Constitutional Law
Dignity and the Politics of Protection: Abortion Restrictions Under Casey/Carhart
117 Yale L.J. 1694 (2008). This essay on the law and politics of abortion analyzes the constitutional principles governing new challenges to Roe. The essay situates the Court’s recent decision in Gonzales v. Carhart in debates of the antiabortion movement over the reach and rationale of statutes designed to overturn Roe—exploring strategic considerations that lead advocates to favor incremental restrictions over bans, and to supplement fetal-protective justifications with womanprotective justifications for regulating abortion. The essay argues that a multi-faceted commitment to dignity links Carhart and the Casey decision on which it centrally relies. Dignity is a value that bridges communities divided in the abortion debate, as well as diverse bodies of constitutional and human rights law. Carhart invokes dignity as a reason for regulating abortion, while Casey invokes dignity as a reason for protecting women’s abortion decisions from government regulation. This dignity-based analysis of Casey/Carhart offers principles for determining the constitutionality of woman-protective abortion restrictions that are grounded in a large body of substantive due process and equal protection case law. Protecting women can violate women’s dignity if protection is based on stereotypical assumptions about women’s capacities and women’s roles, as many of the new woman-protective abortion restrictions are. Like old forms of gender paternalism, the new forms of gender paternalism remedy harm to women through the control of women. The new woman-protective abortion restrictions do not provide women in need what they need: they do not alleviate the social conditions that contribute to unwanted pregnancies, nor do they provide social resources to help women who choose to end pregnancies they otherwise might bring to term. The essay concludes by reflecting on alternative—and constitutional—modes of protecting women who are making decisions about motherhood.
The Supreme Court Appointments Process and the Real Divide Between Liberals and Conservatives
117 Yale L.J. 1947 (2008).
Treaties' End: The Past, Present, and Future of International Lawmaking in the United States
117 Yale L.J. 1236 (2008). Nearly every international agreement that is made through the Treaty Clause should be approved by both houses of Congress as a congressional-executive agreement instead. In making this case, this Article examines U.S. international lawmaking through empirical, comparative, historical, and policy lenses. U.S. international lawmaking is currently haphazardly carved up between two tracks of international lawmaking, with some areas assigned to the Treaty Clause route, others to the congressional-executive agreement route, and many uncomfortably straddling the two. Moreover, the process for making international law that is outlined in the U.S. Constitution is close to unique in cross-national perspective. To explain how the United States came to have such a haphazard and unusual system, this Article traces the history of U.S. international lawmaking back to the Founding. The rules and patterns of practice that now govern were developed in response to specific contingent events that for the most part have little or no continuing significance. The Treaty Clause process is demonstrably inferior to the congressional-executive agreement process as a matter of public policy on nearly all crucial dimensions: ease of use, democratic legitimacy, and strength of the international legal commitments that are created. Thus, this Article concludes by charting a course toward ending the Treaty Clause for all but a handful of international agreements. By gradually replacing most Article II treaties with ex post congressional-executive agreements, policymakers can make America’s domestic engagement with international law more sensible, effective, and democratic.
A Blueprint for Applying the Rules Enabling Act's Supersession Clause
117 Yale L.J. 1225 (2008).
Ledbetter in Congress: The Limits of a Narrow Legislative Override
117 Yale L.J. 971 (2008).
United States v. Ankeny: Remedying the Fourth Amendment's Reasonable Manner Requirement
117 Yale L.J. 723 (2008).
The Constitution Outside the Constitution
117 Yale L.J. 408 (2007). Countries lacking a single canonical text define the “constitution” to include all laws that perform the constitutive functions of creating governmental institutions and conferring rights on individuals. The British Constitution, for example, includes a variety of constitutive statutes, such as the Magna Carta and the Parliament Acts. This Article proposes a thought experiment: what if we defined the U.S. Constitution by function, rather than by form? Viewed from this perspective, “the Constitution” would include not only the canonical document but also a variety of statutes, executive materials, and practices that structure our government. What these constitutive materials lack is a third characteristic shared by some (but not all) constitutions: formal entrenchment against legal change. Decoupling the entrenching function from the constitutive functions offer a relatively simple answer to one of the most important problems in constitutional theory: how do we explain the evident fact that the structure of our government and the rights of the people have changed pervasively since the Founding, in ways that are simply not reflected in Article V amendments to the canonical text? The answer is that the constitutional order can change in this way because most of it was never entrenched in the canonical text to begin with. Most of the salient changes—the growth of the administrative state, the proliferation of individual entitlements—are changes to our “constitution outside the constitution” that are neither mandated nor forbidden by the canonical document. This functional account of constitutionalism also has implications for constitutional doctrine and scholarship. It tends to undermine doctrinal prescriptions grounded in a sharp dichotomy between constitutional and statutory claims, and it suggests that basic constitutional values—such as federalism or concern for individual rights—are relevant to statutory construction. Finally, the functional account suggests a broader set of concerns for constitutional law teaching and scholarship.
