Category Archives: Constitutional Law
Nov 4, 2013 Charles ShanorConstitutional Law
Balance between judicial power to invalidate legislative and executive actions on constitutional grounds and judicial deference to democratic decision-making is critical to the success of the American legal system. Too much deference undermines fundamental constitutional norms; too little deference undermines representative government. It’s a common refrain of Supreme Court dissents, by both conservative and liberal Justices, that the Court has arrogantly refused to defer—or slavishly deferred—to the other branches of government.
Stepping into this vortex, Judge Richard Posner has written a cogent, circumspect, sometimes quirky article on the historical trajectory of “Thayerian deference” from the 1890s to the 1970s. His history elucidates what constitutional deference encompassed in this period and why that theory of deference met its demise. Posner wisely marries the decline of such deference with the rise of constitutional theory. Continue reading "Judicial Deference Defrocked"
Oct 4, 2013 Thomas E. BakerConstitutional Law
Cass R. Sunstein, Constitutional Personae (preliminary draft July 25, 2013), available at SSRN.
Several years ago, I attended an AALS program featuring Cass Sunstein as a panelist. He spoke last, about an hour into the session. The moderator introduced him to knowing laughter by announcing, “Our last presenter is Cass Sunstein, who has just written another book . . . while he has been waiting to speak this morning.” Sunstein is an original, provocative thinker and a remarkably prolific writer: the kind of scholar who shuttles from the University of Chicago to Harvard University, the kind of public intellectual who takes time off to run OIRA (Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) in the Obama Administration.
Sunstein writes—a lot!—about administrative law and constitutional law. In my own field, constitutional law, Sunstein always delivers intriguing insights. He does it again in this draft article. Conceptual articles like this one remind me of the economic models I studied in college: they are abstracted from reality but help us to better understand it. The SSRN version I read is clearly a draft and still has some way to go. (I wonder if any of his other fans occasionally get the feeling that Sunstein sometimes lets go of his pieces too soon.) Continue reading "SCOTUS Masks"
Sep 4, 2013 Ilya SominConstitutional Law
One of the most widely accepted truisms of American constitutional law is that the federal government has the power to condemn property through eminent domain. In modern times, even scholars and jurists who generally take a narrow view of federal power—myself included, until I read this pathbreaking article—did not question this idea. Yet, as William Baude shows, the conventional wisdom at the time of the Founding, and for many decades thereafter, was exactly the opposite: the federal government did not have the authority to condemn property within the territory of state governments. It could only do so in the District of Columbia and the federal territories. Baude’s research has important implications for the constitutional law of both federalism and takings.
Most students of takings law are aware that the Supreme Court did not rule that the federal government had the power of eminent domain until the 1875 case of Kohl v. United States. But Baude’s important work shows that that result was far from a foregone conclusion. Indeed, he argues that Kohl was wrongly decided. Continue reading "Is There a Federal Eminent Domain Power?"
Jul 23, 2013 Paul HorwitzConstitutional Law
Ronald Dworkin’s death in February, at the age of 81, was surely a deep personal loss for those who knew and loved him, and marked the end of an epoch, an after-the-fact close to the late twentieth century, in liberal legal thought. The loss was of less moment, perhaps, to current work in constitutional law and theory. Dworkin’s missiles against the current Supreme Court, which continued to land in the pages of the New York Review of Books, were more than merely transatlantic missiles; they seemed to have been launched from another time and place altogether. Still, until the end, he wrote with grace, clarity, and an air of authority. I’m grateful that what appears to be his last major work was in one of my own areas of interest, the relationship between law and religion.
