Legislation Commons^™

What Was Wrong With The Record?, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

Shelby County v. Holder offers three reasons for why the record Congress amassed to support the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) was legally insufficient to justify the statute's continued regional application: (1) the problems Congress documented in 2006 were not as severe as those that prompted it to craft the regime in 1965; (2) these problems did not lead Congress to alter the statute's pre-existing coverage formula; and (3) these problems did not exclusively involve voter registration and the casting of ballots.

Assessing Divisibility In The Armed Career Criminal Act, Ted Koehler

Michigan Law Review

When courts analyze whether a defendant's prior conviction qualifies as a "violent felony" under the Armed Career Criminal Act's "residual clause," they use a "categorical approach," looking only to the statutory language of the prior offense, rather than the facts disclosed by the record of conviction. But when a defendant is convicted under a "divisible" statute, which encompasses a broader range of conduct, only some of which would qualify as a predicate offense, courts may employ the "modified categorical approach." This approach allows courts to view additional documents to determine whether the jury convicted the defendant of the Armed Career …

Towards A Balanced Approach For The Protection Of Native American Sacred Sites, Alex Tallchief Skibine

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Protection of "sacred sites" is very important to Native American religious practitioners because it is intrinsically tied to the survival of their cultures, and therefore to their survival as distinct peoples. The Supreme Court in Oregon v. Smith held that rational basis review, and not strict scrutiny, was the appropriate level of judicial review when evaluating the constitutionality of neutral laws of general applicability even when these laws impacted one's ability to practice a religion. Reacting to the decision, Congress enacted the Relgious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which reinstated the strict scrutiny test for challenges to neutral laws of general …

Free Riding On Benevolence: Collective Action Federalism And The Minimum Coverage Provision, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Opponents of the minimum coverage provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) argue that this “individual mandate” is beyond the scope of Congress’s commerce power because it regulates the “inactivity” of not purchasing health insurance. Defenders of the provision argue that it regulates the “activity” of participating in the interstate health care market, including by obtaining health care without paying for it. This Article argues that the distinction between inactivity and activity is irrelevant to the limits of the commerce power.

Drawing from the theory of collective action federalism that he recently articulated with Robert Cooter, the …

Inside Agency Preemption, Catherine M. Sharkey

Michigan Law Review

A subtle shift has taken place in the mechanics of preemption, the doctrine that determines when federal law displaces state law. In the past, Congress was the leading actor, and courts and commentators focused almost exclusively on the precise wording of its statutory directives as a clue to its intent to displace state law. Federal agencies were, if not ignored, certainly no more than supporting players. But the twenty-first century has witnessed a role reversal. Federal agencies now play the dominant role in statutory interpretation. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized the ascendancy of federal agencies in preemption disputes-an ascendancy …

Is Honor Tangible Property?, James Santiago

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

United States Marine Corps Sergeant Dakota Meyer said, “When they told me that I would be receiving the Medal of Honor I told them that I didn’t want it, because I don’t feel like a hero.” This statement reflects the feelings of many real war heroes who deserve and are given recognition yet feel that they are unworthy of such accolades. Unfortunately, there are also individuals who want the recognition of being a war hero but lie about having served. Nevertheless, the First Amendment will continue to guarantee the freedom of speech of those who lie about unearned military honors …

“Early-Bird Special” Indeed!: Why The Tax Anti-Injunction Act Permits The Present Challenges To The Minimum Coverage Provision, Michael C. Dorf, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

In view of the billions of dollars and enormous effort that might otherwise be wasted, the public interest will be best served if the Supreme Court of the United States decides the present challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) during its October 2011 Term. Potentially standing in the way, however, is the federal Tax Anti-Injunction Act (TAIA), which bars any “suit for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax.” The dispute to date has turned on the fraught and complex question of whether the ACA’s exaction for being uninsured qualifies as a …

Obligatory Health, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court will soon rule on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed in March 2010. Courts thus far are divided on the question whether Congress had authority under the Commerce Clause to impose the Act's "Individual Mandate" to purchase health insurance. At this moment, the public and legal debate can benefit from a clearer understanding of the underlying rights claims. This Article offers two principal contributions. First, the Article argues that, while the constitutional question technically turns on the interpretation of congressional power under the Commerce Clause, underlying these debates is a tension between …

How The Gun-Free School Zones Act Saved The Individual Mandate, Richard A. Primus

Articles

For all the drama surrounding the Commerce Clause challenge to the in-dividual mandate provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”), the doctrinal question presented is simple. Under existing doctrine, the provision is as valid as can be. To be sure, the Supreme Court could alter existing doctrine, and many interesting things could be written about the dynamics that sometimes prompt judges to strike out in new directions under the pressures of cases like this one. But it is not my intention to pursue that possibility here. My own suspicion, for what it is worth, is that the …

