Constitutional Law Commons^™

"Covid-19 Was The Publicist For Homeschooling" And States Need To Finally Take Homeschooling Regulations Seriously Post-Pandemic, Kristia Hoffman

FIU Law Review

Homeschooling was rapidly growing in the U.S. even before COVID-19. The pandemic accelerated this growth by quickly exposing nearly every American family to homeschooling in some form. The pandemic has ushered in a new age of homeschooling characterized by flexibility, technology, collaboration, and alternative forms of schooling beyond the traditional parent-teaching-child framework. Although the Supreme Court has never recognized a fundamental right of parents to homeschool their children, it has repeatedly recognized that parents have the right to direct their children’s education and to choose to educate them in the way they deem fit. There is debate as to what …

Save Your Rights: How Florida And Other States Have Targeted Voting Access Following The 2020 Election, Francisco Varona

FIU Law Review

Following the 2020 general election, Florida’s Republican led legislature introduced Senate Bill 90 (“S.B. 90”), which seeks to put many restrictions on various aspects of the voting process. S.B. 90 limits ballot drop-off boxes, restricts mail-in voting, proscribes “line-warming,” increases registration difficulty, and expands identification requirements. Despite lauding Florida’s election as a gold standard for the rest of the country, Governor Ron DeSantis approved this bill in May of 2021, explaining that Florida should not become complacent despite its success. The Republican Governor approved this law against the backdrop of record voter turnout for Black and Latino voters and record …

Situating Dobbs, Paula A. Monopoli

Faculty Scholarship

The recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health has been characterized as an outlier because its effect is to erase a previously recognized constitutional right. This paper situates Dobbs in a broader feminist constitutional history. It asks if this retrenchment is really such a unique turn in American jurisprudence when it comes to protections or “rights” that matter most to women’s lived experience. The paper argues that if one opens the aperture of constitutional history to embrace a more capacious view of rights, those afforded to women have often been eroded or erased by state legislatures, Congress, and courts. …

America’S Fraught Relationship With Privacy, Russell L. Weaver

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

On The Why Of Same-Sex Marriage In Cuba, Libby Adler

FIU Law Review

Cuba is expected to revise its family code soon and the legal availability of marriage to a person of the same sex will be among the anticipated revisions. This essay pushes past the assumption that same-sex marriage operates as an obvious item along any nation’s progressive path, or a universally desirable and sensible legal advance, and inquires as to the why. In a country that is markedly less religious than its neighbors, has a low marriage rate accompanied by a comparatively high divorce rate, and socializes resources such as health care such that they do not depend on marital ties, …

The Human Environment: Awakening To The Indomitable Cuban Spirit--Government, Culture, And People, Berta Hernández-Truyol

FIU Law Review

My thoughts are to write about The Human Environment. I will address the recent events concerning the increased silencing of dissent and the criminal law reforms that prohibit peaceful gatherings.

The Ultimate Injustice: States' Failure To Take Steps To Prevent Wrongful Convictions And, When Wrongful Convictions Are Exposed, To Provide Adequate Assistance To Exonerees, Natalie Lahera

FIU Law Review

Among the many rights guaranteed by the Constitution are the rights to a presumption of innocence, equal protection, due process, a speedy trial, a trial by jury, and legal counsel, if indigent and charged with a serious crime. But those rights do not ensure that the justice system succeeds every time. The United States has exonerated over 3,000 individuals since 1989. The exonerees have collectedly lost over 26,700 years of their lives. Each exoneration has provided insight into the causes of wrongful convictions, the issues with current compensation laws, and even the changes that need to be implemented to avoid …

A Survey Of The Literature On Federal Appellate Practice And Procedure, Thomas E. Baker

FIU Law Review

This is a survey of the literature related to appellate practice and procedure before the United States Courts of Appeals for the benefit of lawyers and judges and scholars. It is reproduced with permission from THOMAS E. BAKER, A PRIMER ON THE JURISDICTION OF THE U.S. COURTS OF APPEALS (Fed. Jud. Ctr. 3d ed. 2023) available at: https://www.fjc.gov/content/379899/primer-jurisdiction-us-courts-appeals-third-edition). This origin explains the scattered references in the entries to “this Primer.”

Third Annual Report To The Editor-In-Chief, Thomas E. Baker

FIU Law Review

This the third annual report of the results of the constitutional law haiku contest conducted in my section of Constitutional Law at the FIU College of Law.

Constitutional Review Of Federal Tax Legislation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Yoseph M. Edrey

Articles

What does the Constitution mean when it says that “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States” (U.S. Const. Article I, Section 8, Clause 1)?

