Tag: Constitutional Law

Book Review: The “Common Sense” of Race – Article by Neil Gotanda

From Volume 83, Number 3 (March 2010)
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In What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America, Ariela J. Gross provides a compelling and nuanced account of race in America. Through her examination of “racial trials”—litigation in which racial identification plays a crucial role—Gross ties together the personal, social, and political dimensions of racial identity and classification. This discussion provides an important new perspective on the study of race in this country. 

Earlier studies of racial classification have focused on the meanings of statutory racial categories. Gross, however, centers her analysis on the formation and reaffirmation of racial categories as a primarily social process. Gross draws from numerous racial trials—spanning slavery in the antebellum South to modern-day Mexican Americans grappling with “whiteness”—in order to survey the origins and history of “black” and “white” as categories in American life.

 

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Book Review: Race, Blood, and What the Alligator Knows: A Review of What Blood Won’t Tell – Article by Jason A. Gillmer

From Volume 83, Number 3 (March 2010)
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From the opening pages of Ariela J. Gross’s What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America, it is clear that the reader is about to embark on something special. The story begins in a Louisiana courthouse in 1857, with an enslaved woman named Alexina Morrison claiming that she is white. For her contemporaries, the assertion no doubt carried troubling implications. James White, the man who insisted Morrison was black, had papers to prove that he paid good money for her and that she was his property. But her “blue eyes and flaxen hair” told a different story, and her recent appearances at public balls in Jefferson Parish had convinced a number of residents that her graceful mannerisms and affectations were those of a white woman rather than slave. The courtroom was soon bombarded with a dizzying array of evidence for such a simple question—was she white or was she black?—with men eventually stripping her to the waist to examine her body for the tiniest signs of her true identity. Three trials later, the community still had not resolved the issue. But more importantly, from Gross’s view, this case provides an unparalleled opportunity to examine the complex and constantly shifting ground of race and its import for this nation’s history.

 

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The Political Economy of Youngstown – Article by Edward T. Swaine

From Volume 83, Number 2 (January 2010)
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The time is ripe for a nondoctrinal assessment of Justice Jackson’s famous three-category framework for challenges to presidential action, elaborated in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (also known as the Steel Seizure Case). Recent national security controversies have given the Youngstown framework a whole new lease on life, and its relevance for courts, Congress, and executive branch officials has never been higher. During the same period, empirical and analytical studies of presidential policymaking have advanced beyond the personality-driven accounts of particular administrations. Together, these developments offer a terrific opportunity to assess how well the Youngstown framework fulfills its objective of advancing congressional interests and constraining presidential power. 

A political economy approach better explains the problem to which Justice Jackson was responding—the capacity of presidential unilateralism to establish policy that can withstand statutory correction, regardless of whether it has a legal basis—and also explains more formally how Youngstown’s categories offer a practical, if legally unorthodox, constraint. The assessment becomes more negative, though, once those categories are treated endogenously—that is, once the political branches are modeled as behaving dynamically and reacting to the framework itself. For example, both case studies and empirical surveys of executive orders suggest that the president may react to the risk of legislative disapproval (which, under Youngstown, will likely result in judicial disapproval as well) by avoiding Congress altogether or by seeking only its indirect blessing. Because these and other results disserve the framework’s objectives, this Article proposes several more benign alternatives—and, in general, advocates reseizing Steel Seizure.

 

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What Dignity Demands: The Challenge of Creating Sexual Harassment Protections For Prisons and Other Nonworkplace Settings – Article by Camille Gear Rich

From Volume 83, Number 1 (November 2009)
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In the more than twenty years since the Supreme Court created Title VII’s workplace sexual harassment protections, judges and feminist legal scholars have struggled to create a clear, conceptual account of the harm sexual harassment inflicts. For years, many courts and scholars were content to justify sexual harassment law by arguing that harassment should be prohibited because it interferes with women’s interest in workplace gender equality; however, by the late 1990s, several feminist legal scholars had revealed the inadequacy of this account, suggesting instead that harassment law should be understood as protecting women from dignitary harm. The failure to reach a broad-based consensus about the injury sexual harassment inflicts, and relatedly about sexual harassment law’s purpose, appeared without significant consequence until federal courts began using understandings developed in the context of workplace sexual harassment law to develop new sexual harassment doctrine for nonworkplace settings. Operating without clear conceptual moorings, many federal courts created narrow, cabined sexual harassment protections governing nonworkplace settings, often without principled justifications for doing so. To demonstrate the serious nature of this problem, this Article explores the Eighth Amendment sexual harassment doctrine courts have created to govern prisoners’ sexual harassment claims against guards, demonstrating the myriad ways in which workplace sexual harassment doctrine has distorted the development of prisoners’ sexual harassment protections. Yet the prison cases discussed here are offered as an example of a potentially far broader phenomenon. To address the larger issue—the distorting effects workplace sexual harassment law has had on other areas of sexual harassment doctrine—this Article argues that we should return to the dignitary account of sexual harassment law that was introduced by feminist workplace sexual harassment scholars in the late 1990s. However, in order to use this dignity analysis for settings other than the workplace, the dignitary framework these scholars introduced must be expanded and particularized to account for the different dignity expectations a person may reasonably hold in different institutional contexts. To that end, this Article offers a nuanced, context-specific analysis that will allow federal courts to determine “what dignity demands” in each institutional setting. The Article demonstrates that this dignitary framework will allow federal courts to identify the key considerations that should be weighed when creating sexual harassment doctrine for locations other than the workplace.

