The Thirteenth Amendment as Basis for Racial Truth & Reconciliation

Article published in the Arizona Law Review

A Proposal to Amend the Michigan Zoning Enabling Act to Allow Amortization of Nonconforming Uses

This article suggests that the Michigan legislature should amend the Michigan Zoning Enabling Act in order to explicitly allow state and local government to amortize nonconforming property uses under limited circumstances. While the current prohibition on amortization protects individual rights and is thus laudable as a liberty-friendly law, it goes too far by categorically refusing to give any account for the public interest. A revised statute allowing amortization, but only when the government satisfies a substantial burden to demonstrate its “reasonableness,” including a showing that the property to be amortized can be put to reasonable alternate use, would properly recognize important (albeit competing) individual and collective interests. The article concludes, moreover, after examining the prohibition’s statutory history and Michigan Supreme Court precedent, that the Michigan Court would have strong basis to uphold such a statutory revision

Second Amendment Incorporation Through the Fourteenth Amendment Privileges or Immunities and Due Process Clauses

The second amendment, alternately maligned over the years as the black sheep of the constitutional family and worse, and praised as a palladium of the liberties of a republic, since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers, should be recognized by the United States Supreme Court to apply to the several States through the Fourteenth Amendment privileges or immunities clause or, alternatively, through the due process clause. This article suggests that the issue of Second Amendment incorporation presents a useful contemporary mechanism for the Court to revive the long-dormant Fourteenth Amendment privileges or immunities clause, and that such judicial recognition of the clause is necessary to respect the Framers’ vision, as inspired by the Declaration of Independence and laid out in the amended Constitution, for a government that would serve, instead of rule, the people. Government would exercise its necessary, limited role, and otherwise leave the people alone - with the Constitution standing ever watchful as guardian to assure that government would not overstep its bounds, as governments are apt to do

Government as Liberty's Servant: The

This essay suggests that the American legal system fails to do proper justice to the robust conception of Liberty under which the nation was founded, and locates a major source of the problem in the Supreme Court’s current presumption-of-constitutionality approach to judicial review, prompted by post-New Deal backlash to Lochner v. New York. This essay offers a new due process clause-based presumption-of-liberty standard of judicial review, modeled on the Court’s existing First Amendment “reasonable time, place and manner” doctrine. This approach, already utilized narrowly by the Third Circuit Federal Court of Appeals in Lutz v. York in 1990, more accurately reflects the Constitution’s core Liberty-First ideals, while also recognizing the proper police-power role of government

Do

Conventional wisdom holds that a municipal corporation receives no protection from the equal protection and due process clauses as against its creating state. The reasoning is that municipal corporations, as mere subunits or instrumentalities of the state, are simply ineligible for such constitutional protections. This article argues that municipal corporations, as ""persons"" under the Constitution, do in fact have standing to assert procedural due process claims against their creating states in cases not involving substantive matters of the state’s internal political organization. Judicial recognition of this principle would advance important values of fairness and doctrinal consistency in state-local relations, and accord an appropriate measure of deference to those constitutionally-maligned “creatures of the state,” municipal corporations

Reading Tea Leaves in Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life: Hope for a Buckley Evolution?

During its 2006-07 Term the U.S. Supreme Court decided Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc., the latest in a long line of cases sprouting from the seminal 1976 First Amendment campaign finance case, Buckley v. Valeo. In Wisconsin Right to Life, the Court concluded that Section 203 of the federal Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, prohibiting the use of corporate funds to finance “electioneering communications” during a specified pre-election period, constituted an as-applied violation of a non-profit corporation’s free speech rights. Wisconsin Right to Life offers useful insights into the Roberts Court’s thinking on the lively question of the propriety of legislative efforts to regulate the financing of political campaigns. On one hand the case demonstrates a Court properly skeptical of laws proscribing constitutionally-protected individual rights (here freedom of expression); on the other, a focused parsing of the principal, concurring, and dissenting opinions uncovers the potential for a coalition of Justices able to undertake the necessary work of evolving Buckley into a socially-legitimate constitutional regime equipped to address meaningfully the especially invidious aspects of Big Money in modern politics. This essay offers thoughts on both themes

