Faculty Bibliography

And Congress should claw it back.

Most jurists and scholars today take for granted that the U.S. Constitution imposes unwritten but judicially enforceable limits on how Congress and the President may construct their interrelationships by statute. This “juristocratic” understanding of the separation of powers is often regarded as a given or inherent feature of American constitutionalism. But it is not. Instead, it emerged from a revanchist reaction to Reconstruction. As an ascendent white South violently returned to power in Washington, its intellectual supporters depicted a tragic era in which an unprincipled Congress unconstitutionally paralyzed the President in pursuit of an unwise and unjust policy of racial equality. Determined to prevent Reconstruction from reoccurring, historians, political scientists, and a future Supreme Court Justice by the name of William Howard Taft demanded judicial intervention to prevent Congress from ever again weaving obstructions around the President. This Lost Cause dogma became Supreme Court doctrine in Myers v. United States. Authored by Chief Justice Taft, the opinion was the first to condemn legislation for violating an implied legal limit on Congress’s power to structure the executive branch. It is today at the heart of an ongoing separation-of-powers counterrevolution. That counterrevolution has obscured, and eclipsed, a more normatively compelling conception of the separation of powers—one that locates in representative institutions the authority to constitute the separation of powers by statute. This “republican” conception accepts as authoritative the decision of the political branches as to whether a bill validly exercises the Necessary and Proper Clause to carry into execution the powers and interrelationships of Congress, the President, and the executive branch. Where the juristocratic separation of powers undermines both the legal legitimacy of the Court and the democratic legitimacy of the political branches, the republican separation of powers sustains an inherently provisional constitutional order—one grounded in deliberation, political compromise, and statecraft.

The political convulsions of the past decade have fueled acute interest in constitutional For the past century, the Supreme Court has skeptically scrutinized Congress’s power to enact healthcare laws and other domestic legislation, insisting that nothing in the Constitution gives Congress a general power to “regulate an individual from cradle to grave.” Yet when Congress regulates immigrants, the Court has contradictorily assumed that Congress has “broad, undoubted power” to do whatever it thinks necessary—even though no clause of the Constitution gives Congress any specific immigration power. The Court has explained this discrepancy with reference to the Chinese Exclusion Case, an 1889 decision in which it allegedly held that Congress possesses “sovereign” power to regulate immigrants beyond Congress’s ordinary enumerated powers. Absent this imagined Immigration Clause, the Court has offered no explanation for its anomalous review of Congress’s immigration laws. This Article contests this traditional reading of the Chinese Exclusion Case as well as the consequences that have followed from it. Throughout the first century of congressional and judicial resistance to Congress’s power to regulate immigration, there was a broad consensus that Congress had no freestanding power to regulate immigrants beyond its ordinary powers to regulate everyone else. Far from disrupting this consensus, the author of the Chinese Exclusion Case adhered to it before, during, and after his opinion. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that the Supreme Court retroactively misread the Chinese Exclusion Case to authorize an extraconstitutional federal immigration power. Yet these misreadings have never explained why the Court invalidates ordinary domestic legislation even as it defers to federal immigration laws. In contrast with scholars and immigration advocates who have sought to apply the Court’s ordinarily skeptical scrutiny to the immigration context, we argue that this history highlights the flaws of relying on judicial review to protect disenfranchised minorities from a hostile and overzealous Congress. This review has functioned to muffle the serious legislative debate that animated the resistance to the first century of federal immigration restrictions. Rather than ask the courts to limit federal immigration laws just as they limit federal healthcare laws, we therefore argue that Congress itself should rethink whether Article I permits the expanse of its immigration laws in effect today.

I begin by defining democracy and antidemocracy. I then describe the farmworkers’ difficulty in cultivating democracy, the antidemocratic potential of Cedar Point, and the longstanding sources of antidemocracy that protect the Supreme Court’s discretion. I then draw a lesson from the farmworkers’ story for how this antidemocracy can be overcome. In short, for democracy to exist anywhere, it must exist everywhere: in our workplaces, our communities, our courts, and our constitutions.

Judicial review gives any five justices power over the whole government. Why?

