Law and Politics Commons^™

Reviewing Church And State In Bourbon Mexico: The Diocese Of Michoacan, 1749-1810 (1994) By David A. Brading, Jose R. "Beto" Juarez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Initiatives—Enemy Of The Republic, Brewster C. Denny

Seattle University Law Review

The Seattle University Law Review's Symposium on the initiative process in Washington State addresses an issue of both transcendent importance to the health of the Republic and immediate challenge to the welfare of the children of this state. This discussion could not be more timely, and not just locally. Here's why. Devolution, tax cuts for the rich and the super rich, welfare reform, and a more conservative, market-oriented philosophy of government lay on the states and low income parents and children the burden of meeting the most critical needs of children-from prenatal care through college. With twenty percent of our …

Blind Faith And Reasonable Doubts: Investigating Beliefs In The Rule Of Law, Jessie Allen

Seattle University Law Review

The article explores the meaning of the rule of law within the American political and legal systems by analyzing the concept in the abstract and its application in President Clinton’s impeachment.

Pause At The Rubicon, John Marshall And Emancipation: Reparations In The Early National Period?, 35 J. Marshall L. Rev. 75 (2001), Frances Howell Rudko

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Challenges To Racial Redistricting In The New Millennium: Hunt V. Cromartie As A Case Study, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Guy-Uriel E. Charles

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Liberalization And Politics Of Environmental Management In Tanzania, Alicia Bosensera Magabe

LLM Theses and Essays

This thesis examines the factors that have prevented the development of an environmental protection legal and institutional regime in Tanzania. It argues that the central focus of economic reforms has been to kick-start the economy by increasing growth through the maximization of resource exploitation. As a result, concerns for environmental sustainability have been relegated to the periphery of the development agenda. Secondly, as a result of domestic resource scarcity brought on by the economic crisis, environmental policymaking has been held hostage to the influence of foreign donors whose agendas have often been at cross-purpose to environmental protection. Thirdly, the nature …

The Politics Of Bush V. Gore, Evan Tsen Lee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Through The Looking Glass Of Teaching: The Death Penalty And The Political Culture Of Detached Passions, Adelaide H. Villmoare

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

Today, despite daily struggles in courtrooms against capital punishment, there appears little legal room to challenge the death penalty. Most constitutional questions appear "settled. Given the present composition of the Supreme Court, there is scant expectation of any major reversals. Also, the Court's future is to be decided by a President who was governor of a state that has executed more people since 1976 than any other state in the nation. While abolitionist scholars and activists continue to raise constitutional issues, the most dramatic events challenging the death penalty have occurred in the larger political arena outside the courtroom. The …

The Soul Of A New Political Machine: The Online, The Color Line And Electronic Democracy, Eben Moglen, Pamela S. Karlan

Faculty Scholarship

In this Essay, we want to suggest two ways in which people's experience with the Internet may affect how they think politics ought to be organized, and to consider the consequences for the political aspirations of minority communities. First, the notion of "virtual communities” – that is, communities that affiliate along nongeographic lines – may provide new support for alternatives to traditional geographic districting practices. As Americans become more comfortable with the idea that people can belong to voluntarily created, overlapping, fluid, nongeographically defined communities, which may be as important as the physical communities in which they live, they may …

Can Process Theory Constrain Courts?, Michael C. Dorf, Samuel Issacharoff, Samuel Issacharoff

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reanalyzing Bush V. Gore: Democratic Accountability And Judicial Overreaching, George L. Priest

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

"On The Make": Campaign Funding And The Corrupting Of The American Judiciary, David R. Barnhizer

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The thesis offered here is that the cost of judicial campaigns has reached a level where both candidates and sitting judges are shaping their behavior to attract financial and other support. This not only results in distortion of judicial selection by repelling meritorious potential candidates who are unwilling to compromise their principles, but in the capture of judges by special interests willing to finance judicial campaigns. Some argue that the great increase in contributions to judicial candidates simply means that contributors are giving to candidates they feel certain will support their positions. To some extent this is certainly true. But …

Mother Of All Rights: Making The World Safe For Religion, David F. Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Freedom of religion is not just one right among many. It is, in the words of the Islamic scholar John Kelsay, "the mother of all rights." When a state recognizes religious liberty, it ipso facto allows people the right to worship an authority higher than the state. Congress should insist that before any reconstruction aid is approved for Afghanistan, the new government there should affirm legal protection for basic human rights, including most importantly, freedom of religion.

