Category Archives: Constitutional Law
Oct 26, 2015 Michael B. CoenenConstitutional Law
David Landau & Rosalind Dixon,
Constraining Constitutional Change, 51
Wake Forest L. Rev. (forthcoming, 2015), available at
SSRN.
Changes to constitutional law do not always further beneficial ends. Sometimes, in fact, they do the opposite, with political actors utilizing mechanisms of constitutional law-making to consolidate their powers, entrench themselves in office, marginalize opposition, and otherwise undermine basic democratic values. Under these circumstances, a constitution can find itself in the perverse position of enabling rather than constraining abusive governmental action—subverting the very principles that it was originally intended to promote.
Comparative constitutional scholars have puzzled over the question of how to prevent “abusive constitutionalism” of this sort. To date, they have focused largely on mechanisms of constitutional amendment, considering ways in which an existing constitutional regime might structure its internal rules of change so as to frustrate a would-be autocrat’s anti-democratic amendment efforts. For example, timing requirements and supermajority voting procedures might render undesirable amendments especially difficult to enact; “eternity clauses” might safeguard essential provisions of a constitutional text against the threat of repeal; and the doctrine of “unconstitutional constitutional amendments” might empower courts to invalidate some forms of anti-democratic action after the fact. In these and other ways, amendment-restricting devices might manage to prevent at least some abusive amendments from ever taking effect.
These are important tools, which have enjoyed some measure of success in the real-world. But, as Professors David Landau and Rosalind Dixon point out in their wonderfully thought-provoking article, Constraining Constitutional Change, even a fail-safe set of constraints on the amendment process cannot eliminate the specter of abusive constitutional change. Looming in the background is the alternative and more daunting possibility of wholesale constitutional replacement—the outright rejection of an old constitutional order (including its amendment rules) in favor of a brand-new constitutional regime. Where amendment rules threaten to foil a would-be autocrat’s abusive constitutional ambitions, that official might simply choose to take the replacement route instead. Continue reading "Can Abusive Constitutionalism Be Checked?"
Sep 23, 2015 Pat GudridgeConstitutional Law
Gillian Metzger is convinced of “[t]he central importance of supervision.” “Supervision and other systemic features of governmental administration with which it overlaps … are fundamental in shaping how an agency operates and its success in meeting its … responsibilities.” (P. 1840.) Nonetheless “constitutional law stands largely aloft from the reality of administrative governance, with the Supreme Court refusing to subject systemic features of government operations to constitutional scrutiny.” (P. 1841.) This dissonance preoccupies Metzger’s article.
Available lines of thought, we know, lie right at hand. The Article II Take Care Clause jumps out as one beginning. Anti-delegation worries, originating in structural preoccupations, suggest another accessible constitutional skein. Metzger’s observations drawing out these threads make for easy reading. (Pp. 1874-1904.) The problem, she thinks, lies largely with courts and their adjudicative inhibitions. In both administrative and constitutional law, ideas of review, “cases” and “controversies,” parties to disputes, resolution and finality, and so on—all work against thinking through matters of system, supervision, “rightful hierarchy,” and so on. Judges are inclined to start with—are prone to hesitating absent—investigations of individual instances. Although she maps possible occasions for taking up questions of supervision directly, Professor Metzger acknowledges that there’s not much chance of provoking large-scale change in judicial orientations (and maybe shouldn’t be). Her several discussions, here too, are searching and extensive, thoughtful and clear. (P. 1859-70, 1904-09, 1914-18.) Continue reading "Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me"
Aug 7, 2015 Charles ShanorConstitutional Law
An essay by Heather Gerken and James Dawson entitled Living Under Someone Else’s Law, 36 Democracy Journal 42 (2015) caught my attention several months ago. The topic was horizontal federalism, and the context was “spillovers,” extraterritorial effects that regulations of one state have on other states. Spillovers do not intentionally discriminate against a state’s neighbors or their citizens, do not favor insiders (citizens or businesses), and do not erect protectionist barriers at state lines. But spillovers have consequences, sometimes annoying, sometimes costly, for neighboring states.
