Category Archives: Constitutional Law

Getting to Grips with Discrimination

Jan 31, 2017 Aziz HuqConstitutional Law

Aziz Huq

Since the mid-1970s, the Supreme Court has insisted with increasing fervor upon an anticlassification norm as the central principle of Equal Protection law. In the past decade, alternative legal solutions to inequality have emerged as competitors with the anticlassification norm. In 2009, the late Justice Scalia observed, in his concurrence in Ricci v. DeStefano, that the disparate impact theory of liability available under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act required employers to categorize by race. Given the priority of colorblindness, Justice Scalia observed, it might therefore fall afoul of the Equal Protection Clause. Two basic instruments for racial equality—both a part of the federal statutory law of antidiscrimination for a half century—suddenly seemed in collision course. This conflict is at the heart of Deborah Hellman’s excellent new article.

The conflict between anticlassification and disparate impact has receded more recently. In a June 2015 decision interpreting the Fair Housing Act, Justice Kennedy brokered an uneasy truce. Yet the pressing and fundamental theoretical question raised by Justice Scalia’s Ricci concurrence has not dissipated: How is it that anticlassification and disparate impact can both purport to mitigate racial discrimination, and yet conflict? Is the disagreement a divergence of tactics—a question of whether one thinks one can get beyond race without accounting for race? Is it the result of a divide between ideal and nonideal theory? Or does it represent a more profound divide over the nature and substance of equality? Continue reading "Getting to Grips with Discrimination"

Mapping the Fault Lines of Normative Constitutional Theory

Dec 15, 2016 Michael B. CoenenConstitutional Law

Michael B. Coenen

How should courts decide constitutional cases? The question has been a long-time favorite of judges and scholars, who have defined, developed, and defended a variety of approaches to the project of constitutional adjudication. Some such approaches privilege the “original public meaning” of the constitutional text; others emphasize judicial precedent; others require close attention to moral considerations; others focus on welfare maximization; others place weight on majoritarian preferences; others look to social movements; others privilege representation reinforcement; and countless others require a complex weighing of these and other factors against one another. When it comes to the application and development of constitutional law, different theorists think that different types of considerations should guide the decision-making inquiry to different degrees, and a great deal of constitutional scholarship centers on the question of how these various considerations should bring themselves to bear on the resolution of constitutional cases.

But the disagreements among constitutional theorists run deeper than the question of how to decide cases; scholars also disagree about how to evaluate the merits of a given decision-making approach. One cannot defend one’s preferred method of constitutional adjudication without identifying reasons why that method is preferable to others. And to identify these reasons, one must have an account of what a successful approach to constitutional adjudication achieves. Should we value methodologies that consistently produce substantively desirable judicial outcomes? Should we value methodologies that best reflect the Constitution’s status as written law ratified by “We the People”? Should we value methodologies that constrain the power of unelected judges? Should we value methodologies that adhere to conventional understandings of “what the law is”? And so on. Different approaches to constitutional decision-making will look more or less attractive depending on the criteria against which we evaluate them. And different people favor different approaches in part because they disagree as to what those criteria should be.

Andrew Coan’s illuminating new article is about this second set of questions—questions that go to what Coan calls the “normative foundations” of constitutional theory. These questions, as Coan readily concedes, are by no means unfamiliar to constitutional lawyers; scholars routinely identify criteria for evaluating a decision-making methodology and, in the course of doing so, have very often set out to defend the relevance of the criteria they use. But what Coan’s article aims to provide is a systematic examination of the competing sets of “first principles” from which different theories of constitutional decision-making begin. Coan’s goal, in other words, is to survey the existing landscape of normative constitutional theory with an eye toward describing and evaluating the various types of reasons and arguments that constitutional theorists regard as relevant to the choice among decision-making methodologies. Continue reading "Mapping the Fault Lines of Normative Constitutional Theory"

Scalia’s Jurisdiction

Nov 14, 2016 Richard M. ReConstitutional Law

Richard M. Re

Chief Justice John Marshall once veered toward tautology in asserting that the Supreme Court “must take jurisdiction, if it should.” In context, Marshall seemed to be saying that the Court’s jurisdiction is properly set by actors other than itself, such as Congress or the Constitution’s drafters and ratifiers. Marshall therefore concluded that for the Court to either “decline the exercise of jurisdiction which is given,” or “usurp that which is not given,” would equally “be treason to the constitution.”

