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Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026 Display 03
No full textBook: Quotable King by Steve Eubankshttps://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/mlk-day-2026-photos/1002/thumbnail.jp
Negotiating Crime: Plea Bargaining, Problem Solving, and Dispute Resolution in the Criminal Context
No full textNegotiating Crime: Plea Bargaining, Problem Solving, and Dispute Resolution in the Criminal Contextwas the first textbook of its kind that covers all of the processes through which criminal cases are resolved in the United States beyond trials. This second edition updates the readings to reflect the very latest scholarship post pandemic and in criminal legal reform.
Negotiating Crime brings together criminal procedure, policy debates, and dispute resolution concepts to examine the practice of criminal law in the 21st century. The first half of the book is devoted to plea bargaining, covering criminal legal practice, policy concerns, and reform proposals. In addition, this section explains negotiation theory and applies it to the practice of plea bargaining. The second half of the book covers problem-solving and therapeutic justice courts, including drug courts and mental health courts, restorative justice, and juvenile justice, with a conclusion focusing on understanding criminal system design.
This book is designed to be used by criminal clinics, seminars, and workshops providing skills, theory, policy, and practice pointers to the next generation of criminal lawyers
Comparison of Groundwater Ownership Regimes in Ten Jurisdictions Across Five Continents
No full textThe regulation of groundwater remains underdeveloped globally and often lags behind the domestic governance of surface water. As a result, groundwater is often subject to unfettered extraction, uses, and contamination. A clear understanding of ownership is central to the success of domestic regulations. However, the types of ownership regime in place in nations around the world are poorly documented in the academic literature. This study addresses that gap through a comparative analysis of domestic groundwater ownership regimes across ten jurisdictions in nine countries spanning five continents. It identifies three dominant models of groundwater ownership: private ownership, public ownership, and non-ownership with public oversight. It then examines how these ownership doctrines impact key dimensions of groundwater governance, including the nature and transferability of the ownership right, the level of government at which regulation takes place, implications for rights of use, and interactions with customary and Indigenous rights. Doing so offers unique insight into how nations with different legal traditions, governance structures, and customary practices address the ownership of groundwater resources. It also suggests that different ownership (and non-ownership) models can have distinct implications for other aspects of groundwater governance
Race, Memory, and Authority in Constitutional Interpretation
No full textThis Essay considers how America’s history and memory regarding race complicate constitutional interpretation. If scholars interpreted the Constitution merely to determine what the majority view of the Constitution may have been when it was ratified—its original public meaning (“OPM”)—the loose use of history and memory to interpret the Constitution might be acceptable. What the People—whose membership is contested—thought the Constitution meant when it was framed is interesting, so long as it does not bind us today. However, as Jack Balkin notes in Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation, lawyers and judges attempt to use history and memory as authority to interpret the Constitution to bind and govern us today.
The use of history and memory with respect to race and constitutional interpretation is problematic. Collective memory regarding race can amount to misremembered or ignored history that reflects the stories America wants to tell itself about race, rather than the full history of race and slavery in America. A full account of the complexity of race and the history of Black Americans may yield a range of OPMs that constitutional text can bear rather than a singular OPM. That could result in a reinterpretation of constitutional text, such as the Reconstruction Amendments, on a more substantial foundation of history and memory that might create new constitutional meanings that comport with and embody the freedom and equality principles that are embedded in the Constitution but have been occluded by a narrow collective memory of race in America
Constitutional Interpretation as Problem Solving: How the Modalities Work
No full textThe standard forms of constitutional argument—the modalities—are central to one of the most important approaches to constitutional interpretation: constitutional pluralism. Both originalists and non-originalists use the modalities. This Essay explains how they work. The modalities of constitutional argument are shared cultural tools for thinking about the Constitution, analyzing legal problems, and formulating arguments to resolve them. Constitutional interpretation is a kind of problem solving, and the modalities are our legal culture’s toolkit for analyzing and solving constitutional problems.
Our use of the modalities presumes that at any point in time, some arguments are better than others. This assumption is central to constitutional argument as a rhetorical practice of giving reasons. Many different kinds of history can help us make arguments with the modalities. There is no artificial limit on the kinds of history that can be relevant to constitutional interpretation.
