Constitutional Law Commons^™

Race-Based Remedies In Criminal Law, Ion Meyn

William & Mary Law Review

This Article evaluates the constitutional feasibility of using race-based remedies to address racial disparities in the criminal system. Compared to white communities, communities of color are over-policed and over-incarcerated. Criminal system stakeholders recognize that these conditions undermine perceptions of legitimacy critical to ensuring public safety. As jurisdictions assiduously attempt race-neutral fixes, they also acknowledge the shortcomings of such interventions. Nevertheless, jurisdictions dismiss the feasibility of deploying more effective race-conscious strategies due to the shadow of a constitutional challenge. The apprehension is understandable. Debates around affirmative action in higher education and government contracting reveal fierce hostility toward race-based remedies.

This Article, …

Disrespect As The Essence Of Constitutional Right Violations, R. George Wright

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The article posits that disrespect is a fundamental concept in understanding constitutional rights violations. It argues that the underlying logic and limits of constitutional rights are rooted in considerations of respect and disrespect, particularly respect for persons. The author contends that both intentional and unintentional disrespect can lead to constitutional violations, affecting various rights such as equal protection, free speech, and due process. The analysis draws on philosophical frameworks, including those of Kant and Rawls, to emphasize the centrality of respect in constitutional jurisprudence.

Bleeding From The Holes In The Theory: How Flawed Deterrence In Federal Tort Claims Enables Police Brutality, Andrew Reisman

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note argues that federal tort laws, particularly the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) and Bivens actions, are ineffective in deterring police brutality due to structural flaws that prevent individual accountability. It proposes reforms to strengthen these legal mechanisms and promote transparency and accountability within federal law enforcement agencies.

The Roberts Court Its First Amendment Free Expression Jurisprudence: 2005-2021, David L. Hudson Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article, Fundamental First Amendment Principles, distills the complexity of First Amendment jurisprudence into ten core principles designed to guide students, lawyers, and scholars through what is often described as a labyrinthine body of law. Recognizing that free-speech doctrine lacks a single unifying framework, the authors identify foundational commitments that structure constitutional analysis, including the protection of criticism of government, the strong prohibition against viewpoint discrimination, the safeguarding of symbolic and offensive expression, and the recognition that not all speech is protected. The Article also emphasizes doctrines protecting the right not to speak, freedom of association, and the contextual …

Federalism, Free Competition, And Sherman Act Preemption Of State Restraints, Alan J. Meese

Faculty Publications

The Sherman Act establishes free competition as the rule governing interstate trade. Banning private restraints cannot ensure that competitive markets allocate the nation's resources. State laws can pose identical threats to free markets, posing an obstacle to achieving Congress's goal to protect free competition.

The Sherman Act would thus override anticompetitive state laws under ordinary preemption standards. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court rejected such preemption in Parker v. Brown, creating the "state action doctrine." Parker and its progeny hold that state-imposed restraints are immune from Sherman Act preemption, even if they impose significant harm on out-of-state consumers. Parker's progeny …

Populism And Constitutionalism: An Essay On Definitions And Their Implications, Mark Tushnet, Bojan Bugarič

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Deceive, Profit, Repeat: Public Deception Schemes To Conceal Product Dangers, Wes Henricksen

Cardozo Law Review

Companies in numerous industries have misled the public by hiding the dangers posed by their products. Sugar manufacturers hid the dangers of high fructose corn syrup and misdirected the public’s attention to fat, causing an epidemic of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. Opioid manufacturers hid the dangers and addictiveness of opioid painkillers, leading to the opioid crisis. Fossil fuel companies misled the public about the causes, certainty, and effects of global warming, resulting in massive unregulated CO2 emissions and causing one of the greatest threats to humankind. This Article identifies all such schemes as belonging to a category of wrongs …

Introductory Essay For The Issue Devoted To The Appointment Of Amy Coney Barrett To The U.S. Supreme Court, David Rudenstine