Incitement To Riot In The Age Of Flash Mobs, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

As people increasingly use social media to organize both protests and robberies, government will try to regulate these calls to action. With an eye to this intensifying dynamic, this Article reviews First Amendment jurisprudence on incitement and applies it to existing statutes on incitement to riot at a common law, state, and federal level. The article suggests that First Amendment jurisprudence has a particularly tortuous relationship with regulating speech directed to crowds. It examines current crowd psychology to suggest which crowd behavior, if any, should as a matter of policy be subject to regulation. It concludes that many existing incitement-to-riot …

What A Load Of Hope: The Post-Racial Mixtape, Jeremiah Chin

Articles

This Comment analyzes how Supreme Court decisions and recent legislation have used the language of post-racialism to re-center whiteness through the law. Rather than using explicit racist language, the post-racial project exploits the language of historical antiracist efforts to negate experiences with discrimination while continuing a hostile environment for racial groups and promoting white supremacy in the United States.

Beginning with Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and Grutter v. Bollinger, and school desegregation in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, this Comment analyzes …

Collateral Review Of Career Offender Sentences: The Case For Coram Nobis, Douglas J. Bench Jr.

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Occasionally, criminals correctly interpret the law while courts err. Litigation pursuant to the federal Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA) includes numerous examples. The ACCA imposes harsher sentences upon felons in possession of firearms with prior "violent felony" convictions. Over time, courts defined "violent" so contrary to its common meaning that it eventually came to encompass driving under the influence, unwanted touching, and the failure to report to correctional facilities. However, in a series of recent decisions, the Supreme Court has attempted to clarify the meaning of violent in the context of the ACCA and, in the process, excluded such offenses. …

Playing Well With Others -- But Still Winning: Chief Justice Roberts, Precedent, And The Possibilities Of A Multi Member Court, William D. Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Whither The Disability Rights Movement?, Robert W. Pratt

Michigan Law Review

While reading this book in 2010, almost twenty years to the date after President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disability Act ("ADA"), one realizes how much the world of politics has changed. It is difficult to remember a time when such major legislation passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 91 to 6 and the House of Representatives by 377 to 28. Even more surprising, as we look back to 1990, is the fact that the executive branch was controlled by a different political party than the legislative branch. Contrast this legislative record with the milieu surrounding …

Teva V. Eisai: What's The Real Controversy, Grace Wang

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

This Note examines the changing role of declaratory judgment actions in challenging patents upon generic entry and evaluates alternative regulatory schemes to the FDA's current system of patent enforcement in the drug approval setting. Part I reviews the Federal Circuit's recent decisions regarding generic drug entry, focusing on how the courts justify declaratory judgments in the current system and when a "controversy" exists to create Article III jurisdiction. Part II examines the complex system of regulating generic drug entry and how attempts to stop the exploitation of loopholes have resulted in a patchwork of regulation by various parties. It challenges …

Four Constitutional Limits That The Minimum Coverage Provision Respects, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Opponents of the minimum coverage provision in the Affordable Care Act charge that if Congress can require most people to obtain health insurance or pay a certain amount of money, then Congress can impose whatever mandates it wishes - or, at least, whatever purchase mandates it wishes. This Essay refutes that claim by identifying four limits on the Commerce Clause that the minimum coverage provision honors. Congress may not use its commerce power: (1) to regulate noneconomic subject matter; (2) to impose a regulation that violates constitutional rights, including the right to bodily integrity; (3) to regulate at all, including …

Securities Law In The Roberts Court: Agenda Or Indifference?, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

To outsiders, securities law is not all that interesting. The body of the law consists of an interconnecting web of statutes and regulations that fit together in ways that are decidedly counter-intuitive. Securities law rivals tax law in its reputation for complexity and dreariness. Worse yet, the subject regulated-capital markets-can be mystifying to those uninitiated in modem finance. Moreover, those markets rapidly evolve, continually increasing their complexity. If you do not understand how the financial markets work, it is hard to understand how securities law affects those markets.

Who Killed The Hybrid Car? State And Local Green Incentive Programs After Metropolitan Taxicab V. City Of New York, Jonathan Skinner

Publications

Unnecessarily broad preemption ruling under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act discourages other states and municipalities from pursuing innovative, environmentally beneficial policies.