The Assembly Clause is the ugly duckling of the First Amendment. Brooding in the shadow of the heralded Free Speech Clause and the venerated Religion Clauses, the Assembly Clause has been described even by its advocates as “forgotten,” a “historical footnote in American political theory and law.” The clause protects “the right of the people peaceably to assemble”—a phrase the Supreme Court has interpreted only once over the past fifty years despite issuing hundreds of opinions interpreting its First Amendment siblings. From the moment it was included in the proposed federal bill of rights, observers have questioned who would bother turning to the Assembly Clause for assistance given the First Amendment’s other protections of free expression. This paper offers a surprising answer. After describing the historical context in which the “right to assemble” was first expressed, it argues that the right could be interpreted not as a narrow right of self-expression but rather as a broad right of self-government. In the decade preceding the American Revolution, advocates of “the right to assemble” used the phrase in response to attempts by royal and parliamentary officials to subordinate their town meetings and colonial legislatures—or, in the language of the day, to subordinate their local and general “assemblies.” This subordination came in various forms: Parliament passed laws disempowering New York’s general assembly until it enacted certain legislation; Parliament censured and then banned town meetings in Massachusetts from debating international affairs; and governors up and down the continent dissolved, changed the location of, and otherwise coerced general and local assemblies into repealing legislation they regarded as seditious. In response, town officials and colonial representatives complained that all people have an inherent right to participate in assembled governments, which in turn have the power to consult their constituents and seek a redress of their grievances—whether by enacting laws with their constituents’ consent or by petitioning other governments for their assistance. The historical context of the assembly clause’s origins suggest that the clause has been interpreted far too narrowly. Once the clause is understood as protecting not only the informal expressions of conventions, marches, and gatherings but also a right to meaningfully participate in effective government, the state and federal assembly clauses look like an important, “forgotten” limit on disenfranchisement and local disempowerment.

FGM can cause short-term complications such as severe pain, hemorrhage, tetanus infection, and urine retention.2 Long-term consequences include recurrent urinary tract infections, cyst formation, sexual difficulties, and increased risk of childbirth complications and newborn deaths.2 While some claim religious or ethnographic reasons for the practice, others view it as sustained by myths of femininity and virginity, and intended to cure vaginal "uncleanliness," prevent "deviant" premarital sexual activity, preserve "purity," and hinder sexual pleasure.2 FGM is a globally recognized human rights violation rendered unlawful under several international treaties. THE COURT'S DECISION On November 20, 2018, Judge Bernard A. Friedman of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan found in Nagarwala that the statute exceeded the federal government's enumerated powers and thus declared the statute unconstitutional.3 The federal government, the court made clear, has no authority to police local or state criminal activity; such authority should be left to the states.3 The Department of Justice declined to prosecute its appeal and the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals refused a request by the House of Representatives to intervene, making Judge Friedman's opinion the final word.4,5 Most criminal laws are passed and enforced by states, as Congress has the power to pass legislation only in areas in which the Constitution grants it authority. "4(p31) It also accords with the interpretation of Congress, which passed the FGM ban after finding that no "single State or local jurisdiction [could] control [FGM]" or protect against the physical, psychological, and civil injury it causes.5 Second, the district court mischaracterized FGM as a noncommercial "form of physical assault" rather than as a paid-for health care service within the national market of licensed medical providers. 3(p22) As federal prosecutors argued, "FGM is usually performed by trained practitioners," and the statute "contemplates criminalizing FGM undertaken by medical practitioners in a commercial healthcare setting, which is in and of itself economic activity.

Abuse of power and obstruction of Congress have long been considered criminal and merit impeachment.

A funny thing about the U.S. Constitution is that it’s written down. Words might seem like an obvious feature of a constitution, but they're notably missing from much of the constitution of the United Kingdom, the country from which the United States seceded. Historians have often assumed that the quirky American practice of putting constitutions into single documents has its origins in the corporate charters of the seventeenth-century trading companies that founded more than half of the thirteen original states. But, as historian Mary Bilder has written, it is surprisingly difficult to explain the change from corporate charter to modern constitution with precision and persuasive power. This Article attempts to do just that, telling the story of an eighty-year lawsuit that forced the Massachusetts Bay Company to treat its charter's terms as Gospel. Relying on original research of thousands of primary sources from the United States and United Kingdom spanning from 1607 through 1793, the Article presents an account of how a corporate charter evolved into a “Charter Constitution” in America while the British Constitution remained intangible. The Article demonstrates that written words became a defining feature of American constitutionalism a century before the American Revolution, and that this distinction between the American and British understanding of constitutions contributed to American independence. It also demonstrates that charter constitutionalism emphasized text but also included methods of interpretation that today might be described as purposivist or living constitutionalist.