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

I Choose, You Decide: Checking The Judiciary From Within, Jeremy N. Sheff

Cardozo Law Review

Efforts to rein in partisanship (or the perception thereof) on the Supreme Court tend to focus either on what Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn call “personnel reforms”—changes to the selection, appointment, or tenure of Justices—or on what they call “disempowering reforms”—changes that divert some of the judiciary’s authority to the political branches, for example via jurisdiction stripping. I propose a different—and perhaps complementary—reform, which would achieve some of the goals of both types of reform without requiring a constitutional amendment. I propose that the selection of a case for the Supreme Court’s discretionary appellate docket should be performed by a …

The Article Iii Publication Power And The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, John Langford

Cardozo Law Review

The Framers vested “the judicial Power of the United States” in independent courts so that they may protect individual liberty and serve as a check on the legislative and executive branches. The judicial power, however, is narrow and not self-executing. As Chief Justice Marshall put it, it is merely the power “to say what the law is.” Federal courts cannot raise armies or pay money to enforce their decrees. Having neither force nor will, courts must instead rely on cultivating public support to secure the authoritative legitimacy necessary to effectuate their judgments.

But what happens when the executive branch asserts …

The Case Of The Dishonest Scrivener: Gouverneur Morris And The Creation Of The Federalist Constitution, William Michael Treanor

Michigan Law Review

At the end of the Constitutional Convention, the delegates appointed the Committee of Style and Arrangement to bring together the textual provisions that the Convention had previously agreed to and to prepare a final constitution. Pennsylvania delegate Gouverneur Morris drafted the document for the Committee, and, with few revisions and little debate, the Convention adopted Morris’s draft. For more than two hundred years, questions have been raised as to whether Morris covertly altered the text in order to advance his constitutional vision, but modern legal scholars and historians studying the Convention have either ignored the issue or concluded that Morris …

What Is "United" About The United States?, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Jack Balkin’s The Cycles of Constitutional Time aims, among other things, to preserve and promote what Jack regards as “democracy and republicanism,” understood as “a joint enterprise by citizens and their representatives to pursue and promote the public good.” My question is whether and how this normative project is possible in a world full of perceptions of social, political, and moral phenomena akin to the white dress/blue dress internet controversy of 2015. Even if Madison had the better of Montesquieu in 1788 (and that is questionable), the United States has grown dramatically since the founding era, in a patchwork, and …

The Place Of The Presidency In Historical Time, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay arises from a symposium based on Jack Balkin’s book, The Cycles of Constitutional Time, which argues that America’s constitutional development is marked by patterns of decline and renewal. I contend that the presidency today has become endowed with outsized expectations borne of popular frustrations with a centuries-old document that is desperately in need of updating. As a result, Presidents enjoy imbalanced and dangerous power to initiate legal reform or stymie it. Going forward, three dynamics are worth watching. First, noisy signals coming from performative transformation can obscure the true source and scope of legal changes initiated by a …

Civic Education In Circumstances Of Constitutional Rot And Strong Polarization Rot, Linda C. Mcclain, James E. Fleming

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay argues that civic education is crucial to remedying what Jack Balkin, in The Cycles of Constitutional Time, diagnoses as “constitutional rot” in the United States. A twenty-first century civic education must meet challenges of polarization and growing diversity and inequality and equip people for forms of democratic participation necessary to the health of constitutional democracy. Some commentators have called the insurrection on January 6, 2021, a “Sputnik moment for teaching civics”—seeing a link between the whitesupremacist/conspiracy-theory mob’s actions and the failure to instill civic virtue in “We the People.” To be capable of spurring national reconciliation and renewal, …

Long Overdue: Fifth Amendment Protection For Corporate Officers, Tracey Maclin

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court has extended to corporations many of the same constitutional rights that were originally intended to protect people.One notable exception, however, is the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on compulsory self-incrimination.

“Corporations may not take the Fifth.” There is a long line of cases dating back to the start of the twentieth century stating—but never directly holding— that corporations are not protected by the Self-Incrimination Clause.

