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Appellations of Origin and the Lisbon System
No full textThe Encyclopedia of Intellectual Property Law is quite simply the definitive reference work in the field. Bringing together over 300 authors from across the world, the Encyclopedia sheds light on the current global state of Intellectual Property Law, providing unique insights into the discipline and how it is affected by globalization and increased regional integration
Memory Warriors, Pluralists, and Abnegators in Constitutional Interpretation: An Essay on Jack Balkin\u27s Pluralist Originalism in Memory and Authority
No full textOne of the most compelling and generative aspects of Jack Balkin’s Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation is its synthesis of constitutional theory, history, and the growing field of the “politics of memory,” and especially the concept of the “memory entrepreneur.” The book project itself is entrepreneurial, if you will, in its cultivating, connecting, and building from different disciplines, academic languages, and national narratives (in that the “politics of memory” is already such an international and interdisciplinary field itself)
Roger Taney, Memory Entrepreneur
No full textRoger Taney’s infamous “opinion of the court” in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which rejected the possibility that Black Americans could ever be citizens of the United States, was rooted in the authority of the past.
But Taney’s account of that past has been a source of criticism ever since the decision was rendered.
To be sure, there was plenty to complain about. Many, though certainly not all, have taken issue with Taney’s narrative of the making of the United States Constitution and its attendant meaning, critiquing both Taney’s understanding of the Union and his insistence that the Constitution was, at its heart, a pro-slavery and white supremacist document that foreclosed Black citizenship. Still more have derided Taney’s account of the rights Black Americans enjoyed—or, rather, in Taney’s telling, didn’t enjoy—in the centuries leading up to Dred. Both his contemporaries and subsequent scholars alike have, in particular, lambasted Taney for downplaying and diminishing both the explicit recognition of Black citizenship in some state constitutions as well as the broader exercise of Black citizenship rights—including the right to vote in a number of states and the right to own property or enter into contracts—throughout the nation.
With Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation, however, Jack Balkin has given us new tools with which to analyze Taney’s shoddy history
Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026 Display 06
No full textBook: Death of a King by Tavis Smiley with David Ritzhttps://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/mlk-day-2026-photos/1005/thumbnail.jp
The Administrative Law of McCarthyism
No full textThis Article recovers the largely overlooked legal and administrative history of the federal loyalty-security program, and argues that it played a formative role in the development of modern civil service protections and administrative law. During the McCarthy era, the United States Civil Service Commission (CSC), under pressure from Congress, implemented a sweeping loyalty program aimed at rooting out purportedly disloyal federal employees. Though often remembered as a moment of political overreach and civil liberties violations, this Article shows that the loyalty program simultaneously catalyzed a surprising expansion in procedural rights for government workers—both through internal reforms initiated by the CSC and through judicial decisions that extended emerging administrative law doctrines into the domain of federal employment.
Drawing on original archival research, this Article reconstructs how the Loyalty Review Board, housed within the CSC, developed formalized standards for loyalty adjudications, including evidentiary thresholds, rights to notice and counsel, and appellate review. These procedures, while initially limited to loyalty hearings, came to inform broader doctrines governing the removal and discipline of civil servants. In particular, courts began to apply principles such as the Accardi doctrine and the Chenery rule—originally developed for public-facing regulatory action—to disputes between the federal government and its own employees. The result was a nascent body of administrative law that treated personnel decisions not as matters of unfettered executive discretion, but as legal acts subject to procedural constraint.
The Article makes two central claims. First, it argues that civil service law should be understood as a core component of administrative law—not merely a subspecialty of public employment law. Legal rules governing the hiring, discipline, and removal of civil servants serve the same functions as more familiar administrative law doctrines: they mediate interbranch conflict, preventing any one branch from dominating federal policy-making and thus serving deeper separation-of-powers and rule of law values. Second, it argues that the regulation of federal employment not only prevents the aggrandizement of the political branches, but also protects individual rights. In the postwar era, federal jobs functioned as a major form of state-administered benefit, and the procedures surrounding those jobs shaped broader public expectations about fairness, merit, and due process. Those expectations were deeply challenged during the unrest of the McCarthy period, but were ultimately vindicated by the creative adaption of administrative law principles.
These lessons are newly relevant today, as the second Trump administration embarks upon one of the most ambitious attempts to remake the federal civil service in generations, often explicitly seeking to replace merit systems with tests of personal and political loyalty
Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026 Display 02
No full textPoster of Intelligence plus character, that is the goal of true education. MLK with photograph.https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/mlk-day-2026-photos/1001/thumbnail.jp
Geographical Indications
No full textThe Encyclopedia of Intellectual Property Law is quite simply the definitive reference work in the field. Bringing together over 300 authors from across the world, the Encyclopedia sheds light on the current global state of Intellectual Property Law, providing unique insights into the discipline and how it is affected by globalization and increased regional integration
Why Constitutional Argument Matters
No full textThe program for this symposium promised that I would be discussing the “descriptive grammar of constitutional law.” To put my purpose less benignly, I should say that I mean to attack the practice of limiting what I will call “modal analysis” to its descriptive virtues. Part of that attack will be the claim that courts and their commentators should pay closer attention to the modal requirements of the fundamental forms of constitutional discourse, but not because straying from this is a kind of grammatical faux pas. After all, if the system I have urged for constitutional analysis—the system of classifying constitutional arguments and requirements for their use—were only descriptive of what courts and presidents and columnists do, then their very clumsiness—and worse— would amount to a kind of permissible reform
Obituary For the Birth Certificate
No full textHave birth certificates outlived their usefulness? Birth certificates establish an individual’s name, identity, age, race, sex and gender, parental authority, and citizenship. In addition, the information collected at the time of birth and reflected on a long-form birth certificate provides data for public health policy, population statistics, internal migration, government planning, and resource allocation. Birth certificates are also the all-access pass to American life, necessary for many functions of modern life: registering a child in school, signing a child up for soccer, getting a driver’s license and passport, enlisting in the military, and applying for government benefits. All of this, for a simple and ubiquitous government document, is a lot. And some of these functions are contradictory, producing confusion and uncertainty about family connections, citizenship, and identity.
Using birth certificates in adoption as a case study, this Article examines the contradictions inherent in relying on birth certificates to do too much. By examining the history and myriad functions of birth certificates, particularly in the context of adoption, this Article illustrates the ways our current regime of birth certificates creates inefficiencies, confusion, and outright deception. It proposes the disaggregation of the functions of birth certificates to reflect more accurately the valuable truths needed from this most important government document. In particular, this Article suggests an alternative to birth certificates—a series of narrowly tailored government documents, including a certificate of parental authority—to reflect more accurately the reality of today’s more complex lives and families