Foreword, Thomas A. Eaton

Georgia Law Review

It has long been accepted that deterrence and vindication are two of the primary purposes of the body of law we know as "constitutional torts." Justices of every ideological stripe have acknowledged deterrence and vindication as the legitimate objectives of suits against governments and government officials who violate a person's constitutional rights. Justices with philosophies as divergent as Brennan's and Scalia's agree that civil rights actions serve an essential vindicatory function.' Justices Breyer, O'Connor, Blackmun, White, Marshall, and Powell have authored opinions that embrace the deterrent effect of such actions. The acceptance of deterrence and vindication as the twin goals …

In Defense Of Making Government Pay: The Deterrent Effect Of Constitutional Tort Remedies, Myriam E. Gilles

Georgia Law Review

I will argue in this Essay that there are a number of reasons to expect that the imposition of constitutional tort damage awards against individual officers or their municipal employers does have a deterrent effect on the behavior of these governmental actors and entities. In Part I, I will focus on the ways in which the imposition of constitutional tort remedies against an individual officer does deter. While Professor Levinson decries the inability of the law and economics paradigm to explain government actors' response to constitutional tort damages, he fails to meaningfully account for the role of the qualified immunity …

Election Disputes And The Constitutional Right To Vote, Joseph W. Little

UF Law Faculty Publications

This commentary is an enlargement of a talk delivered at the annual conference of the Socio-Legal Studies Association (United Kingdom) held in Bristol, England, in April 2001. The purpose was to raise questions about where the "right-to-vote" comes from in the Florida and U.S. Constitutions and whether the constitutional right-to-vote possesses useful legal force in the judicial resolution of a closely-contested election. The Gore-Bush Florida election controversy was the stimulus.

Among the subsidiary questions are: What should a written constitution for a democratic government say about the right to vote? And, how, if at all, should constitutional litigation play a …

Turf: An Eye-Witness Account Of The Sovereign Sensitivities Of The Un Human Rights Committee, Craig M. Scott

Articles & Book Chapters

In late March 1998, the author was present, as an observer, at a Human Rights Committee meeting at the United Nations in New York during which attention was drawn to an unofficial written statement drafted by the 1997- 1998 Chairperson of the Chairpersons (Philip Alston, then-Chairperson of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights). The Human Rights Committee members understood the statement had been delivered verbatim the day before to the Commission on Human Rights by Alston on behalf of the Chairpersons. That statement was intended to inform the Commission of the Chairpersons’ latest views as contained in their …

Direct Democracy Is Not Republican Government, Steven William Marlowe

Seattle University Law Review

This Article will initially explain the examples of direct democracy in the states of Washington and Oregon. It will then analyze the United States Constitution's Guarantee Clause. Finally, this Article will argue that state initiative and referendum provisions are inconsistent with a republican form of government and that laws passed through the use of this process are unconstitutional.

Presidential Ethics: Should A Law Degree Make A Difference?, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

Two of the nation's most controversial presidents, Nixon and Clinton, were both lawyers, and both of them had ethics-related problems while in office. This essay reviews whether any model ethics rules force lawyer-presidents to behave at a higher standard than non-lawyer-presidents; then it discusses the implications for legal education if we really do want lawyers to go above and beyond the norm of behavior.

Exploiting Trauma: The So-Called Victim's Rights Amendment, Lynne Henderson

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Growing Up Dependent: Family Preservation In Early Twentieth-Century Chicago, David S. Tanenhaus

Scholarly Works

Beginning in 1911 with Illinois’ passage of the Funds to Parents Act—the first statewide mothers’ pensions legislation—the Chicago Juvenile Court built a two-track system for dependency cases that used the gender of single parents to track their children. The first or “institutional” track followed a nineteenth century model of family preservation that poor families had relied upon since before the Civil War, in which parents had used institutions to provide short-term care for their children during hard times. The juvenile court also established a “home-based” track for dependency that reflected a new model of family preservation. Progressive child-savers denounced the …

