potential and should be further explored. Third, to the extent convergence occurs, it matters whether concerns of judicial administration or political reconstruction are driving doctrinal changes.

Lochner V. New York (1905) And Kennedy V. Louisiana (2008): Judicial Reliance On Adversary Argument, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist called Lochner v. New York (1905) “one of the most ill-starred decisions that [the Supreme Court ever rendered.” The Justices’ deliberations preceding the 5-4 decision demonstrate the courts’ reliance on advocacy in the adversary system of civil and criminal justice. The stark imbalance between the state’s “incredibly sketchy” brief and Joseph Lochner’s sterling submission may have determined Lochner’s outcome, and thus may have changed the course of constitutional history, by leading two Justices to join the majority on the central question of whether New York’s maximum-hours law for bakery workers was a reasonable public health …

Agency Independence After Pcaob, Kevin M. Stack

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Separation of powers has a new endeavor. The PCAOB decision makes the validity of good-cause removal protections depend on the separation of adjudicative from policymaking and enforcement functions within the agency. At a minimum, within independent agencies, it preserves the second layer of removal protection only for dedicated adjudicators. But its logic extends further. In PCAOB, the demand for political supervision over rulemaking and enforcement trumped Congress's choice to preserve the independence of officials who perform those roles and also adjudicate. In that way, PCAOB reversed the consistent constitutional validation of good-cause removal protections for those who engage in adjudication. …

The Framers' Intent: John Adams, His Era, And The Fourth Amendment, Thomas K. Clancy

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Optimal Specificity In The Law Of Separation Of Powers: The Numerous Clauses Principle, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

In this response to Professor John Manning’s Separation of Powers as Ordinary Interpretation, Professor Gary Lawson agrees with Manning’s argument that there is no overarching constitutional principle of “optimal specificity.” Lawson argues, however, that there are other overarching principles that are fairly derivable from the text, such as a principle of “decisional independence.” Moreover, Lawson suggests a bigger potential problem with Manning’s argument: when judges apply functionalist or formalist reasoning to decide cases, they may be engaging in a qualitatively different activity than Manning assumes, and his careful interpretative analysis may therefore be largely beside the point.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Appointment With Trouble, Kent H. Barnett

Scholarly Works

This article considers whether the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director’s appointment of the Bureau’s Deputy Director comports with the Appointments Clause. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act established the Bureau in July 2010, as well as the offices of the Bureau’s Director and Deputy Director, to coordinate the regulation and enforcement of federal consumer-financial-protection laws. Under that act, the Director appoints the Deputy Director. The Appointments Clause permits “Heads of Departments” to appoint inferior officers like the Deputy Director. But it is unclear if the Bureau is a “department” and thus if the Director is a department …

Dangerous People Or Dangerous Weapons: Access To Firearms For Persons With Mental Illness, Lawrence O. Gostin, Katherine L. Record

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The recent attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has once again focused the nation’s attention on the danger of the wide availability of firearms.  The Supreme Court has ruled that gun restrictions may only be imposed on those deemed “prohibited persons” under the Gun Control Act of 1968.  Although some are easily identifiable (e.g., children, convicted felons), one widely inclusive group is not – the mentally ill.

The current system designed to bar the mentally ill from purchasing or possessing firearms is ineffectual due to a lack of reporting and the existence of loopholes.  What’s more, no state has developed …

Lochner, Lawrence, And Liberty, Joseph F. Morrissey

Georgia State University Law Review

Many of the states of the United States have statutes, constitutional provisions, and court decisions that deny individuals the right to have a family, specifically a spouse and children, based on sexual orientation.

Advocates have made a wide variety of arguments attacking such restrictions. Scholars and litigants frequently argue that such acts violate constitutional guarantees of equal protection or invade a constitutional right to privacy. However, such arguments are often defeated by counter arguments presented with religious, moral, and even emotional fervor.

This article presents and defends a new analytical framework based on liberty of contract to advance gay rights. …

Joe The Ploughman Reads The Constitution, Or, The Poverty Of Public Meaning Originalism, Jack N. Rakove

San Diego Law Review

Originalism is hot. A couple of decades ago, one might have thought that its death knell had sounded when the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork failed in the Senate. Although one wondered exactly what kind of originalism Justice Bork might have performed in practice, he was regarded as the theory's leading academic spokesman, and the defeat of his nomination might have served as a fatal blow to the cause. Within a few years, however, Justice Antonin Scalia published his lecture Originalism: The Lesser Evil, signaling that the cause remained alive and well. Although Justice Scalia's views of the practice …

The Oberlin Fugitive Slave Rescue: A Victory For The Higher Law, Steven Lubet

Faculty Working Papers

This article tells the story of the Oberlin fugitive slave rescue and the ensuing prosecutions in federal court. The trial of rescuer Charles Langston marked one of the first times that adherence to "higher law" was explicitly raised as a legal defense in an American courtroom. The article is adapted from my book -- Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial -- which tells this story (and several others) in much more detail.

