Jurisprudence Commons^™

Rights In The Eyes Of The Beholder: The Lived Hierarchy Of Rights In India's Democracy, Sehar Abdullah, Keerthana Satheesh, Prashant Narang

Socio-Legal Review

This paper examines how citizens in India perceive and prioritise fundamental rights, with particular attention to the six freedoms under Article 19(1) and the property right. While the freedoms of Article 19(1) remain central to democratic citizenship, the Forty-Fourth Constitutional Amendment of 1978 reclassified the right to property as a constitutional right under Article 300A. This shift prompts an important question: Does the diminished constitutional rank of property correspond to its place in popular hierarchies of rights? Our in-depth interviews with 26 respondents, whose livelihoods make them especially sensitive to changes in both categories of rights, reveal that citizens continue …

Keynote Address: Community Over Constitution, Riddhi Mukhopadhyay

Seattle University Law Review

In this keynote address, Riddhi Mukhopadhyay challenges the veneration of the U.S. Constitution by highlighting its origins in exclusion and its continued failure to protect marginalized communities. Drawing from her experience in civil legal aid and gender justice, she argues that the Constitution was drafted to consolidate power among white, wealthy men and continues to reflect that legacy through racial, gender, and class-based inequities. While acknowledging the significance of constitutional amendments and landmark cases, Mukhopadhyay emphasizes that meaningful change has always come from community-led action, not top-down reform. Additionally, Mukhopadhyay calls on lawyers and legal advocates to center community, practice …

Constitutional Futurism As Pedagogy, Jeremiah Chin

Seattle University Law Review

Constitutional Law has transformed from a course on history to a discussion of current events. Cases like Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo reveal that the study of constitutional law is not a static, or even linear, discussion of constitutional text and history. Law is a shifting, changing enterprise that reflects social constructions of power, authority, and identity. How do we teach, learn, and understand constitutional law that is so laden with history, riddled with theories of consistency and adherence to precedent, but ultimately subject …

Maine's Reception Of The Common Law, Maine Law Review

Maine Law Review

From the fledgling days of statehood, and throughout the nineteenth century, attorneys and judges frequently invoked the constitutional reception clause in defining Maine law. The clause served the valuable purpose of providing the new state with a transitional system of law. In the words of Prentiss Mellen, first Chief Justice of Maine's Supreme Judicial Court, reception "was evidently designed to prevent confusion consequent upon a suspension of law, and the injury which would thereby result to the community and individuals." After the nineteenth century, as Maine developed an indigenous body of decisional and statutory law, the reception provision increasingly fell …

The Waiting Is The Hardest Part: The Constitutionality Of Firearm Waiting Periods, F. Lee Francis

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This Article examines the constitutionality of firearm waiting period laws through the lens of the Supreme Court’s evolving Second Amendment jurisprudence. Although such laws are frequently defended as prudent public safety measures, their validity turns not on legislative purpose but on constitutional principle, particularly as framed in District of Columbia v. Heller and New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen.

Under those decisions, the scope of the Second Amendment is determined not by judicial balancing of contemporary interests, but by reference to the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. The Article surveys that tradition and finds no …

The Wrongly Read Right: Insurrection And The Second Amendment Right To Bear Arms, Aman Mcleod, Jacob M. Jones

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Several judges and scholars have interpreted the Second Amendment as creating a right to bear arms to facilitate armed resistance against the government whenever it threatens to impose tyranny. These arguments have been made in books, scholarly articles, and court decisions. Many of the proponents of the pro-armed insurrection interpretation of the Second Amendment root this point of view in the history of the right to bear arms in the Anglo-American legal tradition. This Article argues that the Second Amendment does not create a right to bear arms to resist government authority because such a right is inconsistent with several …

Big Business As Gun Control, David B. Kopel, George A. Mocsary, Bhav Ninder Singh

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Gun control increasingly bypasses direct legislative enactments by co-opting the commercial marketplace. Financial institutions and insurers often face regulatory pressures, frequently articulated through vague notions of “reputational risk,” to terminate or restrict services for lawful firearms businesses and advocacy groups. The debanking tactic, seen in initiatives such as Operation Choke Point, can deny essential financial products to firearm owners, merchants, and organizations, curtailing the practical exercise of constitutionally protected rights. Simultaneously, government agencies sometimes pursue warrantless data collection from bank records and merchant category codes, building profiles of lawful purchasers and eroding privacy and due-process norms.