One of the bigger-picture theoretical questions that seems to have sparked renewed interest in this field is whether “religion”—whatever that is—is “special” for constitutional purposes. That question has been raised in a variety of ways. Chris Eisgruber and Larry Sager have asked, from an egalitarian perspective, whether religious claims can be set apart from claims of conscience. Both Brian Leiter and Micah Schwartzman have questioned from a philosophical perspective whether the distinctive treatment of religion is capable of coherent justification. Others, such as Caroline Mala Corbin and Nelson Tebbe, have approached things from a different but complementary position, asking whether nonbelievers are unfairly disadvantaged in the current legal regime. And religion’s specialness, as an intrinsic matter or for more earthbound legal purposes, has its defenders, too, prominent among them such writers as Michael McConnell and Andy Koppelman. It’s a question that certainly has an air of the abstract, but it has important implications for Religion Clause doctrine. Continue reading "The Sublime Dworkin"
Jun 18, 2013 William BaudeConstitutional Law
Clyde S. Spillenger,
Risk Regulation, Extraterritoriality, and the Constitutionalization of Choice of Law, 1865-1940, UCLA School of Law Research Paper No. 12-01
(February 15, 2012), available at
SSRN.
Most constitutional law scholars pay no attention to the field of conflicts of law. Conflicts governs the law of multi-jurisdictional litigation—like which state’s law to apply when a railroad worker is injured on a train from Alabama to Mississippi, or whether a marriage in one state will be recognized in another, or how to enforce a court’s ruling against assets or people in another state. And as those examples might suggest, it can frequently seem like a technical adjunct to civil procedure.
Yet conflicts questions frequently do interact with constitutional law principles of federalism. One example is the doctrine of “extraterritoriality”—the limits on a state’s ability to regulate stuff that takes place somewhere else. Territoriality is a basic premise of the federal system; everybody knows that the New York legislature can’t just sit down and rewrite all of the laws of New Jersey. This seems like a common-sense requirement of our constitutional structure. But as Clyde Spillenger demonstrates in Risk Regulation, Extraterritoriality, and the Constitutionalization of Choice of Law, 1865-1940, the nature and source of this principle is misunderstood today. Continue reading "State Boundaries and Constitutional Limits"
May 13, 2013 Pat GudridgeConstitutional Law
Whatever Reva Siegel writes is worth close study. This recent Yale Law Journal article is no exception — characteristically alert and probing, quintessentially first-rate. She identifies a worry recurring in important opinions Justice Kennedy has written recently – an intimation that identifying individuals on the basis of race is balkanizing. This suggestion or something like it, she notes, also shows up in affirmative action opinions Justices O’Connor and Powell wrote and in an impressive article by Paul Mishkin Professor Siegel herself, Robert Post, and others have taken up. She wonders whether the balkanizing worry defines a third way — an alternative to both color-blind concerns with use of racial classifications as such and preoccupations with the facts and circumstances of subordination. The well-known Seattle and New Haven controversies look like appropriate cases for use of the balkanizing idea, she thinks. Her discussion of Seattle (and the Louisville companion, not really separated) is somewhat abstract. Her assessment of how the city made matters worse in New Haven, and the likely consequences, feels especially dead-on.
As the article itself suggests in its long finish, the notion of “balkanizing” is provocative but incomplete. There needs to be some filling in. Reva Siegel is sure about that, but she doesn’t try to take the work too far. She’s sketching but not necessarily joining this school of thought. But what she writes is nonetheless a very effective prompt, an invitation to readers to pose tests or propose for themselves more in the way of elaboration. Indeed, a true sign of the great success of the article lies in how quickly the reader begins to join in Siegel’s exploration. Continue reading "Balkan Ghosts"
Feb 4, 2013 Mark TushnetConstitutional Law
How do liberal democracies deal with threats to liberal constitutionalism, when those threats come from political parties willing to use the existing mechanisms of liberal constitutionalism to gain power–and then eliminate liberal constitutionalism? This question was a concern for scholars of constitutionalism several generations ago. More recently, the phenomenon has been captured in the slogan, “One person, one vote, one time,” associated with some positions taken at the first stage in a transition away from authoritarianism–though perhaps only to another form of authoritarianism. Transitional situations are one thing, though; established liberal democracies are another. The experience of Weimar Germany was taken as an illustration–perhaps inapt in detail but useful for thinking through the problem–of the use by antidemocratic forces of democratic means to attain power.
