Download of the Week
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Mauro Zamboni (Stockholm University – Faculty of Law) has posted For Whom Should Legislation be Written? Legislative Audiences, Legal Outputs, and Participatory Democracy on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Modern legislation is commonly portrayed as a universal instrument addressed equally to all citizens. This article challenges that assumption by arguing that legislative texts are inevitably written…
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The Download of the Week is A Conservative Case Against Originalism: The Problem of the Construction Zone and Its Implications by Ronald C. Den Otter. Here is the abstract: The issue with originalism that has generated by far the most scholarly interest and controversy over the years concerns how the original meaning can be recovered with enough confidence…
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The Download of the Week is Old Rulings, New Reasons by Jack Boeglin. Here is the abstract: When the Supreme Court does away with a longstanding legal principle, what should become of the hundreds, if not thousands, of precedents across the judicial system that rely upon it? Does some residual precedential value continue to attach to a decision…
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The Download of the Week is Originalism’s General-Law Turn by Nina Varsava & Bill Watson . Here is the abstract: Originalists are increasingly turning to a general-law theory of constitutional rights. Under this theory, constitutional enactment declared but did not create constitutional rights. The content of those rights was, and remains, a question of general law—a species…
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The Download of the Week is Presidential Control of the Civil Service by Nicholas Bednar. Here is the abstract: Conventional wisdom treats the federal civil service as largely beyond the president’s reach. This Article challenges that assumption. Legal scholars too often focus on constitutional powers rather than statutory authority. Yet the president has possessed statutory authority to regulate…
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The Download of the Week is In CASA You Missed It by Mila Sohoni. Here is the abstract: This Essay’s purpose is to show how Trump v. CASA should be read—and how it emphatically should not be read. While CASA rejected one pathway to universal injunctive relief on statutory grounds, the decision simultaneously left intact a number of…
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The Download of the Week is Keeping it Real in Constitutional Theory by Aileen Kavanagh. Here is the abstract: In constitutional theory, we are familiar with the claim that a good theory must fit and justify constitutional practice. However, the criterion of ‘fit’ sometimes gets lost in the quest to provide a bold normative theory about what constitutional…
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The Download of the Week is Presidential Removal as Article I, Not Article II by Jed H. Shugerman & Gary Lawson. Here is the abstract: As a matter of original public meaning, Article I’s Necessary and Proper clause is the starting point for both Congress’s power to create offices and the limits on that power. Many legal scholars…
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The Download of the Week is Utopian Constitutionalism by Rosalind Dixon & David Landau. Here is the abstract: An extensive literature examines transformative constitutionalism: the growing tendency of constitutions around the world, especially in the global south, to seek to transform politics and society to reduce poverty, increase inequality, and achieve other goals. Transformative constitutionalists emphasize…
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The Download of the Week is Abstract Review in Article III Courts by E. Garrett West. Here is the abstract: Federal courts are supposed to engage in judicial review only in concrete cases and controversies. Many European constitutional courts, by contrast, engage in abstract review of legislation. But a combination of features of adjudication in the United States…