Rule of Law Commons^™

The People's Court: On The Intellectual Origins Of American Judicial Power, Ian C. Bartrum

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This article enters into the modern debate between “consti- tutional departmentalists”—who contend that the executive and legislative branches share constitutional interpretive authority with the courts—and what are sometimes called “judicial supremacists.” After exploring the relevant history of political ideas, I join the modern minority of voices in the latter camp.

This is an intellectual history of two evolving political ideas—popular sovereignty and the separation of powers—which merged in the making of American judicial power, and I argue we can only understand the structural function of judicial review by bringing these ideas together into an integrated whole. Or, put another way, …

No, The Firing Squad Is Not Better Than Lethal Injection: A Response To Stephanie Moran’S A Modest Proposal, Michael Conklin

Seattle University Law Review

In the article A Modest Proposal: The Federal Government Should Use Firing Squads to Execute Federal Death Row Inmates, Stephanie Moran argues that the firing squad is the only execution method that meets the requirements of the Eighth Amendment. In order to make her case, Moran unjustifiably overstates the negative aspects of lethal injection while understating the negative aspects of firing squads. The entire piece is predicated upon assumptions that are not only unsupported by the evidence but often directly refuted by the evidence. This Essay critically analyzes Moran’s claims regarding the alleged advantages of the firing squad over …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Introduction To The Edward Elgar Research Handbook On Law And Emotion, Susan A. Bandes, Jody Lynee Madeira, Kathryn D. Temple, Emily Kidd White

Articles & Book Chapters

The role of emotion in law has long been shrouded in mystery. The legal system is built on assumptions about human behavior, including assumptions about emotion. Thus, unavoidably, understanding emotion is an essential part of building a fairer, more effective system. Yet the emergence and growth of Law and Emotion as a field of study has been slowed by the belief that merely by acknowledging emotion, scholars and jurists would undermine the rule of law. It has been further hampered by the suspicion that emotions are too ephemeral or subjective to be understood in any systematic way. For too long, …

Images Of Reach, Range, And Recognition: Thinking About Emotions In The Study Of International Law, Emily Kidd White

Articles & Book Chapters

There is much critical potential in bringing together the philosophy of emotion and the study of international law. Narratives about legitimate political and legal authority have tended to either assume that it is possible to extricate emotions from political judgement, or to rest upon uncomplicated (and wholly demystified) assumptions about the legibility of emotions over time and place. Philosophers interested in emotion have regularly grappled with questions concerning an emotion’s reach and range (insofar that the emotion in question bears an intersubjective component), and recognition (comprehensibility) of emotions beyond one’s own social and political communities (or even beyond one’s self). …

Choice Of Law And The Preponderantly Multistate Rule: The Example Of Successor Corporation Products Liability, Diana Sclar

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Most state rules of substantive law, whether legislative or judicial, ordinarily adjust rights and obligations among local parties with respect to local events. Conventional choice of law methodologies for adjudicating disputes with multistate connections all start from an explicit or implicit assumption of a choice between such locally oriented substantive rules. This article reveals, for the first time, that some state rules of substantive law ordinarily adjust rights and obligations with respect to parties and events connected to more than one state and only occasionally apply to wholly local matters. For these rules I use the term “nominally domestic rules …

Don't Change The Subject: How State Election Laws Can Nullify Ballot Questions, Cole Gordner

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Procedural election laws regulate the conduct of state elections and provide for greater transparency and fairness in statewide ballots. These laws ensure that the public votes separately on incongruous bills and protects the electorate from uncertainties contained in omnibus packages. As demonstrated by a slew of recent court cases, however, interest groups that are opposed to the objective of a ballot question are utilizing these election laws with greater frequency either to prevent a state electorate from voting on an initiative or to overturn a ballot question that was already decided in the initiative’s favor. This practice is subverting the …

Government Ethics In The Age Of Trump, Adam Raviv

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Americans’ trust in government officials has never been lower. Despite the intense public focus on ethics in government in recent years, legal scholarship on the subject has been sparse. This Article fills the gap by examining the ethics regime of the federal executive branch in depth, with a discussion of both the applicable ethics standards and the agencies and offices that are charged with ensuring that government officials comply with those standards. The Article describes how the current system heavily emphasizes prevention, education, and highly detailed disclosures while it rarely enforces the law against wrongdoers. A federal official in the …

Prosecuting Executive Branch Wrongdoing, Julian A. Cook, Iii

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Attorney General William Barr’s handling of Robert Mueller’s Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election was undeniably controversial and raised meaningful questions regarding the impartiality of the Department of Justice. Yet, Barr’s conduct, which occurred at the conclusion of the Mueller investigation, was merely the caboose at the end of a series of controversies that were coupled together from the outset of the investigation. Ensnarled in dissonance from its inception, the Mueller investigation was dogged by controversies that ultimately compromised its legitimacy.