Spillover examples include California emissions controls, Colorado marijuana legalization, and red state permissive gun-control regulations. Tighter emissions controls by California raised car prices to buyers in all states as national companies produced cars to comply with California rules. This adversely affected auto buyers elsewhere as surely as industrial pollution affected states downwind of the pollution. Likewise, recreational marijuana legalization increased drug trafficking across state lines, upsetting Colorado’s neighbors. Permissive gun sale laws in red states permit citizens in blue states to cross state lines, buy guns, and tote them home. Same-sex marriage bans in red states led, before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, to concern in blue states: would their same-sex marriages be recognized (given ‘full faith and credit’) in neighboring states? The authors cleverly call this situation a “spillunder,” where under-recognition of one state’s law poses potential problems for its citizens when they are in other states.
In a longer article, The Political Safeguards of Horizontal Federalism, Gerken and co-author Ari Holtzblatt examine the underdeveloped legal literature and doctrinal signposts concerning spillovers and compare this virtual vacuum with the extensive literature concerning vertical federalism. They then suggest an approach to horizontal federalism premised on insights from vertical federalism scholarship. Continue reading "Spillover Federalism"
Jul 10, 2015 William BaudeConstitutional Law
Richard M. Re,
Promising the Constitution, 110
Nw. U. L. Rev. (forthcoming, 2016), available at
SSRN.
Many questions about the meaning of the Constitution are disputed. But however we answer those questions, at some point most of us come to a different question: so what? Why do those words on a page have any moral grip on the three-dimensional world of human beings? In one of my favorite new articles of the summer, Promising the Constitution, Professor Richard Re takes on this question and its implications. The answer, he says, is the constitutional oath, which simultaneously commands much less and much more than many have assumed. (Full disclosure: Re is a friend and former classmate.)
Re’s article makes three major contributions. The first is to argue that the oath is what gives the Constitution normative force in our world. We should see the oath not as an empty political ritual, but as a solemn assertion of a promise, with all the moral force that a promise carries. Of course, many philosophers are skeptical about the moral force of promises; but Re surmounts their objections by turning to the democratic context of the oath. While immoral promises and coerced promises might lack moral weight, the constitutional oath today should be seen as neither. Continue reading "The Power of Promises"
Jun 15, 2015 Ilya SominConstitutional Law
Lochner v. New York (1905) has long been one of the most widely reviled decisions in Supreme Court history. The Court’s 1905 ruling striking down a New York maximum hours law for bakers under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been routinely denounced as callous, unjust, and based on blatantly fallacious legal reasoning. It is one of the leading members of the “anti-canon” of important Supreme Court decisions that almost all right-thinking people believe to be wrong. Thomas Colby and Peter Smith’s important new article argues that the longstanding dominance of this view of Lochner has begun to erode, at least among conservatives.
Colby and Smith provide an excellent account of why this trend began, and how it compares with previous developments in conservative and liberal legal thought. As they emphasize, even when the anti-Lochner consensus was at its height, liberals and conservatives opposed the decision for different reasons. For liberals, it became the leading symbol of an era in which the Supreme Court improperly intervened to shield “laissez-faire” economic policy against government interventions intended to protect workers and the poor. Especially after the New Deal revolution in constitutional law, they drew the lesson that Lochner was wrong because courts should generally stay out of “economic” issues, especially in cases where judicial intervention is sought for the benefit of the wealthy and business interests. Continue reading "A Revival of Lochner?"
May 8, 2015 Helen NortonConstitutional Law
Genevieve Lakier,
The Invention of Low-Value Speech,
Harv. L. Rev. (forthcoming), available at
SSRN.
Bedrock First Amendment law calls for the Supreme Court to apply strict scrutiny to the government’s content-based regulation of speech. Except when it doesn’t. Over time, the Court has identified several categories of expression as sufficiently “low value” to trigger a First Amendment analysis less suspicious than strict scrutiny, thus enabling greater government regulation of that speech. These categories have included commercial speech, true threats, incitement to imminent illegal action, “fighting words,” obscenity, defamation, fraud, child pornography, and speech that is integral to criminal conduct. This subject, and what we think we know about it, is the focus of Genevieve Lakier’s valuable new article, The Invention of Low-Value Speech. Especially useful and novel for its strong historical look at the long first era of First Amendment law prior to the twentieth century, it is also important as a refutation of the Court’s current approach that purports to rely entirely on historical analysis to identify categories of low-value speech.
