Fourteenth Amendment Commons^™

Natural Law And Birthright Citizenship In Calvin's Case (1608), Polly J. Price

Faculty Articles

The roots of United States conceptions of birthright citizenship lie deep in England's medieval past. This Article explores Calvin's Case (1608) and the early modem common-law mind that first articulated a theoretical basis for territorial birthright citizenship. Involving all the important English judges of the day, Calvin's Case addressed the question of whether persons born in Scotland, following the descent of the English crown to the Scottish King James VI in 1603, would be considered "subjects" in England. Calvin's Case determined that all persons born within any territory held by the King of England were to enjoy the benefits of …

Gift Or Loan Of State Money, Court Of Appeals Gagliardo V. Dinkins

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Right To Counsel, Supreme Court, Appellate Division Second Department, People V. Taylor

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Self-Incrimination, Supreme Court, Appellate Division Second Department People V. Hendricks

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Race, Redistricting And A Republican Poll Tax: The Supreme Court's Voting Rights Decisions Of The 1995-96 Term, Frank Parker

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Limits On Preemption And Punitive Damages: Can They Be Related?, Peter Zablotsky

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Equal Protection Held Hostage: Ransoming The Constitutionality Of The Hostage Taking Act, Victor C. Romero

Faculty Scholarship

This Article contends that, following the Supreme Court's lead in Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña and City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Centers, Inc., the continuing maltreatment of noncitizens in this country requires that federal alienage classifications be reviewed with the same strict, or at least heightened rational basis, scrutiny applied to state legislation.

Part II of this Article describes the 1979 Hostage Taking Convention and sets forth some of its provisions in an effort to better understand the impetus for the HTA. Part III examines the legislative history of the HTA and briefly describes the Yunis case as …

Equal Protection Of The Laws: Recent Judicial Decisions And Their Implications For Public Educational Institutions, Anne Dupre, John Dayton

Scholarly Works

This article reviews recent judicial decisions concerning the Equal Protection Clause and provides an analysis of their implications for public educational institutions. The article begins by giving a brief historical overview of the Equal Protection Clause, its application to the states, and describes the three-tiered approach to challenges alleging government denial of equal protection of the laws. Recent applications of each tier are addressed by discussing Adarand v. Pena, Hopwood v. Texas, U.S. v. Virginia, and Romer v. Evans. The article concludes by noting that these recent cases have added to uncertainty concerning the Court’s interpretation of the Equal …

The Right To Appointed Counsel In Termination Of Parental Rights Proceedings: The State's Response To Lassiter, Rosalie R. Young

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Brown V. State Of New York: Judge Simons Says New York State Can Be Held Liable For Money Damages, Eric J. Stockel

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Worthy Champion For Fourteenth Amendment Rights: The United States In Parens Patriae, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

When the Clinton Administration announced its intention to challenge Proposition 209, the new prohibition on affirmative action in California, the Justice Department declined to say whether the United States would formally intervene in the lawsuit already under way or merely file an amicus brief supporting the plaintiffs. Casual observers may have assumed that the Administration considered the form of its participation to raise further political and strategic considerations. That was undoubtedly true. It was also true, however, that Justice Department lawyers faced a legal question as well. According to the precedents on point, the United States required an authorizing statute …

The Constitution And Racial Preference In Law School Admissions, Robert A. Sedler

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

The Failure Of The Religious Freedom Restoration Act Under Section 5 Of The Fourteenth Amendment, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Abolitionist Feminism, Moral Slavery, And The Constitution: “On The Same Platform Of Human Rights”, David A.J. Richards

Cardozo Law Review

The analogy between race and gender plays an increasingly important role in the interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, interpretive arguments about the analogy make little or no reference to the abolitionist historical background of the Reconstruction Amendments in general and the Fourteenth Amendment in particular. This might make some sense if the only legitimate interpretive appeal to history were Raoul Berger's version of originalism, namely, the specific denoted things (including persons and practices) to which the relevant drafters and ratifiers of the pertinent constitutional text would or would not have applied the language in …

Determining Ripeness Of Substantive Due Process Claims Brought By Landowners Against Local Governments, David S. Mendel

Michigan Law Review

Landowners who sustain economic harm from arbitrary and capricious applications of land use regulations may sue the local government entities responsible for applying those regulations under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging that the local government entities deprived them of substantive due process in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. A landowner who brings this claim - an "as-applied arbitrary and capricious substantive due process" claim - may in appropriate cases seek declaratory and injunctive relief, damages, and attorney's fees. Despite controversy among courts and commentators over both the definition of property interests protected by the Due Process Clause and the standard …

Attainder And Amendment 2: Romer's Rightness, Akhil Reed Amar

Michigan Law Review

Call me silly. In fact, call me terminally silly. For despite Justice Scalia's remarkably confident claim, I believe, and shall try to prove below, that the Romer Court majority opinion invalidating Colorado's Amendment 2 was right both in form and in substance, both logically and sociologically. I stress "form" and "logic" at the outset because I share Justice Scalia's belief in the importance of these things in constitutional adjudication. I also share his commitment to constitutional text, history, and structure, and his suspicion of "free-form" constitutionalism. And so I shall highlight the text, history, and spirit of a constitutional clause …

Is Amendment 2 Really A Bill Of Attainder? Some Questions About Professor Amar's Analysis Of Romer, Roderick M. Hills Jr.

