Supreme Court of the United States Commons^™

Immigration Policy And The Rhetoric Of Reform: “Deport Felons, Not Families,” Moncrieffe V. Holder, Children At The Border, And Idle Promises, Terri R. Day, Leticia M. Diaz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Mirandizing Terrorism Suspects? The Public Safety Exception, The Rescue Doctrine, And Implicit Analogies To Self-Defense, Defense Of Others, And Battered Woman Syndrome, Bruce Ching

Journal Articles

This article argues that in creating the public safety exception to the Miranda requirements, the Supreme Court implicitly analogized to the criminal law doctrines of self-defense and defense of others. Thus, examining the justifications of self-defense and defense of others can be useful in determining the contours of the public safety exception and the related "rescue doctrine" exception. In particular, the battered woman syndrome -- which is recognized in a majority of the states and has been successfully invoked by defendants in some self-defense cases -- could provide a conceptual analogue for arguments about whether law enforcement officers were faced …

Inferiority Complex: Should State Courts Follow Lower Federal Court Precedent On The Meaning Of Federal Law?, Amanda Frost

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The conventional wisdom is that state courts need not follow lower federal court precedent when interpreting federal law. Upon closer inspection, however, the question of how state courts should treat lower federal court precedent is not so clear. Although most state courts now take the conventional approach, a few contend that they are obligated to follow the lower federal courts, and two federal courts of appeals have declared that their decisions are binding on state courts. The Constitution’s text and structure send mixed messages about the relationship between state and lower federal courts, and the Supreme Court has never squarely …

Do Conservative Justices Favor Wall Street: Ideology And The Supreme Court's Securities Regulation Decisions, Marco Ventoruzzo, Johannes W. Fedderke

Faculty Scholarship

The appointment of Supreme Court justices is a politically-charged process and the "ideology" (or "judicial philosophy") of the nominees is perceived as playing a potentially relevant role in their future decision-making. It is fairly easy to intuit that ideology somehow enters the analysis with respect to politically divisive issues such as abortion and procreative rights, sexual conduct, freedom of speech, separation of church and state, gun control, procedural protections for the accused in criminal cases, governmental powers. Many studies have tackled the question of the relevance of the ideology of the justices or appellate judges on these issues, often finding …

Supreme Court Jurisprudence Of The Personal In City Of Los Angeles V. Patel, Brian L. Owsley

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Recently, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision in City of Los Angeles v. Patel striking down a city ordinance that required hotel and motel owners to make their guest registries available to police officers whenever requested to do so. Although the Court’s opinion in Patel simply affirmed the Ninth Circuit’s finding that the ordinance was unconstitutional, the Court could have used Patel to readdress the third-party doctrine, which establishes that “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.” Patel provided a vehicle for the Court to do so, particularly because …

No More Shortcuts: Protect Cell Site Location Data With A Warrant Requirement, Lauren E. Babst

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

In modern society, the cell phone has become a virtual extension of most Americans, managing all kinds of personal and business matters. Modern cell tower technology allows cell service providers to accumulate a wealth of individuals’ location information while they use their cell phones, and such data is available for law enforcement to obtain without a warrant. This is problematic under the Fourth Amendment, which protects reasonable expectations of privacy. Under the Katz two-prong test, (1) individuals have an actual, subjective expectation of privacy in their cell site location data, and (2) society is prepared to acknowledge that expectation as …

The Supreme Court’S 2014-2015 Term: The Year The Administrative State Trembled, Joel Alicea

Scholarly Articles

The opinions of the Supreme Court’s most recent term indicate that the court’s conservative justices are rethinking the scope and power of the administrative state.

In The Beginning There Was None: Supreme Court Review Of State Criminal Prosecutions, Kevin C. Walsh

Scholarly Articles

This Article challenges the unquestioned assumption of all contemporary scholars of federal jurisdiction that section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 authorized Supreme Court appellate review of state criminal prosecutions. Section 25 has long been thought to be one of the most important provisions of the most important jurisdictional statute enacted by Congress. The Judiciary Act of 1789 gave concrete institutional shape to a federal judiciary only incompletely defined by Article III. And section 25 supplied a key piece of the structural relationship between the previously existing state court systems and the new federal court system that Congress constructed …

Addressing Three Problems In Commentary On Catholics At The Supreme Court By Reference To Three Decades Of Catholic Bishops' Amicus Briefs, Kevin C. Walsh