But the fact that a corporation cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment does not explain why a person who works for a corporation cannot. As a matter of text, the Fifth Amendment draws no distinction …

How Chevron Deference Fits Into Article Iii, Kent H. Barnett

Scholarly Works

U.S. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, along with Professor Philip Hamburger, assert that Chevron deference-under which courts defer to reasonable agency statutory interpretations-violates Article III. Chevron does so because, they argue, it either permits agencies, not courts, "to say what the law is" or requires judges to forgo independent judgment by favoring the government's position. If they are correct, Congress could not require courts to accept reasonable agency statutory interpretations under any circumstances. This Article does what these critics, perhaps surprisingly, do not do-situates challenges to Chevron within the broad landscape of the Court's current Article III …

Court Packing As An Antidote, Rivka Weill

Cardozo Law Review

Court packing is considered the nuclear weapon that may unleash total chaos on the American constitutional system. Even in the face of a highly controversial appointment process to the U.S. Supreme Court during the 2020 presidential election season, scholars caution against the wisdom and utility of resorting to court packing. This Essay makes three bold arguments: First, a President may nominate a candidate to the Supreme Court at any time, including their last year in office; this is true both empirically and normatively. It is the Senate’s responsibility to ensure the people’s will is not frustrated. Second, never since the …

The Iron Rule, Jacob Bronsther, Guha Krishnamurthi

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Amplified Speech, Erin L. Miller

Cardozo Law Review

This Article introduces the concept of amplification into First Amendment law. Amplification, or the size of the audience reached by speech, lies at the heart of many contemporary free speech struggles. Yet the concept is surprisingly absent as a category of analysis from constitutional doctrine and virtually undiscussed in legal scholarship. Amplification deserves its own set of legal rules and doctrines, because the right to amplify one’s speech serves the two core types of First Amendment interests—those of audiences and those of speakers—differently than the right to choose the content of one’s speech. The higher the degree of amplification, the …

The 2021 Race For Pa. Supreme Court: The Questions The Candidates Have To Answer, Bruce Ledewitz

Newspaper Columns

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

September 28, 2021: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court Race--I Don't Trust The Democrats And I Am Afraid Of The Republicans, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “The Pennsylvania Supreme Court Race--I don't trust the Democrats and I am afraid of the Republicans“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

When “Empty Is Not Closed”: Organizing Efforts To (Officially) Close St. Louis’ Infamous Workhouse, Brianna Coppersmith

SLU Law Journal Online

Despite years of community organizing, legal advocacy, and policy change to close St. Louis’ Medium Security Institution, the jail has reopened. In this article, Brianna Coppersmith provides a brief history of the campaign to close the jail, commonly called the Workhouse, and discusses what its reopening might mean for related pending litigation.

Pendekatan Keadilan Integratif Dalam Membangun Institusi Publik Yang Legitim, Tri Harnowo, Alavi Ali

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

Public institutions have a very important role in providing public services in order to fulfill basic needs and the rights of every citizen, therefore the formation and operation must have public legitimacy. This paper discusses conceptual ideas in establishing legitimate public institutions based on the integrative justice principle, by taking Rawlss proscedural justice, Habermass communication theory and Lind’s perceptive justice as theoritical framework. The results of this study provide a concept of legitimate public institutions where in its formation and operatioan must fulfill the principles of participatory, constitutionality, universality, accessibility, efficiency, partiality, dialectic, deliberative, care, respect and explanatory.

