Category Archives: Constitutional Law
Sep 26, 2014 Charles ShanorConstitutional Law
Why does our republic accept judgments invalidating decisions of presidents, congresses, and federal agencies? Why do state authorities elected by local constituents accept decisional overrides by federal judges? These questions, often called “the counter-majoritarian difficulty,” have drawn the attention of scholars for decades.
Professor Ronald Krotoszynski’s “The Unitary Executive and the Plural Judiciary: On the Potential Virtues of Decentralized Judicial Power,” casts new light, albeit indirectly, on this paradox. Descriptively, the article usefully examines the design parameters (constitutional, statutory, and procedural) of the federal judicial power. Normatively, it suggests hidden strengths to these parameters, which improve the quality and acceptance of judicial decisions that are often overlooked by analysts and reformers. Continue reading "Dispersing Judicial Power"
Aug 13, 2014 Ilya SominConstitutional Law
David R. Upham,
Interracial Marriage and the Original Understanding of the Privileges or Immunities Clause (2013), available at
SSRN.
Legislation banning interracial marriage has long played an important role in debates over originalism and constitutional interpretation. When such laws came under legal attack in the 1950s and 1960s, their seeming compatibility with originalism was emphasized by conservatives and segregationists as a justification for courts to uphold them.Since the Supreme Court invalidated laws banning interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia (1967), their apparent acceptability under the original meaning has been deployed by a very different set of commentators: opponents of originalism, most of them associated with the political left. For these critics, the compatibility of laws banning interracial marriage with originalism is not a reason to uphold them, but rather a reason to reject originalism itself. If originalist constitutional interpretation requires such an abhorrent result as upholding blatantly racist laws restricting marriage rights, then perhaps originalism itself is morally bankrupt.
Regardless of the purpose for which it is used, the originalist case for the constitutionality of laws banning interracial marriage seems initially strong. Public opposition to interracial marriage was widespread when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified and for decades thereafter. Numerous states, northern and southern, banned interracial marriage at the time the amendment was adopted, and the Supreme Court unanimously endorsed the constitutionality of anti-miscegenation laws in Pace v. Alabama in 1883. As late as 1968, a year after Loving, a Gallup poll showed that only 20% of Americans approved of interracial marriage between blacks and whites. This and other similar evidence helps explain the longstanding conventional wisdom that the result in Loving cannot be justified on originalist grounds.
In his recent unpublished paper, “Interracial Marriage and the Original Understanding of the Privileges or Immunities Clause,” Professor David Upham has produced the most far-reaching challenge to that conventional wisdom so far. The few previous originalist defenses of Loving, such as an important 2012 article by Steven Calabresi and Andrea Matthews, do not consider as wide a range of evidence. Moreover, Calabresi and Matthews concede that the “original intent” of the amendment and the expectations of the public were consistent with the constitutionality of laws banning interracial marriage, arguing only that the Amendment’s “original public meaning” cuts against those laws. Continue reading "Originalism and Interracial Marriage"
Jul 14, 2014 William BaudeConstitutional Law
It is a rare achievement to write about a case in the constitutional law canon and tell us something we did not know. This is the achievement of John Stinneford’s recent article, The Illusory Eighth Amendment. Despite its title, the most interesting part of Stinneford’s article is actually an analysis and critique of the Supreme Court’s famous decision in Miranda v. Arizona.
For those who neither study criminal procedure nor watch police procedurals, Miranda held that in the absence of a provable superior alternative: Continue reading "Understanding Prophylactic Supreme Court Decisions"
Jun 18, 2014 Mark KendeConstitutional Law
Deborah N. Pearlstein,
Law at the End of War, 99
Minn. L. Rev. — (forthcoming 2014), available at
SSRN.
The United States has formally fought a “war on terror” since 9/11, but a key question is whether it will ever end. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004), for example, the U.S. Supreme Court essentially pronounced that enemy combatants in Guantanamo could be held for the “duration of hostilities.” It is not clear, however, when that will occur, especially since the war is principally against a non-state group, Al Qaeda, bent on terrorizing the U.S. for as long as the group survives. As Professor Deborah Pearlstein shows in her important new article, Law at the End of War, U.S. Supreme Court decisions contain language that has been interpreted to mean that when a war ends is a political question. Marshaling U.S. Supreme Court precedents, international law, the related law of armed conflict, and public policy interests, Pearlstein argues persuasively to the contrary.