Michigan Law Review

As I first discovered as a law student in Professor Amar's classes on legal history and federal courts, it is generally an intellectual treat to listen to Professor Amar's legal analysis, even when he is attacking one's own arguments. So my pleasure at reading Professor Amar's analysis of the Court's decision in Romer v. Evans was only partly dampened by his disapproval of the respondents' brief that I and other plaintiffs' counsel filed with the Court. According to Amar, this respondents' brief provided the Court with "so little help" that it had to rely on an entirely different and much …

Gray V. Netherland 116 S.Ct. 2074 United States Supreme Court

Capital Defense Journal

No abstract provided.

Clagett V. Commonwealth 252 Va. 79, 472 S.E.2d 263 (1996) Supreme Court Of Virginia

Capital Defense Journal

No abstract provided.

Reflections On “From Slaves To Citizens”, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Cardozo Law Review

The thesis of Professor Donald Nieman's paper, "From Slaves to Citizens: African-Americans, Rights Consciousness, and Reconstruction," is that the nation experienced a revolution in the United States Constitution and in the consciousness of AfricanAmericans. According to Professor Nieman, the Reconstruction Amendments represented "a dramatic departure from antebellum constitutional principles," because the Thirteenth Amendment reversed the pre-Civil War constitutional guarantee of slavery and "abolish[ed] slavery by federal authority." The Fourteenth Amendment rejected the Supreme Court's "racially-based definition of citizenship [in Dred Scott v. Sandford], clearly establishing a color-blind citizenship" and the Fifteenth Amendment "wrote the principle of equality into the …

The Fifteenth Amendment And "Political Rights", Akhil Reed Amar

Cardozo Law Review

Professor Xi Wang has offered us an altogether exemplary paper on black suffrage. Rather than trying to criticize it, I shall attempt to extend it by picking up where he left off. My main text is the Fifteenth Amendment. I would like to suggest that the best interpretation of the Fifteenth Amendment would read it as encompassing a cluster of political rights; the Amendment protects not only the right to vote, but also the right to hold office, the right to be voted for, the right to vote in a legislature, the right to serve on a jury, and even …

Black Suffrage And The Redefinition Of American Freedom, 1860-1870, Xi Wang

Cardozo Law Review

One of the most important outcomes of the Civil War was the establishment of a new constitutional order. Under this new order, African Americans, a people whose essential human rights had been denied under the old constitutional order, were constitutionally emancipated from slavery and recognized as American citizens. They received the privileges and immunities that white Americans had automatically assumed. Male black Americans also received the right to vote. This new order, as embraced by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, was a truly remarkable achievement of Reconstruction. What is additionally significant is that these Amendments became …

Are The Similarities Between A Woman's Right To Choose An Abortion And The Alleged Right To Assisted Suicide Really Compelling?, Marc Spindelman

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In this Article, Marc Spindelman examines the relationship between abortion and assisted suicide. He begins his discussion with the constitutional framework within which courts should consider the assertion that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects an individual's decision to commit assisted suicide. The Author then considers and, based on relevant Supreme Court doctrine, rejects the conception of personal autonomy that undergirds the claimed constitutional right to assisted suicide. Finally, the Author points out some legal and cultural distinctions between abortion and assisted suicide, arguing that these distinctions offer courts good reasons for holding that the Fourteenth Amendment's …

Personal Reflections On Adarand Construction Co. V. Pena, Steven H. Hobbs

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

At Loggerheads: The Supreme Court And Racial Equality In Public School Education After Missouri V. Jenkins, Roberta M. Harding

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

June 12th of 1995 marked a somber occasion in the annals of school desegregation litigation. On that day, the United States Supreme Court sent disturbing messages in its opinion in Missouri v. Jenkins. The Court's decision hinders achievement of the objective of school desegregation litigation—providing equal educational opportunities for African-American public school children—and detrimentally impacts other substantive areas of civil rights litigation. This article examines what I believe are several important general consequences of Jenkins's the impairment of a trial judge's discretionary equitable remedial powers; the Court's establishment of a new agenda that sacrifices the interests of African-American …

Democratic National Committee V. Edward J. Rollins: Politics As Usual Or Unusual Politics?, Rachel E. Berry

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Effect, Or No Effect: A Comparison Of Prima Facie Standards Applied In "Disparate Impact" Cases Brought Under The Fair Housing Act (Title Viii), Kristopher E. Ahrend

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Sheppard V. Commonwealth 250 Va. 379, 464 S.E.2d 131 (1995) Supreme Court Of Virginia

Capital Defense Journal

No abstract provided.

Maximizing Your Potential: The Effective Use Of Co-Counsel In A Capital Case, Courtney S. Townes

Capital Defense Journal

No abstract provided.

Fry V. Commonwealth 250 Va. 413, 463 S.E.2d 433 (1995) Supreme Court Of Virginia

Capital Defense Journal

No abstract provided.