Constitutional Law

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Volume 92.5
Constitutional Rights as Protected Reasons
Stephanie Hall Barclay
Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and Faculty Co-Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.

For very helpful comments, conversations, and encouragement on this draft and earlier versions of this project, the author thanks Joel Alicea, Howard Anglin, Kristina Arriaga, Randy Barnett, William Baude, Rachel Bayefsky, Joseph Blocher, Samuel Bray, Christian Burset, Jud Campbell, Louis Capozzi, Piero Ríos Carrillo, Conor Casey, Nathan Chapman, Aimee Clesi, Nicholas Cole, Steve Collis, Caroline Mala Corbin, Katherine Mims Crocker, Marc DeGirolami, Michelle Dempsey, Alma Diamond, Hasan Dindjer, Richard Ekins, Timothy Endicott, David Enoch, Bridget Fahey, Richard Fallon, John Finnis, Frederick Gedicks, Nazila Ghanea, Sherif Girgis, Raphaël Grenier-Benoit, Simona Grossi, Jeremy Gunn, John Harrison, Michael Helfand, Richard Helmholz, Don Herzog, Steven Heyman, Kristin Hickman, Jessie Hill, Heidi Hurd, Michael Kang, Paul Kerry, Andrew Koppelman, Konrad Ksiazek, Genevieve Lakier, Lia Lawton, Douglas Laycock, Robert Leider, Tyler Lindley, Christopher Lund, Elinor Mason, Michael McConnell, Stefan McDaniel, Bradley Miller, Darrell Miller, Paul Miller, Robert Miller, Christina Mulligan, Jim Oleske, Filipa Paes, James Phillips, Richard Pildes, Jeffrey Pojanowski, Zachary Price, Haley Proctor, Eric Rassbach, Richard M. Re, Bradley Rebeiro, Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, Zalman Rothschild, Angelo Ryu, Stephen Sachs, Josep Tirapu Sanuy, Micah Schwartzman, Amanda Shanor, Reva Siegel, Geoffrey Sigalet, Lawrence Solum, Anna Stelle, John Stinneford, Mark Storslee, Michael David Thomas, Rebecca Tushnet, Francisco Urbina, Pía Chible Villadangos, Eugene Volokh, Derek Webb, Grégoire Webber, Lael Weinberger, Andrew Willinger, John Witte, Kara Woodbury-Smith, Ilan Wurman, Paul Yowell, Mary Ziegler, the participants at the Women in Legal Philosophy Conference at Villanova Law School, the First Annual UChicago Constitutional Law Conference, the Oxford Public Law Discussion Group, the Oxford University Bonavero Institute of Human Rights Works-in-Progress session, Federalist Society Junior Scholar Panel at Association of American Law Schools, the Salmon P. Chase Colloquium, the Georgetown Law School Works-in-Progress session, the Minnesota Law School Works-in-Progress session, the Pepperdine Law School Nootbaar Fellows workshop, the Northwestern Law School Works-in-Progress session, the Northwestern Law School Public Law Colloquium, and the Stanford Law School Constitution Center Works-in-Progress workshop. For excellent research assistance, the author thanks Nat Deacon, Chris Ostertag, Jacob Feiser, Mathias Valenta, Anneliese Ostrom, and Athanasius Sirilla.

Professor Stephanie Hall Barclay proposes and defends a new theoretical model of constitutional rights. While virtually all the prevailing theories about constitutional rights envision, at some level, judges balancing the importance of various individual rights against the importance of other societal goods in tension with those rights and generally hold out the judiciary as the primary guardian of these rights, this Article explains why the existing accounts of constitutional rights are either incoherent or incomplete. It proposes and defends an alternative model that is more consistent with democratic principles and the institutional competencies of the various branches of government.

Constitutional Law
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Constitutional Amendment by State Statute? The Case of Dual Sovereignty in Illinois
Luke Henkel
J.D. candidate at The University of Chicago Law School, Class of 2026.

Thank you to Tyler Ashman and Liam Haffey for providing helpful feedback and assistance on this Case Note.

The Constitution’s Double Jeopardy Clause allows successive criminal prosecutions for the same conduct so long as they are pursued by separate sovereigns (such as two different states). This Case Note examines Illinois law to argue that state statutes are a useful, though imperfect, means of addressing the dual sovereignty doctrine. It argues further that the details of statutory language are highly consequential to whether states can scale back dual sovereignty in practice.

Constitutional Law Criminal Defense Criminal Procedure Jurisdiction State Law
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United States v. Harris: A Hard Sell for Involuntary Medication of Defendants
Rachel Caldwell
Rachel Caldwell is a J.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Law School, Class of 2025.

This Case Note offers some direction for handling competing interests in this developing body of law and other complex cases weighing intersecting constitutional rights against governmental interests. Parts I and II provide background information, describing the Sell test and the current state of constitutional and statutory religious protections. Part III critically analyzes how courts, including the Fifth Circuit, have considered religious objections in Sell determinations so far. Because such analysis remains underdeveloped in the courts, Part IV suggests frameworks for coherently integrating Free Exercise doctrine into Sell inquiries based on the “hybrid theory” of constitutional rights.

Constitutional Law Criminal Law Criminal Procedure
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Tiktok Bans: A Takings Clause Blunder?
Bridget Gilchrist
Bridget Gilchrist is a J.D. Candidate at the University of Chicago Law School, Class of 2025.

She thanks Henry Gilchrist, Timothy Burke, Kimberly Burke, and Alexis Berg for their support, and the University of Chicago Law Review Online team for all their hard work.