Professor Adam Winkler’s recent history of corporate rights, We the Corporations, showed that folk wisdom about corporate personhood is exactly backwards: businesses have won their rights not by asserting their own personhood, but by purporting to represent the real, rights-bearing people behind the corporate veil. In this review, Professor Nikolas Bowie elaborates on this second framework –– what he calls “corporate statehood.” If this metaphor has had pathological consequences, Bowie argues, the problem isn’t necessarily intrinsic to the metaphor. Drawing on a narrative from the Lochner era, Bowie urges reformers to “make the metaphor true,” and in doing so convert “industrial oligarchies” into representative, accountable institutions.

For over two thousand years, conscientious people from Plato to Gandhi have grappled with the dilemma of how to respond when a government orders you to do something you disagree with — say, pay a tax that will fund a war. Perhaps the most famous answer comes from the book of Matthew, when Jesus of Nazareth declared, "Render . . . unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." One way to interpret this declaration contends that you should always comply with fairly imposed civil obligations — at least until you can persuade others to accommodate your views. A second argues that if conscience so dictates, you should disobey the government and accept whatever punishment it doles in return. Recently, a group of constitutional lawyers have offered a third option: Sue the government. Adopting a libertarian interpretation of the First Amendment's protection of free speech and religious exercise, these lawyers argue that it is presumptively unconstitutional for the government ever to put one's moral obligations in conflict with one's civil obligations. As evidence, they draw on cases such as West Virginia v. Barnette, in which the Supreme Court struck down a regulation that compelled objecting school children to recite the pledge of allegiance. In the past few years these lawyers have asked the Court to extend Barnette's logic to petitioners who object to birth control, labor unions, vaccinations, same-sex marriage, and all kinds of politically charged topics. The Supreme Court has been sympathetic to these lawyers, in one case declaring that the First Amendment generally "prevent[s] the government from compelling individuals to express certain views or pay subsidies for speech to which they object." The Court has even acted on this declaration to invalidate laws that tax public-sector employees and donate the revenue to politically active labor unions. But this declaration is wrong. Treating compulsory laws as presumptively invalid not only contradicts historical practice, it's also at odds with the Court's precedent in nearly every other constitutional context. The First Amendment, along with the rest of the Constitution, was adopted to create a functional government out of the embers of a failing state. For any government to function — especially in a politically and religiously pluralistic society like the United States — it must be able to compel residents to do all sorts of things a minority might disagree with, from paying taxes and obeying generally applicable laws to accepting conditions on public benefits. Accordingly, the Supreme Court has rejected claims brought under every clause of the First Amendment (and many other articles of the Constitution) whenever it has realized that "government would not work" were it constitutionally prohibited from compelling citizens to do or pay for things they might not like. Even the author of Barnette recognized the danger of converting the First Amendment into a suicide pact. This Article molds these Supreme Court moments of clarity into a coherent doctrine, which I call the "government could not work" doctrine. Analyzing a wide variety of cases, I conclude that objectionable compulsion, in and of itself, should not make a law presumptively unconstitutional, triggering the so-called strict scrutiny that the Court currently applies when a person objects to subsidizing the political activity of a labor union. As the Court has declared throughout its history — with a brief exception between about 1940 and 1980 — applying such strict scrutiny every time a person challenges a compulsory law would "cripple" the government. In other words, the First Amendment doesn't render American citizens uniquely exempt from the universal dilemma of having to decide whether to abide by a disagreeable law. The authors of the First Amendment wanted a government that tolerated dissent, not a government that would be incapacitated by it.

