The Constitutional Rights of Teachers and Professors

The discussion examines the current state of educators\u27 rights and identifies two key areas that are still hotly contested: extramural utterances that my be critical of the institution itself and a teacher\u27s freedom with his own classroom. A survey of two recent cases illuminates these issues

Trends in the Supreme Court: Mr. Jefferson’s Crumbling Wall—A Comment on Lynch v. Donnelly

This comment is based upon an address by Professor Van Alstyne to the Annual Conference of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, delivered on May 17, 1984, at Williamsburg, Virginia

The Second Amendment and the Personal Right to Arms

For many years, the Second Amendment was politely ignored, or summarily dismissed, by America\u27s legal academy. In recent years, however, more and more law professors have begun taking the Second Amendment seriously. Professor William Van Alstyne, one of the nation\u27s most respected Constitutional law professors, and the author of a leading Constitutional law casebook; offers his contribution in this essay. Van Alstyne suggests that the Second Amendment means exactly what it says: that individual citizens have a right, not merely a privilege, to own and carry firearms. He also commends the National Rifle Association for its constructive role as a defender of civil liberties. This essay was first published in 1994, in volume 43 of the Duke Law Journal, beginning on page 1,236. It is reprinted by permission

Book Review

This review of The Supreme Court on Trial by Charles Hyneman, questions why the work’s tackling the age-old issues of the source of judicial review and its constitutionality is particularly novel or unique from other such examinations. Issue is also taken with Brown v. Board of Educaion\u27s dominance of such discussion and the book’s poor treatment of the desegregation cases

Making Sense of Desegregation and Affirmative Action

This review discusses J. Harvie Wilkinson\u27s From Brown to Bakke and its companion work, Counting by Race: Equality from the Founding Fathers to Bakke and Weber written by Terry Eastland and William J. Bennett. Wilkinson\u27s work is found to maintain a narrow focus on its specific subject of school desegregation and the Supreme Court, but it suffers from over-exaggeration and an abundance of adornment in his writing style. Counting is a provocative piece that asserts the position that the Constitution is still not color-blind, despite what many have proposed, and makes an authoritative argument for such a claim

Notes on a Bicentennial Constitution: Part I, Processes of Change

With the approach of the Bill of Rights bicentennial, this paper takes the cause for celebration as an equally important occasion for critique. This work argues that the most distinguishing aspects of our Constitution are not the Bill of Rights, federalism, and separation of powers, but rather the availability of judicial review, the political insulation of federal judges, and the limited mechanisms available for constitutional change

The ‘Competition of the Market’: “Enter the Elephant!” [A Restatement of a Most Perplexing First Amendment Conundrum]

This short essay revisits the enduring problem of “government propaganda” in the domestic marketplace of “competing ideas.” Drawing his argument from the suggestions and from strongly worded dicta by several famous twentieth century justices (most notably Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Louis Brandeis, Robert Jackson and Hugo Black), Van Alstyne suggests that the First Amendment invests every ordinary citizen with suitable standing (akin to that of a corporate shareholder) to call upon any judge bound by oath of office, as set forth in Article VI, and whose aid is thus appropriately invoked, to enjoin the government from acting as an ideological partisan). The essay provides examples of left and right-wing use of government propaganda to provoke the reader to share the author’s concern. Does it make any sense to say that the First Amendment may forbid the government to silence unpopular views but freely allow the government itself to weigh in through its own partisan propaganda? What happened in Germany when the courts of that sophisticated nation sedulously adopted that view

Ten Commandments, Nine Judges, and Five Versions of One Amendment - The First. (“\u3cem\u3eNow\u3c/em\u3e What?”)

This article explores the variety of opinions expressed by the Justices in the two “Ten Commandments” cases, specifically Justice O’Connor’s dissent and Justice Breyer’s concurrence in Van Orden v. Perry