Constitutional Law
An Intersectional Critique of Tiers of Scrutiny: Beyond “Either/Or” Approaches to Equal Protection
Examining a long-overlooked passage on gender in Justice Powell’s Bakke concurrence, the Essay applies the theory of intersectionality to show that Justice Powell’s reasoning was flawed. As his “single-axis” approach reveals, tiers-of-scrutiny analysis creates a doctrinal puzzle in equal-protection law, especially when applied to Black women.
Supreme Court as Superweapon: A Response to Epps & Sitaraman
Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman propose radical reforms to restore a moderate Supreme Court. Unfortunately, their proposals might destroy the Court’s legitimacy in order to save it. A Court unbound by legal principle is too powerful a weapon to leave around in a democracy; we should start thinking about disarmament.
How to Save the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court faces an impending legitimacy crisis. This Feature explains why structural reform is necessary to save what is good about the Court, and identifies criteria that effective reform should satisfy. The Feature then proposes two alternative reforms to the Court’s structure: the Lottery Court and the Balanced Bench.
Jury Selection as Election: A New Framework for Peremptory Strikes
The ability of peremptory strikes to contribute to impartial juries has long been debated. This Note argues that both defenders and critics have overlooked an important value served by peremptory strikes beyond impartiality: democratic legitimacy. Just as elections help legitimate the state’s coercive power, jury selections help legitimate the trial’s coercive power.
Empire States: The Coming of Dual Federalism
In the standard account of federalism’s eighteenth-century origins, the Framers divided government power among two sovereigns to protect individual liberties. This Article offers an alternative history. It emphasizes that federalism was a form of centralization—a shift of authority from diffuse quasi-sovereigns into the hands of only two legitimate sovereigns.
The Reverse-Entanglement Principle: Why Religious Arbitration of Federal Rights Is Unconstitutional
Several courts have compelled religious arbitration of employment disputes even when the arbitration agreement explicitly states that holy text would trump federal law. This Comment articulates a “reverse-entanglement” principle that explains why courts violate the Establishment Clause when they enforce arbitral decisions that apply religious principles to secular-law disputes.
The Voluntariness of Voluntary Consent: Consent Searches and the Psychology of Compliance
The Fourth Amendment allows police to perform warrantless searches of individuals if they give consent to be searched and that consent is voluntary. Based on original laboratory research, this Essay posits that fact-finders assessing voluntariness underappreciate the extent to which suspects feel pressure to comply with requests to be searched.
Making Black Lives Matter: Properly Valuing the Rights of the Marginalized in Constitutional Torts
Black lives are systematically undervalued by constitutional enforcement remedies. Courts and scholars have unquestioningly adopted tort law’s corrective-justice scheme for § 1983 suits. But corrective justice is unsatisfactory in a context where the government and private parties frequently interact. This Note argues that distributive justice should be considered as a viable alternative.
The High Stakes of Low-Level Criminal Justice
Alexandra Natapoff reviews Misdemeanorland, summarizing the book’s key contributions and extending its insights about New York City’s system of misdemeanor managerial social control to illuminate the broader dynamics and democratic significance of the U.S. misdemeanor process.
The Present Crisis in American Bail
This Essay reviews the recent rise of systemic injunctions against money bail systems and a major question they raise: what level of scrutiny applies to allegedly unconstitutional bail systems. It concludes that, in light of history and precedent, strict scrutiny is the appropriate standard.
Customs, Immigration, and Rights: Constitutional Limits on Electronic Border Searches
This Essay traces the historical evolution of the border search exception to the Fourth Amendment to argue that CBP and ICE are currently operating outside constitutional constraints and proposes a tiered approach, restricted in scope and requiring increasing levels of protections the more invasive the search becomes.
Fourth Amendment Reasonableness After Carpenter
In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court held that a warrant is required when the government collects certain categories of third-party data. This Essay argues that a categorical warrant requirement for electronic surveillance is a mistake, and that, when faced with warrantless electronic surveillance, courts should instead consider whether such surveillance is reasonable.
A Response to Justice Goodwin Liu
Judge Jeffery Sutton responds to Justice Goodwin Liu’s Review of 51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law.
State Courts and Constitutional Structure
Justice Goodwin Liu of the California Supreme Court reviews Judge Jeffrey Sutton’s new book, 51 Imperfect Solutions: The Making of American Constitutional Law.
The Dilemma of Localism in an Era of Polarization
Localism discourse has long confronted a fundamental problem: how can we remain committed to decentralized decision-making while checking the excesses of local parochialism? This Essay proposes a new approach in our polarized era, emphasizing the joint role state individual rights and the often-ignored concept of the general welfare might play.
The New Jim Crow Is the Old Jim Crow
A vast divide exists in the national imagination between the racial struggles of the civil rights era and those of the present. Drawing on the work of Elizabeth Gillespie McRae and Jeanne Theoharis, this Review argues that complexifying this oversimplified history is critical to contemporary racial equality work.
The Treaty Problem: Understanding the Framers’ Approach to International Legal Commitments
Bond v. United States failed to answer important questions about the scope and limits of the treaty power. This Comment highlights an underexplored factor driving the Framers’ formulation of that power—the threat of war inherent in all treaty violations—and its implications for Bond’s lingering questions.
Trump v. Hawaii: How the Supreme Court Simultaneously Overturned and Revived Korematsu
This Essay compares the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold President Trump’s travel ban to the Court’s decision nearly seventy-five years ago to affirm the internment of Japanese Americans in Korematsu. It argues that while Hawaii v. Trump formally overturned Korematsu, it essentially recreated the doctrine under a new name.
A Legal Sanctuary: How the Religious Freedom Restoration Act Could Protect Sanctuary Churches
Over the last three decades, the doctrine and political valence of protections for religious exercise have shifted significantly. This Note analyzes how those changes provide new legal protections for sanctuary churches, demonstrating how religious freedom statutes can protect marginalized individuals and serve progressive causes.
Impeachment: A Handbook
Charles Black’s Impeachment: A Handbook has become the authoritative guide on the subject of presidential impeachment. This year, the Yale University Press published a new edition of the classic, incorporating new material by constitutional theorist Philip Bobbitt. Bobbitt’s contribution to the new edition appears in this Essay.