Jurisprudence Commons^™

The Supreme Court In Bondage: Constitutional Stare Decisis, Legal Formalism, And The Future Of Unenumerated Rights, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay advances a formalist conception of constitutional stare decisis. The author argues that instrumentalist accounts of precedent are inherently unsatisfying and that the Supreme Court should abandon adherence to the doctrine that it is free to overrule its own prior decisions. These moves are embedded in a larger theoretical framework--a revival of formalist ideas in legal theory that he calls "neoformalism" to distinguish his view from the so-called "formalism" caricatured by the legal realists (and from some other views that are called "formalist").

In Part II, The Critique of Unenumerated Constitutional Rights, the author sets the stage by …

The Politicization Of Clarence Thomas, Jagan Nicholas Ranjan

Michigan Law Review

Perception often shapes memory. In particular, the way one perceives a noteworthy public figure often shapes that figure's historical legacy. For example, history largely remembers John Coltrane as one of the greatest jazz saxophone players of our time. His improvisational skill, innovative style, and mastery over his instrument all serve to classify him in the public memory as the ultimate jazz performer. Yet, as the example of Coltrane might demonstrate, perception is unjustly deficient. Coltrane was not merely a great saxophone player; he was first and foremost a religious figure whose spirituality drove his creativity and manifested itself in prayerful …

The Treaty Power And American Federalism, Part Ii, Curtis A. Bradley

Michigan Law Review

In an article published in this Review two years ago, I described and critiqued what I called the "nationalist view" of the treaty power. Under this view, the national government has the constitutional power to enter into treaties, and thereby create binding national law by virtue of the Supremacy Clause, without regard to either subject matter or federalism limitations. This view is reflected in the writings of a number of prominent foreign affairs law scholars, as well as in the American Law Institute's Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations Law of the United States. In my article, I argued that this …

Textualism And Judgment, Suzanna Sherry

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Textualism, like other foundationalist theories such as originalism, purports to be a grand theory of constitutional interpretation, answering all questions with the same single-minded and narrowly constrained technique. The inevitable result is a diminution of what one might call judgment. Judgment is what judges use to decide cases when the answer is not tightly constrained by some interpretive theory. It is an aspect of what others have called prudence, or pragmatism.' But if one has a theory of constitutional interpretation that is supposed to produce clear answers in a relatively mechanical way, there is little room for the exercise of …

Legal Indeterminacy: Its Cause And Cure, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Legal indeterminacy--the extent to which any particular legal theory cannot provide knowable answers to concrete problems is one of the principal themes of modern jurisprudence. Indeterminacy plays an important role in debates concerning interpretation, the nature of legal obligation, and the character and possibilities of the rule of law. Indeterminacy looms particularly large in debates concerning originalism as a method of constitutional interpretation. Some scholars insist that originalism resolves too few problems to be of much use, while others argue that originalism's indeterminacy is often overstated.

A Nonoriginalist Perspective On The Lessons Of History, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Text Is Just A Text, Paul F. Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

A Heterodox Catechism, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

Conservatism And The Rehnquist Court, David F. Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Now that the Supreme Court has been overwhelmingly staffed by appointees of Republican Presidents, we can ask: To what extent have they been faithful to the original version of the Constitution as articulated during its early years? How have they revivified the structural protections? How have they communicated an ethical sense of their own role in the structure? The answer, unfortunately, is that the record remains disappointing.

Three Mistakes About Interpretation, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

Against Constitutional Theory, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Tempting Of America, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

THE TEMPTING OF AMERICA by Robert Bork. New York: The Free Press/Macmillan, 1990. Hdbd: pp. xiv-432.

In the concluding third of The Tempting of America Robert Bork recounts his unsuccessful fight to gain Senate confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Bork relates his war story to the rest of the book. In the first two-thirds of Tempting, he takes us on a grand tour of the Constitution's career, starting in the courts with Chief Justice John Marshall, on through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and New Deal eras. He finishes with a detailed examination of the Warren, Burger and Rehnquist Courts. …

Law Without Mind, Steven D. Smith

Michigan Law Review

A large part of the work done by lawyers and judges involves the interpretation of enacted law - primarily, statutes and the Constitution. Not surprisingly, legal scholars offer a good deal of advice, usually unsolicited, about how the task of interpretation should be performed. At present, such scholarly advice commonly recommends variations on an approach that may be called "present-oriented interpretation." This approach discourages judges from equating a law with its historical meaning or "original understanding." Instead, it urges them to construe statutes and constitutional provisions in a way that will render the law "the best it can be" in …

Missing Pieces: A Cognitive Approach To Law, Pierre Schlag

Publications

No abstract provided.

Taking The Framers Seriously, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article reviews Taking the Constitution Seriously by Walter Berns (1987).

This review focuses on three of the key historical points that Walter Berns makes: his arguments that the Declaration of Independence is a Lockean document; that the Constitution encapsulates the political philosophy of the Declaration; and that the framers viewed the commercialization of society as a salutary development and were unambivalent champions of the right to property. Examination of these issues suggests that the ideological universe of the framers was far more complex than Berns indicates. While the revolutionary era witnessed a new concern with individual rights and a …

Stare Decisis And Constitutional Adjudication, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Despite endless literature urging that constitutional adjudication be severed from explorations into the understandings at the creation of the Constitution, original understanding continues to play a prominent role in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence. For the Court, originalism seemingly provides a legitimate ground for decisionmaking; for the people, it provides assurances against judicial usurpation of power properly belonging to other branches of government, or retained by the people themselves.

But difficulties with originalism emerge once the existing constitutional order is actually examined. The Supreme Court's repeated invocations of the Framers' understanding notwithstanding, a significant portion of our constitutional order cannot reasonably …

Rationalism In Constitutional Law, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.