The Roberts Court Revolution, Institutional Legitimacy, and the Promise (And Peril) of Constitutional Statesmanship

Our nation is in the middle of a constitutional revolution. While many periods of constitutional transformation have arisen out of large-scale political realignments, the Roberts Court Revolution is a product of our nation’s long (and unusual) political interregnum. Even as neither political party has managed to secure enough support to reconstruct our nation’s politics, the Roberts Court—with its young and ambitious conservative majority—has already moved quickly to reconsider key pillars of the existing constitutional regime. This represents a challenging moment for the Roberts Court and its institutional legitimacy. To counteract this danger, the Justices might return to an old idea—one that has both seduced and vexed scholars and Justices alike for generations: constitutional statesmanship. When wrestling with the statesmanship ideal, theorists are often inclined to simply shrug their shoulders, concede that a precise definition is impossible, and suggest that we often know statesmanship when we see it. We can do better. In this Article, I define constitutional statesmanship for our age of constitutional revolution. Drawing on a diverse set of theorists and methodological approaches—most notably, Ronald Dworkin’s famous concept of “fit”—I argue that constitutional statesmanship is best understood as the balance between three modes of analysis: (1) legal fit (relying on conventional legal materials and arguments); (2) popular fit (drawing on concrete indicators of current public opinion); and (3) pragmatic fit (factoring in predictions about public responses, policy consequences, and assessments by legal elites)

Decolonial Antiracist Feminist Digital Activism: Naming Carolina Maria de Jesus, Lélia González, and Marielle Franco on Twitter

This chapter analyses Ubuntu as central to the practice of naming as deployed by antiracist feminists in Brazil. We argue that name listing, name repetition, and citation, among Brazilian feminists of Color, are closely related to Ubuntu philosophy, helping to open up counterpublic spaces of resistance among Brazilian antiracist feminists. Through naming, users acknowledge their place in a larger feminist, antiracist tradition, strengthen their sense of citizenship, create contentious lineages and establish alliances with intersectional feminists in other areas of the Global North and South. Naming is an identity maintenance technique that creates collective identities, disseminates knowledge, offers role models and inspiration, creates memorials for the deceased and celebrates the actions of new and future generations. This is why it is strongly connected to Ubuntu philosophy. We focus on three Black female intellectuals—Marielle Franco, Lélia González, and Carolina Maria de Jesus—analysing tweets referencing their names, their transnational circulation, the appearance of hashtags, the users more frequently referenced and retweeted, and the topics mobilized in social networks

Everyday Heroism and the Journey of the Community in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

This article examines the impact of everyday heroism on community in the science fiction novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (2014) by Becky Chambers. While science fiction often features superhuman action or scientist heroes and technocratic dystopian futures, Chambers’s novel represents the recent trend of hopepunk, which sets stories within mundane social interactions to imagine gradual positive change. Instead of its action-adventure potential, the narrative in Chambers’s novel focuses on the relationships between a multi-species crew of a spaceship, creating a heightened sense of the crew as a found family where individuals come to accept and support each other – and in this way, the story centers around the journey of the community towards equality, inclusion, and hope. I argue that the everyday heroism in the novel is transparent but highly prosocial, overall resulting in a representation of everyday heroism as a way to imagine more hopeful futures

Misconstruing Digital Advertising Taxes as Consumption Taxes

Earlier this year, an article by professors Christine Kim and Darien Shanske supporting the adoption of state-level digital advertising taxes gained traction in state legislative circles. They recently reiterated many of their arguments in this publication. In their articles, the professors contend that digital advertising taxes can be justified as taxes on the interactions between users of digital services and the providers of those services. They further argue that those interactions are properly characterized as barter transactions representing untaxed consumption and that digital advertising taxes are permissible vehicles for taxing that consumption..

Conceptions of Heroic Leadership in Civil Society

While nations face multiple disruptions to civil society, individuals in late adolescence and early adulthood are overlooked for heroic leadership opportunities in some cultures. An underestimation of individuals’ abilities is sometimes fostered by biological definitions of human development that align competence with physical changes in the brain (Blakemore, 2012). Prolonged exposure to such disregard can encourage individuals to restrict the information they notice, fostering distortion in the intentions that support leadership readiness (Pratkanis, 2007). Studies of individuals’ conceptions of how the world operates can improve leadership readiness if such evidence is used to verify that individuals notice essential information. Using this logic to explore undergraduates’ readiness for heroic leadership, a highly diverse sample of individuals in late adolescence and early adulthood shared their understanding of human rights and civil society. These trait-focused conceptions were then compared with dispositional conceptions of heroism to explore variance in undergraduates’ readiness to embrace heroic opportunities

“Every Child Needs A Champion”: Foster Children with Disabilities and the Appointment of Surrogate Parents Under Idea

When a parent is absent, children in foster care who receive special education services are entitled to the appointment of a surrogate parent. This appointment is especially necessary due to the importance of the parent’s role in special education law and the often enhanced educational needs of children in foster care. However, the logistics of how surrogate parents are appointed and trained vary widely across the country. This article examines the legal landscape of the appointment of surrogate parents for children in foster care who receive special education services both nationally and in Virginia. This article also reviews the training and appointment process in other states, including the strong role undertaken by state education agencies in ensuring the prompt appointment of trained surrogate parents. The article concludes with recommendations for improving these processes in Virginia, and examines methods to increase positive educational outcomes for Virginia’s youth in foster care who receive special education services

Investigating Appraisal Discrimination

Over the past five years, the question of whether real estate appraisers systematically undervalue homes purchased or occupied by Black and Hispanic households has emerged as a significant civil rights issue. Major media have highlighted some instances where the same home received a dramatically higher appraisal when the appraiser believed the client was white rather than Black. Some social scientists have argued that appraisal discrimination is the root cause of the lower housing prices that prevail in many urban minority neighborhoods— and thus an important source of the racial “wealth gap.” Candidate Biden expressed strong concern about the issue during the 2020 presidential campaign, and President Biden in 2021 created a special cabinet-level Task Force on Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity (PAVE) to investigate the issue and propose solutions..

Jepson School of Leadership Studies Dean\u27s Report 2023 - 2024

University of Richmond\u27s Jepson School of Leadership Studies Dean\u27s Report for 2023 - 2024