Supreme Court of the United States Commons^™

Brief Of Amicus Curiae Religious Freedom Institute In Support Of Petitioner, John A. Meiser, Nicole Stelle Garnett, Richard W. Garnett Iv, Francesca Genova Matozzo

Court Briefs

No. 21-1405
Lester J. Smith v. Timothy Ward

On Petition for Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit

From the Summary of Argument

Lester Smith comes to this Court in unusual circumstances: the district court found that the Georgia Department of Corrections offered no rationale that could justify its prohibition on beards longer than half an inch under RLUIPA, and yet— without disputing that finding—the Eleventh Circuit ruled that the State may still enforce the half-inch limitation against Smith. The Eleventh Circuit’s denial of any relief from what has been shown to be …

Homogenous Diversity, Melissa Mortazavi

Other Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Corpus Linguistics Criticisms Of Heller Misuse Corpus Linguistics, Michael Showalter

SMU Law Review Forum

A number of linguistics experts have asserted that new corpus-linguistics evidence undermines the U.S. Supreme Court’s conclusion in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment phrase keep and bear arms means to possess and carry weapons. At the time of ratification, the term bear arms carried both an idiomatic sense meaning “to serve as a soldier” and a literal sense meaning “to carry weapons.” The Heller majority concluded that the Second Amendment uses the literal sense, partly because the idiomatic reading has the absurd implication of causing the Amendment to protect a right to serve as a soldier. …

Renewing The Vagueness Challenge To Crimes Involving Moral Turpitude, Melissa London

Washington Law Review

Noncitizens who have been convicted of a “crime involving moral turpitude” (CIMT) under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) can be deported. However, the INA fails to provide a definition for “moral turpitude” or a list of crimes that necessarily involve “moral turpitude.” As a result, judges are given wide discretion to decide when a crime is morally reprehensible enough to render a noncitizen deportable. This moral determination in the CIMT analysis has led to disparate results among the lower courts, which deprives noncitizens of meaningful notice of what conduct could render them deportable. In 1951, the Supreme Court held …

Most Favored Racial Hierarchy: The Ever-Evolving Ways Of The Supreme Court’S Superordination Of Whiteness, David Simson

Michigan Law Review

This Article engages in a critical comparative analysis of the recent history and likely future trajectory of the Supreme Court’s constitutional jurisprudence in matters of race and religion to uncover new aspects of the racial project that Reggie Oh has recently called the “racial superordination” of whiteness—the reinforcing of the superior status of whites in American society by, among other things, prioritizing their interests in structuring constitutional doctrine. This analysis shows that the Court is increasingly widening the gap between conceptions of, and levels of protection provided for, equality in the contexts of race and religion in ways that prioritize …

Book Review: The Mighty Roe Has Fallen (Probably): A Call To Action As An Antidote To Despair, Loreen Peritz

Journal of Law and Policy

Reviewing CONTROLLING WOMEN: WHAT WE MUST DO NOW TO SAVE REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM. By Kathryn Kolbert & Julie Kay. New York, NY: Hachette Books, 2021. 304 pp., $29.00

Most Favored Racial Hierarchy: The Ever-Evolving Ways Of The Supreme Court's Superordination Of Whiteness, David Simson

Articles & Chapters

This Article engages in a critical comparative analysis of the recent history and likely future trajectory of the Supreme Court’s constitutional jurisprudence in matters of race and religion to uncover new aspects of the racial project that Reggie Oh has recently called the “racial superordination” of whiteness—the reinforcing of the superior status of whites in American society by, among other things, prioritizing their interests in structuring constitutional doctrine. This analysis shows that the Court is increasingly widening the gap between conceptions of, and levels of protection provided for, equality in the contexts of race and religion in ways that prioritize …

We Clerked For Justices Scalia And Stevens. America Is Getting Heller Wrong., Katherine A. Shaw, John Bash

Online Publications

In the summer of 2008, the Supreme Court decided District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the court held for the first time that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to gun ownership. We were law clerks to Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion, and Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the lead dissent.