One of Pearlstein’s central arguments is that the judiciary has long been willing to decide when a war has ceased. These determinations have major legal consequences, since war triggers the applicability of important statutes and conventions. For example, she counters conventional views regarding The Prize Cases, 67 U.S. 635 (1863), where the question was whether President Lincoln had the “right” to impose a naval blockade on southern ports after the Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter in 1861. While the Court said it “must be governed by the decisions and acts of the political department of the Government” on the question of “what degree of force the crisis demands,” she convincingly asserts that this simply means Lincoln had the power to decide to shoot back. The Court did not exclude itself from deciding whether war existed in light of the President’s actions. Indeed, the Court rejected executive branch arguments that it must abstain from such assessments, as a matter of international law, unless Congress formally declared war. Continue reading "The Battle Between Law and War"
May 19, 2014 Jack BeermannConstitutional Law
Emily J. Zackin, Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places: Why State Constitutions Contain America’s Positive Rights (Princeton University Press, 2013).
I am on the prowl. It’s 1 a.m. and I’ve been looking for Mr. (or Ms.) Rights all night. I’ve been hanging out in every Article of the Constitution of the United States and I have been deep into the pages of the United States Reports and the Federal Reporter. Oh, I have found plenty of negative rights, like the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment and the right not to be twice placed in jeopardy for the same criminal act. But I need something more positive in my life. I want those things that make a person happy, like medical care, clean air and water, good working conditions, and a good education for my kids. I want positive rights.
Even though I turn on my hundred-watt charm, the federal courts keep turning me down. Then the person next to me slaps a book on the bar and says, “Take a look at this. I think it’ll get you what you want—or at least what you need.” Continue reading "Looking for Mr. (or Ms.) Rights"
Apr 18, 2014 Paul HorwitzConstitutional Law
Steven D. Smith, The Jurisprudence of Denigration, U.C. Davis L. Rev (forthcoming, 2014), available at SSRN.
Steven D. Smith has written another characteristically challenging paper. I fear that the paper, “The Jurisprudence of Denigration,” will be accepted without cavil by those who tend to disagree with decisions like United States v. Windsor or Lawrence v. Texas, and rejected without hesitation by those who champion those decisions. Either move would be unfortunate. This is a paper that says something important about the nature of modern constitutional and moral rhetoric surrounding hot-button social issues, and the uneasy position of judges and scholars as they attempt to find legally serviceable language with which to address social controversies in real time.
The paper’s argument has wide-ranging implications but is blissfully clear and simple. In Windsor, Justice Kennedy argued that section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act was the product of “a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group”—that it came from a “purpose . . . to demean,” “injure,” and “disparage.” As Smith writes, “Justice Kennedy and the Court thereby in essence accused Congress—and, by implication, millions of Americans—of acting from pure malevolence.” This “extraordinary claim” forms part of a “discursive pattern” by judges and scholars that Smith calls “the discourse of denigration.” And it is wrong and dangerous. “Precisely contrary to its irenic and inclusivist intentions, by maintaining and contributing to that destructive discourse, the Supreme Court aggravates the conflict that is often described, with increasing accuracy, as the ‘culture wars.’”
At this point I can envision the supporters of Winsdor hastily yanking on the cord and seeking to get off the bus. But they should stick around, because Smith has some larger, interesting claims to make. Those claims do not require one to abandon support for Windsor or LGBT rights, but simply to ask how the Court gets there. Kennedy may have been arguing, Smith suggests, “that to disapprove of homosexual conduct is to declare or deem persons prone to such conduct to be in some sense lesser or inferior beings.” But that is a logical fallacy: “From the fact that a person is inclined to some behavior deemed immoral [by others], . . . it simply does not follow that the person is in any sense a lesser or inferior human being. And while those who disapprove of some behavior as immoral may believe that people who engage in the behavior are lesser human beings, they need not believe any such thing.” Even if supporters of DOMA and similar laws actually do regard gays and lesbians as “in some sense lesser human beings,” that still does not prove ineluctably that they are acting from a bare desire to harm those individuals. Continue reading "Denigration as Forbidden Conduct and Required Judicial Rhetoric"
Mar 21, 2014 Pat GudridgeConstitutional Law
In their beautifully clear essay, Duke Professors Bradley and Siegel argue that the clarity of constitutional terms—when we glimpse it—is a result of hard work, however implicit. Clarity turns on construction, the effortful identification and deployment of what we decide are apt presuppositions. Seemingly easy cases of constitutional interpretation and enforcement are, Bradley and Siegel think, therefore of a piece with hard cases. At work just below the surface, we discover the same repertoire of devices that lawyers, judges, and academics use in dealing with ambiguities, gaps, anachronism, history, or similar vagaries: senses of purpose or structure, concern for consistency with established readings, popular understandings, and so on. Circa 1980s cls (critical legal studies) discussions of constitutional law were pretty much right in this regard. “It is important to ask not only whether and why American interpreters regard themselves as bound by text that they deem clear,” they write, “but also when they deem the text clear. Text is not merely a fixed structure to be built upon…rather it is also something that is itself partly constructed and reconstructed.”
