Source: https://lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/2015/03/index.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 07:36:24+00:00

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E.J. Dionne in his book "Our Divided Political Heart" argues that the strength of America lies in its ability to paradoxically create "communitarian individualists ---- and individualistic communitarians." Edward O. Wilson in his book 'The Social Conquest" contends that the most successful groups of insects and animals on Earth over the last 4.54 billion years have been those who have been able to achieve a balance of altruism and selfishness.
This essay explores how the American experience may be a fractal of what has been the general experience of life in the history of this planet.
Historically, the rational basis test has been a constitutional rubber stamp. In Eldred v. Ashcroft and Golan v. Holder, the Supreme Court applied the rational basis test and respective held that Congress could extend the copyright term of existing works and restore copyright protection of public domain works, despite evidence that Congress intended to benefit copyright owners at the expense of the public. But in Lawrence v. Texas and United States v. Windsor, the Supreme Court applied the rational basis test and held that state and federal laws were unconstitutional because they were motivated by animosity. This essay argues that Lawrence and Windsor may reflect the emergence of a “new rationality” that authorizes courts to consider legislative intent, including evidence of both animosity and corruption. If so, perhaps the Court should reconsider Eldred and Golan.
How is the principle of human dignity apprehended by the law? What are the legal functions of 'dignity'? How is dignity understood in different legal traditions? This article looks at these issues from the perspective of comparative law.
Cooperative federalism programs and spending grants are like contracts. There is a federal offer and a state acceptance; there are terms and conditions, obligations and penalties. And there is a “meeting of the minds” — a moment when the states consent to a federal offer and the deal is done. But because the states are not monolithic actors — and many officials, acting through many different political processes, could conceivably speak for the state — the federal government establishes procedures that dictate which state actors may consent on the state’s behalf and how.
I call these “consent procedures.” These procedures are ubiquitous: they appear in every program and facilitate every grant that requires voluntary state participation. But they are not innocuous. Some require a particular state officer to serve as the state’s spokesperson. Others require the states to express their consent by proceeding through certain state-level processes. Still others automatically enroll the states and infer their ongoing consent from their failure to opt out. In Professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s popular framing, Congress controls the “choice architecture” within which states make the decision to join or reject voluntary cooperative programs. Like “choice architecture,” consent procedures do more than operate as processes for registering state consent. Many also shape how states internally discuss, deliberate, and decide whether to join federal programs. They affect the formation as much as the expression of state consent.
This Article is the first to identify and critically analyze these procedures. It canvasses their many forms and features. It contextualizes them in the Court’s federalism jurisprudence and identifies potential constitutional concerns. It asks whether and under what conditions they are consistent with the core values of American federalism. And it describes ways that different stakeholders — Congress, federal agencies, and the states — can navigate them going forward. The federal government’s largely unnoticed ability to set consent procedures is a consequential feature of twenty-first-century federalism. Federal-state collaboration is increasingly Congress’s regulatory model of choice, and the terms of these collaborations will be the federalism fight of this new century. Consent procedures force to the forefront fundamental questions about the degree of autonomy, self-determination, and respect the states deserve when they are negotiating, defining, and agreeing upon the terms of their cooperative ventures — questions that become more pressing with each legislative session.
Very interesting and highly recommended!
Each proposal must include a cover page with paper title, presenter, affiliation, and a current email contact, along with a C.V. of each presenter and an abstract of no more than 250 words. Please submit materials via email to DukeLawCLRP@gmail.com with the subject line: CRS Symposium Proposal.
Please visit the Center website at http://web.law.duke.edu/lrp/ for more information.
Given the increased national attention to the use of the Clean Air Act to address climate change, an analysis of the origins of the Clean Air Act is instructive for understanding the law in its current form. Contrary to the traditional view, the formation of the Clean Air Act was not the result of the events of the Year of the Environment, but rather, the gradual evolution of a federal regulatory approach to the medium of air between 1955 and 1970. Far from being weak and ineffectual, the federal air pollution laws of 1955, 1963, 1965, and 1967 laid the legal and conceptual framework for the modern Clean Air Act.