Yet the Court is often called on to construe the amorphous jurisdictional provisions of the Constitution, as well as federal statutes, and those efforts frequently require new, difficult judgments. So discretion has a way of working its way into even the most staunchly formalist efforts to ascertain federal jurisdiction, as most famously argued in a seminal paper by David Shapiro over thirty years ago. Continue reading "Scalia’s Jurisdiction"

Recovering Forgotten Struggles Over the Constitutional Meaning of Equality

Oct 6, 2016 Helen NortonConstitutional Law

Helen Norton

Legal history can help us overcome the distortions of time and distance that too often obscure our understanding of struggles both past and present. Katie Eyer’s Ideological Drift and the Forgotten History of Intent exemplifies this kind of legal history. Through painstaking analysis of a century of equal protection decisions by the Supreme Court, she seeks to explain a “perplexing feature of the Court’s early 1970s jurisprudence: the Court’s race liberals’ failure to pursue effects-based approaches to Equal Protection liability at a time when such approaches were gaining credence elsewhere.”

In Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229 (1976), for example, the Court held that the Constitution does not forbid the government’s facially neutral actions that create racial disparities, even if such disparities have the effect of reinforcing traditional racial hierarchies. Rejecting a challenge to the District of Columbia’s examination for police officers that had the effect of disproportionately excluding African-American applicants, the Court held that the equal protection clause addresses only intentionally discriminatory government actions. No member of the Court—including Justices Brennan and Marshall—dissented from this constitutional holding. Continue reading "Recovering Forgotten Struggles Over the Constitutional Meaning of Equality"

A “Follow the Money” Approach to Separation of Powers

Sep 7, 2016 Charles ShanorConstitutional Law

Charles Shanor

This year has featured no shortage of excellent doctrinal pieces in constitutional law—so many that I couldn’t choose among them. This article is different: more political science than law, although it does focus on separation of powers. Many Jotwell readers may not have read it. That’s unfortunate. It deserves follow-up work by constitutional law scholars.

Agency Finance in The Age of Executive Government, by Michael Greve and Christopher DeMuth, opens up a wide agenda for constitutional scholarship premised less on doctrinal issues, and more on a series of interlacing fiscal developments that have shifted power to the executive branch. The burgeoning administrative state, the continuing shift towards executive governance, and the lack of political accountability of administrative agencies have long been academic legal literature fodder. Most of these articles explore the doctrinal and policy nuances of the dividing lines between the political branches. The courts, meanwhile, have occasionally cabined the executive with an institutionally appropriate focus on fact-specific and precedent-based analysis. But both the academy and the judiciary are fundamentally inadequate to the task of cabining the executive branch. Neither can substitute for congressional control over and channeling of executive action, the main control built into the constitutional scheme of separated federal powers. Congressional retreat has facilitated executive creep. Continue reading "A “Follow the Money” Approach to Separation of Powers"

Constitutional Officers: A Very Close Reading

Jul 28, 2016 William BaudeConstitutional Law

William Baude

Everybody should read the Constitution. But some of us find more in its text than others. In a series of underappreciated pieces,¹ Professor Seth Barrett Tillman may have found an intricate and startlingly coherent set of principles about government structure — as well as a reminder to take the Constitution’s words more seriously than we do.

Much of the Constitution (especially the original 1789 document) deals with structure. It creates government institutions, defines their powers, and regulates their membership. In the course of doing so, many of the Constitution’s provisions deal with individuals who hold government office – officers. Indeed, if you start ticking off references to “office” and “officers” as you read through the Constitution, you may notice two things: There are a lot of them, and many of them are phrased differently. Continue reading "Constitutional Officers: A Very Close Reading"

Star Wars, Science Fiction and the Constitution

Jun 27, 2016 Ilya SominConstitutional Law

Ilya Somin

Cass Sunstein is one of America’s leading legal scholars. Both his work generally and his book about Star Wars specifically have attracted enormous attention from both academics and the general public. But one theme of his new book, The World According to Star Wars, highlights an area that is often neglected: the depiction of constitutional issues in science fiction and fantasy.

