Legal History Commons^™

On The Scent: A History Of “The King Of The Foxes” Autograph Manuscript, Jennifer L. Behrens

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Transient And The Permanent In Arbitration, William W. Park

Faculty Scholarship

Several years ago, Jan Paulsson observed that Derek Roebuck might substitute for a time machine, providing a way for us to voyage backward with a guide to put everything in context. Indeed, the great Derek Roebuck, to whom we dedicate this set of essays, gave much of his professional life to making sure that by receiving a glimpse of dispute resolution in earlier times, we might have an opportunity better to understand the reality of present-day arbitration.

Christian Dignity And The Overlapping Consensus, Frederick Mark Gedicks

Faculty Scholarship

This Article rejects arguments by Christian leaders, scholars, and others who lament the secularization of the West and urge Christian dignity as the foundation of universal human rights. It argues instead that only a secular conception of dignity free of Christian metaphysics can create an overlapping consensus in support of human rights.

Part I describes the roots of Christian dignity in medieval theology and status. Part II briefly recounts how the Renaissance and Enlightenment re-centered the end of dignity from knowing God to knowing oneself, while the Reformation’s extension of original sin to the intellect left Catholicism as the primary …

Deep Tracks: Album Cuts That Help Define The Essential Scalia, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Jeff Sutton and Ed Whelan have collected some of Justice Scalia’s “greatest hits” in a volume entitled The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law. The book is an excellent introduction to the jurisprudential thought and literary style of one of the most influential legal thinkers—and legal writers—in modern times. As with any “greatest hits” compilation, however, there are inevitably going to be key “album cuts” for which there will not be space. This essay seeks to supplement Sutton and Whelan’s invaluable efforts by surveying three of those “deep tracks” that shed particular light on …

Amicus Brief In Collins V. Mnuchin On Original Public Meaning Of Presidential Removal And The 'Decision Of 1789', Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

Petitioners and the en banc Court of Appeals below have rested their contention that the Constitution grants the President at-will removal authority over the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) on historical claims about the first Congress’s ostensible “Decision of 1789.” In so doing, Petitioners are following Chief Justice Taft’s account in Myers v. United States, upon which this Court relied on in 2010 and again last term for an originalist interpretation of Article II. New historical research shows that Myers was incorrect. The “Decision of 1789” actually supports, rather than undermines, Congress’s power to limit presidential removal. …

New York Bail Reform: A Quick Guide To Common Questions And Concerns, Emmanuel Hiram Arnaud, Beulah Sims-Agbabiaka

Faculty Scholarship

In the wake of New York state passing comprehensive bail reform in 2019, legislators encountered fervent backlash. That backlash prompted several amendments, but many questions concerning the practical effects of the reforms remain. In this Essay, we explore the history of bail in New York, the amendments, and provide answers to some of the biggest questions and concerns surrounding bail reform in New York and elsewhere.

Chevron As Construction, Lawrence B. Solum, Cass R. Sunstein

Faculty Scholarship

In 1984, the Supreme Court declared that courts should uphold agency interpretations of ambiguous statutory provisions, so long as those interpretations are reasonable. The Chevron framework, as it is called, is now under serious pressure. Current debates can be both illuminated and softened with reference to an old distinction between interpretation on the one hand and construction on the other. In cases of interpretation, judges (or agencies) must ascertain the meaning of a statutory term. In cases of construction, judges (or agencies) must develop implementing principles or specify a statutory term. In cases that involve statutory construction, the argument on …

Themes From Fallon On Constitutional Theory, Lawrence B. Solum

Faculty Scholarship

Law and Legitimacy in the Supreme Court by Professor Richard Fallon explores the relationship between normative legitimacy and the Supreme Court’s role in constitutional interpretation and construction. This essay interrogates Fallon’s ideas in the context of the great debate between originalism and living constitutionalism via the development of the themes. The first theme focuses on the relationship between Fallon’s views and the originalist claim that constitutional interpretation and construction should be constrained by the original public meaning of the constitutional text. The second theme focuses on Fallon’s development of the idea of reflective equilibrium as a method for constitutional theory …

Data And The Social Obligation Norm Of Property: An Essay In Honor Of Professor Gregory S. Alexander, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

In the age of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal and sundry other data breaches at Under Armour, Target, and Best Buy, the issue of security and privacy in consumer data has become increasingly important. For much of the modern era, the development of technology has gone relatively unchecked, with the United States having ceded much of the policymaking terrain to Silicon Valley. This has resulted in the unbridled creation of vast amounts of consumer data. Users who engage with tech platforms generate bits and bytes about themselves based on their activities, preferences, and habits. This information — “data” — is then …

Historical Gloss, Madisonian Liquidation, And The Originalism Debate, Curtis A. Bradley, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Constitution is old, relatively brief, and very difficult to amend. In its original form, the Constitution was primarily a framework for a new national government, and for 230 years the national government has operated under that framework even as conditions have changed in ways beyond the Founders’ conceivable imaginations. The framework has survived in no small part because government institutions have themselves played an important role in helping to fill in and clarify the framework through their practices and interactions, informed by the realities of governance. Courts, the political branches, and academic commentators commonly give weight to such …

