Constitutional Law Commons^™

Collective Action Federalism And Its Discontents, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

An increasing number of scholars argue that the Commerce Clause is best read in light of the collective action problems that the nation faced under the Articles of Confederation. The work of these “collective action theorists” is reflected in Justice Ginsburg’s opinion in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. Writing for four Justices, she stressed the “collective-action impasse” at the state level to which the Affordable Care Act responds.

In its purest form, a collective action approach maintains that the existence of a significant problem of collective action facing two or more states is both necessary and sufficient …

The New Textualism, Progressive Constitutionalism, And Abortion Rights: A Reply To Jeffrey Rosen, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

La Interseccion De La Responsabilidad Extracontractual Y El Derecho Constitucional Y Los Derechos Humanos, George C. Christie

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Story Of Ewing: Three Strikes Laws And The Limits Of The Eighth Amendment Proportionality Review, Sara Sun Beale

Faculty Scholarship

In 1994 California enacted the nation's harshest "three strikes" law. Under this law, any felony can serve as a third strike, and conviction of a third strike requires a mandatory prison sentence of 25 years to life. In Ewing v. California, 538 U.S. 11 (2003), the Supreme Court held that sending a drug addict who shoplifted three golf clubs to prison for 25 years to life under the three strikes law did not violate the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment. The chapter for the forthcoming Criminal Law Stories tells the story of the Ewing case, describing …

Saving The First Amendment From Itself: Relief From The Sherman Act Against The Rabbinic Cartels, Barak D. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

America’s rabbis currently structure their employment market with rules that flagrantly violate the Sherman Act. The consequences of these rules, in addition to the predictable economic outcomes of inflated wages for rabbis and restricted consumer freedoms for the congregations that employ them, meaningfully hinder Jewish communities from seeking their preferred spiritual leader. Although the First Amendment cannot combat against this privately-orchestrated (yet paradigmatic) restriction on religious expression, the Sherman Act can. Ironically, however, the rabbinic organizations implementing the restrictive policies claim that the First Amendment immunizes them from Sherman Act scrutiny, thereby claiming the First Amendment empowers them to do …

Jack Balkin’S Rich Historicism And Diet Originalism: Health Benefits And Risks For The Constitutional System, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

In Living Originalism, Jack Balkin reasons from two points of view — the perspective of the constitutional system as a whole and the perspective of the faithful participant in that system. First, he provides a systemic account of constitutional change, which he calls “living constitutionalism.” Second, he offers an individual approach to constitutional interpretation and construction, which he calls “framework originalism” or “the method of text and principle.”

Reasoning from the systemic perspective, Balkin develops a compelling theory of the processes of constitutional change. Balkin may insufficiently appreciate, however, that public candor about — or even deep awareness of — …

Presidential Power, Historical Practice, And Legal Constraint, Curtis A. Bradley, Trevor W. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

The scope of the President’s legal authority is determined in part by historical practice. This Essay aims to better understand how such practice-based law might operate as a constraint on the presidency. Some scholars have suggested that presidential authority has become “unbounded” by law, and is now governed only or primarily by politics. At the same time, there has been growing skepticism about the ability of the familiar political checks on presidential power to work in any systematic or reliable fashion. Skepticism about law’s potential to constrain in this context is heightened by the customary nature of much of what …

Nonsense And The Freedom Of Speech: What Meaning Means For The First Amendment, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

A great deal of everyday expression is, strictly speaking, nonsense. But courts and scholars have done little to consider whether or why such meaningless speech, like nonrepresentational art, falls within “the freedom of speech.” If, as many suggest, meaning is what separates speech from sound and expression from conduct, then the constitutional case for nonsense is complicated. And because nonsense is so common, the case is also important — artists like Lewis Carroll and Jackson Pollock are not the only putative “speakers” who should be concerned about the outcome.

This Article is the first to explore thoroughly the relationship between …

Reverse-Commandeering, Margaret Hu

Faculty Scholarship

Although the anti-commandeering doctrine was developed by the Supreme Court to protect state sovereignty from federal overreach, nothing prohibits flipping the doctrine in the opposite direction to protect federal sovereignty from state overreach. Federalism preserves a balance of power between two sovereigns. Thus, the reversibility of the anti-commandeering doctrine appears inherent in the reasoning offered by the Court for the doctrine’s creation and application. In this Article, I contend that reversing the anti-commandeering doctrine is appropriate in the context of contemporary immigration federalism laws. Specifically, I explore how an unconstitutional incursion into federal sovereignty can be seen in state immigration …

Equality Arguments For Abortion Rights, Neil S. Siegel, Reva B. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Roe v. Wade grounds constitutional protections for women’s decision wheth­er to end a pregnancy in the Due Process Clauses. But in the four decades since Roe, the U.S. Supreme Court has come to recognize the abortion right as an equality right as well as a liberty right. In this Essay, we describe some distinctive features of equality arguments for abortion rights. We then show how, over time, the Court and individual Justices have begun to employ equal­ity arguments in analyzing the constitutionality of abortion restrictions. These arguments first appear inside of substantive due process case law, and then as claims …

Consistently Inconsistent: The Constitution And Animals, Marianne Sullivan

Animal Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Slave By Any Other Name Is Still A Slave: The Tilikum Case And Application Of The Thirteenth Amendment To Nonhuman Animals, Jeffrey S. Kerr, Martina Bernstein, Amanda S. Schwoerke, Matthew D. Strugar, Jared Goodman

