Constitutional Law Commons^™

How Many Supreme Court Justices Can Stand On The Point Of A Needle? Originalist Scholarship, Political Neutrality, And Other Constitutional Nonsense, Stephen M. Feldman

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

In the 1935 article, "Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach," Felix Cohen compared formalist legal reasoning, as practiced by traditional legal scholars and Lochner-era Supreme Court justices, to the philosophical musings of scholastic theologians. Unconnected to empirical reality, formalist legal reasoning was as nonsensical as a disquisition on “‘[h]ow many angels can stand on the point of a needle?’” Nowadays, originalist scholars are similarly engaged in nonsense. These scholars defend, refine, and practice originalist methods of constitutional interpretation as if the Supreme Court justices truly decided cases in accordance with the theory. Regardless, the justices—even the avowed originalists—do not consistently …

Before The Last Breath: How Alabama’S Nitrogen Execution Adoption Created A Procedural Crisis On Death Row, Caroline E. Penfield

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

In 2024 and 2025, Alabama executed eleven people. During this time and in the years leading up to it, the State botched multiple lethal injections. Seeking an ostensibly constitutional way to continue carrying out executions, Alabama introduced death by nitrogen gas suffocation. The problems with lethal injection are not unique to Alabama, but Alabama was the first to adopt and use the novel nitrogen gas method, despite concerns from medical professionals, the public, and inmates themselves. Alabama put little to no protocol in place for inmates to exercise their statutory right to elect this method, leading to confusion and harm. …

Reel It In: Untangling The Circuit Split On The Constitutionality Of Geofence Warrants Under The Fourth Amendment, Kate P. Risser

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

This Note examines geofence warrants and their ongoing threat to constitutionally protected rights such as privacy, speech, and assembly. Part I will provide background information on geofence warrants and examine the prominent justifications for the use of the warrants. Part II will examine how law enforcement’s use of geofence warrants threatens citizens’ constitutionally protected fundamental rights like privacy and reproductive rights. Specifically, Part II addresses how geofence warrants disproportionately target and affect women, people of color, and low-income individuals. Part III will detail the history of the Fourth Amendment tracing its roots to before the Founding Era then exploring applicable …

Child Support Factory: Racist History, Harm, And Unconstitutionality Of The Child Support System's Contractual Operations, Daniel L. Hatcher

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

Within America’s justice institutions, the child support system has become a business. The intended mission of aid has been traded and abdicated through contractual deals to churn vulnerable families into factory-like revenue operations. Juvenile and family courts across the country have partnered through countless intertwined interagency contracts with human service agencies, prosecutors, attorneys general’s offices, probation departments, and policing offices—all aimed at generating revenue from impoverished children and parents rather than serving their best interests. The resulting child support factory is vast, harmful, unconstitutional, unethical, and grew from a racist history that devastated Black families, and still operates with starkly …

The Ten Commandments, Stripped Of Slavery, Exodus & Jubilee, Christopher D. Hampson

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

The Ten Commandments are back on public classroom walls and in federal court, after several states passed new laws requiring school districts to post the text. As attorneys, judges, and amici debate whether First Amendment law has changed enough since Stone v. Graham in 1980 to allow the posting of the ancient religious text, this Essay comes at the situation from an entirely different angle. The precise text proposed by the states might be a good example of “ceremonial deism,” but it removes biblical law from biblical narrative – and, in doing so, unsets the Ten Commandments from their original …

Religious Minorities And Secular Rights, Joshua C. Mcdaniel

Washington and Lee Law Review

When religious claimants sue to protect their ability to practice their faith, they often invoke legal guarantees that specifically protect religious exercise. Yet historically—and still today—they also rely on secular guarantees like freedom of speech or equal protection. And their victories on these grounds set precedents not just for believers but for everyone. As a result, many rights we now take for granted stem from religious minorities pressing for the ability to preach, proselytize, and publish their religious views. No account of free speech law would be complete, for instance, without considering the pathbreaking decisions won by Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Although …

Constructive Falsity, Legal Truth, And The Public Interest In Not Reporting On Expunged Records, Itay Ravid

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover: Using State Constitutions To Escape The Dead Hand Of Article V, Meg Penrose

Washington and Lee Law Review

Thomas Jefferson believed that “the earth always belongs to the living generation.” His constitutional approach would empower twenty-first century Americans to decide twenty-first century problems regularly determined by the United States Supreme Court. Article V, the formal method for constitutional change, seemingly relegates these decisions to the Supreme Court because amending the federal Constitution is nearly impossible.

Unfortunately, our fixation on federal constitutional law often eclipses the power of state constitutional law. State constitutions balance our relatively static federal Constitution with responsive state governments. There is no need to debate what the Framers thought about modern issues when Americans can …

Against A Medical Exception To Equal Protection, Govind Persad

Washington and Lee Law Review

Government regulations of medicine sometimes treat patients differently based on their race or sex. Does heightened scrutiny apply to such regulations—as is usual when law treats someone differently based on a protected characteristic? Or is there a medical exception to equal protection?