Crisis? Whose Crisis?, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Every moment in human history can be characterized by someone as “socially and politically charged.” For a large portion of the population of the United States, nearly the entire history of the country has been socially and politically charged, first because they were enslaved and then because they were subjected to discriminatory laws and unequal treatment under what became known as “Jim Crow.” The history of the United States has also been a period of social and political upheaval for American Indians, the people who occupied the territory that became the United States before European settlement. Although both African-Americans and …

Race, Surveillance, Resistance, Chaz Arnett

Faculty Scholarship

The increasing capability of surveillance technology in the hands of law enforcement is radically changing the power, size, and depth of the surveillance state. More daily activities are being captured and scrutinized, larger quantities of personal and biometric data are being extracted and analyzed, in what is becoming a deeply intensified and pervasive surveillance society. This reality is particularly troubling for Black communities, as they shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden and harm associated with these powerful surveillance measures, at a time when traditional mechanisms for accountability have grown weaker. These harms include the maintenance of legacies of state …

National Security And Judicial Ethics: The Exception To The Rule Of Keeping Judicial Conduct Judicial And The Politicization Of The Judiciary, Joshua E. Kastenberg

Faculty Scholarship

This article is divided into three sections, and it incorporates original research from the personal correspondences of several judges and justices. This article includes unpublished correspondences from various judicial collections at the Library of Congress, the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, the Washington and Lee School of Law’s special collections, the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan Presidential Libraries, the National Library of Australia in Canberra, and Canada’s National Archives in Ottawa. The first section analyzes the current framework governing judicial disqualification based on the separation of powers doctrine as well as the right to an impartial judiciary, …

Motives And Fiduciary Loyalty, Stephen R. Galoob, Ethan J. Leib

Faculty Scholarship

How, if at all, do motives matter to loyalty? We have argued that loyalty (and the duty of loyalty in fiduciary law) has a cognitive dimension. This kind of “cognitivist” account invites the counterargument that, because most commercial fiduciary relationships involve financial considerations, purity of motive cannot be central to loyalty in the fiduciary context. We contend that this counterargument depends on a flawed understanding of the significance of motive to loyalty. We defend a view of the importance of motivation to loyalty that we call the compatibility account. On this view, A acts loyally toward B only if …

Cooley’S Constitutional Limitations And Constitutional Originalism, Lawrence B. Solum

Faculty Scholarship

Thomas Cooley’s A Treatise on The Constitutional Limitations Which Rest upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union was the most influential treatise of constitutional law in the second half of the nineteenth century. This Essay explores the ideas expressed in Cooley’s treatise in light of contemporary originalist constitutional theory. In many ways, Constitutional Limitations anticipated some of the key moves made by contemporary public meaning originalists, including the interpretation-construction distinction and the idea that ordinary meaning, and not technical meaning, is the baseline for constitutional interpretation.

Fixing America's Founding, Maeve Glass

Faculty Scholarship

The forty-fifth presidency of the United States has sent lawyers reaching once more for the Founders’ dictionaries and legal treatises. In courtrooms, law schools, and media outlets across the country, the original meanings of the words etched into the U.S. Constitution in 1787 have become the staging ground for debates ranging from the power of a president to trademark his name in China to the rights of a legal permanent resident facing deportation. And yet, in this age when big data promises to solve potential challenges of interpretation and judges have for the most part agreed that original meaning should …

Copyright As Legal Process: The Transformation Of American Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

American copyright law has undergone an unappreciated conceptual transformation over the course of the last century. Originally conceived of as a form of private law – focusing on horizontal rights, privileges and private liability – copyright law is today understood principally through its public-regarding goals and institutional apparatus, in effect as a form of public law. This transformation is the result of changes in the ideas of law and law-making that occurred in American legal thinking following World War II, manifested in the deeply influential philosophy of the Legal Process School of jurisprudence which shaped the modern American copyright landscape. …

Minimum And Maximum Protection Under International Copyright Treaties, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This Comment addresses minimum and maximum substantive international protections set out in the Berne Convention and subsequent multilateral copyright accords. While much scholarship has addressed Berne minima, the maxima have generally received less attention. It first discusses the general structure of the Berne Convention, TRIPS, and the WCT regarding these contours, and then analyzes their application to the recent “press publishers’ right” promulgated in the 2019 EU Digital Single Market Directive.

The Empty Chair: Reflections On An Absent Justice, Jennifer L. Behrens

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines a January 1888 letter to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison Waite from Associate Justice Stanley Matthews. Justice Matthews requested time away from the notoriously overworked Court’s session in order to attend the funeral of Dr. Peter Parker, renowned medical missionary and diplomat. The piece presents biographical sketches of Justice Matthews and Dr. Parker, and considers the historical context of the potential absence on the late nineteenth-century Court’s operations.