Three Observations About Justice Alito's Draft Opinion In Dobbs - Commentary, John M. Greabe

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] "There is much to say about Justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which was leaked from the United States Supreme Court on May 2 [2022].

Obviously, the most significant direct consequence of the proposed decision, which overrules Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) while upholding the constitutionality of a Mississippi law that outlaws most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, would be the restriction or elimination of abortion services throughout much of the nation. This will have all sorts of attendant consequences, large and smaller, many of which …

Abortion Rights Under State Constitutions: A Fifty-State Survey, Robert L. Bentlyewski

Fordham Law Review Online

The U.S. Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade and its progeny, removing any federal law protection of the right to an abortion. However, numerous state supreme courts have interpreted their state constitutions to independently recognize such a right, finding their state’s equal protection, due process, and privacy rights more expansive than those at the federal level. This Essay surveys all fifty states to ascertain how much protection each state currently affords to women’s right to an abortion. Most state supreme courts have not made a determinative ruling on the issue, and a significant majority of state constitutions …

Probing For Holes In The 100-Year-Old Baseball Exemption: A New Post-Alston Challenge, Sam C. Ehrlich

University of Cincinnati Law Review

As professional baseball’s unique exemption to antitrust law celebrates its one-hundredth year of existence, it faces a new attack in Nostalgia Partners v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, a claim by a group of minor league owners shut out of MLB’s recent restructuring of its minor league affiliate system. While the baseball exemption has weathered dozens of similar challenges over the past century, the Nostalgia Partners plaintiffs claim that circumstances on the Supreme Court have changed enough that the justices would be willing to overturn or narrow the exemption in their favor. This claim rests with the Court’s …

A Tipping Point In Ohio: The Primacy Model As A Path To A Consistent Application Of Judicial Federalism, The Honorable Pierre Bergeron

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Cleave Within The Piney Woods: Nacogdoches, Stephen F. Austin State University And How Racial Integration Divided The Town And Gown, Caitlin Hornback

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Stephen F. Austin State University was once the pride and joy of the city of Nacogdoches, Texas. When the Texas State Legislature began to look for a location for their new state normal school, the people of the East Texas town fought to have it built there and the Stephen F. Austin Teacher’s College opened its doors in September 1923 to a proud community. Through the trials and tribulations of early twentieth century events, the school managed to stay afloat and grow in numbers. Dr. Ralph W. Steen became the president of the college in 1958 and he oversaw a …

Blue Water Navy, Hannah Melinda Woods

Veterans Studies Undergraduate Capstones

For years, Veterans who served on ships during the Vietnam war have been denied access to Agent Orange Veterans Affairs benefits. These group of veterans are called the Blue Water Navy. This paper explores the background of this issue, legislation coming about this issue, and the against sides of this issue.

Is The End Of Roe V. Wade Near? Leaked Scotus Brief Says Yes, Nicole Huberfeld, Linda C. Mcclain

Shorter Faculty Works

Protesters on both sides of the abortion debate descended on the US Supreme Court Monday night and into Tuesday after a leaked secret draft of a US Supreme Court opinion indicated that a majority of justices support overturning Roe v. Wade, after almost 50 years of legalized abortion rights in America. If finalized, possibly as soon as this summer, the bombshell could trigger a cultural tsunami across American life, forcing some women to travel to another state for an abortion and putting the divisive issue at the heart of the fall midterm elections.

