Constitutional Law

Ensuring compliance with laws that constrain the state is one of public law’s central challenges.

I recall vividly a flight that I took about ten years ago.  As my wife and I boarded the plane, the pilot greeted us at the threshold—a nice touch.  I couldn’t help but notice his necktie, and maybe that was the point.  It was emblazoned with “Second Amendme

Professors Adam Chilton and Mila Versteeg’s How Constitutional Rights Matter is simply a game changer.

Chilton and Versteeg tell an interesting story. I use the word “story” deliberately, to locate the genre of the work in narrative—in their terms, qualitative—analysis, rather than in the scientistic genre.

For centuries, mixed-race Americans have felt a sense of isolation as unique as their racial makeup. Whether society perceived a multiracial person as White or non-White could determine everything from whom they could marry to which jobs they could work to which areas and homes they could live in.

In May 2019, the Supreme Court attempted to clarify the long-disputed standard for First Amendment retaliatory arrest claims. Nieves v Bartlett holds that, as a threshold matter, a plaintiff must prove a lack of probable cause for their arrest, but that a “narrow qualification”—an exception to the probable cause burden—“is warranted for circumstances where officers have probable cause to make arrests, but typically exercise their discretion not to do so.”

This Essay concerns a constitutional puzzle, the puzzle of for-cause removal. For a century the Supreme Court has been attempting to answer a simple question: when is it constitutional for Congress to provide that an agency head or lower official can be removed only for cause?

Chief Justice John Roberts mystified and frustrated court watchers with his opinions in the closing weeks of the Supreme Court’s October 2019 term.

The Court in Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did not hold that the restriction on presidential removal of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) director was unconstitutional. At least, it did not do so according to standard principles of stare decisis and the orthodox account of the law of judicial review—the legal principles under which courts implement the hierarchical superiority of the Constitution to all other legal norms.