Are Blue Devils now Red Devils? Bradley and Siegel think not. They believe they are just clearing out confusion about the role of constitutional texts in constitutional thinking. Some theorists posit that constitutional texts as such figure mostly marginally—for example, as focal points within a largely common law analysis (Bradley and Siegel cite David Strauss) or as initial frameworks (they discuss Jack Balkin). But if we understand our readings of constitutional passages as involving the same hard work whether we reach clear conclusions or end indecisively, we may rightly characterize our approaches as strongly textual—as always closely engaging constitutional wordings, even if the literal texts never or hardly ever operate in our thinking in isolation. Professors Bradley and Siegel assemble a substantial list of exemplars in support. They include discussions of the word “Congress” in the First Amendment; Fifth Amendment reverse incorporation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause; the limited limits (so to speak) on the applicability of the Eleventh Amendment, and Lincoln’s reading of the Suspension Clause. Continue reading "Constructive Criticism"
Feb 14, 2014 Paul HorwitzConstitutional Law
James D. Nelson, Conscience, Incorporated, Mich. St. L. Rev. (forthcoming), available at SSRN.
Perhaps the single hottest issue in American law and religion right now is the dispute over the so-called “contraceptive mandate.” The Affordable Care Act requires employers to extend insurance coverage to include contraceptive care. It includes some exemptions for particular churches and other religious organizations, but the Obama administration has refused to extend that exemption too widely. A number of businesses or business owners have complained that this mandate violates “their” religious consciences and that, under the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment and/or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, an exemption is required. Key questions raised by the controversy include whether corporations have religious rights at all, whether the mandate constitutes a substantial burden, and whether the mandate is generally applicable or not. Lower court rulings are all over the map. The Supreme Court will hear two of those cases next month.
Articles on the contraceptive mandate are a growth industry right now but, with all due respect, few of them have said anything all that deep. Much of the work on this issue is still at the shadow-amicus-brief stage of legal doctrinalism, in which the first articles addressing a legal issue read like standard legal briefs lining up on one side of the issue or the other. There is some value in that for the litigants, and for those scholars who are rehearsing for amicus participation. But those articles really are just rehearsals, efforts to fight tomorrow’s battles with yesterday’s tools. Continue reading "Beyond Contraceptive Mandate Doctrinalism"
Jan 16, 2014 Mark TushnetConstitutional Law
Every once in a while you read an article that makes you smack your head and say, “Duh—this is so obvious (and obviously right)—that I can’t understand why I didn’t see it before.” That’s the mark of a terrific article. It says something that is obvious after you’ve read it, but that wasn’t at all obvious (to you, at least) before. Deborah Hellman’s article on the Supreme Court’s treatment of “avoiding corruption” as a justification for campaign finance regulation is terrific in that way.
According to the Court, the First Amendment limits the kinds of corruption that can be targeted by campaign finance regulation. Only quid pro quo corruption—the more or less direct exchange of money given to a candidate for the candidate’s vote or other action on a matter of interest to the donor—counts for First Amendment purposes. Professor Hellman points out that “corruption” is what she calls a “derivative concept.” That is, you can’t say that some activity “corrupts” an institution’s proper operation without specifying beforehand what that proper operation should be. After developing that point with examples from universities (nepotism is bad in hiring faculty members because academic departments are supposed to make decisions based on academic criteria, but preferential admission to selective public schools for siblings of a student already enrolled there might be permissible because of their overall goals), she turns to politics. Continue reading "Corruption, Partisan Gerrymandering, Theories of Democracy, and the Supreme Court"
Dec 4, 2013 Mark KendeConstitutional Law
Ittai Bar-Siman-Tov, Semi-Procedural Review, 6 Legisprudence 271 (Dec. 2012), available at SSRN.
The most famous problem in American constitutional law is the counter-majoritarian dilemma, which asserts that it’s troubling for an unelected U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate duly enacted laws. In a journal article, Semiprocedural Judicial Review, Israeli legal scholar Ittai Bar-Simon-Tov makes an important contribution to the scholarly debate over this dilemma, drawing partly on the jurisprudence of several national and trans-national courts. This global focus distinguishes his article from some similar earlier work by American law professor Dan Coenen. Tov’s theory preserves judicial review but also promotes deliberative democracy.
The article starts with evidence that various courts have found laws unconstitutional, or illegal, because the laws were adopted without sufficient deliberation, public consultation, legislative findings, notice, or other procedural protections. The author himself does not reject substantive review, but he argues that examining a law’s procedural context should also determine legality, especially when courts are engaged in proportionality analysis (e.g. the balancing of the state’s interest versus the individual’s burden). This addition of procedural to substantive review minimizes the counter-majoritarian dilemma by fostering thicker democratic processes. Continue reading "Can “Semi-Procedural Review” Help Solve the Problems of Constitutional Theory?"
