Category Archives: Constitutional Law

The Value of Moderation, Tebbe-Style

Oct 25, 2017 Sarah Barringer GordonConstitutional Law

Sarah Barringer Gordon

Nelson Tebbe’s aspiration is nothing less than teaching us all to think more clearly and coherently about issues of marriage equality and religious freedom. For anyone paying attention, this bandwidth of legal disputes is white hot. And it is rare to find such a thoughtful voice on these questions, which keep coming at us but are rarely dealt with as skillfully and thoughtfully as in Tebbe’s work. Just last June, for example, the United States Supreme Court took cert on a case from Colorado, involving a wedding cake baker who says his expressive voice is implicated in his work. His religious beliefs mean that he cannot participate in making the cake for a same-sex couple. The baker is represented by the conservative Alliance Defense Fund and the ACLU represents the couple.

Tebbe’s book, although published before the case made it up to the Supreme Court, tells us how he would like us to think about the outcome. In public accommodations, such as businesses that are open to the public, the law does not force speech when it orders such a business to comply with non-discrimination mandates. Instead, we should recognize that by opening their doors to the public, the owners of Masterpiece Cakeshop have taken a voluntary step into society. Particularly with questions of religious freedom and racial discrimination, we have a strong background of past engagement with analogous issues. We also have deep legal and social commitments to treating customers equally, without reference to race, religion, national origin, marital status, and now, sexual orientation. Continue reading "The Value of Moderation, Tebbe-Style"

Checking the Government’s Deception Through Public Employee Speech

Sep 25, 2017 Helen NortonConstitutional Law

Helen Norton

Suppose the United States elected a president with authoritarian tendencies. Imagine that the president regularly attacked and undermined institutions and individuals that sought to hold his administration accountable for its actions. Assume, for purposes of the hypothetical, that members of the President’s party controlled both the House and the Senate and saw little partisan self-interest in checking the executive branch. Just pretend.

Under those circumstances, where else might we turn for help in ensuring that our government remains accountable to us? In The Special Value of Public Employee Speech, Heidi Kitrosser reminds us that “government employees are crucial safety valves for protecting the people from abuse and incompetence, given their unique access to information and to a range of avenues for transmitting the same.” More specifically, she points out that the everyday heroism of public employees includes

the simple acts of employees doing their jobs conscientiously and in accordance with the norms of their professions. When employees engage in such behavior – for instance, when government auditors honestly and competently investigate and report in a manner consistent with professional auditing standards – they help to maintain consistency between the functions the government purports to perform and those that it actually performs. In this sense, public employees are potential barriers against government deception. They can disrupt government efforts to have it both ways by purporting publicly to provide a service while distorting the nature of that service. When they do this through their speech acts—for example, by reporting the results of budgetary analyses or scientific studies—they engage in speech of substantial First Amendment value. (Pp. 302-303).

In Garcetti v. Ceballos, however, the Supreme Court interpreted the First Amendment to offer no protection for public employees’ truthful speech in a broad range of circumstances—including their truthful reports of governmental lies and other misconduct. Rejecting a First Amendment challenge by a prosecutor disciplined for writing an internal memo that criticized a police affidavit as including serious misrepresentations, the Court held by a 5-4 vote that “when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.” In concluding that a government employer should remain free to assert “control over what the employer itself has commissioned or created,” the majority thus created a bright-line rule that treats public employees’ speech delivered pursuant to their official duties as speech that the government may restrain and punish without running afoul of the First Amendment. Continue reading "Checking the Government’s Deception Through Public Employee Speech"

Individual Rights and Collective Governance

Aug 9, 2017 Charles ShanorConstitutional Law

Charles Shanor

Ozan O. Varol’s article Structural Rights usefully mixes two aspects of constitutional law that teachers and authors, at least for pedagogical purposes, separate when organizing coverage of their subject. My casebook, for example, covers “structural” features of the United States Constitution, such as separation of powers and federalism, then proceeds to “rights” chapters dealing with, for example, due process and equal protection. Students typically find structural features more difficult and non-intuitive, while they are very comfortable with rights protections for individuals.

Of course, separation of powers and federalism are fairly commonly viewed as liberty-enhancing. The Framers initially thought a Bill of Rights unnecessary: governmental structural restrictions and competing government power centers, they thought, would prevent government oppression. Today, perhaps in part due to the “rights revolution” of the Warren Court, my generation typically views the Bill of Rights and section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment as bulwarks of individual freedom, central and indispensable to our constitutional order. But the point of the Constitution as a whole was to enhance governance by “We the People.” The rights provisions, as Varol’s article elucidates powerfully, empower rather than merely protect “the People.” They frame and drive our governance structure. Continue reading "Individual Rights and Collective Governance"

Does the Constitution Require Due Process Abroad?

