Constitutional Law

During and after last year’s expansive Black Lives Matter protests, police departments nationwide publicly shared robust video surveillance of protestors. Much of this footage rendered individual protestors identi­fiable, sometimes in ways that seemed intentional. Such disclosures raise First Amendment concerns under NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson and its progeny, including the recent Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta decision....

THE PUZZLES AND POSSIBILITIES OF ARTICLE V

David E. Pozen* & Thomas P. Schmidt**

Legal scholars describe Article V of the U.S. Constitution, which sets forth rules for amending the document, as an uncommonly stringent and specific constitutional provision. A unanimous Supreme Court has said that a “mere reading demonstrates” that “Article V is clear in statement and in meaning, contains no ambiguity, and calls for no resort to rules of construction.” Although it is familiar...

An unfamiliar equality principle is gaining prominence in consti­tutional discourse. Equal value presumptively prohibits government from regulating protected activities while exempting other activities to which the government’s interest applies just as readily. Although the principle is being developed in the context of free exercise, it has implica­tions for other guarantees in constitutional law. This Article offers two arguments....

In response to Black Lives Matter protests across the country in the summer of 2020, then-President Donald Trump sent federal agents into numerous American cities to “dominate” the protesters. These agents were largely unidentified, lacking both departmental insignia and badges dis­playing their personal identification information. As we have seen in the past, when law en­forcement officers do not identify themselves, they can evade accountabil­ity...

Appropriations lie at the core of the administrative state and are be­com­ing increasingly important as deep partisan divides have stymied sub­stan­tive legislation. Both Congress and the President exploit appropria­tions to control government and advance their policy agendas, with the border wall battle being just one of several recent high-profile examples. Yet in public law doctrine, appropriations are ignored, pulled out for spe­cial...

A defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him is a cornerstone of our adversarial system of criminal justice. Or is it? Under current law, defendants can invoke their confrontation right only by going to trial. But trials account for about five percent of criminal convictions. That means that the overwhelming majority of defendants convicted in the United States never get to exercise their constitutional right to confront the government’s...

Does the Constitution guarantee a habeas Privilege or not? Even though the Supreme Court appeared to answer this foundational habeas question in Boumediene v. Bush, it seemed to have unceremoniously rescinded that answer in DHS v. Thuraissigiam. This Piece, using Thuraissigiam as a starting point, links this...

Incarcerated transgender individuals with gender dysphoria have increasingly turned to the courts to seek medical relief in the form of gen­der confirmation surgery (GCS). These claims generally allege that prison officials’ denials of GCS amount to deliberate indifference, which is forbidden under the cruel and unusual punishment provision of the Eighth Amendment. To date, the First, Fifth, and Ninth Circuits have been the primary federal appellate...

Dating back to the Founding, theorists have touted the checking value of the press in exposing government corruption and abuse. Pretextual arrests targeting professional and citizen journalists raise significant First Amendment concerns. Even a brief, “catch-and-release” detainment may altogether prevent a newsgatherer from capturing images or disseminating timely news updates from an event. In this sense, arrests of newsgatherers pose similar...

THE CONSTITUTION AFTER DEATH

Fred O. Smith, Jr.*

From mandating separate and unequal gravesites, to condoning mutilation after lynchings, to engaging in cover-ups after wrongful police shootings, governmental actors have often degraded dignity in death. This Article offers an account of the constitutional law of the dead and takes aim at a legal rule that purports to categorically exclude the dead from constitutional protection. The rule rests on two faulty premises. The first...