Social media platforms compound …

Legislative Reforms To End Lawfare By State And Local Prosecutors, Elizabeth Beske

Legislative Testimony & Comments

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government will hold a hearing on Tuesday, March 4, 2025, at 2:00 p.m. ET. The hearing, "Legislative Reforms to End Lawfare by State and Local Prosecutors," will examine the use of lawfare tactics by the Biden-Harris Administration to weaponize the rule of law against political opponents. It will further highlight legislative reforms to end politically motivated state and local prosecutions.

Historical Tradition, The Second Amendment, And Marrying Gun Rights And Regulation: Examining The Proposals In Gavin Newsom's Twenty-Eighth Amendment And Their Place In Second Amendment Jurisprudence, Guy Cheatham

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

In September 2017, Stephen Paddock checked into rooms 32-134 and 32- 135 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. Both rooms looked over the Route 91 Festival in Las Vegas Village. Over the course of five days, Paddock brought twenty-two suitcases into his room: five on September 25th, seven on the 26th, two on the 28th, six on the 30th, and two on October 1st. On September 30th, Paddock placed “Do Not Disturb” signs on the doors of rooms 32-134 and 32-135. Paddock considered booking the high level suites for weeks; Google searches from May to September 2017 reveal …

The Inadequacy Of Perpetuating Vestiges Of Segregation In K-12 Curriculum: The Justiciability Of Reviewing Duties To Adequacy In Florida's Education Clause, Soumya Sreerama

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Although the Supreme Court declared segregation the most abusive affront to education and ruled to eliminate vestiges of segregation “root and branch,” those same roots have grown unchecked to remain prominent today. One of the undercurrents of state-sponsored discrimination that has escaped desegregation remedies is the skewed, whitewashed curriculum that permeated K-12 classrooms in Jim Crow America. More troubling, is that those vestiges of an inadequately biased curriculum are still slithering in students’ courses today. Although student movements and education reformists have attempted to counter skewed curricula by supplementing them with separate ethnic studies courses, states like Florida recently passed …

Pozen And The Puzzle Of Counterfactuals, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Constitution and the War on Drugs, David Pozen’s carefully researched and brilliantly argued book, is both illuminating and disturbing: illuminating because it unearths forgotten moments when judicially formulated constitutional doctrine that could have ended or sharply restricted the War on Drugs were well within the Overton Window, and disturbing because it surfaces hard questions about historical contingency and the scope of the change that might have occurred in a counterfactual world. In this review, the author argues that the failure to specify both the nature of the counterfactual and the breadth of the alternative possibility have confused discussions …

George Washington’S Teeth, Wittgenstein, And Two Gruesome Problems For Originalism, Scott Devito

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

With the conservative turn of the U.S. Supreme Court, originalism has become ascendant. This rise to preeminence should trouble the legal community because originalism is grounded on a naive understanding of the interpretative process. Once we wash away this naivety and delve more deeply into legislative interpretation, we see that originalism fails in three ways. First, here is recent empirical evidence that general meaning is rare and, as such, the original meaning required by the theory is unlikely to have existed. Second, originalism fails to take into account the Problem of Induction—that making generalized inferences from a limited dataset is …

Problems With Authority, Amy J. Griffin

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Judicial decision-making rests on a foundation of unwritten rules—those that govern the weight of authority. Such rules, including the cornerstone principle of stare decisis, are created informally through the internal social practices of the judiciary. Because weight-of-authority rules are largely informal and almost entirely unwritten, we lack a comprehensive account of their content. This raises serious questions—sounding in due process and access to justice—about whether judicial decision-making rests ultimately on judges’ arbitrary and unexamined preferences rather than transparent and deliberative processes. These norms of authority are largely invisible to many, including parties appearing before the courts. They govern the …

Survival Labor, Yvette Butler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article makes one simple, novel claim: crime is labor when it generates income, allows individuals to pursue self-sufficiency, or allows them to fulfill societal expectations of providing for or caring for dependents. When individuals engage in survival crimes, instead of seeing them as criminals, we should see them as workers engaged in survival labor.

