Download of the Week
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The Download of the Week is Empirical Constitutional Studies: The State of the Field by Mila Versteeg. Here is the abstract: This Foreword takes stock of the rapid rise of empirical studies on constitutions and constitutional law. It traces the field’s development from large-scale coding of written constitutional texts to more recent data collection efforts…
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The Download of the Week is Power and Immunity in Youngstown and Trump v. United States by Katherine Shaw. Here is the abstract: In Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion for the Court in Trump v. United States, granting ex-presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution, Justice Robert Jackson’s famous concurrence in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company…
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DotW is Blame and Punishment: The Difference Duty Makes by Michelle Madden Dempsey. Here is the abstract: When it comes to blaming and punishing, what difference does it make if the blame and punishment are in response to a breach of duty rather than simply a failure to conform to an ordinary reason? Put in…
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DotW is Old Textualism, New Juristocracy by Marco Basile. Here is the abstract: This Article traces the emergence of text-centric theories of legal interpretation in the early nineteenth century amid an increasingly writing-based legal culture. While many scholars and judges associate textualism with the Founding period’s enactment of written constitutions and innovation in the separation…
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The Download of the Week is The Nature of a Precedent’s Error by Nina Varsava. Here is the abstract: This paper considers whether and under what conditions a judge might take herself to be justified in overturning a precedent based on the nature of the precedent’s error, and regardless of the stare decisis factors, such…
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The Download of the Week is Proportionality in Administrative Law by Christopher J. Walker. Here is the abstract: In this era of rapid change in administrative law—both at the Supreme Court and from the White House—the foreword to the law review’s annual administrative law issue presents a timely opportunity to take stock of the future…
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The Download of the Week is Historical Practice Theories by Ashraf Ahmed. Here is the abstract: Contemporary constitutional law and theory is preoccupied with the question of practice. Over the last decade, across a range of issues—from gun rights to elections to school prayer to the structure of the administrative state—the Supreme Court has decided cases on the…
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The Download of the Week is Pragmatic Conceptualism, Public Nuisance, and the American Opioid Litigation by Benjamin C. Zipursky. Here is the abstract: Public nuisance as a part of American tort law has been as high profile in the first decades of this century as products liability law was in the last several decades of the 20th century.…
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The Download of the Week is Truly General Jurisprudence by Felipe Jiménez. Here is the abstract: There has been a recent turn towards a new form of nonpositivism in Anglo-American jurisprudence. This paper focuses on the theories articulated by Mark Greenberg and Scott Hershovitz (I label their views as the “New Legal Anti-Positivism” or NLAP). NLAP argues…
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The Download of the Week is Democratic Sovereignty and the Prerogative to Make Money: The Case of the Federal Reserve by Christine A. Desan. Here is the abstract: The surge of executive power unleashed by the Supreme Court has reached the Federal Reserve, provoking a crisis that the justices seem suddenly anxious to avoid. But the drama is…