After World War Two Germany responded by embedding in its Basic Law the idea of militant democracy, developed during the war by the exile political theorist Karl Loewenstein. Many other nations have followed suit. Militant democracy extends to political parties the idea that nations can permissibly use force against subversive individuals. According to the idea of militant democracy, liberal democracies can permissibly ban antidemocratic political parties and deny their members the ability to serve in public positions, even in the bureaucracy (because they might use their discretion to favor their antidemocratic comrades). Militant democracy is constitutionalism’s resolution of the problem in political theory of whether and why we should tolerate the intolerant. And, like that problem, the one militant democracy addresses is difficult to resolve. Power-holders may well misdescribe political opposition as a threat to democracy itself, and seek to suppress political parties that are “merely” forceful opponents of their programs. Continue reading "Generals Can Sometimes Be More Pro-Democratic Than Politicians"
Oct 24, 2012 Mark Kende & Matthew ShimanovskyConstitutional LawJotwell
Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. made headlines during his confirmation hearings by comparing judges to baseball umpires. Now imagine that umpires had the ability to secretly obtain expert and other opinions about whether a pitch is a ball or strike. That is the question raised by Allison Orr Larson’s important new article, Confronting Supreme Court Fact Finding. Larson’s article shows how U.S. Supreme Court justices are actually doing more of their own fact-finding, rather than just acting as the nation’s highest appellate court of law. Following Kenneth Culp Davis, she calls these findings “legislative facts,” to contrast them with “adjudicative facts.” The article usefully explores the causes and consequences of this significant development.
Larson shows that some justices have used “in house” fact finding, beyond the crucible of the adversary process and cross examination, in 90 of 120 of the most important cases decided in the last 15 years. Of those 90 cases, 47% cite to 4 or more sources outside of the briefs. Larson says that the Internet has been instrumental in permitting such fact finding. The Internet allows each justice to bolster an opinion, counter a scathing dissent, or justify overturning previous case law. Continue reading "The U.S. Supreme Court As Fact Finder?"
Sep 19, 2012 William BaudeConstitutional LawJotwell
Jud Campbell,
Commandeering and Constitutional Change,
122 Yale L. J. —, (forthcoming 2013)
available at SSRN.
Some of the best constitutional history papers have a single conceptual move that makes you see the world differently. Once you understand some previously unappreciated legal rule or piece of historical context, everything falls into place. Jud Campbell’s forthcoming article in the Yale Law Journal, Commandeering and Constitutional Change, is just such a paper.
The topic is “commandeering”—i.e., whether the federal government can force state officers to execute federal law. The Supreme Court has said that it cannot, because commandeering is inconsistent with state sovereignty. Campbell’s central insight is this: At the time of the Founding, commandeering was the Anti-Federalist position, not the Federalist position. The Anti-Federalists thought that it was much better for state sovereignty to have federal law executed by their own officers. They did not want a corps of officers in the states with federal paychecks and federal allegiance, and they were willing to accept commandeering, as opposed to voluntary cooperation, as the price of state execution. Continue reading "New Light on the Old World and Commandeering"
Aug 2, 2012 Charles ShanorConstitutional LawJotwell
Great scholarship in American constitutional law ranges from the conceptually original to the historically meticulous. The most cited articles of all time contain far more of the former than the latter. This year’s scholarship contains a rare piece that is both conceptually groundbreaking and a deep historical dive. An article of interest to multiple audiences, Nathan Chapman and Michael McConnell’s Due Process as Separation of Powers merits kudos from both conceptualists and historicists.
Chapman and McConnell note that due process, the “oldest phrase and the oldest idea in our Constitution,” has, perversely, become “the most unrecognizable in modern interpretation,” a phrase used to “subvert the separation of powers” by giving courts “a super-legislative power to change rather than enforce and interpret the law.”
The authors demonstrate that Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment due process, when applied by courts to constrain legislative power, had a very specific original meaning lost to both the judiciary and modern readers. This meaning is contrary to recent scholarly conclusions that (1) due process only applies to judicial process, (2) substantive due process enables judicial review of legislative policy choices violating judicial notions of property or liberty, even under proper procedures, and (3) substantive due process is contemplated under the Fourteenth but not the Fifth Amendment. Continue reading "Structural, not Substantive, Due Process"