The carceral system continues to disproportionately harm racial minorities and people living in poverty. The foundations of many laws regulating racialized bodies and the policing of those bodies has created a culture where blackness is equivalent to criminality. While a penal abolitionist framework is helpful …

Outcome Reasons And Process Reasons In Normative Constitutional Theory, Lawrence B. Solum

Faculty Scholarship

Constitutional theory is a mess. Disagreements about originalism and living constitutionalism have become intractable. Constitutional theorists make some arguments that seem clearly fallacious and advance proposals that are pie in the sky. One of the reasons for the mess is an overreliance by constitutional theorists on “outcome reasons,” justifications that rely on the theorist’s beliefs about what outcomes are good and what outcomes are bad. This outcome-drive approach is exemplified by the so-called “canonical cases” argument, which evaluates positions in normative constitutional theory on the basis of its counterfactual implications for a handful of prior decisions of the Supreme Court. …

Abortion Politics And The Rise Of Movement Jurists, Robert L. Tsai, Mary Ziegler

Faculty Scholarship

This Article employs the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and litigation in its wake as the jumping off point to reconsider the connections between judges, the Constitution, and social movements. That movements influence constitutional law, and that judicial pronouncements in turn are reshaped by politics, is well-established. But, while these accounts of legal change depend upon judges to embrace movement ideas, less has been written about the conditions under which judicial entrenchment can be expected to take place. There may, in fact, be different types of judicial dispositions towards external political phenomena.

In this Article, …

Litigating Original Meaning From Heller To Rahimi: The Role Of Lawyering In The Confused Path Of Second Amendment Jurisprudence, Lawrence Rosenthal

American University Law Review

The Second Amendment is on a jurisprudential march. An individual right to “keep and bear arms” for purposes unrelated to militia or military service was not recognized until the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision, applying what it took to be the original meaning of the “right to keep and bear arms” found in the Second Amendment, in District of Columbia v. Heller. Subsequently, the Court, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, invalidated a statute requiring a permit to carry concealable firearms on a showing of particularized need. Most recently, in United States v. Rahimi, …

The First Amendment To The Constitution, Associational Freedom, And The Future Of The Country: Alabama’S Direct Attack On The Existence Of The Naacp, Helen J. Knowles-Gardner

Seattle University Law Review

Sixty years ago, on Wednesday, April 8, 1964, Professor Harry Kalven, Jr., gave the second of three lectures at The Ohio State University College of Law Forum. These lectures were published two years later in a book entitled The Negro & the 1st Amendment. In the second lecture, Kalven distinguished between direct and indirect threats to the associational freedom of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Kalven categorized the 1958 decision in NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson as an indirect effort to control the NAACP.

With the benefit of material obtained from numerous archival sources, …

The Repeal Of Religious Accommodations -- A Constitutional Analysis, Ronald J. Colombo

American University Law Review

Under modern Supreme Court jurisprudence, the First Amendment ordinarily imposes no heightened standard of review upon neutral laws of general applicability that coincidentally burden the free exercise of religion. To relieve or minimize this burden, however, lawmakers are generally free to promulgate exemptions from, or accommodations to, such laws for the benefit of religious adherents. Such accommodations are common.

When a law is not neutral with respect to religion, or when the law is not generally applicable, then it will be subject to the exacting test of strict scrutiny to the extent that it burdens the free exercise of religion. …

The State Of Our Republic: State Constitutions’ Role In Creating A More Perfect Union, Caroline Bullock

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis situates state constitutionalism in the modern context of federal constitutional paralysis. By tracing patterns of state constitutional development, we find that states were always the fundamental setting of democracy, and there has always been critical action happening at state legislatures, in state courts, and through state constitutional change. State constitutions provide an active means to achieve progress and protect rights not federally enshrined (and thus, endangered by the political process). The use of state constitutions to prescribe ways of life, protect individual and specialized rights, and to limit local governments has always occurred, but with the current federal …

Originalism After Dobbs, Bruen, And Kennedy: The Role Of History And Tradition, Randy E. Barnett, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In three recent cases, the constitutional concepts of history and tradition have played important roles in the reasoning of the Supreme Court. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization relied on history and tradition to overrule Roe v. Wade. New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen articulated a history and tradition test for the validity of laws regulating the right to bear arms recognized by the Second Amendment. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District looked to history and tradition in formulating the test for the consistency of state action with the Establishment Clause.

These cases raise important questions about …

Originalism After Dobbs, Bruen, And Kennedy: The Role Of History And Tradition, Randy E. Barnett, Lawrence B. Solum

Faculty Scholarship

In three recent cases, the constitutional concepts of history and tradition have played important roles in the reasoning of the Supreme Court. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization relied on history and tradition to overrule Roe v. Wade. New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen articulated a history and tradition test for the validity of laws regulating the right to bear arms recognized by the Second Amendment. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District looked to history and tradition in formulating the test for the consistency of state action with the Establishment Clause.