In the fall of 1859, John Price was a fugitive slave living in the abolitionist community of Oberlin, Ohio. He was lured out of town and …

Illegal Aid: Legal Assistance To Immigrants In The United States, Geoffrey Heeren

Law Faculty Publications

There is an enormous unmet need for immigrant legal aid in the United States. This is partly due to regulations that bar federally funded legal services organizations from representing many types of immigrants. The possible repeal of these restrictions is rarely discussed as a means to expand immigrant access to counsel. Federal funding for immigrant legal aid appears to have become taboo, despite the fact that for much of its history, legal aid was deeply connected to immigration. This forgotten history reveals that there was once broad national consensus in favor of immigrant legal aid; it became contentious and faced …

"Displaced By A Force To Which They Yielded And Could Not Resist": A Historical And Legal Analysis Of Mayor And City Counsel Of Baltimore V. Charles Howard Et. Al, Matthew Kent

Legal History Publications

The experience of the Baltimore Police Commissioners is instructive in understanding the state of affairs in Baltimore during the Civil War era. The removal of the commissioners by the Union Army and the subsequent civil trial, The Mayor and City Council of Baltimore v. Charles Howard, provides a window through which one may examine the historical, legal and political circumstances of the time. The legal status of the commissioners also sheds light on modern legal doctrine related to the detention of American citizens as “enemy combatants” without the benefit of certain constitutional guarantees. By analyzing the Howard case with a …

Plurality Of Political Opinion And The Concentration Of The Media, Maurice Stucke

Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

What Will We Lose If The Trial Vanishes?, Robert P. Burns

Faculty Working Papers

The number of trials continues to decline andfederal civil trials have almost completely disappeared. This essay attempts to address the significance of this loss, to answer the obvious question, "So what?" It argues against taking a resigned or complacent attitude toward an important problem for our public culture. It presents a short description of the trial's internal structure, recounts different sorts of explanations, and offers an inventory of the kinds of wounds this development would inflict.

Why Jack Balkin Is Disgusting, Andrew Koppelman

Faculty Working Papers

Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin didn't win friends when he announced that (1) he is now a constitutional originalist and (2) the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment protects the right to abortion. His claim to membership in the originalist club brought forth a small army of eager bouncers, who were sure that originalism couldn't possibly defend the paradigmatic departure from the Constitution's original meaning.

Balkin has indeed posed a radical challenge to the vision of law that drives the originalists – more radical than he is willing to admit. His theory is in such deep tension with a commonly …

Bad News For Mail Robbers: The Obvious Constitutionality Of Health Care Reform, Andrew Koppelman

Faculty Working Papers

Two federal district judges have invalidated the so-called "individual mandate" in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. Their reasoning is bizarre and mischievous. The novel approach to constitutional law that they propose would misread the Constitution, betray the intentions of the framers, and cripple the nation's ability to address one of its most pressing problems.

The correct legal analysis is simple. Congress has the authority to solve problems that the states cannot separately solve. It can choose any reasonable means to do that.

Doma, Romer, And Rationality, Andrew Koppelman

Faculty Working Papers

It has been objected by many that the Defense of Marriage Act lacks a rational basis because it reflects a bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group. The increasing success of the argument, which has persuaded three federal judges, reveals the hidden normative premises of rational basis analysis, at least whenever that analysis is used to invalidate a statute. Since 1996, when DOMA was passed by overwhelming margins in both houses of Congress, the country's attitudes toward gay people have evolved rapidly, to the point where this kind of mindless lashing out at gays looks a lot less attractive. …

Partisan Conflicts Over Presidential Authority, Jide Okechuku Nzelibe

Faculty Working Papers

A prevailing view in the legal and political science literature assumes that power holders seek to expand or contract their constitutional authority based on incentives that are intrinsic to the logic of the institutional offices they occupy. For instance, it is generally assumed that Presidents are empire builders who will almost always prefer maximum flexibility in shaping their policy objectives, whereas members of Congress may sometimes shirk their institutional prerogatives because of electoral incentives or collective action problems. A similar institutional logic underpins the view that federal courts will often seek to expand their interpretive authority in constitutional controversies at …

The U.S. Supreme Court Gets It Right In Arizona V. Gant: Justifications For Rules Protect Constitutional Rights, Shenequa L. Grey

St. Thomas Law Review

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the justifications or rationales for legal principles form the basis for compliance with the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution; and that therefore, failure to comply with those justifications leads to unconstitutional searches and seizures. Strict compliance with the underlying justifications prevents the courts from circumventing the Constitution by establishing a rule, then expanding it beyond its intended purpose. This article demonstrates and reiterates that compliance with the underlying justifications for establishing rules is essential to protecting individual constitutional rights. In addressing these issues, Part I of this article gives …

The Fifth Freedom: The Constitutional Duty To Provide Public Education, Areto Imoukhuede

