Constitutional Law Commons^™

The Unconstitutional Prosecution Of Asylum-Seeking Parents Under Trump’S Family Separation, Sergio Garcia

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

President Donald Trump’s policy of separating families at the border, known as Trump’s “Zero Tolerance Policy,” was piloted in El Paso, Texas in 2017. Under Trump’s policy, the government separates asylum-seeking parents from their children in order to create “unaccompanied minors” and then prosecute parents. Trump’s policy is standard practice along the nation’s southern border. However, Trump’s prosecution and conviction of asylum–seeking parents violate the constitutional criminal law principles and constitute outrageous government conduct. For example, consider the cases of asylum-seeking parents Elba Luz Dominguez–Portillo, Natividad Zavala–Zavala, Jose Francis Yanes–Mancia, Blanca Nieve Vasquez– Hernandez, and Maynor Alonso Claudino–Lopez (collectively referred …

Corporate Constituents: Corporations Have More Influence On The Federal Government Than Real People Under Current U.S. Campaign Finance Regulations, Colin Schoell

UC Law Constitutional Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Expanding Third-Party Standing In Custody Actions: How The Opioid Crisis Has Impacted Lgbtq Parental Rights In Pennsylvania, Jill C. Gorman

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Declared a public health emergency by the federal government, the opioid crisis often places children in foster care when parents fatally succumb to their addictions. To unburden the foster care system and to accommodate family members who want to care for these children, Pennsylvania enacted Act No. 21 on July 3, 2018, to expand custody standing to include certain third parties. However, because the legislature has not expanded the legal definition of “parent,” Act No. 21 poses a threat to the legal rights of nonbiological LGBTQ parents.

This Comment begins by explaining how the opioid crisis motivated the Pennsylvania legislature …

Physical Presence Is In No Wayfair!: Addressing The Supreme Court’S Removal Of The Physical Presence Rule And The Need For Congressional Action, Claire Shook

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

The Commerce Clause of Article I grants Congress the power to regulate commerce. In the past, an entity had to have a physical presence in a state for that state to impose taxes on the entity. Due to the changing landscape of online businesses, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in South Dakota v. Wayfair in June 2018 to remove the physical presence rule as it applied to the Commerce Clause analysis of state taxation. The Wayfair decision’s ramification is that states can now impose taxes on businesses conducting sales online without having any physical presence in those states. While the …

Regulating Habit-Forming Technology, Kyle Langvardt

Fordham Law Review

Tech developers, like slot machine designers, strive to maximize the user’s “time on device.” They do so by designing habit-forming products— products that draw consciously on the same behavioral design strategies that the casino industry pioneered. The predictable result is that most tech users spend more time on device than they would like, about five hours of phone time a day, while a substantial minority develop life-changing behavioral problems similar to problem gambling. Other countries have begun to regulate habit-forming tech, and American jurisdictions may soon follow suit. Several state legislatures today are considering bills to regulate “loot boxes,” a …

The State Of Exactions, Timothy M. Mulvaney

Faculty Scholarship

In Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District, the Supreme Court slightly expanded the range of circumstances involving conditional land use permits in which heightened judicial scrutiny is appropriate in a constitutional “exaction” takings case. In crafting a vision of regulators as strategic extortionists of private property interests, though, Koontz prompted many takings observers to predict that the case would provide momentum for a more significant expansion of such scrutiny in takings cases involving land use permit conditions moving forward, and perhaps even an extension into other regulatory contexts, as well.

Five years on, this Article evaluates the extent …

Even Some International Law Is Local: Implementation Of Treaties Through Subnational Mechanisms, Charlotte Ku, William H. Henning, David P. Stewart, Paul F. Diehl

Faculty Scholarship

Multilateral treaties today rarely touch on subjects where there is no domestic law in the United States, In the U.S. federal system, this domestic law may not be national law, but law of the constituent States of the United States. However, in light of the U.S. Constitution Article VI, treaties in their domestic application unavoidably federalize the subjects they address. The most sensitive issues arise when a treaty focuses on matters primarily or exclusively dealt with in the United States at the State or local level. Although U.S. practice allows for some flexibility to accommodate State/local interests, the federal government …

Introduction: Symposium: Incitement At 100 And 50-And Today-Free Speech And Violence In The Modern World, William Araiza, Joel Gora

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reconstituting We The People: Frederick Douglass And Jürgen Habermas In Conversation, Paul Gowder

Northwestern University Law Review

This Article draws on Black American intellectual history to offer an approach to fundamental questions of constitutional theory from the standpoint of the politically excluded.

Democratic constitutional theory is vexed by a series of well-known challenges rooted in the inability to justify law without democracy (“the countermajoritarian difficulty”) and the inability to justify any particular composition of the popular demos without law (“the problem of constituent power”). Under conditions of genuine egalitarian political inclusion, a constitutional conception of popular sovereignty derived primarily from the civic republican constitutional patriotism associated with Jürgen Habermas and others can resolve these challenges by providing …

Third-Party Bankruptcy Releases: An Analysis Of Consent Through The Lenses Of Due Process And Contract Law, Dorothy Coco

Fordham Law Review

Bankruptcy courts disagree on the use of third-party releases in Chapter 11 bankruptcy plans, the different factors that circuit courts consider when deciding whether to approve a third-party release, and the impact of the various consent definitions on whether a release is or should be binding on the creditor. Affirmative consent, “deemed consent,” and silence are important elements in this discussion. Both contract law and due process provide lenses to evaluate consent definitions to determine whether nondebtor third-party releases should bind certain creditor groups. This Note proposes a solution that follows an affirmative consent approach to protect against due process …