The Canons of War
117 Yale L.J. 280 (2007). War powers hang in a delicate balance, with conflicting statutes overlying contrasting constitutional prerogatives. Because Congress has filled nearly every shadowy corner of Justice Jackson’s “zone of twilight” with its own imprimatur, war powers debates now hinge on traditional statutory interpretation, albeit in a unique context. This Note draws upon the complete set of judicial opinions assessing authorizations for the use of military force in order to propose context-specific canons for interpreting war powers statutes. These canons of war provide a principled way for courts to ascertain the limits of executive power and civil liberties in times of military conflict.
Designing a Constitution-Drafting Process: Lessons from Kenya
This Note examines Kenya’s recent constitution-writing experience as a case study for designing constitution-drafting processes in emerging democracies. Eight years after Kenya’s constitutional review process began, and after a highly acrimonious drafting period, Kenyans roundly defeated a proposed new constitution in a national referendum. This Note describes Kenya’s experience and considers six lessons on designing a constitution-drafting process. It then proposes how a constitution-drafting process in a country like Kenya might have been more effectively designed. 116 Yale L.J. 1824 (2007).
Reluctant Nationalists: Federal Administration and Administrative Law in the Republican Era, 1801-1829
In 1801 the Jeffersonian Republicans took charge of Congress, the presidency, and the national administration, determined to roll back the state-building excesses of their Federalist predecessors. In this effort they were partially successful. But the tide of history and the demands of a growing nation confounded their ambitions. While reclaiming democracy they also built administrative capacity. This Article examines administrative structure and accountability in the Republican era in an attempt to understand the “administrative law” of the early nineteenth century. That inquiry proceeds through two extended case studies: the Jeffersonian embargo of 1807-1809 and the multi-decade federal effort to survey and sell the ever-expanding “public domain.” The first was the most dramatic regulation of commerce attempted by an American national government either before or since. The second began a land office business that dominated the political and legal consciousness of the nation for nearly a century. The embargo tested the limits of administrative coercion and revealed an escalating conflict between the necessities of regulatory administration and judicial review in common law forms. The sale of the public domain required the creation of the first mass administrative adjudication system in the United States and revealed both the ambitions and the limits of congressional control of administration in a polity ideologically devoted to assembly government. Together these cases describe the early-nineteenth-century approach to a host of familiar topics in contemporary administrative law: presidential versus congressional control of administration, the propriety and forms of administrative adjudication, policy implementation via general rules, and the appropriate role of judicial review. Perhaps most significantly, both the embargo episode and the efforts to privatize the public domain demonstrate the singular importance of internal administrative control and accountability in maintaining neutrality and consistency in the application of federal law. This “internal law of administration” remains both a crucial and an understudied aspect of American administrative governance. 116 Yale L.J. 1636 (2007).
Article III En Banc: The Judicial Conference as an Advisory Intercircuit Court of Appeals
116 Yale L.J. 1625 (2007)
Re-Justifying the Fair Cross Section Requirement: Equal Representation and Enfranchisement in the American Criminal Jury
116 Yale L.J. 1568 (2007) This Note proposes a new justification for the fair cross section (FCS) requirement governing criminal jury composition. While the Supreme Court has defended the requirement by invoking demographic conceptions of the jury’s legitimacy, many scholars have observed that this approach is at odds with contemporary jury law and practice. This Note argues that courts should instead defend the FCS requirement as a means of ensuring that eligible participants are included in the jury franchise. Besides solving an intractable doctrinal puzzle, an enfranchisement-based approach draws attention to ways in which widespread juror selection practices exclude underrepresented groups and thereby undermine the jury’s democratic character.