Free Speech and National Security Bootstraps

It is troubling that courts treat administrative designations—specifically, both FTO determinations and information classification—as bootstraps by which to yank speech restrictions from the clutches of probing judicial scrutiny. This Article builds on existing scholarly critiques to identify and examine the common thread of national security bootstrapping that runs through both sets of cases. The hope is that in so doing, some greater light may be shed both on the cases themselves and, more broadly, on the costs and benefits of judicial deference to executive national security claims where civil rights and civil liberties are at stake

The Constitutionality of Mandates to Purchase Health Insurance

Health insurance mandates have been a component of many recent health care reform proposals. Because a federal requirement that individuals transfer money to a private party is unprecedented, a number of legal issues must be examined. This paper analyzes whether Congress can legislate a health insurance mandate and the potential legal challenges that might arise, given such a mandate. The analysis of legal challenges to health insurance mandates applies to federal individual mandates, but can also apply to a federal mandate requiring employers to purchase health insurance for their employees. There are no Constitutional barriers for Congress to legislate a health insurance mandate as long as the mandate is properly designed and executed, as discussed below. This paper also considers the likelihood of any change in the current judicial approach to these legal questions

The Future of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in the Hands of a Conservative Court

This Essay argues that the future of the majority-minority district is in peril, as a conservative majority on the Court stands poised to strike down section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. When the Court takes up the constitutionality of Section 2, binding precedent will play a secondary role at best. Instead, the Justices’ policy goals and ideological preferences - namely, their personal disdain for the use of race in public life - will guide the Court’s conclusion. In this vein, Justice Kennedy holds the fate of the Act in his hands. To be clear, this Essay is not trying to prognosticate the future of the Act. Instead, it is far more intrigued by the many lessons that the fate of the Act offers about the Court as an institution; the Court’s treatment of colored communities and their interests; and the role political attitudes play in guiding judicial behavior. As the Court continues to position itself at the center of many political controversies, these lessons gain greater urgency

Education promoted secularization

Why did substantial parts of Europe abandon the institutionalized churches around 1900? Empirical studies using modern data mostly contradict the traditional view that education was a leading source of the seismic social phenomenon of secularization. We construct a unique panel dataset of advanced-school enrollment and Protestant church attendance in German cities between 1890 and 1930. Our cross-sectional estimates replicate a positive association. By contrast, in panel models where fixed effects account for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity, education – but not income or urbanization – is negatively related to church attendance. In panel models with lagged explanatory variables, educational expansion precedes reduced church attendance

Legal Information and the Development of American Law: Writings on the Form and Structure of the Published Law

Robert C. Berring\u27s writings about the impacts of electronic databases, the Internet, and other communications technologies on legal research and practice are an essential part of a larger literature that explores the ways in which the forms and structures of published legal information have influenced how American lawyers think about the law. This paper reviews Berring\u27s writings, along with those of other writers concerned with these questions, focusing on the implications of Berring\u27s idea that in the late nineteenth century American legal publishers created a conceptual universe of thinkable thoughts through which U.S. lawyers came to view the law. It concludes that, spurred by Berring and others, the literature of legal information has become far reaching in scope and interdisciplinary in approach, while the themes struck in Berring\u27s work continue to inform the scholarship of newer writers

The Use of Marketing Knowledge in Formulating and Enforcing Consumer Protection Policy

The purpose of this first chapter of the handbook is to discuss how the findings and approaches offered by the marketing discipline are used in consumer protection policy

The Canon(s) of Constitutional Law: An Introduction

Any discipline has a canon, a set of themes that organize the way in which people think about the discipline. Or, perhaps, any discipline has a number of competing canons. Is there a canon of constitutional law? A group of casebook authors met in December 1999 to discuss the choices they had made - what they had decided to include, what to exclude, what they regretted excluding (or including), what principles they used in developing their casebooks. Most of the authors were affiliated with law schools, but some had developed coursebooks for use in undergraduate political science and constitutional history courses. Each participant was asked to write a short paper describing the canon of constitutional law, either as reflected in his or her choices, or in the range of materials available in the field. What do coursebook authors\u27 reflections on their choices show about the canon(s) of constitutional law? In my view, three themes pervaded our discussions, and many of the papers that follow. A crude classification is that one theme involves the focus of the constitutional law canon, another involves the canon\u27s substance, and the third involves the audience for constitutional law studies

A Muslim Perspective of Leadership – Insights from Oman

This paper presents a Muslim perspective of leadership as viewed from observing leaders in Muscat, Oman – the capital city of the Middle East country that has grown at the rate of just under 4% per year since 2000 and is awash with residents from places throughout the world. With this rate of growth and rich diversity, leadership designed to make an equitable impact is required to govern

Substitute Arguments in Constitutional Law

In this article, I argue that that substitution is crucial to our practice of constitutional law. Of course, if one wished, one could easily extend the domain of substitution beyond these boundaries. Substitute arguments are an important aspect of law more generally and, indeed, of life. I have nonetheless chosen to limit my discussion to constitutional substitution because, I believe, overt discussion of substitution in this particular area illuminates important aspects of our constitutional regime-–aspects that substitution itself regularly obscures. To put my central point directly, I hope to show that constitutional law amounts to one, giant substitute argument