This Case Note explores the possibility that, in a world where TikTok is banned or heavily regulated, individual TikTok users could sue states under a Takings Clause theory. Any such cases would have to wrestle with two core questions (1) whether the account holders hold an actionable property interest in their accounts; and (2) if so, whether permanently and totally depriving users of access to their accounts constitutes a taking.

Administrative Law Constitutional Law First Amendment Regulation
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The Truth of Erasure: Universal Remedies for Universal Agency Actions
T. Elliot Gaiser

T. Elliot Gaiser is the Solicitor General of Ohio. He previously clerked for Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., at the Supreme Court of the United States; for Judge Neomi Rao on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; and for Judge Edith H. Jones on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He holds a J.D. from The University of Chicago Law School and a B.A. in Political Economy and Rhetoric & Public Address from Hillsdale College.

Mathura Sridharan

Mathura J. Sridharan is the Director of Ohio’s Tenth Amendment Center and serves as a Deputy Solicitor General in the Ohio Attorney General’s Office. She previously clerked for Judge Steven J. Menashi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Judge Deborah A. Batts on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. She holds a J.D. from New York University School of Law, and an M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nicholas Cordova

Nicholas A. Cordova is an associate at Boyden Gray PLLC and former Simon Karas Fellow to the Ohio Solicitor General. He previously clerked for Judge Paul B. Matey on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. in Political Science from Waynesburg University.

Courts, litigants, and scholars should not be confused by the ongoing debate about nationwide or so-called “universal” injunctions: the proper scope of remedies under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and other statutes providing for judicial review of agency action is “erasure.” This Article aims to save scholars’ recent progress in showing the legality of stays and vacatur under the APA from muddled thinking that conflates these forms of relief with other universal remedies that face growing criticism.

Administrative Law Constitutional Law
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85.4
Citizens of the State
Maeve Glass
Associate Professor of Law, Columbia Law School

For helpful comments on earlier drafts, many thanks to Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Christine Desan, Einer Elhauge, Elizabeth F. Emens, Marie-Amélie George, Noah Glass, Jeffrey Gordon, Annette Gordon-Reed, Jamal Greene, Ariela J. Gross, Hendrik Hartog, Bert I. Huang, Freya Irani, Olatunde C. Johnson, Jeremy Kessler, Ryan Liss, Kenneth W. Mack, Jane Manners, Henry P. Monaghan, Shaun Ossei-Owusu, Christina Duffy Ponsa-Kraus, Vlad Perju, David Pozen, Alex Raskolnikov, Martha A. Sandweiss, Carol Sanger, Matthew A. Shapiro, Emily Stolzenberg, Sarah L. Swan, Sean Wilentz, and Rebecca E. Zietlow, as well as the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review and participants in the Columbia Law School Associates and Fellows Workshop, the Harvard Legal History Workshop, and the American Society for Legal History.

In the midst of a New England winter long ago, young people of Boston filed into a drafty meeting hall up the road from the harbor. They had assembled on that January morning in 1839 for the seventh annual meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society.

Constitutional Law
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Article
Severing Unconstitutional Amendments
James Durling
Yale Law School, JD Candidate, 2018
E. Garrett West
Yale Law School, JD Candidate, 2018

Thanks to John Brinkerhoff, Abbe Gluck, Ted Lee, Daryl Levinson, Scott Levy, and Mike Showalter for helpful comments and conversations. Thanks also to the careful editors at the University of Chicago Law Review. All errors are our own.

Constitutional Law
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85.2
Against Constitutional Excess: Tocquevillian Reflections on International Investment Law
David Schneiderman
Faculty of Law and Department of Political Science (courtesy), University of Toronto

Political sociologist Claus Offe has diagnosed the participatory deficit in North Atlantic democracies as the product of an imbalance in state–market relations. When the market is supreme, public policy can do little to constrain the market’s ever-expanding realms.

Constitutional Law International Law
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85.2
Autocratic Legalism
Kim Lane Scheppele
Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and University Center for Human Values, Princeton University

Research for this Essay was conducted while the author was Visiting Professor of Law and John Harvey Gregory Lecturer on World Organization, Harvard Law School, Spring 2017. She would like to thank the members of the Group on Autocratic Legalism (GOAL) at Harvard Law School, particularly Cem Tecimer, Isabel Roby, and Jakub Jozwiak for their excellent research assistance on Turkey, Venezuela, and Poland, respectively, as well as Mark Tushnet, Vicki Jackson, Scott Brewer, Oren Tamir, and others who attended these sessions for providing both a sounding board and new cases to consider. For valuable research assistance on Hungary, she would also like to thank Panna Balla of Harvard Law School and Cassie Emmons and Miklós Bánkuti, currently and formerly of Princeton. She also appreciates the daily counsel of Jan-Werner Müller, Dan Kelemen, Laurent Pech, Dimitry Kochenov, Tomasz Koncewicz, and Gábor Halmai for constant exchanges on these topics in real time. And she thanks participants in the symposium organized by Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq on The Limits of Constitutionalism, as well as the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review for insightful suggestions.

By now, we know the pattern: A constitutional democracy, flawed but in reasonably good standing, is hit by a transformative election.

Constitutional Law
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85.2
Populist Constitutions
David Landau
Mason Ladd Professor and Associate Dean for International Programs, Florida State University College of Law

With the rise of populist political leaders in the West, such as President Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, the study of populism has become a central concern.

Constitutional Law

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