Faculty Scholarship

“The fifth freedom is freedom from ignorance. It means that every[one], everywhere, should be free to develop his [or her] talents to their full potential – unhampered by arbitrary barriers of race or birth or income.” Lyndon B. Johnson This article argues that education is a fundamental human right that the U.S. Supreme Court has failed to recognize because of the Court’s bias towards negative, rather than positive rights. Viewed from the limited perspective of rights as liberties, the concern with declaring a fundamental right to education is that education legislation would be strictly scrutinized, thus causing the undesired result …

Reverse Incorporation Of State Constitutional Law, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

State supreme courts and the United States Supreme Court are the independent and final arbiters of their respective constitutions, and may therefore take different approaches to analogous state and federal constitutional issues. Such issues arise often, because the documents were modeled on each other and share many of the same guarantees. In answering them, state courts have, as a matter of practice, generally adopted federal constitutional doctrine as their own. Federal courts, by contrast, have largely ignored state constitutional law when interpreting the federal constitution. In McDonald v. Chicago, to take only the most recent example, the Court declined to …

Popular Constitutionalism And The State Attorneys General, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

In her article Dead or Alive: Originalism as Popular Constitutionalism in Heller, Professor Reva Siegel argued that the Supreme Court’s opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller relied on originalism to enforce understandings of the Second Amendment that were forged in the late twentieth century through popular constitutionalism. In this Response, Professor Joseph Blocher argues that those understandings reappeared in McDonald v. City of Chicago, in part through the efforts of thirty-eight state attorneys general (SAGs) who filed an amicus brief urging the Court to incorporate the Second Amendment against the states. The SAGs invoked federalism, but their arguments …

Four Constitutional Limits That The Minimum Coverage Provision Respects, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Opponents of the minimum coverage provision in the Affordable Care Act charge that if Congress can require most people to obtain health insurance or pay a certain amount of money, then Congress can impose whatever mandates it wishes—or, at least, whatever purchase mandates it wishes. This Essay refutes that claim by identifying four limits on the Commerce Clause that the minimum coverage provision honors. Congress may not use its commerce power: (1) to regulate noneconomic subject matter; (2) to impose a regulation that violates constitutional rights, including the right to bodily integrity; (3) to regulate at all, including by imposing …

What State Constitutional Law Can Tell Us About The Federal Constitution, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

Courts and scholars have long sought to illuminate the relationship between state and federal constitutional law. Yet their attention, like the relationship itself, has largely been one-sided: State courts have consistently adopted federal constitutional law as their own, and scholars have attempted to illuminate why this is, and why it should or should not be so. By contrast, federal courts tend not to look to state constitutional law, even for persuasive authority. Nor have scholars argued at any length that federal courts can or should look to state constitutional law for guidance in answering the many constitutional questions common to …

Reasoning About The Irrational: The Roberts Court And The Future Of Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

Commentary on the future direction of the Roberts Court generally falls along lines that correlate with the commentators' political views on the desirability of the Court's recent decisions. A more informative approach is to look for opinions suggesting changes in the presuppositions with which the Justices approach constitutional decision making. In footnote 27 in his opinion for the Court in the District of Columbia v. Heller Second Amendment decision, Justice Scalia suggested a fundamental revision of the Court's assumptions about the role of judicial doctrine, and the concept of rationality, in constitutional law. Justice Scalia would eliminate the normative aspects …

Constitutionalizing Local Politics, Joseph Blocher, Ilan Graff

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Conflicted Assumptions Of Modern Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

Contribution to Symposium - The Nature of Judicial Authority: A Reflection on Philip Hamburger's Law and Judicial Duty

Constitutional Limitations On Land Use Controls, Environmental Regulations And Governmental Exactions (2011 Edition), Garrett Power

Faculty Scholarship

This electronic book is published in a searchable PDF format as a part of the E-scholarship Repository of the University of Maryland School of Law. It is an “open content” casebook intended for classroom use in courses in Land Use Control, Environmental Law and Constitutional Law. It consists of cases carefully selected from the two hundred years of American constitutional history which address the clash between public sovereignty and private property. It considers both the personal right to liberty and the personal right in property. The text consists of non-copyrighted material and readers are free to use it or re-mix …

Examining Entrenched Masculinities Within The Republican Government Tradition, Jamie Abrams

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

“May all our citizens be soldiers, and all our soldiers citizens,” Sarah Livingston Jay toasted to revelers celebrating the Revolutionary War in 1789. She expressly conveyed what this article describes as the “foundational fusion” of republican government traditions coupling the military service of citizens-soldiers with male political citizenship. While the core of this fusion is deep, long-standing, and well-documented, this article explores the implicit tensions conveyed in her toast – the dominant masculinity dimensions of this foundational fusion. How do women and black men historically gain full political citizenship and effectuate republican government guarantees given its anchoring in entrenched dominant …