Public trust of criminal investigations of executive branch wrongdoing requires prosecutorial independence. To …

Reform Through Resignation: Why Chief Justice Roberts Should Resign (In 2023), Scott P. Bloomberg

Faculty Publications

Many proponents of reforming the Supreme Court have expressed support for adopting a system of eighteen-year staggered term limits. These proposals, however, are hobbled by constitutional constraints: Amending the Constitution to implement term limits is highly implausible and implementing term limits through statute is likely unconstitutional. This Essay offers an approach to implementing term limits that avoids these constitutional constraints. Just as President Washington was able to establish a de facto Presidential term limit by not seeking a third term in office, Chief Justice Roberts is uniquely positioned to establish a new norm of serving eighteen-year terms on the Court. …

Microwaving Dreams? Why There Is No Point In Reheating The Hart-Dworkin Debate For International Law, Jason A. Beckett

Faculty Book Chapters

A critique of attempts to transpose Hart and Dworkin's legal theories to international law. I demonstrate why neither approach can provide insights into international law. Hart and Dworkin are institutional theorists, their methodologies are anchored by the need to justify the exercise of socially centralised violence. International law lacks both institutions and centralised violence, and the stabilising force these bring; it is radically indeterminate. Attempts to suppress this indeterminacy have resulted in international lawyers fragmenting into communities of practice, united by their eschatological faith in the international community. I challenge this faith.

The Deceptive Dyad: How Falseness Structures International Law, Jason A. Beckett

Faculty Journal Articles

Public International Law (PIL) is portrayed as an autonomous and tolerably just legal system. A determinable system of rules and principles, deployed by professionals to evaluate and constrain the global machinations of power politics. Law as an authoritative structure through which global justice can be pursued. This entrenches a comforting, but false, progress narrative; and obscures the limitations of pursuing progressive change through international law. PIL is structured by false necessity and false contingency. These interact to create the Deceptive Dyad, which disguises the radical indeterminacy of PIL. PIL’s purported demands, however meticulously crafted, do not effect change in the …

School "Safety" Measures Jump Constitutional Guardrails, Maryam Ahranjani

Faculty Scholarship

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and efforts to achieve racial justice through systemic reform, this Article argues that widespread “security” measures in public schools, including embedded law enforcement officers, jump constitutional guardrails. These measures must be rethought in light of their negative impact on all children and in favor of more effective—and constitutionally compliant—alternatives to promote school safety. The Black Lives Matter, #DefundthePolice, #abolishthepolice, and #DefundSchoolPolice movements shine a timely and bright spotlight on how the prisonization of public schools leads to the mistreatment of children, particularly children with disabilities, boys, Black and brown children, and low-income children. …

Accountability For Employers Or Independence For Contractors? Accomplishing Ab5’S Labor Classification Goals In The Gig Economy, Chelsea Rauch

Seattle University Law Review

U.S. employment law traditionally classifies workers as either employees or independent contractors; each worker under this traditional legal rubric can only be classified as one or the other—there can be no ambiguity or overlap. An employee is generally defined as “a person hired for a regular, continuous period to perform work for an employer who maintains control over both the service details and the final product.” In contrast, an independent contractor is generally defined as “a worker who performs services for others, usually under contract, while at the same time retaining economic independence and complete control over both the method …

School “Safety” Measures Jump Constitutional Guardrails, Maryam Ahranjani

Seattle University Law Review

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and efforts to achieve racial justice through systemic reform, this Article argues that widespread “security” measures in public schools, including embedded law enforcement officers, jump constitutional guardrails. These measures must be rethought in light of their negative impact on all children and in favor of more effective—and constitutionally compliant—alternatives to promote school safety. The Black Lives Matter, #DefundthePolice, #abolishthepolice, and #DefundSchoolPolice movements shine a timely and bright spotlight on how the prisonization of public schools leads to the mistreatment of children, particularly children with disabilities, boys, Black and brown children, and low-income children. …