These cases raise important questions about …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Administrative And Federal Regulatory Law Professors In Support Of Respondents, Andrew F. Popper

Amicus Briefs & Court Filings

Amici write to address the first question presented: whether Chevron should be overruled. Properly understood, it should not. Chevron has been much discussed but not always understood. On the one hand, courts have sometimes misapplied the doctrine or failed to understand its legal foundations. On the other, courts and commentators alike have criticized Chevron, often as a result of such aggressive applications. This case provides an opportunity for the Court to clarify what Chevron does and does not entail, while reaffirming the essential role that judicial recognition of constitutionally delegated policymaking authority plays in federal statutory programs. Many of …

The Court And The Private Plaintiff, Elizabeth Beske

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Two seemingly irreconcilable story arcs have emerged from the Supreme Court over the past decade. First, the Court has definitively taken itself out of the business of creating private rights of action under statutes and the Constitution, decrying such moves as relics of an “ancient regime.” Thus, the Supreme Court has slammed the door on its own ability to craft rights of action under federal statutes and put Bivens, which recognized implied constitutional remedies, into an ever-smaller box. The Court has justified these moves as necessary to keep judges from overstepping their bounds and wading into the province of the …

The Failed Idea Of Judicial Restraint: A Brief Intellectual History, Susan D. Carle

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This essay examines the intellectual history of the idea of judicial restraint, starting with the early debates among the US Constitution’s founding generation. In the late nineteenth century, law professor James Bradley Thayer championed the concept and passed it on to his students and others, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, and Felix Frankfurter, who modified and applied it based on the jurisprudential preoccupations of a different era. In a masterful account, Brad Snyder examines Justice Frankfurter’s attempt to put the idea into practice. Although Frankfurter arguably made a mess of it, he passed the idea of …

The Concept Of “Elderly Citizens” In The Indonesian Constitution: A Critical Analysis, Ari Wahyudi Hertanto, Satya Arinanto, Jufrina Rizal

Indonesia Law Review

Human existence is the most important element of the law and the state. They contribute greatly to the growth and development of a nation. Despite their great contribution, all human beings will experience a gradual decrease in their physical and psychological capacity due to ageing. According to the latest Central Statistics Agency report, there exists 29.3 million elderly citizens in Indonesia. This figure is equivalent to 10.82% of the total population. To anticipate this demographic condition, the government ought to ensure the welfare of its elderly citizens in accordance with the mandate of the 1945 Constitution. However, the 1945 Constitution …

Slavery And The History Of Congress's Enumerated Powers, Jeffrey Schmitt

Arkansas Law Review

In his first inaugural address, President Abraham Lincoln declared, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Like virtually all Americans before the Civil War, Lincoln believed in what historians call the “national consensus” on slavery. According to this consensus, Congress’s enumerated powers were not broad enough to justify any regulation of slavery within the states. Legal scholars who support the modern reach of federal powers have thus conventionally argued …

Originalism And The Inseparability Of Decision Procedures From Interpretive Standards, Michael L. Smith

Faculty Articles

In his article, Originalism: Standard and Procedure, Professor Stephen E. Sachs describes a never-ending debate between originalism's advocates and critics. Originalists argue that certain historical facts determine the Constitution's meaning. But determining these facts is difficult, if not impossible for judges, attorneys, and the public. Sachs seeks to rise above this debate, arguing that the legal community should not expect originalism to offer a procedure for interpreting the Constitution. Instead, the legal community should treat originalism as a

standard to judge interpretations.

This Article takes issue with this approach. Originalism is not like other instances in law where statutes or …

Reparations And The International Law Origin Story, John Linarelli

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

America’S Racial Stain: The Taint Argument And The Limits Of Constitutional Law And Rhetoric, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

How should reformers respond to America’s racial stain? The problem is more complex than many imagine. Political activists usually attempt to promote change by taking advantage of a gap between current reality and a touchstone they use to measure the normative desirability of that reality. But what if the touchstone itself is infected by the reality that activists want to change?

Questions raised by this problem do not lend themselves to definitive answers, and this essay does not offer them. Instead, I suggest a variety of responses that attempt to grapple with the difficulty. I also offer tentative assessments of …