Legal History Commons^™

Chief Justices Marshall And Roberts And The Non-Self-Execution Of Treaties, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article is a response to David L. Sloss, Executing Foster v. Neilson: The Two-Step Approach to Analyzing Self-Executing Treaties, 53 Harv. Int'l L L.J. 135 (2012).

David Sloss’s article, Executing Foster v. Neilson, is an important contribution to the literature on the judicial enforcement of treaties. The author agrees with much of it, as he agrees with much of Professor Sloss’ other writing on treaties. In particular, the author agrees that the two-step approach to treaty enforcement that Professor Sloss proposes is generally the right approach, and he agrees that the “intent-based” approach to the self-execution issue …

Making The Modern American Legislative State, William J. Novak

Book Chapters

The essays in this volume are dedicated to two propositions. First, most generally, they aim to reinvigorate scholarly interest in the subject of legislation and bring a new level of analytical sophistication to the study of the legislature. Second, they are committed to looking at legislation developmentally, that is, legislation not as the simple static textual output of a law-drafting body, but as a dynamic social and political process-a living and breathing human activity with a distinct time dimension involving a complex pattern of beginnings, evolutions, maturations, mutations, emendations, and, of course, endings. These propositions nicely intersect with recent themes …

Arbitration And Judicial Civil Justice: An American Historical Review And A Proposal For A Private/Arbitral And Public/Judicial Partnership , Roger S. Haydock, Jennifer D. Henderson

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

Dispute resolution systems historically have included three primary forums: the judicial process, administrative procedures, and the arbitral system. This article focuses on the modem and rapidly expanding third system - that of arbitration. The goal of everyone interested in maintaining a fair, accessible, and affordable civil justice system is to monitor, shape, and maintain arbitration as a fair, accessible, and affordable system. The purpose of this article is to provide information and ideas which will help make that goal a success. The first part of this article explains the historical development of arbitration in this country prior to and under …

The Framers' Federalism And The Affordable Care Act, 44 Conn. L. Rev. 1071 (2012), Steven D. Schwinn

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Federalism challenges to the Affordable Care Act ("ACA") are inspired by the relatively recent resurgence in federalism concerns in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence. Thus, ACA opponents seek to leverage the Court-created distinction between encouragement and compulsion (in opposition to Medicaid expansion), and the Court-created federalism concern when Congress regulates in a way that could destroy the distinction between what is national and what is local (in opposition to universal coverage).

But outside the jurisprudence, the text and history of constitutional federalism tell another story. The text and history suggest that the Constitution created a powerful federal government, of the people …

You Can't Go Holmes Again, Lumen N. Mulligan

Faculty Works

Under the standard interpretation of 28 U.S.C. § 1331, the so called Holmes test, pleading a federal cause of action is sufficient for finding federal question jurisdiction. In January 2012, the Supreme Court, in Mims v. Arrow Financial Services, LLC, recharacterized this standard test for § 1331 jurisdiction as one that considers whether “federal law creates [both] a private right of action and furnishes the substantive rules of decision.” In this first piece to address the Mims Court’s significant change to the § 1331 canon, I applaud its rights-inclusive holding. I contend that this rights-inclusive view rests upon a firmer …

A Decision Theory Of Statutory Interpretation: Legislative History By The Rules, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

We have a law of civil procedure, criminal procedure, and administrative procedure, but we have no law of legislative procedure. This failure has serious consequences in the field of statutory interpretation. Using simple rules garnered from Congress itself, this Article argues that those rules are capable of transforming the field of statutory interpretation. Addressing canonical cases in the field, from Holy Trinity to Bock Laundry, from Weber to Public Citizen, this article shows how cases studied by vast numbers of law students are made substantially more manageable, and in some cases quite simple, through knowledge of congressional procedure. …

The Quest For A Sustainable Future And The Dawn Of A New Journal At Michigan Law, David M. Uhlmann

Articles

When I joined the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School in 2007, the first assignment I gave students in my Environmental Law and Policy class was John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid. It must have seemed like a curious choice to them, particularly coming from a professor who just three months earlier had been the Chief of the Environmental Crimes Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. The book was not a dramatic tale of courtroom battles. In fact, the book was not even about the law, and the clash of environmental values it depicted pre-dated the environmental …

American Legal History Survey: Syllabus, Anders Walker

All Faculty Scholarship

This syllabus provides an overview of American Legal History, focusing on the manner in which law has been used to organize American society. Several themes will be traced through the semester, including law’s role in encouraging innovation and regulating social relations, in part through the elaboration of legal disciplines like property, tort, contract, criminal law, tax, business associations, administrative law, environmental law, securities regulation, commercial law, immigration, and health law. Emphasis will also be placed on the origins and evolution of constitutional law, from the founding to the present.