 

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Rethinking Donor Disclosure After the Proposition 8 Campaign – Note by David Lourie

From Volume 83, Number 1 (November 2009)
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Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that amended the state constitution to deny marriage to same-sex couples, passed by a small margin in November 2008. The campaign was contentious, well funded by both sides, and the subject of much media attention. After Proposition 8 passed, however, the debate about same-sex marriage in California was far from over. Shortly after the election, Proposition 8 opponents organized protests against certain Proposition 8 supporters and their employers throughout California and in other states. For example, opponents protested at the Church of Latter-Day Saints in Los Angeles because the church and its members raised a significant amount of money to support Proposition 8. Opponents also organized boycotts of businesses whose owners or employees donated to support Proposition 8. Several of these protests had negative repercussions for donors. For example, following threats of boycotts of his musical works and his employer, Scott Eckern, the longtime artistic director of the California Musical Theater, resigned from his position after it was revealed that he donated $1000 to Proposition 8. Marc Shaiman, the composer of the music for Hairspray, told Eckern that he would not let his work be performed in the theater due to Eckern’s support for Proposition 8. U.S. law requires a secret ballot for both candidate and issue elections, so how did opponents of Proposition 8 identify the donors to Proposition 8? The answer lies in disclosure laws. In California, as in most states, campaigns must publicly disclose certain information about individuals who donate to a ballot measure or candidate. California’s Political Reform Act of 1974, as amended, provides that all campaign donations of $100 or more must be published on the Secretary of State’s website, allowing the public to easily search for the names of campaign donors online. Further, not only must the donor’s name and the amount of the contribution be disclosed, but the donor’s street address, occupation, and employer’s name—or, if self-employed, the name of the donor’s business—must also be disclosed. On the federal level, campaign contributions to federal candidates are also now easily accessible to the public online. Federal law requires disclosure of individuals who contribute $200 or more to a candidate. This information can be viewed online through the Federal Election Commission’s (“FEC’s”) website, as well as on other websites. Not only has technology increased the availability of donor information online, but political entrepreneurs have also taken the FEC’s campaign finance data and made it even more accessible online, allowing users to search the data by multiple categories. For example, the Huffington Post, a popular blog, runs a search engine called “Fundrace 2008,” which allows a user to search for donors to 2008 presidential candidates by a donor’s first or last name, address, city, or employer. The website boasts about the easy access to the political leanings of nearly anyone a user knows of: “Want to know if a celebrity is playing both sides of the fence? Whether that new guy you’re seeing is actually a Republican or just dresses like one?”

 

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Courts and The Politics of Backlash: Marriage Equality Litigation, Then and Now – Article by Jane S. Schacter

From Volume 82, Number 6 (September 2009)
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Groundbreaking decisions on same-sex marriage, particularly those from the Hawaii, Massachusetts, and California supreme courts, have generated widespread political backlash in the form of state constitutional amendments and statutes, the federal Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”), a proposed federal constitutional amendment, and more. By contrast, the first state supreme court decision to strike down a ban on interracial marriage—Perez v. Sharp, decided by the California Supreme Court in 1948—was met with barely a political whimper, even though it made international headlines and came decades before broad public acceptance of interracial marriage. This Article identifies that puzzling difference, tells the political story of the cases, explores factors that might explain the disparity in political and public reactions, and uses the contrasting case studies to elucidate the political dynamics that surround courts today and to suggest directions for the future study of antijudicial backlash.

 

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The Western Climate Initiative: Cross-Border Collaboration and Constitutional Structure in the United States and Canada – Note by Jeremy Lawrence

From Volume 82, Number 6 (September 2009)
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Scientists have reached a consensus that global warming is a looming threat. A surprisingly large number of national politicians are lagging behind. The U.S. federal government, though making some strides toward reducing national greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions, has only addressed the problem in a piecemeal and halting fashion. In its place, the states have taken the lead. In Canada, the provinces have likewise taken the initiative in the face of federal inaction.

In light of these locally driven efforts, it was only a matter of time before states and provinces began to collaborate in their efforts. The first of these cross-border efforts originated in 2007, when the Western Climate Initiative (“WCI”), originally a GHG reduction partnership between a number of governors in the western United States, added British Columbia and Manitoba to its ranks.

But there is an apparent barrier to such cross-border collaboration. As the U.S. Supreme Court noted in its most recent case on global warming, “When a State enters the Union, it surrenders certain sovereign prerogatives. . . . [I]t cannot negotiate an emissions treaty with China or India.”

 

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“Counter-Counter-Terrorism via Lawsuit”—The Bivens Impasse – Article by George D. Brown

From Volume 82, Number 5 (July 2009)
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This Article deals with one of the most difficult questions arising out of the war on terror: what to do about the victims. How should the legal system respond to claims of collateral damage to constitutional rights when the government has tilted in favor of security at the expense of liberty? The war on terror has already put the American legal system to a severe test, exacerbated by the divide between those who see the problem as essentially one of preserving civil liberties and those who see it as one of preserving national security.

Increasingly, the system will have to grapple with suits by terrorism suspects who seek damages for the governmental conduct to which they have been subjected. The Supreme Court has already decided one such case; others are on their way. Apart from damages for the victims, these suits present the question of potential civil liability for federal officials, particularly those of the previous administration. Much of this litigation will be based on the Bivens doctrine, which permits damages actions for constitutional torts committed by federal officials. This Article contends that the Bivens doctrine exists in two forms: the Marbury-rights model and the prudential-deferential model. The former focuses on the plaintiff and points toward allowing the suit to proceed. The latter focuses on the subject matter and leads to emphasis on protecting the government. It is closely related to the political question doctrine and has prevailed since the 1980s.

 

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