Taking a categorical approach to First Amendment protection, of course, requires a methodology for determining which speech belongs in which categories. In its decision in United States v. Stevens, 559 U.S. 460 (2010), the Supreme Court surprised many observers with its insistence that historical tradition alone has driven its determination that a category of expression is of only low First Amendment value. The Stevens Court struck down a federal statute that prohibited the commercial creation, sale, or possession of depictions of animal cruelty. In so doing, the Court rejected as “startling and dangerous” what it characterized as the government’s proposed “free-floating test for First Amendment coverage . . . [based on] an ad hoc balancing of relative social costs and benefits.” To be sure, the Court started by acknowledging that, “[a]s the Government correctly notes, this Court has often described historically unprotected categories of speech as being ‘of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.’” The Court went on to assert, however:
But such descriptions are just that – descriptive. They do not set forth a test that may be applied as a general matter to permit the Government to imprison any speaker so long as his speech is deemed valueless or unnecessary, or so long as an ad hoc calculus of costs and benefits tilts in a statute’s favor. When we have identified categories of speech as fully outside the protection of the First Amendment, it has not been on the basis of a simple cost-benefit analysis. . . . [but we have instead] grounded [our] analysis in a previously recognized, long-established category of unprotected speech, and our subsequent decisions have shared this understanding.
Stevens thus made the descriptive clam that the Court has relied only on historical analysis to identify categories of low-value speech (i.e., that it has focused on whether courts have historically treated the contested expression as low-value), rather than on balancing analyses that identify contested expression as “low-value” when its threatened harms outweigh its capacity to further key free speech values. Continue reading "How Do We Know When Speech is of Low Value?"
Apr 10, 2015 Jessica Bulman-PozenConstitutional Law
Alison L. LaCroix,
Continuity in Secession: The Case of the Confederate Constitution (forthcoming), available at
SSRN.
Secession has been back in the news of late. Hundreds of thousands of individuals across the country signed petitions seeking permission for their states to leave the United States after President Obama’s reelection; Governor Perry riffed on Texas’s departure from the Union “if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people”; and members of the Second Vermont Republic insist the Green Mountain State would be better off alone. Overseas, a bid for Scottish independence from the United Kingdom nearly prevailed last fall.
A curious feature of many contemporary secessionist movements is their claim to represent the real nation-state from which they seek to depart. The paradigmatic secession case involves a self-consciously distinct national group trying to throw off the yoke of the state encompassing it. But many of today’s movements instead embrace the nation-state they would leave behind, insisting they are truer to its founding principles than the current regime. Alison LaCroix’s provocative and illuminating essay, Continuity in Secession: The Case of the Confederate Constitution, not only sheds light on the most important secessionist movement in American history, but also offers new purchase on this feature of contemporary law and politics. Continue reading "Secession, Then and Now"
Mar 16, 2015 Lyrissa B. LidskyConstitutional Law
In The First Amendment Bubble, Professor Amy Gajda comprehensively examines privacy threats posed by digital media and “quasi-journalists” and demonstrates how their intrusive practices threaten existing press freedoms. The law Gajda addresses is mainly tort law and First Amendment law. Through a wide-ranging survey of reported cases, she documents trial court judges’ growing reluctance to interpret First Amendment precedent to protect journalists who are sued for invasions of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, or other torts. She attributes this judicial reluctance to perceived and real changes within the media itself, including the rise of “quasi-journalists” unmoored by journalistic ethics or a sense of social responsibility, the growing use of invasive newsgathering technology, a tell-all culture enabled by social media, and competitive pressures to both sensationalize the news and present it to the public without benefit of editorial judgment.
Gajda warns that journalists have “pushed the envelope” of First Amendment freedoms so far that the First Amendment bubble may be about to burst. She documents the judicial backlash against journalists’ broad claims of constitutional protection by presenting hundreds of examples gleaned (mostly) from trial courts around the country. She argues convincingly that a legal strategy of pushing every First Amendment argument to its outer limits may backfire on journalists and news organizations, since courts increasingly lump legacy media with internet scandal mongers such as TheDirty.com, and become skeptical of media claims that they provide the public with newsworthy information. Continue reading "Privacy and the New Press"
Feb 24, 2015 Mark KendeConstitutional Law
Constitutional interpretation debates generally do not focus on legal pragmatism. They often match originalism against living constitutionalism. Several U.S. Supreme Court justices, such as Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas, have openly embraced originalism. Others, such as Justice Sonia Sotomayor, see the Constitution as an evolving document, sharing views similar to former Justice William Brennan (and perhaps to Ronald Dworkin’s moralism). Alternatively, several scholars, such as Thayer and Vermeule, argue that only “clearly” unconstitutional laws should be invalidated. In addition, “popular constitutionalists” such as Larry Kramer urge the Supreme Court to be restrained and allow constitutional interpretation and change, if any, to arise from the grass roots. But pragmatism is another important method of constitutional interpretation. Justice Stephen Breyer is the Court’s most prominent pragmatist. Pragmatism, however, is often criticized as an empty anti-theory.
