Exhuming Brutus: Constitutional Rot and Cyclical Calls for Court Reform

Once upon a time, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the phrase “judicial independence” struck fear into the hearts of many Americans, especially those associated with the Anti-Federalist movement. Robert Yates, for example, writing under the pseudonym “Brutus,” wrote with horror of the proposed independence of the judiciary: [The Constitution has] made the judges independent, in the fullest sense of the word. There is no power above them, to controul any of their decisions. There is no authority that can remove them, and they cannot be controuled by the laws of the legislature. In short, they are independent of the people, of the legislature, and of every power under heaven. Men placed in this situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself

Civil Liberties and the Dual Legacy of the Founding

This chapter will argue that the framers’ dual legacy in the area of civil liberties has cast a long historical shadow. Since the early republic, Americans have invoked constitutional civil liberties provisions to challenge customary forms of authority. Yet establishing the abstract legitimacy of one\u27s claim – that it comports with a particular conception of religious liberty or the freedom of speech, for example – has typically been insufficient to prevail in the courts.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/polisci_books/1030/thumbnail.jp

Regulating E-Cigarettes: Why Policies Diverge

This paper, part of a festschrift in honor of Professor Malcolm Feeley, explores the landscape of e-cigarette policy globally by looking at three jurisdictions that have taken starkly different approaches to regulating e-cigarettes—the US, Japan, and China. Each of those countries has a robust tobacco industry, government agencies entrusted with protecting public health, an active and sophisticated scientific and medical community, and a regulatory structure for managing new pharmaceutical, tobacco, and consumer products. All three are signatories of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, all are signatories of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, and all are members of the World Trade Organization. Which legal, economic, social and political differences between the three countries explain their diverse approaches to regulating e-cigarettes? Why have they embraced such dramatically different postures toward e-cigarettes? In seeking to answer those questions, the paper builds on Feeley\u27s legacy of comparative scholarship, policy analysis, and focus on law in action

The Federalist Society and the "Structural Constitution:" An Epistemic Community At Work

This thesis contributes to an understanding of the pathways of civic influence into the least dangerous branch of American politics - the Judicial Branch. Specifically, this thesis examines the influence of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy - a conservative and libertarian legal network of more than 40,000 members - on twelve of the most salient Supreme Court decisions concerning federalism and the separation of powers over the last three decades. As a special case, it also examines Federalist Society influence on a subset of controversial Executive Branch policies issued under George W. Bush. To understand the unique nature of this civic group's influence, it establishes the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy as a kind of epistemic community; i.e., a network of legal professionals and civic leaders bound together and shaped by a set of beliefs about law, the nature of government, and constitutional interpretation. Using this framework, it proceeds to demonstrate how individual members of the Federalist Society acted as "cognitive baggage handlers," carrying these shared ideas into their roles as judges, academics, litigators, and government officials. Finally, it evaluates the extent to which these actors were successful or not in diffusing the epistemic community's ideas into law and policy. It finds that while there is substantial evidence of Federalist Society influence in the areas of federalism and separation of powers, overall the results have been mixed. The final chapter examines why that was and speculates as to the conditions that might facilitate and frustrate epistemic community influence more generally

Exhuming Brutus: Constitutional Rot and Cyclical Calls for Court Reform

Once upon a time, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the phrase “judicial independence” struck fear into the hearts of many Americans, especially those associated with the Anti-Federalist movement. Robert Yates, for example, writing under the pseudonym “Brutus,” wrote with horror of the proposed independence of the judiciary: [The Constitution has] made the judges independent, in the fullest sense of the word. There is no power above them, to controul any of their decisions. There is no authority that can remove them, and they cannot be controuled by the laws of the legislature. In short, they are independent of the people, of the legislature, and of every power under heaven. Men placed in this situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself

Higher Law: Can Christian Conservatives Transform Law Through Legal Education?

The allure of law schools as transformative institutions in the United States prompted Christian Right leaders to invest in legal education in the 1990s and early 2000s. The aspiration was to control the training of lawyers in order to challenge the secular legal monopoly on law, policy, and culture. In this article, we examine three leading Christian conservative law schools and one training program dedicated to transforming the law. We ask how each institution seeks to realize its transformative mission and analyze how they organize themselves to produce the kinds of capital (human, intellectual, social, cultural) needed to effectively change the law. To do so, we develop a typology of legal institutionbuilding strategies (infiltration, supplemental, and parallel alternative) to compare the relative advantages and disadvantages of institutional forms. We conclude by discussing implications of our findings for those looking to law schools as sites of broader transformation within the law