Second Thoughts

By now it is evident that legislators need to understand how all the words of the Second Amendment fit together, and how they, in turn, mesh with other words in the Constitution. Most gun control proposals seek to regulate rather than prohibit, limiting the amount and type of ammunition, restricting the number of guns one can buy, and so on

Lex Majoris Partis: How the Senate Can End the Filibuster on Any Day by Simple Majority Rule

Amar, the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, explains his preferred version of the so-called nuclear option by which a simple Senate majority may modify or eliminate the Senate\u27s entrenched filibuster practice

Labor Pains in America\u27s New Birth of Freedom: How the Reconstruction Amendments Were Enacted

Almost a century after American colonists secured their freedom from England, internal conflict surrounding the legitimacy of slavery forced our still-evolving nation to evaluate its core values in a “struggle over the meaning of democracy itself.

Response: Continuing the Conversation

In The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction, I aimed to start a conversation, not end one. I am thus grateful for the generosity of the many fine scholars who in the preceding pages have graciously accepted the invitation to converse. And I am especially grateful for the extraordinary hospitality of the University of Richmond Law Review, which has kindly given a home to this conversation

On Impeaching Presidents

The constitutional tragedy-or was it farce?-that the nation went through at the end of the millennium was literally unprecedented. Never before had a duly elected President been impeached by the House and tried by the Senate. (Andrew Johnson, it must be recalled, became President by dint of one man\u27s bullet, rather than all men\u27s ballots.) These momentous events raised profound constitutional questions for politicians, journalists, and, ultimately, ordinary Americans in whose name our government governs

Marbury, Section 13, and the Original Jurisdiction of the Supreme Court

In this year marking the Bicentennial of the Judiciary Act of 1789, and in a symposium designed to commemorate that Act, it might seem perverse, if not downright gauche, to begin by reminding the reader that § 13 of this Act was the only congressional provision held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court for the first third of our Constitution\u27s history. (The case, of course, was Marbury v Madison.) I nevertheless begin this way because I believe that a careful re-examination of the narrow constitutional issues raised by § 13 will yield important insights into larger and much debated issues of constitutional law. And the icing on the (200th birthday) cake is that such a re-examination will acquit § 13 of the Marbury Court\u27s charge of unconstitutionality-surely a fitting message to deliver on this celebratory occasion (even though it raises some problems for me about what I shall be able to write without perversity or gaucherie fourteen years hence, on the Bicentennial of Marbury itself)

The Lawfulness of Section 5 -- and Thus of Section 5

Few law review articles try to make their central legal argument in their very title - via title words that do not merely describe the argument that will be made in the body of the article, but actually make the basic legal argument, complete with legal reasoning ( and Thus ). But this is such an article. To unpack, briefly, this title\u27s (and this article\u27s) argument: section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) is an obviously appropriate, and thus lawful, congressional enactment pursuant to section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which explicitly empowers Congress to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article - that is, the Fourteenth Amendment itself. Those who oppose section 5 of the VRA claim that its regime of selective preclearance - whereby certain states with sorry electoral track records must get preapproval from federal officials in order to do things that other states with cleaner electoral track records may do automatically - is not appropriate, not proper, not proportional