The definition of “tax” for constitutional purposes has become important considering the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (“NFIB”), in which Chief Justice Roberts for the Court upheld the constitutionality of the individual mandate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) under the taxing …

Policing Protest: Speech, Space, Crime, And The Jury, Jenny E. Carroll

Articles

Speech is more than just an individual right-it can serve as a catalyst for democratically driven revolution and reform, particularly for minority or marginalized positions. In the past decade, the nation has experienced a rise in mass protests. However, dissent and disobedience in the form of such protests is not without consequences. While the First Amendment promises broad rights of speech and assembly, these rights are not absolute. Criminal law regularly curtails such rights - either by directly regulating speech as speech or by imposing incidental burdens on speech as it seeks to promote other state interests. This Feature examines …

The Public Voice Of The Defender, Russell M. Gold, Kay L. Levine

Articles

For decades police and prosecutors have controlled the public narrative about criminal law. The news landscape features salacious stories of violent crimes while ignoring the more mundane but far more prevalent minor cases that clog the court dockets. Defenders, faced with overwhelming caseloads and fear that speaking out may harm their clients, have largely ceded the opportunity to offer a counternarrative based on what they see every day. Defenders tell each other about the overuse of pretrial detention, intensive pressure to plead guilty, overzealous prosecutors, cycles of violence, and rampant constitutional violations-all of which inflict severe harm on defendants and …

The Possibility Of Modern India, Madhav Khosla

Faculty Scholarship

The history of modern constitutionalism has immortalized several events of much moment. It has, however, cast scant attention upon a great deal other episodes that merit greater engagement. Among this latter category is the making of modern India – the crafting of the constitutional text that would create the world’s largest democracy. The Indian case invites attention not merely because of its size but rather because of its conditions. This postcolonial experiment involved the coming together of democratization and constitution-making in a setting that was poor, uneducated, and divided, and one that was stepped in centuries of tradition. Unlike in …

Appropriations, The Budget, And Public Debt Transparency: The Fiscal Panorama, Gillian E. Metzger, Anna Gelpern, Alissa Ardito Ashcroft, Erika Lunder, Karla Vasquez-Suarez

Faculty Scholarship

Appropriations, budget, and public debt law lurk in the recesses of public law. Every now and again, in a blaze of glory and spilled ink, they emerge under the guise of a constitutional issue. Should a constitutional question arise, usually separation of powers, amid a political stalemate, then an extended shutdown or debt ceiling drama steal the spotlight. After a last-minute compromise or, rarely, a judicial ruling, the green eyeshades return. Money, finance, public spending – whether mandatory or discretionary – exert little charm over lawyers, who went to law school to avoid arithmetic. But the federal government pays for …

Nondelegation Blues, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

The nondelegation doctrine is in crisis. For approximately a century, it has been the Supreme Court’s answer to questions about transfers of legislative power. But as became evident in Gundy v. United States, those answers are wearing thin. So, it is time for a new approach.

This Foreword goes beyond existing scholarship in showing how underlying principles, framing assumptions, constitutional text, and contemporary analysis are all aligned in barring transfers of power among the branches of government. Rarely in constitutional law does a conclusion about a highly contested question rest on such a powerful combination.

At the same time, …

State Constitutional Rights And Democratic Proportionality, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Miriam Seifter

Faculty Scholarship

State constitutional law is in the spotlight. As federal courts retrench on abortion, democracy, and more, state constitutions are defining rights across the nation. Despite intermittent calls for greater attention to state constitutional theory, neither scholars nor courts have provided a comprehensive account of state constitutional rights or a coherent framework for their adjudication. Instead, many state courts import federal interpretive practices that bear little relationship to state constitutions or institutions.

This Article seeks to begin a new conversation about state constitutional adjudication. It first shows how in myriad defining ways state constitutions differ from the U.S. Constitution: They protect …

States Of Emergency: Covid-19 And Separation Of Powers In The States, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

No event in recent years has shone a brighter spotlight on state separation of powers than the COVID-19 pandemic. Over a more than two-year period, governors exercised unprecedented authority through suspending laws and regulations, limiting business activities and gatherings, restricting individual movement, and imposing public health requirements. Many state legislatures endorsed these measures or were content to let governors take the lead, but in some states the legislature pushed back, particularly — albeit not only—where the governor and legislative majorities were of different political parties. Some of these conflicts wound up in state supreme courts.

This Essay examines the states’ …

It Doesn't Matter What "Interpretation" Is, Francisco J. Urbina

Journal Articles

Reviewing: HOW TO INTERPRET THE CONSTITUTION? By Cass Sunstein. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2023. Pp. IX + 195. $22.95 (hardcover).

Living Traditionalism, Sherif Girgis

Journal Articles

From the Article

This Article offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Court’s living traditionalism, which turns out to include scores of cases spanning every subject and Justices of every stripe. Next, the Article identifies a fundamental but previously unrecognized tension in the method itself: If the Court gives living-traditionalist cases full weight as precedent, it defeats the reasons for using the method at all. Put another way, it is incoherent to treat political practices as a ratchet: capable of moving law in one direction (e.g., against a right in 2022) but not the other (in favor of the right …

Life After Dobbs, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

The article begins, "The  Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now over rule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives." It is now one year, and one full election cycle, since the Supreme Court closed its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization with those words. That is time enough to gauge how the "people and their elected representatives" have used the authority "return[ed]" to them.