Challenges To Racial Redistricting In The New Millennium: Hunt V. Cromartie As A Case Study, Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reconstructing A Divided Society: Development Of Self-Government And Judicial Reform In Kosovo, Sasha Baglay

LLM Theses

For the past decade the Kosovo has been a subject of conflict. Since June 1999 the Province is undergoing the reconstruction of civil society under the direction of the United Nations in the form of the United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK). This thesis analyzes the prospects of developing democratic government in a post-conflict Kosovo. On a larger scale, the Kosovo study serves the basis for the analysis of the techniques available for the international community to build democracy in ethnically divided societies. The argument of this thesis rests on the premise that in ethnically divided societies traditional democratic …

An "Effective Death Penalty"? Aedpa And Error Detection In Capital Cases, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

On June 11, 2001, the United States of America executed Timothy McVeigh. Dwarfed among the many unspeakable evils that Mr. McVeigh wrought is a speakable one I will address here, namely, the so-called Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 ("AEDPA").

Abbreviated, AEDPA's political history is as follows: In November 1994, the "Gingrich Congress" was elected on its Contract with America platform. One of the planks of that platform – one of the few that actually ended up passing Congress – was the so-called "Effective Death Penalty Act." That proposal had little to do with the death penalty and, …

Nixon V. Shrink Missouri Government Pac: The Beginning Of The End Of The Buckley Era?, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, the Supreme Court emphatically reaffirmed a key element of the campaign finance doctrine first articulated in Buckley v. Valeo a quarter-century earlier that governments may, consistent with the First Amendment, impose limitations on the size of contributions to election campaigns. Shrink Missouri was significant because the Eighth Circuit decision reversed by the Supreme Court had sought to strengthen the constitutional protection provided to contributions and had invalidated limitations on donations to Missouri state candidates that were actually higher than the limits on donations to federal candidates that the Supreme Court had previously …

Party As A "Political Safeguard Of Federalism": Martin Van Buren And The Constitutional Theory Of Party Politics, Gerald F. Leonard

Faculty Scholarship

In the last decade or so, the Supreme Court has revitalized judicial enforcement of federalism. This development has spurred the partisans of Herbert Wechsler's "political safeguards of federalism" to begin a serious investigation of the ways in which extra-judicial politics can and does substitute for and complement the judicial role in enforcing federalism and the Constitution. Similarly, constitutional scholars have turned in increasing numbers to the question of how even judicially promulgated doctrines of constitutional law turn out to be more derivative of popular politics than vice versa. Necessarily, much of the investigation on both fronts has turned historical and …

Everything I Need To Know About Presidents I Learned From Dr. Seuss, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Oaths are out of fashion these days. This is an era in which it is widely considered unreasonable to expect the President of the United States to obey basic principles of law and justice, much less to honor something as abstract as an oath. Perjury the violation of a legally binding oath-is publicly defended as proof of the offender's humanity rather than his criminality. And one should not even mention in polite company something as gauche as honoring an oath of marriage. Those pesky vows of marital fidelity were, after all, just words.

Through The Looking Glass Of Teaching: The Death Penalty And The Political Culture Of Detached Passions, Adelaide H. Villmoare

Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest

Today, despite daily struggles in courtrooms against capital punishment, there appears little legal room to challenge the death penalty. Most constitutional questions appear "settled. Given the present composition of the Supreme Court, there is scant expectation of any major reversals. Also, the Court's future is to be decided by a President who was governor of a state that has executed more people since 1976 than any other state in the nation. While abolitionist scholars and activists continue to raise constitutional issues, the most dramatic events challenging the death penalty have occurred in the larger political arena outside the courtroom. The …

Reconstructing The Rule Of Law, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The action taken in Bush v. Gore by the five conservative Justices on the United States Supreme Court, Bugliosi argued, was not just wrong as a matter of law, but criminal: It was a malem in se, fully intended, premeditated theft of a national election for the Presidency of the United States. Now, as Balkan and Levinson would argue, this seventh, "prosecutorial" response -- that the Court's action was not just wrong but criminal -- is also not available to a devotee of either radical or moderate indeterminacy. Even assuming both criminal intent and severe harm-a wrongful, specific intent to …

The Ideology Of Judging And The First Amendment In Judicial Election Campaigns, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.