Animal Law Review

On its face, the Thirteenth Amendment outlaws the conditions and practices of slavery and involuntary servitude wherever they may exist in this country—irrespective of the victim’s race, creed, sex, or species. In 2011, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, on behalf of five wild-captured orcas, sued SeaWorld for enslaving the orcas in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment. The case presented, for the first time, the question of whether the Thirteenth Amendment’s protections can extend to nonhuman animals. This Article examines the lawsuit’s factual, theoretical, and strategic underpinnings, and argues that the district court’s opinion ultimately dismissing the suit failed …

Emerging Technologies And Dwindling Speech, Jorge Roig

Scholarly Works

Inspired in part by the recent holding in Bland v. Roberts that the use of the “Like” feature in Facebook is not covered by the Free Speech Clause, this article makes a brief foray into the approach that courts have taken in the recent past towards questions of First Amendment coverage in the context of emerging technologies. Specifically, this article will take a closer look at how courts have dealt with the issue of functionality in the context of First Amendment coverage of computer source code. The analysis of this and other recent experiences, when put in a larger context, …

Rethinking Section Five: Deference, Direct Regulation, And Restoring Congressional Authority To Enforce The Fourteenth Amendment, Tiffany C. Graham

Scholarly Works

After the Supreme Court's decision in City of Boerne v. Flores, the Court worked systematically to undermine the scope of Congress's regulatory authority under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court did this as part of the neo-federalist revival, in an effort to restrain congressional power in favor of elevating state power against federal intrusion. The Court took this route in restraining various powers, among them the powers granted to Congress under Article I of the U.S. Constitution. Arguably, though, the effort to restrain Congress was most pronounced in the arena of Section 5. In this Article, I argue …

Supreme Court Holds Grand Jury Witnesses Absolutely Immune From § 1983 Liability, Martin Schwartz

Scholarly Works

This article discusses the Supreme Court's ruling in Rehberg v. Paulk, 132 S. Ct. 1497 (2012), which extended the absolute witness immunity recognized in Briscoe v. LaHue, to grand jury witnesses. In an unanimous opinion, written by Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., the Court held that grand jury witnesses are absolutely immune from §1983 liability for their testimony, and even for conspiring to give false testimony.

Constructive Upheaval: Railway Labor Executives'ass'n V. Gibbons And The "Choice Of Clause" Challenge To Traditions Of Statutory Construction, Jordan C. Seal

Georgia Law Review

When confronted with constitutional challenges to
Congress's legislative authority, courts must build their
analyses on an interpretation of the statute's language.
Such cases implicate principles of statutory construction
that lay the groundwork for the rulings that follow.
Throughout American judicial history, courts have
favored flexible interpretation to protect Congress's
enactments from constitutional attack. The Supreme
Court's decision in Railway Labor Executives' Association
v. Gibbons dramatically departed from that tradition,
suggesting instead that legislation should be categorized
as a particular type of law to ensure that Congress does
not overstep the boundaries of its enumerated powers.
Although its shift in perspective …

Interagency Litigation And Article Iii, Joseph W. Mead

Georgia Law Review

Agencies of the United States often find themselves on
opposite sides of the "v. " in disputes ranging from alleged
unfair labor practices in federal agencies, to competing
statutory interpretations, to run-of-the mill squabbles over
money. Yet Article III's case-or-controversy requirement

includes--at a minimum-adverse parties and standing.
Courts have disagreed with one another over the extent to
which litigation between the sovereign and itself meets
Article III standards. Despite the volume of scholarship
on Article III standing, relatively little attention has been
paid to Article III's requirement of adverse parties in
general, or the justiciability of intrabranch litigation in
particular. …

Safe Haven No Longer: The Role Of Georgia Courts And Private Probation Companies In Sustaining A De Facto Debtors' Prison System, Sarah D. Bellacicco

Georgia Law Review

Georgia was specifically established as a colony for debtors-a haven where they could be safe from imprisonment. It is a haven no longer. Georgia courts are regularly imprisoning people for failing to pay debts, often through probation revocation of probationers who have failed to pay a fine or fee imposed as a condition of probation. Some of these probationers are on probation solely because they could not pay a fine on the day of sentencing, a practice which greatly increases the amount they owe due to the additional probation fees imposed. In Bearden v. Georgia, the Supreme Court held that …

The Regulation Of Race In Science, Kimani Paul-Emile

Faculty Scholarship

The overwhelming majority of biological scientists agree that there is no such thing as race among modern humans. Yet, scientists regularly deploy race in their studies, and federal laws and regulations currently mandate the use of racial categories in biomedical research. Legal commentators have tried to make sense of this paradox primarily by looking to equal protection strict scrutiny analysis. However, the colorblind approach that attends this doctrine — which many regard as synonymous with invalidation — does not offer a particularly useful way to think about the use of race in research. It offers no way to address how …

Firearms Policy And The Black Community: An Assessment Of The Modern Orthodoxy, Nicholas J. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

The heroes of the modern civil rights movement were more than just stoic victims of racist violence. Their history was one of defiance and fighting long before news cameras showed them attacked by dogs and fire hoses. When Fannie Lou Hamer revealed she kept a shotgun in every corner of her bedroom, she was channeling a century old practice. And when delta share cropper Hartman Turnbow, after a shootout with the Klan, said “I don’t figure I was being non-nonviolent, (yes non-nonviolent) I was just protecting my family”, he was invoking an evolved tradition that embraced self-defense and disdained political …