Law and Politics Commons^™

Are The Right People Being Punished For The Russian Doping Scandal?, Robert Blecker

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

How The Russian Doping Scandal Caused A War Between World Sporting Authorities, Robert Blecker

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Martin Luther King's Beloved Community And European Trumpism, Henry J. Richardson Iii

Valparaiso University Law Review

No abstract provided.

How Constitutional Norms Break Down, Josh Chafetz, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

From the moment Donald Trump was elected president, critics have anguished over a breakdown in constitutional norms. History demonstrates, however, that constitutional norms are perpetually in flux. The principal source of instability is not that these unwritten rules can be destroyed by politicians who deny their legitimacy, their validity, or their value. Rather, the principal source of instability is that constitutional norms can be decomposed – dynamically interpreted and applied in ways that are held out as compliant but end up limiting their capacity to constrain the conduct of government officials.

This Article calls attention to that latent instability and, …

The Fortification Of Inequality: Constitutional Doctrine And The Political Economy, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

As Parts I and II of this Essay elaborate, the examination yields three observations of relevance to constitutional law more generally: First, judge-made constitutional doctrine, though by no means the primary cause of rising inequality, has played an important role in reinforcing and exacerbating it. Judges have acquiesced to legislatively structured economic inequality, while also restricting the ability of legislatures to remedy it. Second, while economic inequality has become a cause célèbre only in the last few years, much of the constitutional doctrine that has contributed to its flourishing is longstanding. Moreover, for several decades, even the Court’s more liberal …

Administrative Law's Political Dynamics, Christina L. Boyd, Kent Barnett, Christopher J. Walker

Scholarship@WashULaw

Over thirty years ago, the Supreme Court in Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. commanded courts to uphold federal agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes as long as those interpretations are reasonable. This Chevron deference doctrine was based in part on the Court’s desire to temper administrative law’s political dynamics by vesting federal agencies, not courts, with primary authority to make policy judgments about ambiguous laws Congress charged the agencies to administer. Despite this express objective, scholars such as Frank Cross, Emerson Tiller, and Cass Sunstein have empirically documented how politics influence circuit court review of agency statutory …

Confident Pluralism: Surviving And Thriving Through Deep Difference, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

In the three years since Donald Trump first announced his plans to run for president, the United States seems to become more dramatically polarized and divided with each passing month. There are seemingly irresolvable differences in the beliefs, values, and identities of citizens across the country that too often play out in our legal system in clashes on a range of topics such as the tensions between law enforcement and minority communities. How can we possibly argue for civic aspirations like tolerance, humility, and patience in our current moment?

In Confident Pluralism, John D. Inazu analyzes the current state …

Trump As A Constitutional Failure, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

The election of Donald Trump as president represented a failure of American politics. Trump is a serial liar, a sexual predator, deeply conflicted financially, hostile to bedrock democratic institutions such as free press, and ignorant of even the broad brushstrokes of important policy matters. The best evidence suggests that he is a white nationalist, a plutocrat, and a professional con artist, dangerously attracted to corrupt and incompetent sycophants, self-obsessed and aggressive to the point of psychopathy, and otherwise temperamentally unfit to be in charge of the world’s largest military and nuclear arsenal. There is some evidence that Trump or members …

The Search For An Egalitarian First Amendment, Jeremy K. Kessler, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past decade, the Roberts Court has handed down a series of rulings that demonstrate the degree to which the First Amendment can be used to thwart economic and social welfare regulation – generating widespread accusations that the Court has created a "new Lochner." This introduction to the Columbia Law Review's Symposium on Free Expression in an Age of Inequality takes up three questions raised by these developments: Why has First Amendment law become such a prominent site for struggles over socioeconomic inequality? Does the First Amendment tradition contain egalitarian elements that could be recovered? And what might a …

Restoring Trade’S Social Contract, Timothy Meyer, Frank J. Garcia

Michigan Law Review Online

As we write this, U.S. trade policy is falling into deeper and deeper disarray. The United States, Canada, and Mexico are holding frenzied meetings to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). As recently as October 11, 2017, President Donald Trump warned that he will withdraw the United States from NAFTA if he does not get a deal that is “fair” to American workers. Indeed, the Trump Administration has already pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), threatened to withdraw from the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), and is holding the World Trade Organization (WTO)’s …

