Fourteenth Amendment Commons^™

The Missouri Student Transfer Program, Howard E. Fields Iii

Dissertations

In 1993, the state of Missouri passed the Outstanding Schools Act. This law was created as a means to ensure that “all children will have quality educational opportunities, regardless of where in Missouri they live.” Section 167.131 of this law states that an unaccredited district must pay the tuition and transportation cost for students who attend an accredited school in the same or adjoining district. This portion of the law became known as the Student Transfer Program.

The Riverview Gardens School District (RGSD) was one of three unaccredited school districts in the state of Missouri in 2013. With close to …

Liberty Of Palate, Samuel R. Wiseman

Maine Law Review

As lawmakers concerned with problems as diverse as childhood obesity, animal cruelty, and listeria have increasingly focused their attention on consumers, legal issues surrounding food choice have recently attracted much broader interest. Bans on large sodas in New York City, fast food chains in South Los Angeles, and foie gras in California and Chicago have provoked national controversy, as have federal raids on raw milk sellers. In response, various groups have decried restrictions on their ability to consume the food products of their choice. A few groups have organized around the principle of what we might call liberty of palate, …

Personal Jurisdiction In The Data Age: Macdermid V. Deiter's Adaptation Of International Shoe Amidst Supreme Court Uncertainty, Ryan Almy

Maine Law Review

In MacDermid, Inc. v. Deiter, the Second Circuit held that a Connecticut court may exercise personal jurisdiction over a defendant who allegedly used a computer in Canada to remotely access a computer server located in Connecticut in order to misappropriate proprietary, confidential electronic information belonging to a Connecticut corporation. This Note argues that, given the factual elements before the court, MacDermid was an unsurprising, orthodox, and proper holding in the context of personal jurisdiction jurisprudence. However, the facts in MacDermid, and the corresponding limits inherent in the Second Circuit’s holding, reveal potentially gaping holes in our modern personal jurisdiction framework …

The Post-Crawford Rise In Voter Id Laws: A Solution Still In Search Of A Problem, David M. Faherty

Maine Law Review

In Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter identification law, which required registered voters to present government-issued photo identification at the polls. Instead of applying heighted scrutiny to a law that had an effect on voter qualifications, the Court simply balanced the asserted state interest of protecting the integrity and reliability of elections by preventing voter fraud against the burden imposed on eligible voters who were prevented from voting because they did not possess the required form of photo identification. Not persuaded by the fact that Indiana could not point to a single instance of …

The Magic Mirror Of "Original Meaning": Recent Approaches To The Fourteenth Amendment, Bret Boyce

Maine Law Review

Nearly a century and a half after its adoption, debate continues to rage over the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of basic rights. Of the three clauses in the second sentence of Section One, the latter two (the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses) loom very large in modern Supreme Court decisions, while the first (the Privileges or Immunities Clause) is of minimal importance, having been invoked only once to strike down a state law. Originalists—those who hold that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning—have often deplored this state of affairs. Many have argued …

The Prevailing Culture Over Immigration: Centralized Immigration And Policies Between Attrition And Accommodation, Antonios Kouroutakis

Seton Hall Circuit Review

No abstract provided.

Does "Precrime" Mesh With The Ideals Of U.S. Justice?: Implications For The Future Of Predictive Policing, Jackson Polansky, Henry F. Fradella

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

Both the short story and film Minority Report are premised on a Precrime unit that relies on the psychic abilities of human mutants who can predict the commission of crimes before they occur. Advances in technology suggest that the science fiction depicted in Minority Report may one day become a reality. This paper summarizes the ways in which the criminal justice system currently derives crime predictions and extrapolates from these methods how technology might one day allow police to intervene before crimes are committed with great regularity and accuracy. The paper contemplates how an actual precrime system would struggle to …

Keeping Gideon'S Promise: Using Equal Protection To Address The Denial Of Counsel In Misdemeanor Cases, Brandon Buskey, Lauren Sudeall Lucas

Faculty Publications By Year

The Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees criminal defendants the right to counsel, and the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that right is applicable to all defendants in felony cases, even those unable to afford a lawyer. Yet, for defendants facing misdemeanor charges, only those defendants whose convictions result in incarceration are entitled to the assistance of counsel.

