Constitutional Law Commons^™

Law School News: 'Marketplace Of Ideas' Imperiled (04-05-2018), David A. Logan

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Rwu First Amendment Blog: David Logan's Blog: Media Centralization Imperils Marketplace Of Ideas 04-05-2018, David A. Logan

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

The Invalidation Of The Maine Congressional Term Limits Law: A Vindication Of Democracy, David A. Soley

Maine Law Review

On November 8, 1994, the voters of Maine enacted a term limits law that arbitrarily limited the democratic right to vote for the candidate of their choice. The law provided that Maine's United States Representatives could not appear on the ballot after six consecutive years of service and that Maine's United States Senators could not appear on the election ballot after twelve consecutive years of service. On May 26, 1995, the United States District Court for the District of Maine found that the law was an unconstitutional violation of the Qualifications Clauses of the United States Constitution and permanently enjoined …

The People Against The Constitution, Aziz Z. Huq

Michigan Law Review

A review of Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?.

The Resilient Foundation Of Democracy: The Legal Deconstruction Of The Washington Posts's Condemnation Of Edward Snowden, Hanna Kim

Indiana Law Journal

On September 17, 2016, The Washington Post (“the Post”) made history by being the first paper to ever call for the criminal prosecution of its own source —Edward Snowden. Yet, two years prior to this editorial, the Post accepted the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for its “revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency”—an honor which would not have been bestowed had Snowden not leaked the documents through this news outlet. The other three major media outlets that received and published Snowden’s documents and findings—The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Intercept—all have taken the …

The Middle-Class Constitution: A Response, Ganesh Sitaraman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

I am very grateful to the Boston University Law Review for bringing together such a terrific group of scholars to engage with my book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic. It is a testament to the work and excellence of the Boston University Law Review that they pulled together such an intellectually engaging group of commentators. My deepest thanks also to Professors Markovits, Rahman, Lyons, Epstein, and Somin for taking the time to read the book and comment on it.

A Lost Opportunity To Reach A Consensus On Gerrymandering, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

Newsroom: 'You Can't Help Being In Awe' 1-30-2018, Michael M. Bowden, Edward Fitzpatrick

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Resurrection Of Trust In American Law And Public Discourse, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals

The Resurrection Of Trust In American Law And Public Discourse, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

When I Left The Darwin Day Committee, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

The United States As An Idea: Constitutional Reflections, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Echoes Of Slavery Ii: How Slavery's Legacy Distorts Democracy, Juan F. Perea

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Sustaining Collective Self-Governance And Collective Action: A Constitutional Role Morality For Presidents And Members Of Congress, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

In the United States today, the behavior of the political branches is generally viewed as more damaging to the American constitutional system than is the behavior of the federal courts. Yet constitutional law scholarship continues to focus primarily on judges and judging. This Article suggests that such scholarship should develop for presidents and members of Congress what it has long advocated for judges: a role morality that imposes normative limits on the exercise of official discretion over and above strictly legal limits. The Article first grounds a role morality for federal elected officials in two purposes of the U.S. Constitution …

Beyond The Bosses' Constitution: The First Amendment And Class Entrenchment, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s “weaponized” First Amendment has been its strongest antiregulatory tool in recent decades, slashing campaign-finance regulation, public-sector union financing, and pharmaceutical regulation, and threatening a broader remit. Along with others, I have previously criticized these developments as a “new Lochnerism.” In this Essay, part of a Columbia Law Review Symposium, I press beyond these criticisms to diagnose the ideological outlook of these opinions and to propose an alternative. The leading decisions of the antiregulatory First Amendment often associate free speech with a vision of market efficiency; but, I argue, closer to their heart is antistatist fear of entrenchment …

The Democratic Deficit, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

Why democracy? Institutions of government and others must meet conditions of legitimacy. Why? and what are they? what are principles of legitimacy, like the principle of subsidiarity? and how does democracy fit in a theory of legitimacy? The paper surveys what it takes to be the seven most important advantages of democratic government: civil and political rights, more extensive opportunities for people to engage in public affairs, responsiveness to the expressed preferences of the people, stability, peaceful transfer of power, loyalty and solidarity. It then considers the role of legitimation in securing these advantages. These reflection lead to the question …

