Hernandez v. Mesa and the Extraterritorial Constitution Return to the Supreme Court
Michael Ramsey
Yesterday the Supreme Court granted certiorari (again) in Hernandez v. Mesa, the case of the border patrol agent (Mesa) who, while in the United States, shot across the border and killed a Mexican citizen (Hernandez) in Mexico. The case reached the Court in 2017 but was remanded without a definitive ruling; after the Fifth Circuit […]
New Book: “Fidelity and Constraint” by Lawrence Lessig
Michael Ramsey
Recently published, by Lawrence Lessig: Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution (Oxford U. Press 2019). Here is the book description from Amazon: The fundamental fact about our Constitution is that it is old — the oldest written constitution in the world. The fundamental challenge for interpreters of the Constitution […]
Abolish the Feres Doctrine
Michael Ramsey
In the New York Times, Stephen Vladeck (Texas): Congress Should End a ‘Harsh and Unfair’ Rule That Blocks Troops From Court. From the introduction: The Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg don’t agree on much. On Monday, however, they both dissented from their colleagues’ decision to deny review of Daniel v. United States, in which […]
Hyatt I, II, and III
Andrew Hyman
On May 16, my co-blogger Michael Ramsey blogged here about the California v. Hyatt (Hyatt III) case involving a state’s sovereign immunity in the courts of other states, and did so again on May 22. I agree with much of what Mike writes, for example that Hyatt III is very different from other SCOTUS precedents […]
Ilan Wurman on Hyatt and Sovereign Immunity
Michael Ramsey
At Law & Liberty, Ilan Wurman (Arizona State): Originalism and Sovereign Immunity. From the core of the argument: … I agree that the Court has indeed messed up sovereign immunity doctrine. But, as I explain in my book, A Debt Against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism, the results in most of these cases are consistent […]
Seth Barrett Tillman on George Washington and Foreign Emoluments
Michael Ramsey
At the New Reform Club, Seth Barrett Tillman: General George Washington and the Bank of England. From the introduction (footnotes omitted): There is substantial evidence to support the inference that Washington, for one, did not view “private business pursuits . . . with foreign state-chartered trading companies” as emoluments. During the Revolutionary War, George Washington […]
Michael Pardo: Confrontation After Scalia and Kennedy
Michael Ramsey
Michael S. Pardo (University of Alabama School of Law) has posted Confrontation After Scalia and Kennedy (Alabama Law Review, Vol. 70, 2019) (29 pages) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This symposium essay discusses the recent history and current state of the Confrontation Clause and then explores its possible futures. Justice Scalia’s 2004 opinion in Crawford v. […]
Scott Gerber on Chisholm v. Georgia
Michael Ramsey
At Law & Liberty, Scott Gerber: In Defense of the Supreme Court’s First Constitutional Law Decision. From the introduction: Last Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, in a 5 to 4 opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, that a state can maintain its sovereign immunity from lawsuits in other […]
Jordan Perkins: Originalism, Judicial Supremacy, and the Concept of Law
Michael Ramsey
Jordan Perkins (Columbia University, Department of Political Science) has posted Thinking Institutionally About Judicial Review: Originalism, Judicial Supremacy, and the Concept of Law (48 pages) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: In this essay, I intend to advance two primary ideas. In the first part, I argue that originalism, as a judicial philosophy incubated as a conservative […]
Unifying Original Intent and Original Public Meaning
Mike Rappaport
John McGinnis and I have just published a new article on Original Methods Originalism, the interpretive theory that we have developed. In this post, I wanted to describe the first part of the article. In a second post, John will describe the latter part of our piece. One of the significant challenges for originalism is […]