Economic Individualism And Preference Formation, Andrzej Rapaczynski

Faculty Scholarship

This note examines some issues involved in an attempt to go beyond the assumption, long-made by most economists, that people’s preferences are simply to be treated as “given” and that the principle of consumer sovereignty entails a refusal to consider some (or some people’s) revealed preferences as more authoritative than others. The most important break with that assumption has been the development of behavioral economics, which shows that people may not always know what they really want, and that economists have to develop a more critical approach, distinguishing people’s true preferences from those that are merely apparent. While this approach, …

Municipal Responses To Vacant Properties In The United States, James J. Kelly Jr.

Journal Articles

The administrative law specialized magazine No. 24 which explores the foundation of administrative law theory. This issue contains 5 articles that focus on the vacant house issue.

Vacant house measures in American municipalities

The President Is The Chief Executive, But Does Not Control The Mueller Probe, Bruce Green, Rebecca Roiphe

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Changing The First Lady's Mystique: Defining The First Lady's Legal Role And Upending Gender Norms, Ashlee A. Paxton-Turner

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the lack of formal guidelines governing the First Lady by first considering the history of the role and how the three branches of government have typically dealt with the role. Attention is also given to the possible intersection with the anti-nepotism statute when and if the First Lady acts as an advisor to the President. This Article then goes on to suggest that this lack of formality has allowed gender norms to govern the role. In an era where women’s rights have resurfaced as a central theme in political discourse, this Article concludes by suggesting some possible …

Judicial Intervention As Judicial Restraint, Guy-Uriel Charles, Luis E. Fuentes-Rohwer

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines the Court's decision in Gil v. Whitford. It advances two claims. First, it provides a comprehensive account of the Court's skepticism of judicial supervision of democratic politics, an account that we call the narrative of nonintervention. It situates Gill within that account and argues that the Court's reluctance to intervene is a function of the Court's institutional calculus that it ought to protect its legitimacy and institutional capital when it engages in what look like political fights. Second, the paper provides an instrumentalist account for judicial intervention. It argues that the Court should intervene to prevent partisan …

State Public-Law Litigation In An Age Of Polarization, Margaret H. Lemos, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

Public-law litigation by state governments plays an increasingly prominent role in American governance. Although public lawsuits by state governments designed to challenge the validity or shape the content of national policy are not new, such suits have increased in number and salience over the last few decades — especially since the tobacco litigation of the late 1990s. Under the Obama and Trump Administrations, such suits have taken on a particularly partisan cast; “red” states have challenged the Affordable Care Act and President Obama’s immigration orders, for example, and “blue” states have challenged President Trump’s travel bans and attempts to roll …

The United States As An Idea: Constitutional Reflections, H. Jefferson Powell

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Political Norms, Constitutional Conventions, And President Donald Trump, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

This symposium Essay argues that what is most troubling about the conduct of President Trump during and since the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign is not any potential violations of the U.S. Constitution or federal law. There likely have been some such violations, and there may be more. But what is most troubling about President Trump is his disregard of political norms that had previously constrained presidential candidates and Presidents, and his flouting of nonlegal but obligatory “constitutional conventions” that had previously guided and disciplined occupants of the White House. These norms and conventions, although not “in” the Constitution, play a …

Can The President Control The Department Of Justice?, Bruce Green, Rebecca Roiphe

Articles & Chapters

As the investigation into President Trump's campaign ties to Russia grows increasingly intense, it is critical to understand how much control the President has over the Attorney General and the Department of Justice. Some critics claim that the President has absolute power to direct federal prosecutors and control their decisions. The President and his lawyers, joined by several scholars, take this claim one step further by arguing that the chief executive could not be guilty of obstruction of justice because his control over all prosecutorial decisions is absolute. This issue last arose during the Nixon Administration. The Department of Justice …

Learning To Live With Judicial Partisanship: A Response To Cassandra Burke Robertson, Bruce Green, Rebecca Roiphe

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.