Supreme Court of the United States Commons^™

Black Women And Girls And The Twenty-Sixth Amendment: Constitutional Connections, Activist Intersections, And The First Wave Youth Suffrage Movement, Mae C. Quinn

Seattle University Law Review

On this 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment—and on the cusp of the fiftieth anniversary of the Twenty-sixth Amendment—this article seeks to expand the voting rights canon. It complicates our understanding of voting rights history in the United States, adding layers to the history of federal constitutional enfranchisement and encouraging a more intersectional telling of our suffrage story in the days ahead.

Thus, this work not only seeks to acknowledge the Twenty-sixth Amendment as important constitutional content, as was the goal of the article I wrote with my law student colleagues for a conference held at the University of Akron …

Equality Is A Brokered Idea, Robert Tsai

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This essay examines the Supreme Court's stunning decision in the census case, Department of Commerce v. New York. I characterize Chief Justice John Roberts' decision to side with the liberals as an example of pursuing the ends of equality by other means – this time, through the rule of reason. Although the appeal was limited in scope, the stakes for political and racial equality were sky high. In blocking the administration from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, 5 members of the Court found the justification the administration gave to be a pretext. In this instance, that lie …

Reevaluating Politicized Identity & Notions Of An American Political Community In The Legal & Political Process, Marvin L. Astrada Jd, Phd

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

The Pursuit Of Comprehensive Education Funding Reform Via Litigation, Lisa Scruggs

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Panel Discussion: The Right To Education: With Liberty, Justice, And Education For All?

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Thin Separability: An Answer To Star Athletica, Angelo Marchesini

Seattle University Law Review

Courts have consistently struggled to adopt a test that appropriately interprets the Copyright Act’s language protecting works of art incorporated into useful articles. The analysis that allows protections of these works of art is called “separability,” and it has been an ambiguous area of copyright law since its inception. In essence, this analysis gives copyright protection to a work of art incorporated into a useful article as long as the work of art is “separate” from the utilitarian aspects of the useful article. The Supreme Court was positioned to end the uncertainty surrounding the separability analysis in its recent decision, …

Herman Melville’S Billy Budd: Why This Classic Law And Literature Novel Endures And Is Still Relevant Today, Rodger Citron

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Confession Obsession: How To Protect Minors In Interrogations, Cindy Chau

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

Mcculloch V. Madison: John Marshall's Effort To Bury Madisonian Federalism, Kurt T. Lash

Law Faculty Publications

"In his engaging and provocative new book, The Spirit of the Constitution: John Marshall and the 200-Year Odyssey of McCulloch v. Maryland, David S. Schwartz challenges McCulloch’s canonical status as a foundation stone in the building of American constitutional law. According to Schwartz, the fortunes of McCulloch ebbed and flowed depending on the politics of the day and the ideological commitments of Supreme Court justices. Judicial reliance on the case might disappear for a generation only to suddenly reappear in the next. If McCulloch v. Maryland enjoys pride of place in contemporary courses on constitutional law, Schwartz argues, then this …

How Circuits Can Fix Their Splits, Wyatt G. Sassman

Marquette Law Review

The desire to avoid conflicts between the regional circuits of the federal courts of appeals, commonly known as “circuit splits,” has had an immense influence on the structure and operation of the federal appellate courts for roughly a century. Over time, the Supreme Court has been assigned responsibility for resolving these conflicts. Yet as overall federal caseloads have increased, this reliance on the Supreme Court has imposed serious and well-recognized burdens on the operation of the federal courts. For decades scholars have debated bold proposals to address these problems, such as creating a new national court dedicated to resolving conflicts …

Saving America’S Privacy Rights: Why Carpenter V. United States Was Wrongly Decided And Why Courts Should Be Promoting Legislative Reform Rather Than Extending Existing Privacy Jurisprudence, David Stone

St. Mary's Law Journal

Privacy rights are under assault, but the Supreme Court’s judicial intervention into the issue, starting with Katz v. United States and leading to the Carpenter v. United States decision has created an inconsistent, piecemeal common law of privacy that forestalls a systematic public policy resolution by Congress and the states. In order to reach a satisfactory and longlasting resolution of the problem consistent with separation of powers principles, the states should consider a constitutional amendment that reduces the danger of pervasive technologyaided surveillance and monitoring, together with a series of statutes addressing each new issue posed by technological change as …

Washington’S Young Offenders: O’Dell Demands A Change To Sentencing Guidelines, Erika Vranizan

