16885 research outputs found
Sort by
But for a Free Press: A Response to Press Freedom Skeptics
No full textThis Article is divided into three Parts. Part I will outline the history-in-law case for why the historical record sufficiently supports recognizing distinct constitutional press freedoms. Part II then provides a history-in-law response to some of the most common arguments made by press freedom skeptics as to why distinct constitutional press freedoms should not be recognized by the courts. Lastly, Part III makes the case for why the recognition of distinct constitutional press freedoms should become a jurisprudential reality and provides a roadmap to accomplish this.
This abstract has been taken from the authors\u27 introduction
Second Amendment Principles
No full textIn United States v. Rahimi, the Supreme Court explained that firearm regulations “must comport with the principles underlying the Second Amendment.” This Article examines what those principles are, how to derive them, and how to apply them in concrete cases. It begins with the Second Amendment’s core principle of defense of self and community, which traces its lineage back to classical thinkers like Aquinas and Grotius. The tradition of firearm regulation that surrounded the adoption of the Second Amendment depended on this fundamental principle. But it also developed subsidiary principles that implement the defense principle in specific ways. This Article analyzes a spectrum of these historical laws from the colonial through the antebellum periods and extracts the “principles that underpin our regulatory tradition.”
While the Court’s explicit direction to rely on these principles is new, its entire line of Second Amendment case law, from Cruikshank to Rahimi, engages with them at some level. Implementing these principles as the Court has provides a robust framework for adjudicating contemporary Second Amendment challenges. This Article provides examples of how to apply these principles in cases involving concealed carry regulations, “assault weapons” bans, and felon-in-possession laws. And looking forward, this Article argues that courts need only grapple with the Second Amendment’s fundamental defense principle to understand the “historical tradition of firearm regulation” that now determines the scope of our Second Amendment rights
An Interview with Lynda Butler
No full textThis law school has a great community, with the students and with the faculty and with the faculty-student relations. You don\u27t find that at a lot of law schools. -- Lynda Butler
------------------------------------
In this oral history, dated March 26, 2025, Professor Emerita and former Dean Lynda L. Butler gives us an overview of her 43 years of service to William & Mary Law School. Butler shares her experience as one of the first women to receive tenure at the law school, narrates the growth of environmental law from the 1980s to today, and speaks about her role managing the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference for almost ten years. We gain perspective on the roles of Dean and Vice Dean at the law school—both positions Butler has held—and hear how the student body, admissions process, and student experience has evolved from the unique perspective of a long-term administrator. Butler’s devotion to professorship is demonstrated through her many scholarly publications and academic awards as discussed in the interview, and her passion for mentoring students shines through in her stories.https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/oralhist_all/1019/thumbnail.jp
Beijing Children\u27s and Migrant Workers\u27 Legal Aid and Research Center in Beijing, China
No full textLogan Smith [1L] will conduct comparative research in Chinese and foreign legal systems on issues concerning the protection of children\u27s and migrant workers’ rights. The Legal Aid and Research Center is the largest public interest legal service organization in China and China\u27s first NGO to specialize in children\u27s rights
The Jurisprudence of Constitutional Entitlement
No full textLawyers are accustomed to thinking of constitutional law as a familiar binary: Either a given governmental policy or practice is constitutional and therefore permitted, or unconstitutional and forbidden. But not all constitutional laws are created equal. A state practice which may be constitutional in concept (such as the death penalty) may, in some or many applications, violate specific constitutional rules and become impermissible. When a policy which has been affirmed to be constitutional in general repeatedly runs up against problems as-applied, a legal tension emerges: can the state implement the policy or not? This dilemma illuminates a third constitutional category: the constitutional entitlement. A constitutional entitlement is a practice that the government is not just allowed but entitled to do, such that if the practice does appear to violate more specific constitutional restrictions, it is the restrictions which must yield. More than being permitted to enact the policy, a constitutional entitlement identifies those policies which a government must be allowed to implement no matter how they might interact with normal constitutional doctrines.
Some constitutional entitlements are relatively uncontroversial: the very notion of “strict scrutiny” is predicated on the notion that government must be given some avenue to pursue certain exceptionally important interests even where they would otherwise seem to breach a constitutional guarantee. However, the jurisprudence of constitutional entitlement has stretched far beyond this narrow domain and instead has become an ad hoc means of carving out particular political priorities of the judiciary’s dominant faction from doctrinal constraint. In areas as diverse as the death penalty, gerrymandering, racial discrimination, and abortion regulation, the federal judiciary has taken policies that are at most constitutionally permissible and instead treated them as entitlements which are largely immune from constitutional scrutiny in any domain whatsoever. Worse, the growing indulgence in constitutional entitlements seems to be bolstering a dangerous sense of entitlement within the judiciary—a sense that their rulings lie beyond valid scrutiny by ordinary citizens and legal observers, and that their privileged position entitles them to exemption from critique or reproach
The Endorsement Test’s Early Years, 1983–1985: Notes from the O’Connor Files
No full textOne of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s signature contributions to U.S. constitutional law was the endorsement test, a subtle but critically important reformulation of the Court’s then prevailing approach to applying the Establishment Clause that focused on the message sent by government action supporting religion and the potentially harmful effects of that message on religious minorities and the political community. Now that the current Court has discarded the endorsement test, leaving the government freer than ever to support religion in a variety of ways, we should expect to see the harms that Justice O’Connor cared about become increasingly widespread and prevalent. Accordingly, now would seem to be an ideal time for scholars and Court-watchers to consider whether Justice O’Connor’s approach to constitutional decision-making might in some ways be preferable to those that predominate today at the Court. The recent opening of Justice O’Connor’s files in the Library of Congress presents new opportunities for this type of inquiry. Specifically, as detailed in this Essay, the files from the key cases between 1983 and 1985 involving the endorsement test reveal a justice who cared about legal principles but also about the real-world consequences of constitutional decision-making. They show someone who thought hard about how to make the law better, who gave serious consideration to the views of others (her colleagues, her clerks, scholars in the field) but who was not afraid to strike out on her own, and who demonstrated substantial courage in the face of forces—particularly the Chief Justice of the Court on which she sat—trying to contain and limit her influence
Foreword to Extended Producer Responsibility
No full textThe William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review’s (ELPR) 2025 Symposium entitled “Extended Producer Responsibility and the Circular Economy” highlighted the intersection of public policy, economic incentives, and environmental concerns as they relate to largescale change and the current legal landscape. A circular economy seeks to keep production materials in circulation for as long as possible by requiring systems that recapture production waste to use the recapture as a resource in the manufacturing of new products. I chose EPR as the Symposium’s topic because I wanted a symposium that truly embodied the multifaceted nature of environmental law and the need for policy that is backed by science and serves the practical needs of producers and consumers.
This abstract has been taken from the author\u27s introductory paragraphs