This article theorizes the under-examined long-term threat to Delaware’s dominance: global competition. In a competitive global business environment, multinational firms and investors have more alternatives when considering where to entrust their investments, raise capital, and adjudicate their disputes. Delaware’s dominance as a site of incorporation and corporate litigation is one of the most debated topics among corporate law scholars. Traditional accounts of Delaware’s dominance overwhelmingly focus on, and at times overstate, potential domestic threats such as interstate competition and federal preemption. A common theme in this literature is the tension between the respective roles of the federal government and the state of Delaware in the regulation of internal corporate affairs. From a global perspective, this approach is too narrow because the destinies of Delaware and the nation are intertwined. The nascent global threat to Delaware and the nation is a confluence of factors including capital migration toward foreign markets, the growing appeal of foreign stock exchanges, multi-jurisdictional litigation, business firms eschewing courts for alternative dispute resolution, and corporate tax-inversion strategies. The new global narrative illuminates key issues such as the importance of Delaware’s courts for resolving complex global business disputes and the contribution of Delaware’s global brand to the strength of United States’ corporate governance. This article posits that Delaware’s key contribution to United States’ corporate governance is the production of substantially judge-made corporate law — a public good providing dynamic guidance to multinational firms and practitioners as well as a deterrent for wayward business behavior.
The modern “voting wars” involve repeated legal challenges alleging that proof-of-citizenship requirements for registration, voter identification laws, and other procedures aimed at protecting the electoral process violate the constitutional “right to vote.” In adjudicating such cases, courts make effectively subjective judgments about whether the challenged statutes or regulations make voting “too” burdensome.
Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment offers critical — and previously overlooked — insight into the scope of the right to vote. It imposes a uniquely severe penalty — reduction in representation in the House of Representatives and Electoral College — when that right is violated. The theory of “remedial deterrence,” a type of "remedial equilibration," teaches that courts take into account the severity of the remedy for a violation of a legal provision when determining that provision’s scope. Stripping a state of its seats in Congress and votes in the Electoral College is a uniquely severe penalty, effectively nullifying the results of one or more elections, disenfranchising the people who voted for the ejected representatives, diluting the vote of each member of the state’s electorate, and potentially even changing control of Congress or the outcome of a presidential election.
For such a dramatic penalty to be appropriate, a State’s actions would have to be especially egregious — a direct disenfranchisement of certain disfavored groups of people. Facially neutral registration or voting procedures with which a person must comply in order to vote, in contrast, are insufficient to meet this highly demanding standard. This remedial deterrence interpretation of § 2 is consistent with both the Fourteenth Amendment’s legislative history and Congress’ contemporaneous interpretation of that provision during its immediate attempt to enforce it. All of the state laws and constitutional provisions that Congress concluded violated § 2 imposed additional qualifications for voting by disenfranchising entire groups of people, such as the poor, the illiterate, or racial minorities, due to their purportedly undesirable traits. The text and structure of § 2, the debates leading to its enactment, contemporaneous interpretation and application of that provision, and the persuasive considerations underlying remedial deterrence itself all counsel in favor of construing the Fourteenth Amendment right to vote as prohibiting the actual, direct disenfranchisement of disfavored groups of people, and not administrative procedures for registration or voting.
This note comments on Mila Versteeg’s paper “Law versus Norms: The Impact of Human Rights Treaties on National Bills of Rights," available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2360814. Versteeg’s paper explores the relationship between international human rights treaties and domestic constitutions, using data on the adoption of 103 constitutional rights in 186 countries. This note suggests that this paper is an important contribution to international law and policy, quantitative and empirical legal research, and comparative law. The main comments will focus on the latter area of research and discuss the relationship between some of the paper’s findings and three frequent topics of contemporary comparative law.

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