The number of misdemeanor prosecutions has increased dramatically in recent years, as have the volume and severity of collateral consequences attached to such convictions; yet, the Court’s right to counsel jurisprudence in this area has remained stagnant. Critics of the …

Post-Racialism And The End Of Strict Scrutiny, David Schraub

Indiana Law Journal

In recent years, a growing social consensus has emerged around the aspiration of a “post-racial” America: one where race is no longer a fault line for social strife or, perhaps, a morally significant trait whatsoever. This ambition, however, lies in tension with the most basic constitutional principle governing our treatment of race in the public sphere: that of “strict scrutiny.” Post-racialism seeks to diminish the salience of race to near negligibility. The strict scrutiny of racial classifications, by contrast, significantly enhances the salience of race by treating it differently from virtually every other personal attribute or characteristic—including hair or eye …

After Flint: Environmental Justice As Equal Protection, David A. Dana, Deborah Tuerkheimer

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay conceptualizes the Flint water crisis as an archetypical case of underenforcement—that is, a denial of the equal protection of laws guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Viewed as such, the inadequacy of environmental regulation can be understood as a failure that extends beyond the confines of Flint; a failure that demands a far more expansive duty to protect vulnerable populations.

An Originalist Defense Of Plyler V. Doe, Steven G. Calabresi, Lena M. Barsky

BYU Law Review

This Article offers a defense of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Plyler v. Doe based on the original public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment when it was enacted in 1868. We argue that at that time, the Fourteenth Amendment granted certain rights, such as life, liberty, and possession of personal property, to immigrants under the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses, but did not grant them the privileges and immunities of citizenship (e.g. all civil rights and the political right to vote). We also argue that public education is a right of all persons protected by the Due Process and …

Motion For Leave To File Amicus Curiae Brief And Brief For The National Association For Public Defense And Kentucky Association Of Criminal Defense Lawyers As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioner, Sneed V. Burress (U.S. March 24, 2017) (No. 16-8047)., Janet Moore

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Wade & Bolton: Fundamental Legal Errors And Dangerous Implications, Robert M. Byrn

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

Justice For Noncitizens: A Case For Reforming The Immigration Legal System, Anna Paden Carson

VA Engage Journal

The immigration legal system exists as a function of the executive branch rather than the judicial branch, and many of the constitutional rights guaranteed in a judicial court do not continue into the immigration legal sphere. Noncitizen defendants in the immigration court system are not guaranteed the same due process rights or right to appointed counsel as United States citizens, which severely limits their chance of a successful outcome. Moreover, while many noncitizens await their trials in these courts, they are often placed in one of the 234 immigration detention facilities across the nation, which further exacerbates the direness of …

The Right To Abortion: Expansion Of The Right To Privacy Through The Fourteenth Amendment, David Goldenberg

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Incorporation: A Consideration Of The Judicial Function In State And Federal Constitutional Interpretation, Richard Boldt, Dan Friedman

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Concealed Motives: Rethinking Fourteenth Amendment And Voting Rights Challenges To Felon Disenfranchisement, Lauren Latterell Powell

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Felon disenfranchisement provisions are justified by many Americans under the principle that voting is a privilege to be enjoyed only by upstanding citizens. The provisions are intimately tied, however, to the country’s legacy of racism and systemic disenfranchisement and are at odds with the values of American democracy. In virtually every state, felon disenfranchisement provisions affect the poor and communities of color on a grossly disproportionate scale. Yet to date, most challenges to the provisions under the Equal Protection Clause and Voting Rights Act have been unsuccessful, frustrating proponents of re-enfranchisement and the disenfranchised alike.

In light of those failures, …

Compliance Requires Inspection: The Failure Of Gender Equal Pay Efforts In The United States, Renalia Dubose

Mercer Law Review

On Friday, January 29, 2016, President Barack Obama expanded a previous executive order by requiring the Department of Labor to collect wage data based on gender, race, and ethnicity from contractors with at least 100 employees doing business with the federal government. That previous executive order was the April 8, 2014 Executive Order 13665 entitled Non-Retaliation for Disclosure of Compensation Information and was designed to amend the September 24, 1965 Executive Order 11246 entitled Equal Employment Opportunity by President Lyndon Johnson. Executive Order 13665 was issued to require transparency concerning compensation among private entities doing business with the federal government …

American Nationals And Interstitial Citizenship, Rose Cuison Villazor

Fordham Law Review

Citizenship scholarship is pervasively organized around a binary concept: there is citizenship (which is acquired at birth or through naturalization) and there is noncitizenship (which accounts for everyone else). This Article argues that this understanding is woefully incomplete. In making this argument, I tell the story of noncitizen nationals, a group referred to by this Article as American nationals. Judicially constructed in the 1900s, and codified by Congress in 1940, American nationals possess some of the rights inherent to citizenship, such as the right to enter and reside in the United States without a visa. Yet, they do not have …

Undressing Naked Economic Protectionism, Rational Basis Review, And Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection, Robert M. Ahlander

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.