Religion And Gay Rights Need Not Be At Loggerheads, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals

‘Trinity’ Case Marks Death Of Originalism, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals

Constitutionalism And Democracy Dataset, Version 1.0, Todd A. Eisenstadt, Carl Levan, Tofigh Maboudi

Political Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The main objective of the CDD is to quantify the process of constitution-making since 1974. This is the first public release of any data on the process of constitution-making. This release includes data on 144 national constitutions promulgated in 119 countries from 1974 to 2014. The unit of analysis in the data is national constitutions. The data in this release includes only “new” constitutions and does not include suspended, re-installed, amended, or interim constitutions. In this release, only countries with a population larger than 500,000 are included. The authors intend to update the data by including all countries, expanding the …

Withholding Judgment: In Reading The Constitution, Judges Should Consider Their Own Morals,, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals

A Taxonomy Of Independent Electoral Reapportionment Systems, James Ruley

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

This paper addresses a means of checking legislative gerrymandering, which I have called the Independent Electoral Reapportionment Commission (IERC). Its purpose is to prevent self-interested politicians from drawing biased constituency lines. While scholars have researched gerrymandering, few scholars have researched commissions designed to limit such gerrymandering, and no comprehensive work details the global means of accomplishing this goal.

Thus, the purpose of this paper is not to normatively prescribe the best practices for composing and empowering an IERC, but rather to descriptively show how different countries conduct this process. While Part II makes some determinations about which commissions may conceptually …

Trending @ Rwu Law: Deborah Gonzalez's Post: Why I Marched... 1-25-2017, Deborah Gonzalez

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Has Nihilism Politicized The Supreme Court Nomination Process?, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals

The Role Of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools In The Renewal Of American Democracy, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

Is Religion A Non-Negotiable Aspect Of Liberal Constitutionalism?, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals.

Transnational Constitution-Making: The Contribution Of The Venice Commission On Law And Democracy, Paul Craig

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Commission for Democracy through Law, better known as the Venice Commission. While part of the Council of Europe, the Venice Commission is much less understood than the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), notwithstanding the existing literature. This chapter therefore seeks to explicate and evaluate. It begins by explicating the organizational foundations of the Venice Commission, followed by analysis of its remit and role. The focus then shifts to triggering and working methodology.

The remainder of the article is concerned with evaluation of the Commission’s role in relation to constitution-making as broadly conceived, the analysis being situated within the literature …

Constitutional Economic Justice: Structural Power For "We The People", Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

Toward that goal, this essay proposes a structural principle of collective economic power for “we the people.” This principle is both consistent with longstanding Constitutional ideals and tailored to the current challenges of neoliberal ideology and policy. It develops two premises: first, it rejects the neoliberal economic ideology that defines legitimate power and freedom as individualized “choice” constrained by an existing political economy. Instead, this proposed principle recognizes that meaningful political economic freedom and power fundamentally consist of access to collective organizations with potential to create a “more perfect union” with better and less constrained options. Second, the post-Lochner principle …

Newsroom: Rwu's News First Amendment Blog 12-07-2016, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Democratic First Amendment, Ashutosh Bhagwat

Northwestern University Law Review

Over the past several decades, the Supreme Court and most First Amendment scholars have taken the position that the primary reason why the First Amendment protects freedom of speech is to advance democratic self-governance. In this Article, I will argue that this position, while surely correct insofar as it goes, is also radically incomplete. The fundamental problem is that the Court and, until recently, scholars have focused exclusively on the Religion Clauses and the Free Speech Clause. The rest of the First Amendment—the Press, Assembly, and Petition Clauses—might as well not exist. The topic of this Article is the five …

Newsroom: Can Court 'Restore Fundamental Liberties'? 03-23-2016, Sheldon Whitehouse, David A. Logan

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.