Arbitrary control over its own docket is the hallmark of the modern Supreme Court. While the Court’s power to choose its cases is a frequent subject of study, its practice of preselecting questions for review has received almost no attention. This is particularly surprising since the Court openly adds or subtracts questions in some of its most consequential and politicizing cases. Yet despite the significance of this practice, its origins are...
Legal History
This Article uncovers the intellectual foundations of presidential administration and—on the basis of original archival research and new contextualization—grounds its legitimacy in the fight against fascism. It shows how the architects of presidential control of the administrative state reconciled a strong executive with democratic norms by embracing separation of powers in order to make the government responsible and antifascist. It then draws...
Gregory Ablavsky’s Federal Ground explains how the national government and American law were transformed in the federal territories that compose modern Ohio and Tennessee. Ablavsky’s careful research and fresh perspective will make his work a vital reference for historians, but this Book Review also highlights the book’s significance for legal academics and lawyers. Ablavsky has collected extraordinary evidence about property...
Scholars have long worried about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. But commentators have largely overlooked the inferior federal judiciary—and the potential tradeoffs between Supreme Court and lower court legitimacy. This Essay aims to call attention to those tradeoffs. When the Justices are asked to change the law in high-profile areas—such as abortion, affirmative action, or gun rights—they face a conundrum: To protect the legitimacy...
This Article refutes the claim that the Constitution was originally understood to contain a nondelegation doctrine. The Founding generation didn’t share anything remotely approaching a belief that the constitutional settlement imposed restrictions on the delegation of legislative power—let alone by empowering the judiciary to police legalized...
Seven words stand between the President and the heads of over a dozen “independent agencies”: inefficiency, neglect of duty, and malfeasance in office (INM). The President can remove the heads of these agencies for INM and only INM. But neither Congress nor the courts have defined INM and hence the extent of agency independence. Stepping into this void, some proponents of presidential power argue...
The President has “two bodies.” One body is personal, temporary, and singular. The other is impersonal, continuous, and composite. American public law reveals different perspectives on how to manage—but cannot escape—this central paradox. Our major disagreements and confusions about presidential power track what we might think of as the fault lines between these two bodies. An array of seemingly disparate debates on topics ranging from...
Shortly after John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, President Andrew Johnson directed that Booth’s alleged coconspirators be tried in a makeshift military tribunal, rather than in the Article III court that was open for business just a few blocks from Ford’s Theatre. Johnson’s decision implicated a fundamental constitutional question that was heatedly debated throughout the Civil War: When, if ever, may the federal...
A century ago and in the midst of American involvement in World War I, future Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes delivered one of the most influential lectures on the Constitution in wartime. In it he uttered his famous axiom that “the power to wage war is the power to wage war successfully.” That statement continues to echo in modern jurisprudence, though the background and details of the lecture have not previously been explored in detail....
From Citizens United to Hobby Lobby, civil libertarian challenges to the regulation of economic activity are increasingly prevalent. Critics of this trend invoke the specter of Lochner v. New York. They suggest that the First Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and other legislative “conscience clauses” are being used to resurrect the economically libertarian substantive due process jurisprudence of the early...