Calling Balls And Strikes? Chief Justice Roberts In October Term 2019, Meghan Dalton

Notre Dame Law Review

Part I of this Note will outline the scope of the assignment power, focusing on the strategic considerations a Chief Justice can make in assigning opinions. Part II will analyze Roberts’s voting and assignment patterns in October Term 2019, specifically applying the earlier discussions to his assignment choices in three key cases decided this term. Part III will focus on Chief Justice Roberts’s jurisprudential values and explore how these concerns might have informed his decision making in October Term 2019. Finally, this Note concludes by asking to what extent Roberts’s recent assignment choices are consistent with his signature promise to …

Swimming Up The Stream Of Commerce: How Plaintiffs In Products Liability Litigation Are Disadvantaged By Current Personal Jurisdiction Doctrine, Lily S. Smith

University of Richmond Law Review

The growth of e-commerce has facilitated an increasing number of products’ travel, frequently across state and international lines. This development has subsequently increased litigation between parties who are of diverse residencies. These disputes have challenged the fundamental territorial principles that established early personal jurisdiction doctrine. Moreover, unprecedented corporate expansion—both geographically and economically—has created an environment that has outgrown a doctrine focused on protecting defendants’ rights. As courts are beginning to reform their analysis in products liability litigation towards finding Amazon and others like it strictly liable for injuries caused by products sold on their sites, Amazon will have to find …

Forgetting Marbury's Lesson: Qualified Immunity's Original Purpose, Tobias Kuehne

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

Substantial parts of the history of qualified immunity remain unwritten. While qualified immunity is hotly debated among scholars and practitioners, we know little about qualified immunity’s origins, and the institutional pressures that shaped its historical path. This Article provides that missing history. It begins by observing the striking parallels between Pierson v. Ray—qualified immunity’s origin case—and Marbury v. Madison. Both were suits against government officials to vindicate individual rights granted by a congressional statute, and both cases arose while the Court was under intense political pressure. In each case, the Supreme Court struck a surprising middle ground: It …

Ideological Preferences Of Supreme Court Justices: The Shift Throughout Tenure, Amelia Ver Woert

Political Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

For this thesis, I will analyze the tenure of five Supreme Court justices across the decades, ranging from the year 1940 up to the present year of 2022. The analysis will examine the variation between the justices' decisions at the beginning of their term compared to the decisions near the end of their term. The purpose of this study is to properly distinguish whether Supreme Court justices who have served on the bench for more than a decade are impacted by ideological drift and preference shifts throughout their career. The importance of this analysis is to determine the impact of …

Completing Expungement, Brian M. Murray

University of Richmond Law Review

The limits of expungement are where the hope for real reentry meet the desire for criminal justice transparency. That a criminal record, ordered expunged by a judge after a long and arduous process, continues to exist in the world of private actors is a cold, harsh reality for those attempting to reenter civil society. It is also reassurance for parents hiring a babysitter, school districts seeking new employees, and employers concerned about workplace liability. Not to mention, the thought that all records of criminal justice adjudication could be purged forever intuitively sounds Orwellian, even in an age where surveillance, whether …

Rethinking Retroactive Rulemaking: Solving The Problem Of Adjudicative Deference, Gwendolyn Savitz

University of Richmond Law Review

The Chevron doctrine enables courts to defer to authoritative, legally binding agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. Though more frequently applied when reviewing rulemaking, the doctrine is actually more powerful when applied to an adjudication. In an adjudication, the agency can attach consequences to past actions made before the interpretation announced in the adjudication itself. Since such a determination will receive deference on review, this declaration effectively becomes a new rule, having gone through neither public notice or public comment. Not only does it become a new rule, it becomes a new rule that is effective retroactively. It is illogical to …

Redefining The Badges Of Slavery, Nicholas Serafin

University of Richmond Law Review

Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment grants Congress the authority to eliminate the “badges and incidents” of slavery. What constitutes an incident of slavery is clear: the incidents of slavery are the legal restrictions, such as submission to a master and a ban on the ownership of productive property, that were inherent in the institution of slavery itself. What constitutes a badge of slavery is far less certain, and relatively few legal scholars have examined the historical meaning of the metaphor. Nevertheless, there has emerged a renewed interest in Section 2, such that the literature now abounds with proposals for …