Both legal scholars and other commentators on law and public policy would do well to pay more attention to this subject. Far more people watch science fiction movies and read science fiction books than pay attention to serious nonfiction commentary on political and constitutional issues. Whether we like it or not, these products may well have an impact on public attitudes, a possibility supported by some social science research.¹ They also often reflect the concerns of their time. Continue reading "Star Wars, Science Fiction and the Constitution"

A Right to Participate in the Electoral Process

Apr 29, 2016 Jessica Bulman-PozenConstitutional Law

Jessica Bulman-Pozen

In McCutcheon v. FEC, Chief Justice Roberts described campaign contributions as a form of participation in electoral politics. His plurality opinion invalidating aggregate limits on contributions to federal candidates concluded that “[c]onstituents have the right to support candidates who share their views and concerns” and that representatives’ responsiveness to such concerns “is key to the very concept of self-governance through elected officials.” As commentators quickly noticed, there was something curious about this paean to democratic representation: the “constituents” the Chief Justice described were not eligible to vote for most of the candidates they were funding. They were not, in other words, constituents in the usual sense. Was this a mere “oops”? A deliberate, if subtle, move to reshape campaign finance law? Something else?

Robert Yablon’s insightful new article, Voting, Spending, and the Right to Participate, offers a fresh approach to this conundrum. Rather than dismiss McCutcheon’s arguments about political participation as rhetoric or subterfuge, Yablon engages the opinion’s suggestion that “[t]here is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders,” a right that may be exercised through the franchise or through monetary contributions. What would it mean, he asks, for our disparate law concerning voting and spending to instead conceptualize both as forms of participation in the electoral process? Continue reading "A Right to Participate in the Electoral Process"

The Value and Limits of Free Exercise Doctrinalism

Apr 11, 2016 Paul HorwitzConstitutional Law

Paul Horwitz

In recent years, a lot of the best and most interesting scholarship on law and religion has been on the theoretical side. A good deal of thought and ink has been spent, for example, asking whether religion is “special” for purposes of constitutional law, or whether there is not (or no longer) a sufficient or justifiable distinction between religious beliefs and other closely held beliefs. Certainly that question can have a powerful payoff in the law, but for the most part writers addressing that question have treated it at a higher level of abstraction, and acknowledged that the question might be viewed differently and answered more prosaically with the specific text, history, and jurisprudence of the United States Constitution in mind.

Now, it appears, we are back to doctrine—and, more specifically, free exercise doctrine, whether constitutional or, and perhaps especially, statutory. The two pieces discussed here—Frederick Mark Gedicks’s Identifying ‘Substantial’ Burdens: How Courts May (and Why They Must) Judge Burdens on Religion under RFRA, and Michael A. Helfand’s Identifying Substantial Burdens—are fine examples of the phenomenon. Continue reading "The Value and Limits of Free Exercise Doctrinalism"

The U.S. Supreme Court and Humble Opinion Writing

Mar 2, 2016 Mark KendeConstitutional Law

Mark Kende

American politics is increasingly polarized. The New York Times recently published an article listing all of the people and organizations that Donald Trump has insulted during his Presidential campaign so far. Republicans and Democrats get in trouble just for working together in Congress. This makes the U.S. Supreme Court an especially interesting institution right now. Though unelected, it is made up of Republican and Democratic appointees who decide important constitutional and other cases together. Professor Eric Berger, of the University of Nebraska School of Law, has written an important law review article addressing a related problem that has emerged on the Court: a tendency towards “absolutism” in its judicial opinions. So, has political polarization somehow carried over to the Court? If yes, what are the explanations and solutions?

Professor Berger’s article is well written, nicely organized, deeply researched, and comprehensively analyzed. Moreover, his article shows the value of traditional doctrinal legal scholarship, though the article includes abundant theory as well. The article was published before Chief Justice Roberts’ dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. __ (2015), where Roberts wrote that gay people may celebrate the decision, but added derisively that the majority’s decision has “nothing to do with the Constitution.” Ironically, the point of Roberts’s dissent was the lack of humility in Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. So Professor Berger is on to something. The late Justice Scalia frequently, and with increasing harshness, skewered the opinions of the other justices. Continue reading "The U.S. Supreme Court and Humble Opinion Writing"