The Small-Er Screen: Youtube Vlogging And The Unequipped Child Entertainment Labor Laws, Amanda G. Riggio

Seattle University Law Review

Family vloggers are among the millions of content creators on YouTube. In general, vloggers frequently upload recorded videos of their daily lives. Family vloggers are unique because they focus their content around their familial relationships and the lives of their children. One set of family vloggers, the Ace Family, has recorded their children’s lives from the day they were born and continue to upload videos of each milestone, including “Elle Cries on Her First Rollercoaster Ride” and “Elle and Alaïa Get Caught Doing What!! **Hidden Camera**.” Another vlogging couple, Cole and Savannah LaBrant, post similar content, including videos titled “Baby …

Why Do The Poor Not Have A Constitutional Right To File Civil Claims In Court Under Their First Amendment Right To Petition The Government For A Redress Of Grievances?, Henry Rose

Seattle University Law Review

Since 1963, the United States Supreme Court has recognized a constitutional right for American groups, organizations, and persons to pursue civil litigation under the First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances. However, in three cases involving poor plaintiffs decided by the Supreme Court in the early 1970s—Boddie v. Connecticut,2 United States v. Kras,3 and Ortwein v. Schwab4—the Supreme Court rejected arguments that all persons have a constitutional right to access courts to pursue their civil legal claims.5 In the latter two cases, Kras and Ortwein, the Supreme Court concluded that poor persons were properly barred from …

The Uncertain Future Of Administrative Law, Jeremy K. Kessler, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

A volatile series of presidential transitions has only intensified the century-long conflict between progressive defenders and conservative critics of the administrative state. Yet neither side has adequately confronted the fact that the growth of uncertainty and the corresponding spread of guidance – a kind of provisional “rule” that invites its own revision – mark a break in the development of the administrative state as significant as the rise of notice-and-comment rulemaking in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas rulemaking corrected social shortsightedness by enlisting science in the service of lawful administration, guidance acknowledges that both science and law are in need …

Re-Reading Chevron, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Though increasingly disfavored by the Supreme Court, Chevron remains central to administrative law doctrine. This Article suggests a way for the Court to reformulate the Chevron doctrine without overruling the Chevron decision. Through careful attention to the language of Chevron itself, the Court can honor the decision’s underlying value of harnessing comparative institutional advantage in judicial review, while setting aside a highly selective reading that unduly narrows judicial review. This re-reading would put the Chevron doctrine – and with it, an entire branch of administrative law – on firmer footing.

Data Governance And The Elasticity Of Sovereignty, Roxana Vatanparast

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Traditionally, the world map and territorially bounded spaces have dominated the ways in which we imagine how states govern, make laws, and exercise their authority. Under this conception, reflected in traditional international law principles of territorial sovereignty, each state would have exclusive authority to govern and make laws over everything concerning the land within its borders. Yet developments like the proliferation of data flows, which are based on divisible, mobile, and interconnected components of data, are not territorially bounded. This presents a challenge to the traditional bases for territorial sovereignty and jurisdiction under international law, which some scholars claim is …

Functional Statehood In Contemporary International Law, William Thomas Worster

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

The international community lacks a form of territorial-based, international legal personality distinct from statehood, and yet, non-state, territorial entities of varying degrees of autonomy or independence need to function within the international community in some form. Some of these entities cannot be recognized as states because their creation violates jus cogens norms, though others are not recognized based on an assessment that they may not fully qualify as a state or that there are political reasons to refuse recognition. However, existing states still need to engage with these territorial quasi-states through the only paradigm the international community has—statehood. For example, …

Fault Lines: An Empirical Legal Study Of California Secession, Bill Tomlinson, Andrew W. Torrance

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental, & Innovation Law

Over the last decade, multiple initiatives have proposed that California should secede from the United States. This article examines the legal aspects of California secession and integrates that analysis with findings from an empirical study of public perceptions of such secession. There is no provision in the United States Constitution allowing states, or other political or geographical units, to secede unilaterally. The Civil War was fought to uphold this principle, and the United States Supreme Court confirmed it in its 1869 Texas v. White decision. Nevertheless, numerous instances of secession, both legal and extralegal, have occurred across human history, and …