Although there is no general hierarchy of the modalities that applies in every case, not all of the modalities are equally relevant in a given case. In some cases, some modalities are more important than others. The modalities are also not incommensurable. First, their boundaries are not fixed, and some arguments may fit into more than one modality. Second, our views about the best argument within one modality may be shaped by our views about the best arguments in others. Lawyers and judges use the modalities with a defeasible assumption of coherence: that employing different ways of looking at a problem can help them converge on a single answer or a small set of answers.
One should not fear that multiple modalities give judges too much leeway in constitutional interpretation. The primary constraints on judges arise from professional education, socialization, and internalization of the judicial role. At any point in time, these intersubjective constraints can keep interpretations of the Constitution within certain limits. But in highly polarized times like those we live in, lawyers and judges may increasingly disagree, not only about the best interpretation of the Constitution, but even about what kinds of legal arguments are off-the-wall and on-the-wall. When constitutional rot is ascendant, the problem that constitutional law faces is not too many modalities. Rather, the problem is the decay of norms of political forbearance, social trust, professional legal culture, and the judicial role
Originalist Arguments in Free Speech History
No full textContrary to what historians and legal scholars have often assumed, originalism has played an important role in American free speech history. During the 1950s, originalist interpretations of the First Amendment as prohibiting the crime of seditious libel became popular in legal argumentation, court rulings, and in popular culture more generally. The reason for the popularity of these arguments was the Red Scare. Liberal lawyers, judges, and scholars deployed originalist arguments in their battles against government anti-Communist measures. They argued that the original meaning and purpose of the First Amendment was the ban on punishment for criticism of the government, and that many of the government’s anti-Communist measures were effectively a form of liability for seditious libel and unconstitutional. These First Amendment arguments faded from the scene until new originalist arguments, this time calling for the restriction of free speech in libel cases, were taken up in the twenty-first century
Historical Methods of Constitutional Interpretation and Political Gradations
No full textIn this symposium Essay, I explore the hypothesis that as constitutional politics have become more assertive, historical methods of interpretation have become more prominent. In other words, the claim I would like to test is that the intensification of constitutional politics and the prominence of historical argument are correlated. Moreover, the relationship between the two appears to be linear. As arguments become bolder, they are more likely to deploy history as a method of interpretation. That proposition may seem counterintuitive, and it is intriguing
Regulating Reader(s): Book People v. Wong, Compelled Speech, and Sexually Explicit Library Materials in the Fifth Circuit
No full textThis Note analyzes the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ recent holding in Book People, Inc. v. Wong, which struck down Texas Education Code Chapter 35. Passed under the 88th Texas Legislature’s READER Act in 2023, Chapter 35 instituted a mandatory rating system that required Texas book vendors to review the books they sold to district schools and open-enrollment charter schools for sexually explicit material. Book vendors banded together to oppose the law, arguing that it constituted compelled speech, a legal doctrine that has come to the forefront of First Amendment fights since the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in 303 Creative v. Elenis. Applying Elenis’s recent articulation of this doctrine, the Fifth Circuit found Chapter 35 to unconstitutionally compel these book vendors to articulate subjective opinions on a topic they would rather remain silent about. Due to the number of states, particularly those in the Fifth Circuit, implementing similar restrictions on library materials, this Note considers the holding in Book People to be a valuable source of current Fifth Circuit law and an important articulation of free speech rights, given that statutes mandating rating systems are likely to persist. The Note analyzes the history and outcome of the READER Act and Book People, its place in the history of compelled-speech doctrine jurisprudence, and what Book People means for other Fifth Circuit states’ recent legislation. Since the Texas Legislature has recently introduced a bill addressing constitutional errors in the original Chapter 35, this Note takes the rare opportunity to weigh whether the proposed bill will survive a second round with the Fifth Circuit
Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026 Display 08
No full textBook open to photographs on p.188 of Bob Ray Sanders\u27 book: MLK, Jr. greeting a woman at Majestic Theater with Veda Felder and p.189 MLK with dignitaries at Love Field.https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/mlk-day-2026-photos/1007/thumbnail.jp
Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026 Display 04
No full textBook: The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. by Peniel E. Josephhttps://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/mlk-day-2026-photos/1003/thumbnail.jp