Rekonstruksi Relasi Antar Lembaga Legislasi Di Indonesia, Sutan Sorik

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

This study discusses the reconstruction of relations between legislative institutions in Indonesia. This study aims to find the ideal relations of the Regional Representative Council(DPD), the House of Representatives (DPR), and the President in the formation of laws in Indonesia, as an effort to produce laws that have efficacy and usefulness. The type of research used in this study is normative juridical research. From the analysis found that the authority of the DPD is constitutionally only optional and has no imperative power, which then has implications for the relations between the DPD and the DPR and the President in shaping …

Mengkaji Penerapan Sanksi Pidana Dalam Pencegahan Penyebaran Covid-19 Di Indonesia, Aliyth Prakarsa, Dadang Herli, Rena Yulia

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

The police in handling policies that are applied in an emergency period use criminal sanctions, meanwhile, the police also need to provide education and legal protection for the community when there are repressive efforts from the police in enforcing government policies through the Chief of Polices Declaration. The specific target to be achieved is to examine the application of the Chief of Polices Declaration in the application of the contents of the edict that contains criminal sanctions and examine its effectiveness in its application. The method used in this study is a normative and empirical legal research method. Normative research …

Politik Hukum Rancangan Undang-Undang Cipta Kerja Disektor Lingkungan Hidup Dan Kehutanan (Suatu Telaah Kritis), Wahyu Nugroho, Erwin Syahruddin

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

Draft Law on Cipta Kerja using the omnibus law method in the environment and forestry sector needs to be tested in the current constitutionalism of the environment. In this article, the author will focus on environmental and forestry issues in the content of the Draft Law on CiptaKerja with the formulation of the problem, how is the critical review of the material contained in the Draft Law on Cipta Kerja inthe environment and forestry sector? and what are the implications of the material content regulated in the DraftLaw on Cipta Kerja in the environment and forestry sector?The results of his …

Politik Hukum Program Keluarga Berencana Di Indonesia, Aditya Rahmadhony, Mardiana Dwi Puspitasari, Maria Gayatri, Iwan Setiawan

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

Regime or government change has specificlegal political characteristics, including the Political Law of Family Planning. Each period of government has different views and policies on the implementation of the national family planning program as one of the programs in population control in Indonesia. This study aims to determine the effect of legal politics on the success of the family planningprogram in Indonesia by analyzing statutory regulations in the form of policy rules relating to the family planning program at each government period. The research method used is juridical-normative research through a literature review approach by analyzing policies in the form …

Fungsi Akta Notaris Dalam Lisensi Hki: Perspektif Fidusia, Dian Cahayani, Merlin Swantamalo Magna

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

This study aims to analyse the function of a notarial deed in an Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) license based on a fiduciary perspective. This type of research is normative legal research by examining secondary data sourced from the principles and theories and laws and regulations. The method of data collection is done by studying literaturesuch as regulations, books, documents or other writings to support this research. The collected data is thenanalyzed qualitatively using data analysis methods. Based on the results of the study it can be concluded that the notary has the authority in making the deed of fiduciary guarantee …

Analisis Yuridis Kedudukan Narapidana Sebagai Justice Collaborator, Bambang Sugiri, Nurini Aprilianda, Hanif Hartadi

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

This article aims to examine the inmates position as a justice collaborator in the disclosure of organized crime that can assist law enforcement officers. This is againstthe backdrop of crown witnesses who are often used in proving criminal cases but are judged to be in violation of human rights. The difficulty of disclosure of organized crime is that the perpetrators involved in organized crime are bound by the oath of silence (omerta). Information from inmates related to crime networks he has committed, facilitates the disclosure of organized crime by law enforcement officers. This paper is based on the results of …

Perilaku Ramah Air Dalam Perspektif Hukum(Studi Peraturan Daerah Dki Jakarta Dan Kota Depok Terkait Sumber Daya Air), R. Ismala Dewi, Aad Rusyad Nurdin

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

Various water resource problems that occur in Indonesia, including in DKI Jakarta and surrounding cities, such as flooding, drought, raw water crisis, river water pollution, have an impact on decreasing water availability. This is partly due to the unfriendly behavior of the community in using water, especially those in water catchment areas. Therefore, it is necessary to manage waterto maintain the sustainability of water availability so as to provide fair benefits to the community. Given these objectives and the existence of complex water problems, it requires adequate regulation. A rule that is not only to overcome the act of destroying …