Brief of Constitutional Law Scholars and Practitioners as Amici Curiae In Support of Plaintiffs-Appellants and Supporting Reversal,Georges v. United Nations, Docket No. 15-00455 (Second Circuit 2015)

Prospective amici curiae are scholars and practitioners of United States Constitutional law. Together, Amici have substantial experience researching, publishing, teaching, and litigating in the field of Constitutional law, particularly on the constitutional right of access to the courts. Amici have a strong interest in ensuring that immunity does not infringe on individual constitutional rights, specifically the fundamental right of access to the courts. They submit their brief in support of Plaintiffs-Appellants’ position that immunity should not be accorded to the Defendants-Appellees in this case, where doing so would unconstitutionally impinge on Plaintiffs-Appellants’ fundamental right of access to the courts

Teaching Legal Research and Writing with Actual Legal Work: Extending Clinical Education into the First Year

In this article, we advocate using actual legal work to teach legal research and writing courses, including first year courses. By “actual legal work,” we mean work that is part of an ongoing or planned lawsuit, transaction, negotiation or other form of legal representation. We offer an overview and critique of the traditional legal writing curriculum, and we describe our initiatives to build upon and enhance that curriculum with the use of actual legal work. We conclude with some thoughts on the relative merits of our approach and ideas for following our model

The Framers\u27 Federalism and the Affordable Care Act

Federalism challenges to the Affordable Care Act ( ACA ) are inspired by the relatively recent resurgence in federalism concerns in the Supreme Court\u27s jurisprudence. Thus, ACA opponents seek to leverage the Court-created distinction between encouragement and compulsion (in opposition to Medicaid expansion), and the Court-created federalism concern when Congress regulates in a way that could destroy the distinction between what is national and what is local (in opposition to universal coverage). But outside the jurisprudence, the text and history of constitutional federalism tell another story. The text and history suggest that the Constitution created a powerful federal government, of the people (not the states), and that the Constitution increasingly empowered that government, at the explicit expense of the states, over time. Thus, the text and history stand directly against the federalism challenges to the ACA. And the opponents, and apparent ACA skeptics on the Court, have therefore avoided them. This Article seeks to explore the text and history as applied to the ACA. It argues that a proper understanding of the text and history-through the text of the Constitution, the text of the Articles of Confederation, and the votes at the Constitutional Convention-show that neither Medicaid expansion nor universal coverage violate the Framers\u27 federalism principles