Yet, Professors Michael Sullivan and Daniel Solove have provided a great service by authoring an essay which shows that judicial pragmatism is not theoretically rudderless—it has normative components. Sullivan also authored a valuable book about legal pragmatism. Though their essay addresses questions of legal philosophy, it has enormous significance for constitutional law as will be shown. Indeed, pragmatism may better describe the reality of the U.S. Supreme Court’s constitutional interpretive approach than the sophisticated theories mentioned above, as the Court’s hardest cases are often decided by policy and practical considerations. These considerations trump because the tough cases usually involve an ambiguous text and history, as well as conflicting judicial precedents. Sullivan and Solove accomplish their task by relying on the philosophical pragmatism of John Dewey, and other arguments, to question various components of prominent Judge Richard Posner’s legal pragmatism. They critique Judge Posner’s supposed value neutral consequentialism, his view of the democratic process, his conception of philosophizing, and what they see as Posner’s status quo conservatism on many issues. Sullivan and Solove advocate a more critical approach towards the status quo’s views of constitutional principles such as equality, liberty, justice, and the democracy that results. In short, Sullivan and Solove embrace a thicker notion of the good and of democracy than Judge Posner. Continue reading "Getting Theoretical About Judge Posner’s Legal Pragmatism (Thanks to John Dewey) and the Implications for Constitutional Interpretation"
Nov 5, 2014 Pat GudridgeConstitutional Law
Mr. Young means to test empirically the existence of “constitutional moments,” changes occurring outside formal processes of amendment that Bruce Ackerman has posited are important elements in the American constitutional progress. To this end, Young focuses Measure on the so-called Reconstruction “moment,” from the period preceding the 1866 congressional elections through 1868, the time range within which Ackerman discerns a structured process of profound commitment to a new racially open political, legal, and institutional order. (See Bruce Ackerman, We The People: Transformations 99-252 (1998).) Measure studies the front pages of some 600 newspapers, viewing 2,000 articles published between June 1, 1866 and December 31, 1866; 2,612 articles published between June 1, 1868 and December 31, 1868; 5,000 newspaper pages on which the word “constitution” appeared between January 1, 1866 and December 31, 1868; and 15,322 newspaper front pages published between June 1 and December 31 in 1866, 1868, 1870, 1872, and 1884. All told, Young takes into account 32,544,870 words. (See Table I, P. 2021.)
In 1866 and 1868, “results indicate empirical support for the hypothesis that Americans were paying attention to constitutional-level issues during these periods.” The newspaper coverage surveyed between 1866 and 1872 and then 1884 shows “support for both the notion that constitutional issues were of high salience during this period and that sustained attention to those issues spiked during certain key moments in 1866 and 1868.” “[E]vidence of both constitutional discourse and a gradual decline in the prevalence of that discourse over time” is “consistent the with predictions of Ackerman’s theory that sustained popular attention to constitutional politics peaks during transformative constitutional moments and then declines as normal politics once again take center stage.” (P. 2053.) “Had my results indicated either no evidence of constitutional discourse, or a constant level of such discourse across time, it would have called into question the entire theoretical superstructure of Ackerman’s work.” (PP. 2053-54.)
“[F]or all the millions of words and thousands of newspaper articles this Note analyzes,” Mr. Young concedes, “this is a rather modest conclusion.” “[T]here is nothing surprising about the fact that the media was paying attention to the passage of major constitutional amendments in the aftermath of a devastating civil war.” (P. 2053.) It’s not Young’s bottom line, however, that marks his effort as important. “[M]illions of words and thousands of newspaper articles”—no law student reads this much! How did he do that? Continue reading "Future Present?"