Recently, in United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court upheld a law that restricted access to medical treatments for transgender minors. Though its holding did not rely on medical exceptionalism, its discussion reinvigorated interest in a “medical exception” to equal protection: that medical decisions are exempt from the searching review applied when governmental decisions consider protected characteristics.

For …

American Public Law Revolution, Victoria Frances Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court has birthed a public law revolution. This revolution should not be known as a constitutional revolution because it is bigger than constitutional law—it covers statutory and administrative law as well. This revolution has been powered not by social movements, but by an interpretive philosophy known as originalism. Originalism has been deeply misunderstood by its critics. This Article examines three myths about originalism—that it is primarily about history, that it is a traditional theory of adjudication, and that it is democratic. Originalism is a semantic theory, not a theory of history, and it is a theory that privileges …

Judicial Underreach: Tiktok Inc. V. Garland'S Implications For National Security And Free Speech, Olivia Sharp

Colorado Law Student Scholars

No abstract provided.

The Domestic Mirror: Tiktok V. Garland, Data Privacy, And Meaningful Free Expression, Olivia Sharp

Colorado Law Student Scholars

No abstract provided.

Why Democratic Backsliding Is Legal: Judicial Legitimacy And Institutional Decay In The United States, Sherlyn Ochoa

Posters - 2026

“In the United States, democratic backsliding is not a violation of the law—it is increasingly a product of it.” Democratic change often occurs through judicial interpretation Courts shape rights, participation, and equality Focus: how judicial legitimacy allows major democratic shifts—both expansion and restriction of rights

The Original Meaning And Understanding Of The Investigative Power Of The Grand Jury In The Constitution Of Alaska, Savannah Shoffner, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

The investigatory, or reporting, power of grand juries refers to the body’s ability to issue statements on wide-ranging matters of public policy, generally aimed at exposing “inefficiency, neglect, or criminal or quasi-criminal conduct” by government officials. Grand jurors may propose an investigation themselves or respond to a request from a citizen. The reports produced by these investigations need not be tied to a specific indictment to be released.

Text, history, and tradition reveal that the grand jury has been understood as an intermediary between the government and the people, empowered to make public statements on the people’s behalf and entrusted …

Article Iii's Constraints On The Legislative Power, Elizabeth Beske

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Article III’s heightened concreteness standard for statutory harms takes federal judges deep into legislative terrain, jeopardizing statutory damage provisions and confining Congress to post hoc solutions rather than preemptive strikes. The Supreme Court has insisted that creating a cause of action is a legislative function. At the same time, its recent standing cases instruct lower federal courts to permit suit on statutory injuries only when they find actual harm that bears a tight connection to injuries recognized at common law. This new harm requirement rests uneasily with countless statutes featuring statutory damage provisions that are in place precisely because damages …

False Conflict: Colorblindness And Section 2 Of The Voting Rights Act, W. Kerrel Murray

Fordham Law Review

If friends and foes of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 agree on one thing, it is the irrepressible conflict between section 2’s attention to race and constitutional colorblindness. They’re wrong. Rightly understood, section 2’s design is remarkably compatible with colorblind constitutionalism’s letter and spirit.

To show how, this Article first returns to section 2’s origins and the preexisting approach its text codifies. That approach had an underappreciated ethos: When intentional discrimination’s effects sufficiently distort a political system, an electoral rule’s results might impugn its unconstitutionality, even if the rule had been adopted without discriminatory purpose. Drawing …

Interrogation Of Regents And Administrative Reliance Interests In The Context Of Vacillating Immigration Policy, Sarah Engelberg-Nolan

Fordham Law Review

Arbitrary and capricious review under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) operates as an important agency-accountability tool when invoked as intended. But the recent U.S. Supreme Court case Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California and subsequent lower federal court cases have opened the floodgates to a more searching and potentially activist review. In Regents, the Court held that the administration of President Donald J. Trump could not rescind the discretionary immigration program Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in the manner the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) attempted, in part because DHS failed to …

Article Iii's Constraints On The Legislative Power, Elizabeth Earle Beske

William & Mary Law Review

Article III’s heightened concreteness standard for statutory harms takes federal judges deep into legislative terrain, jeopardizing statutory damage provisions and confining Congress to post hoc solutions rather than preemptive strikes. The Supreme Court has insisted that creating a cause of action is a legislative function. At the same time, its recent standing cases instruct lower federal courts to permit suit on statutory injuries only when they find actual harm that bears a tight connection to injuries recognized at common law. This new harm requirement rests uneasily with countless statutes featuring statutory damage provisions that are in place precisely because damages …

2025 Martin Luther King, Jr. Keynote Lecture, Madiba Dennie

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Press Freedom As A First Amendment Paradigm, Gregory P. Magarian

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.