Seattle University Law Review

This Note argues that the O’Dell decision was a watershed moment for criminal justice reform. It argues that the reasoning in O’Dell should be seized upon by the legislature to take action to remediate instances in which defendants are legal adults but do not possess the cognitive characteristics of an adult sufficient to justify adult punishment. Given both the scientific impossibility of identifying a precise age at which characteristics of youthfulness end and adulthood begins and the Court’s repeated recognition that these very factors impact culpability, the current approach to sentencing young offenders aged eighteen to twenty-five as adults simply …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Untangling Entanglement, Stephanie H. Barclay

Journal Articles

The Court has increasingly signaled its interest in taking a more historical approach to the Establishment Clause. And in its recent American Legion decision, the Supreme Court strongly suggested that the three-prong Lemon test is essentially dead letter. Such a result would make sense for the first two prongs of the Lemon test about secular purpose and the effects. Many scholars have observed that these aspects of the prong are judicial creations far afield of the Establishment Clause history. But what of the entanglement prong of the test? If we rejected all applications of this prong of the analysis, would …

Setting Our Feet: The Foundations Of Religious And Conscience Protections, Hanna Torline

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note does not attempt to claim that religion and conscience are not moral equivalents, that they are not equally important, or that they do not require equal legal treatment. Nor does it attempt to claim the converse. Simply put, it argues that a consideration of the different foundations underlying conscience protections and religious protections should give pause to anyone arguing that the two are equivalent. This Note concludes that the rationales behind protecting religion and conscience are different enough to merit consideration in the debate. For if religion and conscience are treated as equivalents under the law, they will …

Statutory Realism: The Jurisprudential Ambivalence Of Interpretive Theory, Abigail R. Moncrieff

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In the renaissance of statutory interpretation theory, a division has emerged between "new purposivists," who argue that statutes should be interpreted dynamically, and "new textualists," who argue that statutes should be interpreted according to their ordinary semantic meanings. Both camps, however, rest their theories on jurisprudentially ambivalent commitments. Purposivists are jurisprudential realists when they make arguments about statutory meaning, but they are jurisprudential formalists in their views of the judicial power to engage in dynamic interpretation. Textualists are the inverse; they are formalistic in their understandings of statutory meaning but realistic in their arguments about judicial power. The relative triumph …

Supreme Silence And Precedential Pragmatism: King V. Burwell And Statutory Interpretation In The Federal Courts Of Appeals, Michael J. Cedrone

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article studies statutory interpretation as it is practiced in the federal courts of appeal. Much of the academic commentary in this field focuses on the Supreme Court, which skews the debate and unduly polarizes the field. This Article investigates more broadly by looking at the seventy-two federal appellate cases that cite King v. Burwell in the two years after the Court issued its decision. In deciding that the words “established by the State” encompass a federal program, the Court in King reached a pragmatic and practical result based on statutory scheme and purpose at a fairly high level of …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Overwriting And Under-Deciding: Addressing The Roberts Court's Shrinking Docket, Meg Penrose

Faculty Scholarship

How do we evaluate a Supreme Court that writes more than it decides? Despite having the lowest decisional output in the modern era, the Roberts Court is the most verbose Supreme Court in history. The current Justices are more likely than past Justices to have their individual say in cases, writing more concurring and dissenting opinions than prior Courts. These opinions are longer, often strongly worded, and rarely add clarity to the underlying decision. The Roberts Court has shifted from being a decisional body to becoming an institution that comments on more cases than it decides.

This article critiques the …

The Claims And Limits Of Justice Scalia's Textualism: Lessons From His Statutory Standing Decisions, Michael P. Healy

Cardozo Law Review

Two decisions written by Justice Scalia near the end of his life, Lexmark International Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., 572 U.S. 479 (2014), and Thompson v. North American Stainless, LP, 562 U.S. 170 (2011), reshaped the law of statutory standing and provide important insights into the claims and limits of textualism. These decisions have reshaped the law of statutory standing in three ways. They have changed the legal terminology; expanded the range of cases to which the zone-of-interests test applies; and changed the application of the zone-of-interests test when it applies to determine statutory standing. This Article discusses these …

Defying Mcculloch? Jackson’S Bank Veto Reconsidered, David S. Schwartz

Arkansas Law Review

On July 10, 1832, President Andrew Jackson issued the most famous and controversial veto in United States history. The bill in question was “to modify and continue” the 1816 “act to incorporate the subscribers to the Bank of the United States. This was to recharter of the Second Bank of the United States whose constitutionality was famously upheld in McCulloch v. Maryland. The bill was passed by Congress and presented to Jackson on July 4. Six days later, Jackson vetoed the bill. Jackson’s veto mortally wounded the Second Bank, which would forever close its doors four years later at the …