"What Do I Do About This Word, 'Unavoidable'?": Resolving Textual Ambiguity In The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, Jason Lafond

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The quote in the title of this Essay comes from Justice Breyer, expressing his frustration with the language of section 22(b)(1) of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. Justice Breyer made this comment during the October 12, 2010, oral argument in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, Inc., a case about the availability of state tort claims based on vaccine design defects. The question before the Court was whether that section expressly preempts such claims against vaccine manufacturers "if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions …

It Is Logic Rather Than Whom You Trust: A Rejoinder To Prof. Cohen, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

This article is the continuation of an exchange that has taken place between Prof. Stephen B. Cohen and me concerning the validity of criticisms leveled by Chief Justice John Roberts on an opinion by then-Judge Sonia Sotomayor writing for the Second Circuit in the case of William L. Rudkin Testamentary Trust v. Commissioner. While affirming the Second Circuit’s decision, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, criticized and rejected Justice Sotomayor’s construction of the relevant statutory provision. In an article in the August 3, 2009, issue of Tax Notes, Cohen defended Justice Sotomayor’s construction of the statute and …

What Best To Protect Transsexuals From Discrimination: Using Current Legislation Or Adopting A New Judicial Framework, S. Elizabeth Malloy

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This article specifically examines the issues and controversies that transsexual individuals have encountered as a result of their lack of protection under anti-discrimination laws, particularly the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Title VII. Part I is an overview of our society's binary sex/gender system and how this system serves to exclude and disenfranchise transsexuals. Part II examines the relationship between disability law and transsexuals, both explaining why they were excluded from the ADA and how state disability laws have provided more protection. Part III discusses how transsexuals have fared under a Title VII sex discrimination approach. This section also …

Equitable Balancing In The Age Of Statutes, Jared Goldstein

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Congressional End-Run: The Ignored Constraint On Judicial Review, Luke M. Milligan

Georgia Law Review

This Article identifies an untended connection between
the research of legal academics and political scientists. It
explains how recent developments in constitutional theory,
when read in good light, expose a gap in the judicial
politics literature on Supreme Court decision making. The
gap is the "congressional end-run."
End-runs occur when Congress mitigates the policy cost
of adverse judicial review through neither formal limits on
the Court's autonomy nor substitution of its constitutional

interpretationfor that of the Court, but through a different
decision which cannot, as a practical if not legal matter,
be invalidated by the Court. End-runs come in several …

Litigation Strategies For Dealing With The Indigent Defense Crisis, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

The indigent defense delivery system in the United States is in a state of crisis. Public defenders routinely handle well over 1,000 cases a year, more than three times the number of cases that the American Bar Association says one attorney can handle effectively. As a result, many defendants sit in jail for months before even speaking to their court-appointed lawyers. And when defendants do meet their attorneys, they are often disappointed to learn that these lawyers are too overwhelmed to provide adequate representation. With public defenders or assigned counsel representing more than 80% of criminal defendants nationwide, the indigent …

Reviving Employee Rights - Recent And Upcoming Employment Discrimination Legislation: Proceedings Of The 2010 Annual Meeting Of The Association Of American Law Schools Section On Employment Discrimination Law, Scott A. Moss, Sandra Sperino, Robin R. Runge, Charles A. Sullivan

Publications

No abstract provided.

Engineering The Endgame, Ellen D. Katz

Michigan Law Review

This Article explores what happens to longstanding remedies for past racial discrimination as conditions change. It shows that Congress and the Supreme Court have responded quite differently to changed conditions when they evaluate such remedies. Congress has generally opted to stay the course, while the Court has been more inclined to view change as cause to terminate a remedy. The Article argues that these very different responses share a defining flaw, namely, they treat existing remedies as fixed until they are terminated. As a result, remedies are either scrapped prematurely or left stagnant despite dramatically changed conditions. The Article seeks …

Pleading With Congress To Resist The Urge To Overrule Twombly And Iqbal, Michael R. Huston

Michigan Law Review

In Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the Supreme Court changed the rhetoric of the federal pleading system. Those decisions have been decried by members of the bar, scholars, and legislators as judicial activism and a rewriting of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Such criticism has led members of both houses of Congress to introduce legislation to overrule the decisions and return to some variation of the "notice pleading" regime that existed before Twombly. This Note argues that both of the current proposals to overrule Twombly and Iqbal should be rejected. Although the bills take different …

Misplaced Modifiers - Say What, David Spratt

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Rudkin Testamentary Trust -- A Response To Prof. Cohen, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

In the August 3 issue of Tax Notes, Prof. Stephen Cohen wrote an article about Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s opinions in three tax cases. Of those three cases, only the opinion she wrote in William L. Rudkin Testamentary Trust v. Commissioner, 467 F.3d 149 (2d Cir. 2006), Doc 2006- 21522, 2006 TNT 203-4, is worthy of comment. Although the Second Circuit’s decision in that case was affirmed by the Supreme Court under the name Knight v. Commissioner, the construction of the critical statutory language that Justice Sotomayor adopted was rejected and criticized by Chief Justice Roberts, writing for a unanimous court. …

New Groups And Old Doctrine: Rethiking Congressional Power To Enforce The Equal Protection Clause, William D. Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.