The Conceptual Gap Between Doré And Vavilov, Mark Mancini

Dalhousie Law Journal

This paper argues that there is a fundamental conceptual gap between the cases of Doré and Vavilov. This is because both cases are motivated by different conceptions of administrative law. In Vavilov, the paper suggests that the Court melded together two theories of judicial review; a Diceyan theory based on a harmonious understanding of the principles of legislative sovereignty and the Rule of Law; and a “culture of justification” for administrative decision-makers. On the other hand, Doré is motivated by a functionalist understanding of administrative law, in which the expertise of decision- makers is emphasized. The paper explores the doctrinal …

Accommodating Legal Ignorance, Stewart E. Sterk

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Court-Packing In 2021: Pathways To Democratic Legitimacy, Richard Mailey

Seattle University Law Review

This Article asks whether the openness to court-packing expressed by a number of Democratic presidential candidates (e.g., Pete Buttigieg) is democratically defensible. More specifically, it asks whether it is possible to break the apparent link between demagogic populism and court-packing, and it examines three possible ways of doing this via Bruce Ackerman’s dualist theory of constitutional moments—a theory which offers the possibility of legitimating problematic pathways to constitutional change on democratic but non-populist grounds. In the end, the Article suggests that an Ackermanian perspective offers just one, extremely limited pathway to democratically legitimate court-packing in 2021: namely, where a Democratic …

Enough Is As Good As A Feast, Noah C. Chauvin

Seattle University Law Review

Ipse Dixit, the podcast on legal scholarship, provides a valuable service to the legal community and particularly to the legal academy. The podcast’s hosts skillfully interview guests about their legal and law-related scholarship, helping those guests communicate their ideas clearly and concisely. In this review essay, I argue that Ipse Dixit has made a major contribution to legal scholarship by demonstrating in its interview episodes that law review articles are neither the only nor the best way of communicating scholarly ideas. This contribution should be considered “scholarship,” because one of the primary goals of scholarship is to communicate new ideas.

Practical Truth: The Value Of Apparent Honesty In Supreme Court Opinions, Timothy C. Macdonnell

Catholic University Law Review

The focus of this Essay is on the importance that apparent honesty has on the persuasive force of Supreme Court opinions. Legal scholars and Supreme Court Justices have observed the connection between the Court’s legitimacy and the persuasive force of its opinions. Because the Court’s opinions are both an exercise of the Court’s power and the justification for that power, the Justices’ opinions must be persuasive.

The study of rhetoric has long recognized three methods of persuading an audience of the correctness of a particular view. Those methods are appeals to logic, credibility, and emotion. Of theses three methods, I …

Eight Months Later, Ellen D. Katz

Reviews

Rick Hasen’s Election Meltdown provides a concise and scathing analysis of what ails the American electoral process. Rick identifies four “principal dangers”—namely, voter suppression, “pockets of incompetence” in election administration, “dirty tricks,” and “incendiary rhetoric” about stolen or rigged elections. He argues that these dangers have contributed to past dysfunctional elections and are sure to infect future ones. Election Meltdown closes with some proposals to temper the identified dangers so as to make voting less difficult and restore confidence in the electoral process.

Expanding The Reach Of Progressive Prosecution, Jeffrey Bellin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Symposium comes at a critical juncture for America's prosecutors. One important question-"Is there room for a new kind of prosecutor?"- has already been answered. Self-styled "progressive prosecutors" are flourishing in jurisdictions across the country. The question remains whether the progressive prosecutor movement will have a lasting impact and, if so, what that impact will be. One way this question will be answered is through the movement's influence on the many prosecutors who are open to reform but unlikely to adopt the "progressive" label or accompanying rhetoric. This Essay explores this theme by discussing, first, the rise of progressive prosecution …

Human Rights And The Rule Of Law: Implications For Canada-China Relations, Pitman B. Potter

All Faculty Publications

China’s rise to prosperity has seen increased tension with international standards of human rights and the rule of law such that, after a lengthy period of tentative engagement China has more recently worked to change international standards to accommodate its interests. China’s approach to human rights and the rule of law has significant implications for Canada, not only for our bilateral relations but also in terms of the impacts on international institutions that are of vital interest to Canada. In response, Canada should pursue a program of selective engagement, that combines attention to China’s abuses of human rights and the …