Reviving a Natural Right: The Freedom of Autonomy

This article explores the historical foundations of the individual rights of equality and free choice on matters of natural private concern (collectively, “freedom of autonomy”) in America, looks at several present-day applications, and concludes that meaningful steps must be taken – by encouraging greater awareness among lawmakers and courts of original meanings of the constitutional terms “liberty,” “property,” “privileges,” and “immunities,” and perhaps even through constitutional amendment – to revive this most basic right from an overbearing government

Rescuing the Fourteenth Amendment Privileges or Immunities Clause: How “Attrition of Parliamentary Processes” Begat Accidental Ambiguity; How Ambiguity Begat SlaughterHouse

This essay addresses a topic of great academic and practical interest currently facing the Supreme Court: whether the Privileges or Immunities Clause, which has lain dormant since the Court’s erroneous 1873 SlaughterHouse Cases decision, should be resurrected in order to apply the Second Amendment to the States. The essay makes the unique argument that the textual basis for the SlaughterHouse Court’s holding regarding the clause - i.e., the lack of parallel textual construction in the Fourteenth Amendment Section One’s first two sentences regarding citizenship - was in fact the wholly unintentional product of what we might call “attrition of parliamentary processes.” This analysis is not new to the Supreme Court. Borrowed from an oral argument made before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1882 by Roscoe Conkling (a member in 1866 of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction), the analysis played a vital role in leading the Court to its 1898 conclusion that the word “person” in Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment should be read to include artificial persons, including corporations - an interpretation substantially broader than that given previously by the SlaughterHouse majority. Just as the Court in the last decades of the nineteenth century corrected the Court’s too-narrow interpretation of Section One “personhood,” so it should now - finally - begin to correct its earlier misreading of the distinction in Section One between U.S. and state citizenship in order to restore the privileges or immunities clause to its full intended effect of applying the Bill of Rights (and more) to the States

Neural correlates of enhanced visual short-term memory for angry faces: An fMRI study

Copyright: © 2008 Jackson et al.Background: Fluid and effective social communication requires that both face identity and emotional expression information are encoded and maintained in visual short-term memory (VSTM) to enable a coherent, ongoing picture of the world and its players. This appears to be of particular evolutionary importance when confronted with potentially threatening displays of emotion - previous research has shown better VSTM for angry versus happy or neutral face identities.Methodology/Principal Findings: Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, here we investigated the neural correlates of this angry face benefit in VSTM. Participants were shown between one and four to-be-remembered angry, happy, or neutral faces, and after a short retention delay they stated whether a single probe face had been present or not in the previous display. All faces in any one display expressed the same emotion, and the task required memory for face identity. We find enhanced VSTM for angry face identities and describe the right hemisphere brain network underpinning this effect, which involves the globus pallidus, superior temporal sulcus, and frontal lobe. Increased activity in the globus pallidus was significantly correlated with the angry benefit in VSTM. Areas modulated by emotion were distinct from those modulated by memory load.Conclusions/Significance: Our results provide evidence for a key role of the basal ganglia as an interface between emotion and cognition, supported by a frontal, temporal, and occipital network.The authors were supported by a Wellcome Trust grant (grant number 077185/Z/05/Z) and by BBSRC (UK) grant BBS/B/16178

Interventional bronchoscopy for benign tracheobronchial diseases under cardiopulmonary bypass support: case reports and literature review

The use of cardiopulmonary bypass as an adjunct to airway surgery for non-malignant diseases in adults is not well established in the UK. We are reporting two cases which demonstrate the additional benefits of using cardiopulmonary bypass during difficult bronchoscopy and complex airway stenting. The first case presents an emergency indication for cardiopulmonary bypass in a life-threatening but benign condition. The second case presented, utilises cardiopulmonary bypass standby as adjunct to a potentially life threatening procedure. A review of the literature is also provided