Deconstructing 'Just And Proper': Arguments In Favor Of Adopting The 'Remedial Purpose' Approach To Section 10(J) Labor Injunctions, William K. Briggs

Michigan Law Review

Congress, through the 1947 addition of section 10(j) to the National Labor Relations Act, authorized district courts to grant preliminary injunctive relief for unfair labor practices if they deem such relief "just and proper." To this day a circuit split persists over the correct interpretation of this "just and proper" standard. Some circuits interpret "just and proper" to require application of the traditional equitable principles approach that normally governs preliminary injunctions. Other circuits interpret "just and proper" to require an analysis of whether injunctive relief is necessary to preserve the National Labor Relations Board's remedial power This Note examines the …

Punctuated Equilibrium: A Model For Administrative Evolution, 44 J. Marshall L. Rev. 353 (2011), Mark C. Niles

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Freedom Of Information Act Trial, 61 Am. U. L. Rev. 217 (2011), Margaret B. Kwoka

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the paucity of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) cases that go to trial and courts' preference for resolving these disputes at the summary judgment stage. Using traditional legal analysis and empirical evidence, this Article explores whether we should expect FOIA cases to go to trial and how the scarcity of FOIA trials compares to the trial rate in civil litigation generally. It concludes that the unusual use of summary judgment in FOIA cases has unjustifiably all but eliminated FOIA trials, which occur in less than 1 % of FOIA cases. It further examines how conducting FOIA trials …

Property In Law: Government Rights In Legal Innovations, Stephen Clowney

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

One of the most enduring themes in American political thought is that competition between states encourages legal innovation. Despite the prominence of this story in the national ideology, there is growing anxiety that state and local governments innovate at a socially suboptimal rate. Academics have recently expressed alarm that the pace of legal experimentation has become "extraordinarily slow," "inefficient," and "less than ideal." Ordinary citizens, too, seem concerned that government has been leeched of imagination and the dynamic spirit of experimentation; both talk radio programs and newspapers remain jammed with complaints about legislative gridlock and do-nothing politicians who cannot, or …

The Constitution As An Exploding Cigar And Other “Historian’S Heresies” About A Constitutional Orthodoxy, R.B. Bernstein

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Blowing Out All The Candles: A Few Thoughts On The Twenty-Fifth Birthday Of The Sentencing Reform Act Of 1984, J. C. Oleson

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Misunderstanding Congress: Statutory Interpretation, The Supermajoritarian Difficulty, And The Separation Of Powers, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Every lawyer's theory of statutory interpretation carries with it an idea of Congress, and every idea of Congress, in turn, carries with it an idea of the separation of powers. In this article, the author critiques three dominant academic theories of statutory interpretation--textualism, purposivism, and game theory--for their assumptions about Congress and the separation of powers. She argues that each academic theory fails to account for Congress's dominant institutional features: "the electoral connection," the "supermajoritarian difficulty," and the "principle of structure-induced ambiguity." This critique yields surprising conclusions, rejecting both standard liberal and conservative views on statutory interpretation.

"Plain" meaning, it …

Industrial Terrorism And The Unmaking Of New Deal Labor Law, Ahmed A. White

Publications

The passage of the Wagner (National Labor Relations) Act of 1935 represented an unprecedented effort to guarantee American workers basic labor rights--the rights to organize unions, to provoke meaningful collective bargaining, and to strike. Previous attempts by workers and government administrators to realize these rights in the workplace met with extraordinary, often violent, resistance from powerful industrial employers, whose repressive measures were described by government officials as a system of "industrial terrorism." Although labor scholars have acknowledged these practices and paid some attention to the way they initially frustrated labor rights and influenced the jurisprudence and politics of labor relations …

Collective Action Federalism: A General Theory Of Article I, Section 8, Robert D. Cooter, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

The Framers of the United States Constitution wrote Article I, Section 8 in order to address some daunting collective action problems facing the young nation. They especially wanted to protect the states from military warfare by foreigners and from commercial warfare against one another. The states acted individually when they needed to act collectively, and Congress lacked power under the Articles of Confederation to address these problems. Section 8 thus authorized Congress to promote the “general Welfare” of the United States by tackling many collective action problems that the states could not solve on their own.