Ordinary Causation: A Study In Experimental Statutory Interpretation, James Macleod

Indiana Law Journal

In a series of recent split decisions interpreting criminal and tort-like legislation, the Supreme Court has purported to give statutory causation requirements their ordinary, plain meaning. Armed with dictionaries, examples from everyday speech, and commonsense intuitions, the Court’s majority has explained that statutory phrases like “because of” and “results from” entail but-for causation as a matter of ordinary usage. There’s just one problem: The Court’s majority (and the many state and federal courts following its lead) is wrong on the facts—specifically, the facts about how people ordinarily interpret, understand, and use causal language.

This Article considers a novel approach to …

A Second Opinion: Can Windsor V. United States Survive President Trump’S Supreme Court?, Artem M. Joukov

Journal of Law and Policy

This Article examines President Donald Trump’s recent recomposition of the United States Supreme Court and the potential effects on Windsor v. United States and its progeny. The Article considers whether the shifting balance of the Court may lead to reconsideration of Windsor, particularly via attempted exploits of the weaknesses in the standard of review applied to reach the decision. The Article will conclude that while revolutionary, Windsor lacked the doctrinal clarity of its offspring, Obergefell v. Hodges, and therefore may be at greatest risk of reversal by the increasingly conservative Court. In particular, the Court may rely on the conflict …

Panel 6: The Median Justice

Georgia State University Law Review

Moderator: Eric Segall

Panelists: Jonathan Adler, Lee Epstein, and Sasha Volokh

Between Brady Discretion And Brady Misconduct, Bennett L. Gershman

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The Supreme Court’s decision in Brady v. Maryland presented prosecutors with new professional challenges. In Brady, the Supreme Court held that the prosecution must provide the defense with any evidence in its possession that could be exculpatory. If the prosecution fails to timely turn over evidence that materially undermines the defendant’s guilt, a reviewing court must grant the defendant a new trial. While determining whether evidence materially undermines a defendant’s guilt may seem like a simple assessment, the real-life application of such a determination can be complicated. The prosecution’s disclosure determination can be complicated under the Brady paradigm because …

The Quantum Of Suspicion Needed For An Exigent Circumstances Search, Kit Kinports

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

For decades, the United States Supreme Court opinions articulating the standard of exigency necessary to trigger the exigent circumstances exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement have been maddeningly opaque and confusing. Some cases require probable cause, others call for reasonable suspicion, and still, others use undefined and unhelpful terms such as “reasonable to believe” in describing how exigent the situation must be to permit the police to proceed without a warrant. Not surprisingly, the conflicting signals coming from the Supreme Court have led to disagreement in the lower courts.

To resolve this conflict and provide guidance to law enforcement …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Marriage Equality Comes To The Fourth Circuit, Carl Tobias

Washington and Lee Law Review

Marriage equality has come to America. Throughout 2014, several federal appellate courts and numerous district court judges across the United States invalidated state constitutional or statutory proscriptions on same-sex marriage. Therefore, it was not surprising that Eastern District of Virginia Judge Arenda Wright Allen held that Virginia’s bans were unconstitutional in February. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed her opinion that July. North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia District Judges rejected these jurisdictions’ prohibitions during autumn, and the Supreme Court approved marriage equality the next year. Because marriage equality in the Fourth Circuit presents …

Half A Century Of Supreme Court Clean Air Act Interpretation: Purposivism, Textualism, Dynamism, And Activism, David M. Driesen, Thomas M. Keck, Brandon T. Metroka

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article addresses the history of the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act, which now goes back almost half a century. Many scholars have argued that the Court has shifted from an approach to statutory interpretation that relied heavily on purposivism—the custom of giving statutory goals weight in interpreting statutes—toward one that relies more heavily on textualism during this period. At the same time, proponents of dynamic statutory interpretation have argued that courts, in many cases, do not so much excavate a statute’s meaning as adapt a statute to contemporary circumstances.

The Faith And Morals Of Justic Antonin Scalia, David F. Forte

Intercultural Human Rights Law Review

It is because of Justice Scalia's suspicion of philosophy and of history that he becomes an outspoken textualist. But why should text carry greater authority? Why should the written word, rather than evolving tradition, be of higher authority, particularly to a Roman Catholic? To understand Antonin Scalia's affirmation of the centrality of text, we must, as many already have, seek to find out how the man viewed his religion and how he practiced it.