Constitutional Law
Apple and the American Revolution: Remembering Why We Have the fourth Amendment
On February 16, 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)obtained an unprecedented court order in the San Bernardino shooting case thatwould have forced Apple to design and deliver to the DOJ software capable ofdestroying the encryption and passcode protections built into the iPhone. The DOJasserted that this order was simply the extension of a warrant obtained by theFederal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to search the shooter’s iPhone, which hadbeen locked with a standard passcode.
The Judicial Enforceability and Legal Effects of Treaty Reservations, Understandings, and Declarations
Predicting Utah v. Streiff’s Civil Rights Impact
The Supreme Court’s recent Utah v. Strieff decision declined to apply the exclusionary rule to evidence seized as a result of an arrest that followed an unconstitutional stop. The opinion, in conjunction with Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, has reanimated discussions regarding when, if ever, criminal defendants can expect the exclusionary rule to apply. When applied, the exclusionary rule renders inadmissible evidence recovered through “unconstitutional police conduct”; the evidence’s exclusion reinforces the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. Unlike most discussions of Strieff, which focus on its implications for criminal defendants, this Essay examines how Strieff will impact civil rights plaintiffs’ ability to recover damages for unconstitutional stops under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.
Innocence and Override
For the past three decades, the practice of judicial override in capital cases has allowed Alabama judges to impose the death penalty even where the jury voted for life. However, recent developments have cast doubt on the future of override in Alabama. The United States Supreme Court struck down part of Florida’s capital sentencing scheme in January because “[t]he Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death.” In response, the Florida legislature eliminated override in March, and the Delaware Supreme Court invalidated its own state’s override system on August 2, leaving Alabama as the only state that still permits the practice. Override in Alabama has been attacked on other grounds as well; in 2013, two Justices of the United States Supreme Court expressed Eighth Amendment concerns that Alabama overrides are arbitrary and linked to political pressure.
Transcending the Youngstown Triptych: A Multidimensional Reappraisal of Separation of Powers Doctrine
The time is ripe for a reappraisal of the separation of powers as the organizing principle of our federal government. Most of the relevant doctrinal architecture has been constructed over the past seven decades. Perhaps because of Justice Robert H. Jackson’s incomparable brilliance as a writer, the two-dimensional landscape famously described in his concurring opinion condemning President Truman’s seizure of the U.S. steel industry has dominated discourse about the interaction of the three federal branches. Charting presidential conduct on the vertical axis of a map whose horizontal axis measures Congress’s position ranging from approval to disapproval gave Jackson an elegantly simple and memorable way to classify presidential actions from the most strongly defensible to the most constitutionally vulnerable.
A Better Balance: Providing Survivors of Sexual Violence with “Effective Protection” Against Sex Discrimination Through Title IX Complaints
In Their Hands: Restoring Institutional Liability for Sexual Harassment in Education
Transformation Requires Transparency: Critical Policy Reforms To Advance Campus Sexual Violence Response
Can Corpus Linguistics Help Make Originalism Scientific?
James Phillips, Daniel Ortner, and Thomas Lee begin their engaging essay, Corpus Linguistics & Original Public Meaning: A New Tool To Make Originalism More Empirical, by pronouncing originalism “the predominant interpretive methodology for constitutional meaning in American history.” They then describe and attempt to justify a new tool to improve originalist methodology: a large corpus of Founding-era documents, representative of a host of genres available to educated people of that period. As their title suggests, the brand of originalism they set out to improve is the version at times dubbed “the new originalism”—an iteration that seeks to construe the Constitution in accordance with the understanding of the state constitutional convention members who read its words and heard its supporters at the time.
Corpus Linguistics & Original Public Meaning: A New Tool To Make Originalism More Empirical
Originalism has been the predominant interpretive methodology for constitutional meaning in American history: it is the methodology that has been with us since the Constitution’s birth. With its rebirth in the latter part of the twentieth century and its theoretical evolution from original intent to original public meaning, originalism has been working itself pure—almost.
The Fourth Amendment in the Information Age
To badly mangle Marx, a specter is haunting Fourth Amendment law—the specter of technological change. In a number of recent cases, in a number of different contexts, courts have questioned whether existing Fourth Amendment doctrine, developed in an analog age, is able to deal effectively with digital technologies.