Professor Bowie has authored one of two Responses the Forum is running in December inspired by Professor Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz’s recently published book on impeachment, To End a Presidency. These pieces are being published contemporaneously with Professor Michael Stokes Paulsen’s book review. Bowie offers a theory of the proper scope of the impeachment power that neither Paulsen nor Tribe and Matz embrace — namely, that Congress may only impeach for conduct that violated an extant criminal law. In other words, “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” can only refer to conduct that is in fact a crime or a misdemeanor, and impeachment is best understood as a criminal, rather than civil, process. This was the theory articulated by then-former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis as he defended President Andrew Johnson from impeachment, and Bowie asserts that Curtis’s theory has been right all along. Among his many arguments, Bowie closes with a practical one: Insisting that impeachment be grounded in positive criminal law is the most effective way to ensure that, both now and in the future, it does not become a mere political weapon.

In 1976, the First National Bank of Boston, Gillette, and three other Massachusetts companies announced their plan to oppose a referendum authorizing a graduated income tax. State officials responded that Massachusetts law prohibited this type of corporate political expenditure. The U.S. Supreme Court intervened, declaring that Massachusetts could not prohibit speech based solely on the “corporate identity of the speaker.” The Court reasoned that shareholders through “corporate democracy” were better positioned than states to regulate companies’ political engagement. In the wake of this decision, the Boston City Council—a municipal corporation—announced its plan to spend its corporate dollars in support of a 1978 tax referendum. That same election, Massachusetts Citizens for Life—a nonprofit corporation—financed newsletters promoting anti-abortion candidates. State and federal officials again blocked these corporate political expenditures. This time, however, the Supreme Court protected only the nonprofit, observing that a “voluntary political association” did not “suddenly present the danger of corruption merely by assuming the corporate form.” These Supreme Court decisions armed business and nonprofit corporations with a powerful new weapon—the First Amendment—that future lawyers wielded against advertising bans, labor contracts, healthcare requirements, and, of course, campaign finance laws. At the same time, the decisions left the City of Boston unable to support referenda that the Bank of Boston was free to oppose. This paper will situate this “First Amendment libertarianism” in the political, legal, and social context of 1970s Boston, a city gripped by racial crisis and dependent on business corporations, especially the Bank of Boston, for financial survival. This context helps explain why courts, lawyers, and executives expected that shareholders could responsibly oversee governments better than governments could oversee shareholders—or themselves.

In 1976, the First National Bank of Boston, Gillette, and three other Massachusetts companies announced their plan to oppose a referendum authorizing a graduated income tax. State officials responded that Massachusetts law prohibited this type of corporate political expenditure. The U.S. Supreme Court intervened, declaring that Massachusetts could not prohibit speech based solely on the “corporate identity of the speaker.” The Court reasoned that shareholders through “corporate democracy” were better positioned than states to regulate companies’ political engagement. In the wake of this decision, the Boston City Council—a municipal corporation—announced its plan to spend its corporate dollars in support of a 1978 tax referendum. That same election, Massachusetts Citizens for Life—a nonprofit corporation—financed newsletters promoting anti-abortion candidates. State and federal officials again blocked these corporate political expenditures. This time, however, the Supreme Court protected only the nonprofit, observing that a “voluntary political association” did not “suddenly present the danger of corruption merely by assuming the corporate form.” These Supreme Court decisions armed business and nonprofit corporations with a powerful new weapon—the First Amendment—that future lawyers wielded against advertising bans, labor contracts, healthcare requirements, and, of course, campaign finance laws. At the same time, the decisions left the City of Boston unable to support referenda that the Bank of Boston was free to oppose. This paper will situate this “First Amendment libertarianism” in the political, legal, and social context of 1970s Boston, a city gripped by racial crisis and dependent on business corporations, especially the Bank of Boston, for financial survival. This context helps explain why courts, lawyers, and executives expected that shareholders could responsibly oversee governments better than governments could oversee shareholders—or themselves.

This paper addresses the question of what the role of a tax-­exempt university has been in a deindustrializing city, and how the university has conceived of its responsibilities as an “institutional/corporate citizen” when confronting the need to expand. In 1973, Yale University attempted to build two new residential colleges, but the New Haven city council vetoed construction on the grounds that such expansion would deprive the city of needed tax revenue. This fight was well recorded in Yale president Kingman Brewster’s archives, which also reveal how Yale saw its conflicting responsibilities towards the nation and towards the city.