Law Faculty Publications

Much commentary about Catholic Justices serving on the Supreme Court suffers from three related shortcomings: (1) episodic, one-case-at-a-time commentary; (2) asymmetric causal attributions resulting from inattention to cases in which Catholic Justices vote for outcomes opposite those advocated by the Catholic Bishops' Conference; and (3) inattention to broader jurisprudential and ideological factors. This article uses an overlooked resource to identify and counteract these shortcomings. It assesses the votes of the Justices-Catholic and non-Catholic alike-in the full set of cases from the Rehnquist Court and the Roberts Court (through June 2014) in which the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops filed …

Defamation And The Government Employee: Redefining Who Constitutes A Public Official, Jeffrey Omar Usman

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Enforcing The Fifteenth Amendment, Ellen D. Katz

Book Chapters

This chapter examines efforts to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment in the period from United States v. Reese through Shelby County v. Holder. Reese and Shelby County expose the most rigorous stance the Court has employed to review congressional efforts to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment, while the years in-between show Congress and the Court working more in tandem, at times displaying remarkable indifference to blatant violations of the Fifteenth Amendment, and elsewhere working cooperatively to help vindicate the Amendment’s promise. Defying simple explanation, this vacillation between cooperation and resistance captures the complex and deeply consequential way concerns about federal power, …

We Should Use 'Cause Of Action' More Carefully: A Review Of John F. Preis, How The Federal Cause Of Action Relates To Rights, Remedies, And Jurisdiction, Lumen N. Mulligan

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Justice Ginsburg's Umbrella, Ellen D. Katz

Book Chapters

Near the end of her dissent in Shelby County v. Holder, Justice Ginsburg suggested a simple analogy to illustrate why the regional protections of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) were still necessary. She wrote that “[t]hrowing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

On Class-Not-Race, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Book Chapters

Throughout the civil rights era, strong voices have argued that policy interventions should focus on class or socioeconomic status, not race. At times, this position-taking has seemed merely tactical, opportunistic, or in bad faith. Many who have opposed race-based civil rights interventions on this basis have not turned around to support robust efforts to reduce class-based or socioeconomic inequality. That sort of opportunism is interesting and important for understanding policy debates in civil rights, but it is not my focus here. I am more interested here in the people who clearly mean it. For example, President Lyndon Baines Johnson—who can …

Free Expression, In-Group Bias, And The Court's Conservatives: A Critique Of The Epstein-Parker-Segal Study, Todd E. Pettys

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

P-Values, Priors, And Procedure In Antidiscrimination Law, Jason R. Bent

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Nation Of Widening Opportunities: The Civil Rights Act At 50, Ellen D. Katz, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Books

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an extraordinary achievement of law, politics, and human rights. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Act's passage, it is appropriate to reflect on the successes and failures of the civil rights project reflected in the statute, as well as on its future directions. This volume represents an attempt to assess the Civil Rights Act's legacy.

On October 11, 2013, a diverse group of civil rights scholars met at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor to assess the interpretation, development, and administration of civil rights law in the five decades since …

Certiorari And The Marriage Equality Cases, Carl Tobias

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

Marriage equality has come to much of the nation. Over 2014, many district court rulings invalidated state proscriptions on same- sex marriage, while four appeals courts upheld these decisions. However, the Sixth Circuit reversed district judgments which struck down bans in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. Because that appellate opinion created a patchwork of differing legal regimes across the country, this Paper urges the Supreme Court to clarify marriage equality by reviewing that determination this Term.

The Roberts Court And Penumbral Federalism, Edward Cantu

Faculty Works

For several decades the Court has invoked “state dignity” to animate federalism reasoning in isolated doctrinal contexts. Recent Roberts Court decisions suggest that a focus on state dignity, prestige, status, and similar ethereal concepts — which derive from a “penumbral” reading of the Tenth Amendment — represent the budding of a different doctrinal approach to federalism generally. This article terms this new approach “penumbral federalism,” an approach less concerned with delineating state from federal regulatory turf, and more concerned with maintaining the states as viable competitors for the respect and loyalty of the citizenry.

After fleshing out what “penumbral federalism” …

Will Uncooperative Federalism Survive Nfib?, Abigail R. Moncrieff, Jonathan Dinerstein

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In the end, the Supreme Court's federalism jurisprudence seems to run contrary to its stated goals. The New Federalism era, up to and including NFIB, creates an incentive for the national government to flex its own muscles more, not less. Maybe that result will be good for voters' clarity and for uniformity of national policy, but it is not good for uncooperative federalism or for states' autonomy—the values that the Supreme Court seems to be trying to protect.