The Constitutionalisation Of Development, Maartje De Visser

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

There is a steadily growing interest among academics and policymakers alike in the role of constitutional law in fostering socio-economic development. This attention ties in, at a practical level, with the latest wave of law and development thinking, which conceives of rule-of-law institutions and democracy as existing in a symbiotic relationship with economic growth that together will propel countries to achieve higher levels of foreign investment and overall prosperity. The idea that public law, and the constitution more specifically, has potential in spurring development has for instance found expression across a range of the Sustainable Development Goals formulated under the …

Murr V. Wisconsin And The Inherent Limits Of Regulatory Takings, Lynda L. Butler

Faculty Publications

This article examines the confusion surrounding constitutional protection of property under the substantive due process and takings clauses, using Murr as a springboard for reconsidering the substantive due process/takings distinction and asking whether the regulatory takings doctrine should remain a viable constitutional concept despite its muddled principles. While powerful reasons support treating as compensable economic regulations that are functionally equivalent to physical takings, important differences between physical and regulatory takings need to be recognized as limits to the degree of equivalence possible and therefore to the regulatory takings doctrine. A look back at the evolutionary paths of substantive due process, …

Out Of The Quandary: Personal Jurisdiction Over Absent Class Member Claims Explained, A. Benjamin Spencer

Faculty Publications

Since the Supreme Court's decision in Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court of California, San Francisco County, litigants and lower courts have wrestled with the issue of whether a federal court must be able to exercise personal jurisdiction with respect to each of the claims asserted by absent class members in a class action and, if so, what standard governs that jurisdictional determination. This issue is rapidly coming to a head and is poised for inevitable resolution by the Supreme Court in the near future; multiple circuit courts have heard appeals from district courts that have reached varying conclusions on …

Constitutional Moral Hazard And Campus Speech, Jamal Greene

William & Mary Law Review

One underappreciated cost of constitutional rights enforcement is moral hazard. In economics, moral hazard refers to the increased propensity of insured individuals to engage in costly behavior. This Essay concerns what I call “constitutional moral hazard,” defined as the use of constitutional rights (or their conspicuous absence) to shield potentially destructive behavior from moral or pragmatic assessment. What I have in mind here is not simply the risk that people will make poor decisions when they have a right to do so, but that people may, at times, make poor decisions because they have a right. Moral hazard is not …

Power Matters: Power Configuration And The Death Of American Law, Otis Grant

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Judges As Agents For Development, Maartje De Visser

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This Article explores how constitutional judges can become agents for development and how they may wish to go about performing this role. Due to the high politico-economic stakes involved and the inevitability of trade-offs between competing interests, judicial review of developmental questions is liable to expose judges to negative fall-outs. At the same time, it is fairly common for Asian constitutions to expressly set out the parameters or objectives for economic development that the State is expected to realize, while simultaneously recognizing a suite of (socio-)economic rights, thereby providing textual ammunition to query the validity of a government’s chosen implementation …

The Right To Appointed Counsel: The Case For Unaccompanied Immigrant Children, Amanda Kavita Sewanan

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Contemporary Constitution Making In The Asia Pacific, De Maartje Visser, Ngoc Son Bui

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This issue features a curated set of contextualized case studies that interrogate how six Asian countries have calibrated global imperatives with domestic desires and concerns during the drafting of their latest constitution. Read together, the accounts demonstrate that the impact of globalization on what has long been thought of as a quintessential exercise of national sovereignty is ubiquitous, yet that the precise combination of the global and the local is unique to each country, determined as it is by the strength of domestic interests and factions. Taking contextualized functionalism as its premise, this introduction sketches the contours of an analytical …

Problematika Lembaga Mahkamah Agung Dalam Penegakan Hukum Di Indonesia, Muntaha -

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

A process of law enforcement was considerably as part of system of judicature as well as a part of procedure of justice. The issue on this research is “What is the problematic in Supreme Court related to law enforcement in Indonesia”. This study principally aimed: a. Academically, as further base data. b. Practically, as evaluated material for Supreme Court in adjusting related to law enforcement in institutional jurisdiction. The used method in this research is by means of conceptual approach. Subsequently, the outcome is that problematic of law enforcement toward Supreme Court are: a. Integrity of law enforcer that has …

Faktor Kesukarelaan Dalam Pengunduran Diri Pekerja/Buruh: Studi Putusan Pengadilan Hubungan Industrial Di Medan No. 262/Pdt.Sus-Phi/2017/Pn.Mdn, Di Banda Aceh No. 5/Pdt.Sus- Phi/2016/Pn.Bna, Dan Di Palu No. 18/Pdt.Sus-Phi/2015/Pn.Pal, Patricia Cindy Andriani, Melania Kiswandari

Jurnal Hukum & Pembangunan

Resignation is one of the mechanisms for terminating employment relations that requires voluntary factor in the employee’s action. However, in a number of cases, the resignation was actually not based on the initiative of employee, but was motivated by the employer’s action who put employee into difficult situation so that he/she had no choice but to resign. Therefore, it is necessary to further examine the regulations regarding termination of employment and their implementation at the Industrial Relations Court level toward cases about the employee’s involuntary resignation in decision no. 262/Pdt.Sus- PHI/2017/PN.Mdn, no. 5/Pdt.Sus-PHI/2016/PN.Bna, and no. 18/Pdt.Sus- PHI/2015/PN.Pal. The research is …