Movement Lawyers: Henry L. Marsh's Long Struggle For Educational Justice, Danielle Wingfield-Smith

University of Richmond Law Review

Born in 1933 in Richmond, Virginia, Henry Marsh was a protégé of legendary Virginia civil rights attorney Oliver Hill, who was a member of a civil rights legal team with Spotswood Robinson and commissioned by Charles Hamilton Houston to investigate school inequalities and prepare a legal strategy for dismantling segregationist laws. Growing up in Virginia during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, Marsh was reared in the apartheid culture of Jim Crow society. Later, under Oliver Hill and Samuel W. Tucker’s mentorship, Marsh studied Virginia’s legal and educational systems and learned how to navigate Virginia’s seemingly tranquil Jim Crow politics called …

Humanize, Don't Paternalize: Victim-Offender Mediation After Intimate Partner Violence, Ren Warden

University of Richmond Law Review

Retributive legal systems fail survivors of intimate partner violence. In criminal cases, when the government and the offender are the parties to the matter, the legal status of a survivor is reduced to that of a mere witness. Survivors then must surrender their agency in the fight against their own trauma. Survivors of intimate partner violence (“IPV”) who turn to civil litigation to recover after their experiences may experience further trauma as a result of time-consuming, extensive, and often invasive contact with the legal system. Even restitution, a largely restorative remedy, lacks the agency, finality, and emotive opportunities that IPV …

Replacing Tinker, Noah C. Chauvin

University of Richmond Law Review

In this Article, I wish to question whether reaffirming the animating spirit of Tinker is the best way to protect student speech rights. In allowing schools to punish student speech that school officials reasonably believe could be substantially disruptive, Tinker founds students’ free expression rights on unstable ground. This is true for two reasons. First, the Tinker standard allows school officials to regulate student speech based on their own perceptions of what its impacts will be. While these perceptions must be reasonable, courts have shown extraordinary deference to educators’ claims that student speech could be substantially disruptive. Second, the substantial …

Appoint Candace Jackson-Akiwumi To The Seventh Circuit, Carl Tobias

University of Richmond Law Review

On November 30, Seventh Circuit Judge Joel Flaum assumed senior status when he completed over four decades of rigorous public service as a prominent jurist. On that day, the Senate resumed the prolonged lame duck session, which the GOP upper chamber majority began after voters had elected Joe Biden to replace former President Donald Trump. Trump correctly refrained from nominating Flaum’s successor. Four months later, President Biden dutifully announced that he would name Candace Jackson-Akiwumi to replace Flaum. Jackson-Akiwumi is a particularly qualified, mainstream nominee. Because she comprehensively answered senators’ complex, probing questions, and the Seventh Circuit lacks any people …

How President Biden Can Fill The Central District Of California Bench, Carl Tobias

University of Richmond Law Review

President Joseph Biden confronts an enormous opportunity to seat highly qualified, mainstream federal judges in plenty of appeals court and district court openings which former President Donald Trump neglected to fill in his four-year term. The remarkable California trial level vacant emergency slots, particularly in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, are the United States’ worst-case scenario and consummate promise. The Central District of California tribunal had experienced as many as ten lengthy open court slots among twenty-eight posts during the Trump administration, but it encounters six vacancies today.

A Music Industry Circuit Split: The De Minimis Exception In Digital Sampling, Michaela S. Morrissey

University of Richmond Law Review

When hip-hop icon Biz Markie released his album “All Samples Cleared!” he joked of the end of what was known as the “Golden Age” of digital sampling in the hip-hop and rap music industry. The Golden Age began in the late 1980s, and because there was no regulation of the practice, it was a period of musical enlightenment in which musicians could freely utilize digital sampling without legal repercussion. However, in 2005, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit handed down an opinion that sent shock waves across the music industry. In Bridgeport Music Inc. v. Dimension …

Table Of Contents

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Acknowledgments, Christopher J. Sullivan

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.