Subsequent interpretations of Section …

Cheaters Shouldn't Prosper And Consumers Shouldn't Suffer: The Need For Government Enforcement Against Economic Adulteration Of 100% Pomegranate Juice And Other Imported Food Products, Michael T. Roberts

Journal of Food Law & Policy

In the modern global food system - marked by the trade flow of a variety of food products and ingredients from multiple locations in the world - economically motivated adulteration has emerged as a growing menace that threatens the health and wellbeing of consumers, the economic livelihoods of honest purveyors of food in the global marketplace, and the integrity and viability of national food regulatory systems. Economic adulteration is a form of cheating that includes the padding, diluting, and substituting of food product. Although this cheating is rooted in past food systems, the new paradigm for economic adulteration - a …

Reconsidering Federalism And The Farm: Toward Including Local, State And Regional Voices In America's Food System, Margaret Sova Mccabe

Journal of Food Law & Policy

Why is the relationship between our food system and federalism important to American law and health? It is important simply because federal law controls the American food system. This essay considers how federal law came to structure our food system, and suggests that though food is an essential part of our national economy, the dominating role of the federal government alienates citizens from their food system. It does so by characterizing food as a primarily economic issue, rather than one that has ethical, health, and cultural components. However, state and local governments have much to offer in terms of broadening …

The Limits Of Presidential Recess Appointment Power, Michael Mcnerney

Legislation and Policy Brief

The purpose of this article is to examine the constitutional, legislative, and traditional authority of the President to make recess appointments. The second section discusses the background of the current debate by framing the issue in the context of recent controversial appointments. The third section examines the constitutional language and common law interpretation of the President’s authority. The fourth section looks at appointment power legislation passed by Congress. The fifth section provides parliamentary and legislative recommendations for Congress to act upon to keep its authority. The article concludes by providing a final examination of the reason for a limited presidential …

The Case Against Taxing Citizens, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The bipartisan tax reform bill recently introduced by Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Judd Gregg, R-N.H., proposes to abolish IRC section 911. That section, which exempts U.S. citizens living overseas from tax on the first $80,000 of earned income, is indeed anomalous in the context of a tax on all income "from whatever source derived," and has been subjected to criticism. However, there is a reason section 911 has been in the code since the 1920s: In its absence, citizenship-based taxation becomes completely unadministrable. Rather than continuing the long argument over section 911, Congress should therefore reexamine the basic premise: …

Public Wrongs And Private Bills: Indemnification And Government Accountability In The Early Republic, James E. Pfander, Jonathan L. Hunt

Faculty Working Papers

Students of the history of administrative law in the United States regard the antebellum era as one in which strict common law rules of official liability prevailed. Yet conventional accounts of the antebellum period often omit a key institutional feature. Under the system of private legislation in place at the time, federal government officers were free to petition Congress for the passage of a private bill appropriating money to reimburse the officer for personal liability imposed on the basis of actions taken in the line of duty. Captain Little, the officer involved in one oft-cited case, Little v. Barreme, pursued …

Judicial Legislation, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

My argument will be that it is unjust in the broadest view of our legal system for judges to legislate, even if they confine their legislation to the narrowest limits in the closest of cases. To the extent that my argument is successful in diminishing the judicial legislation position, it would tend to serve to corroborate Dworkin's rights thesis.

Law As Hidden Architecture: Law, Politics, And Implementation Of The Burnham Plan Of Chicago Since 1909, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 375 (2010), Richard J. Roddewig

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

East Going West?: The Promise Of Assured Supply Laws In Modern Real Estate Development, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 319 (2010), Lincoln L. Davies

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Forgotten Namesake: The Illinois Good Samaritan Act's Inexcusable Failure To Provide Immunity To Non-Medical Rescuers, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1097 (2010), David Weldon

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Depression Era Sit-Down Strikes And The Limits Of Liberal Labor Law, Ahmed A. White

Publications

This paper explores the history of sit-down strikes from the New Deal Era and beyond and traces their influence on the substance of modern labor law. It argues that, even as the sit-down strikes proved essential to the development of a meaningful system of labor rights, the strikes also had a very different effect. As this paper undertakes to demonstrate, legal and political attacks on labor rights that were originally aimed at the sit-down strikes metastasized into a more general campaign to prohibit a range of militant strike practices, even those bearing little outward resemblance to the original sit-down strikes. …

Administering The Second Amendment: Law, Politics, And Taxonomy , Nicholas J. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

This article anticipates the post-McDonald landscape by assessing the right to arms in the context of several state regulations and the arguments that might be employed as challenges to them unfold. So far, the core test for determining the scope of the individual right to arms is the common use standard articulated in District of Columbia v. Heller. Measured against that, standard firearm regulations fit into three categories. The first category contains laws that are easily administered under the common use standard. The second category – and the primary focus of this article – consists of laws that can be …

The Niesig And Nlra Union: A Revised Standard For Identifying High-Level Employees For Ex Parte Interviews, Bran C. Noonan

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Crises, Congress, And Cognitive Biases: A Critical Examination Of Food And Drug Legislation In The United States, Sharon B. Jacobs

Publications

No abstract provided.