King Leopold's Bonds And The Odious Debts Mystery, Joseph Blocher, Mitu Gulati, Kim Oosterlinck

Faculty Scholarship

In 1898, in the wake of the Spanish-American war, Spain ceded the colony of Cuba to the United States. In keeping with the law of state succession, the Spanish demanded that the U.S. also take on Spanish debts that had been backed by Cuban revenues. The Americans refused, arguing that some of those debts had been utilized for purposes adverse to the interests of the Cuban people. This, some argue, was the birth of the doctrine of “odious debts”; a doctrine providing that debts incurred by a non-representative government and utilized for purposes adverse to the population do not need …

Empty Chairs, Jennifer L. Behrens

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Rise And Fall Of Transcendent Constitutionalism In The Civil War Era, Cynthia Nicoletti

Faculty Scholarship

In the aftermath of the Civil War, American intellectuals saw the war itself as a force of transcendent lawmaking. They viewed it as a historical catalyst that had forged the United States into a nation. In writing the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress sought to translate the war's nationalistic spirit into text. But in the eyes of many contemporary thinkers, the war's centripetal energy was a doubleedged sword. It could create a nation out of disparate parts, but it was also potentially uncontainable, divorced from the regular lawmaking process and beyond the control of human actors. As a result, many American jurists …

On Trust, Law, And Expecting The Worst, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

This Review has three parts. Part I aims to convey something of the breadth and interest of Hasday’s fascinating new book, foregrounding the role of gender and beginning to touch the subject of trust. Part II delves briefly but widely into the theme of trust, which pervades the book and invites further examination. Part III presents a framework that combines affective trust and epistemic curiosity and applies this framework to illuminate and sort Hasday’s proposals for reform; to critique a recent, dramatic change in the evidentiary treatment of marital confidences; and to devise a novel approach to prenuptial agreements. Throughout, …

Holmes's Understanding Of His Clear-And-Present-Danger Test: Why Exactly Did He Require Imminence?, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

For all the suggestiveness and staying power of his market-in-ideas metaphor, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s most significant influence on First Amendment law has turned out to be his notion that only imminent harm can justify punishment for expressions of opinion. This emphasis on the time dimension in the calculus of harm is now entrenched in modern doctrine. It is easy to imagine how First Amendment law might have developed differently had Holmes’s peculiar focus on imminence not been a factor in shaping how the freedom of speech has come to be understood in the United States.

"The Road I Can't Help Travelling": Holmes On Truth And Persuadability, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Against Progress: Interventions About Equality In Supreme Court Cases About Copyright Law, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

This symposium essay is adapted from my forthcoming book Against Progress: Intellectual Property and Fundamental Values in the Internet Age (Stanford University Press 2021 forthcoming). The book’s primary argument is that, with the rise of digital technology and the ubiquity of the internet, intellectual property law is becoming a mainstream part of law and culture. This mainstreaming of IP has particular effects, one of which is the surfacing of on-going debates about “progress of science and the useful arts,” which is the constitutional purpose of intellectual property rights.

In brief, Against Progress describes how in the 20th century intellectual property …

Contractual Communication, Lawrence B. Solum

Faculty Scholarship

In Pseudo-Contract and Shared Meaning Analysis, Professors Robin Bradley Kar and Margaret Jane Radin develop an important theory of the nature of contract that draws on Paul Grice’s influential theory of meaning. That theory has significant implications for contract doctrine, in particular for questions about the enforceability of so-called “contracts of adhesion” in particular and for “boilerplate” in general. But at the most fundamental level, Kar and Radin’s work is about the nature of contractual communication. They answer the question, “How do contracts mean?,” by proposing a theoretical structure, which they name “Shared Meaning Analysis.” This Essay focuses on …

Why Robert Mueller’S Appointment As Special Counsel Was Unlawful, Steven Calabresi, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Since 1999, when the independent counsel provisions of the Ethics in Government Act expired, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) has had in place regulations providing for the appointment of Special Counsels who possess “the full power and independent authority to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions of any United States Attorney.” Appointments under these regulations, such as the May 17,2017 appointment of Robert S. Mueller to investigate the Trump campaign, are patently unlawful, for three distinct reasons.
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/="/">First, all federal offices must be “established by Law,” and there is no statute authorizing such an office in the DOJ. …

The Virtue Of Vulnerability: Mindfulness And Well-Being In Law Schools And The Legal Profession, Nathalie Martin

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the role of vulnerability in transforming individual relationships, particularly the attorney-client relationship. In this essay, Martin argues that broadening our expressions can improve our client relations and decrease the likelihood that when that inevitable mistake occurs, we will be sued for it. Also, based upon virtue ethics, that practicing vulnerability is also virtuous and thus worthwhile in and of itself.

This essay starts by describing the traits people look for in lawyers as well as evidence that clients often feel that their lawyers are less than human. Then examines how legal education contributes to this problem by …

Faithful Execution And Article Ii, Andrew Kent, Ethan J. Leib, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

Article II of the U.S. Constitution twice imposes a duty of faithful execution on the President, who must "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" and take an oath or affirmation to 'faithfully execute the Office of President." These Faithful Execution Clauses are cited often, but their background and original meaning have never been fully explored. Courts, the executive branch, and many scholars rely on one or both clauses as support for expansive views of presidential power, for example, to go beyond standing law to defend the nation in emergencies; to withhold documents from Congress or the courts; or …