Jul 12, 2017 Ilya SominConstitutional Law

Ilya Somin

Do the rights protected by the Constitution constrain United States government actions outside our borders, especially those directed at noncitizens? The longstanding debate over this question has heated up again in recent years. It is one of the issues raised by the litigation over Donald Trump’s travel ban executive order. It is also a key element of Hernandez v. Mesa, a case recently addressed by the Supreme Court that raises the question of whether the Fourth Amendment applies to a case where U.S. Border Patrol agents fatally shot a 15-year-old Mexican boy just across the border.¹

Nathan Chapman’s important new article on the application of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment abroad, is a timely and important contribution to this debate. It compiles extensive evidence indicating that the Clause was originally understood to constrain U.S. government actions outside our territory, regardless of whether the targets are American citizens or not. If so, it may be that other constitutional rights also apply in such situations. Continue reading "Does the Constitution Require Due Process Abroad?"

The Libertarian First Amendment, the Shifting Apostrophe, and the One-Way Ratchet

Jun 22, 2017 Enrique ArmijoConstitutional Law

Enrique Armijo

In Expanding the Periphery and Threatening the Core, Morgan Weiland tells a story of how the First Amendment has slipped its moorings: how the Supreme Court, through its holdings in commercial speech and corporate campaign finance regulation cases, has decoupled the individual’s right to expression from the reasons for protecting that right; and how the libertarian turn in First Amendment theory, which devalues any interference with the flow of any information for any reason, has fused together protections for corporate and individual speech in a way that abandons First Amendment first principles. Weiland’s article also details the costs of First Amendment agnosticism—in a world where any regulation of speech affronts the informational rights of every listener, the State is powerless to distinguish between kinds of speakers or the quality of speech.

Weiland’s claim that First Amendment theory, properly oriented, should place primacy on listeners’ rights over the rights of speakers goes back to Justice White’s seminal line in 1967’s Red Lion that “it is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount,” as well as to Jerome Barron’s work around the same time, which called for government interventions in the speech market because of its First Amendment-derived obligation to promote the public’s “adequate opportunity for discussion” of issues of public concern.¹  Drawing upon the argument that expressive rights are functionally collective in nature, Weiland’s article makes an important contribution to First Amendment literature by detailing how far the modern Court has strayed from this baseline. Continue reading "The Libertarian First Amendment, the Shifting Apostrophe, and the One-Way Ratchet"

What Will the Federal Government’s Resistance to President Trump Look Like?

Apr 18, 2017 Paul HorwitzConstitutional Law

Paul Horwitz

How should one respond to injustice, illegitimacy, or broader threats posed by a democratic governmental regime? Although readers may lump these items together, the commas and “or” matter here, for they are not all the same and the proper response to each may differ. One common answer to some or all of them is civil disobedience. Another, rendered more problematic by the democratic nature of the regime and perhaps by the relative lack of courage of the professional-managerial class, is open rebellion. A third possible response, Jessica Bulman-Pozen and David E. Pozen argued in a valuable, important, and still under-examined 2015 article, is uncivil obedience: a conscientious, communicative, reformist act of strict “conformity with . . . positive law,” “in a manner that calls attention to its own formal legality, while departing from prevailing expectations about how the law will be followed or applied.”

One might apply some of the same questions to this very jot. The general custom at Jotwell is to talk about recent “things” we “like lots,” and usually only about one article one at a time. The rule extends to articles published in the past two years, but most jots focus on recent or forthcoming articles. Given my own perverse tendencies, many of my past jots have more or less followed Jotwell’s “rules,” while pushing their limits. (And they have talked about doing so, which may violate another Jotwell “rule,” one that applies to legal scholarship more generally: talk about the article or topic itself, not the process or motives behind it. A law review article that began “This Article is intended to advance the current causes of the Democratic Party,” or “This Article is meant to demonstrate my worthiness for promotion” would be refreshingly candid, and might suggest some interesting things about legal scholarship, but this sort of thing is just not done. An article that got even more “meta” about the nature or role of the article, in order to poke at legal scholarship more generally, would be just as suspect, and the letters complaining about it would invariably begin, “Dear Prof. Schlag.”) Here I talk about three “articles” falling within the time limit. But two are scholarly blog posts, and the third involves a bank-shot, because behind it lies that 2015 article by Bulman-Pozen and Pozen, now verging on being too “old”for Jotwell. And all three articles raise the question whether this jot belongs in the constitutional law section or under legal theory or administrative law. Continue reading "What Will the Federal Government’s Resistance to President Trump Look Like?"

A Compassion for the Law

Feb 24, 2017 Mark KendeConstitutional Law

Mark Kende

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor faced a roadblock to confirmation because she had once said in a speech, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” The statement was read by supporters in concert with President Obama’s well-known view that empathy is an important requirement for judges. Her opponents put a different spin on the statement, arguing that this kind of view meant she would be biased in interpreting the law.

Professor Susan Bandes’s fascinating article, Compassion and the Rule of Law, deals well with a closely related topic. Her examples are drawn mostly from constitutional law, but the analysis has broader implications. (Bandes has authored prominent books and articles on the role of passion and emotions in the law.)

Bandes’s initial premise is that the “rule of law” should prevent arbitrary decision-making based on unpredictable emotions. Compassion is problematic—if it incorrectly distorts substantive legal rulings. But she says it can also serve a different purpose. Compassion’s “most important contribution, is as a way of understanding what is at stake for others. Or to put it another way, seeing the rights of others from the inside; as they experience them.” (P. 3.) Continue reading "A Compassion for the 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"