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How the Supreme Court Made Income Inequality a Whole Lot Worse
No full textEconomic inequality is now firmly on the public agenda as candidates and voters alike look for someone to blame for stagnant wages, entrenched poverty and a widening gap between rich and poor.
Bernie Sanders blames Wall Street. Donald Trump points his finger at companies moving overseas. Hillary Clinton identifies middle-class families who are working harder but staying in place as the root cause.
While all these factors and others helped increase inequality, they overlook the role of a key American institution that has also helped widen the gap between rich and poor: the Supreme Court
Voting Trump a Big Risk: Donald Trump Could Set Civil Rights Back 50 Years
No full textSpeaking to a predominantly white crowd in Dimondale, Mich., recently, Donald Trump asked African-Americans: “What do you have to lose by trying something new” like him. “You\u27re living in poverty,” he said. “Your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth are unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”
The short answer is stark: The African American community stands to lose much of the progress we have made in the last 50 years if Donald Trump wins the White House, while the serious problems that we still face will calcify or worsen. As President Barack Obama put it over the weekend, when he told African-Americans he would consider it a “personal insult” if they did not vote for Hillary Clinton: “My name may not be on the ballot, but our progress is on the ballot. Tolerance is on the ballot. Democracy is on the ballot. Justice is on the ballot.”
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Semantic Reversal: Individual, Person, Individualism, INDIVIDUALIZATION, and Subject of Fundamental Rights
Get PDFBased upon the theory of justice, founded on reciprocal and co-operative recognition, this study seeks to demonstrate that there are alternative means of dispute resolution within the spheres of family and work, which produce binding decisions that are accepted by the parties to the conflict as fair. At the same time, it also seeks to demonstrate that certain conflicts cannot be withdrawn from the pur-view and judgment of the State Judiciary System, with the goal of reestablishing the confidence that individuals have in the decision-making system of the state legal system
Class Warfare: Why Antitrust Class Actions are Essential for Compensation and Deterrence
Get PDFRecent empirical studies demonstrate five reasons why antitrust class action cases are essential: (1) class actions are virtually the only way for most victims of antitrust violations to receive compensation; (2) most successful class actions involve collusion that was anticompetitive; (3) class victims’ compensation has been modest, generally less than their damages; (4) class actions deter significant amounts of collusion and other anticompetitive behavior; and (5) anticompetitive collusion is underdeterred, a problem that would be exacerbated without class actions. Unfortunately, a number of court decisions have undermined class action cases, thus preventing much effective and important antitrust enforcement
Toward a Reality-Based Estate Tax
Get PDFCurrently, the estate tax does not accurately value the property and transactions that it is meant to cover. Additionally, the marital and charitable deductions do not reflect actual associated transfers, instead skewing their benefits away from their purported beneficiaries. This Article proposes reforming the estate tax by eliminating these sources of unreality and distortion, and to make the current estate tax a reality-based tax. Through six specific proposals, the Article identifies solutions to the problems associated with testamentary transfers, puts forth alternative methods of valuation to prevent gaming of transfer taxes, and offers significant modifications to two deduction provisions
Potential Impacts on Individuals Caused by the Invasion of NGOs into International Politics
Get PDFIn the contemporary world, NGOs are playing significant roles in international cooperation and globalization. This actively promotes the formation of a global society. Accompanying that, NGOs also have an increased international political influence. Against this background, some scholars believe the rise of NGOs will create an era of individuals’ emancipation from the sovereign states, while others consider that the golden age of autonomy has passed. This paper studies the essence of the association dominated by NGOs and how this association affects individuals in international politics. This paper suggests that the ideal subject for NGOs is one with clearly defined and precise goals and is isolated or compatible with other subjects lest drawing governments’ hostility. The idealized NGOs predominating over all fields may create enterprise association and also help to contribute to a closed international society. The voice of individuals will be silenced in enterprise association and closed society. Therefore, NGOs should function objectively as subsidiary subjects of civil association. If NGOs intrude into the international political field, they will harm individuals
Session B: Is Law Review Scholarship Passé?
No full textLed by Kenneth Lasson, University of Baltimore School of La
What Are Constitutional Rights For? The Case Of The Second Amendment
Get PDFDistrict of Columbia v. Heller—the Supreme Court’s 2008 Second Amendment decision—was the occasion for a momentous national conversation that never happened. Heller sparked heated debates about the Court’s originalist interpretive methodology, but virtually nobody asked what should have been an obvious question: Even if the Court got the meaning of the Second Amendment right, why should we obey that amendment?
This is the curiously underexplored question of the authority of constitutional rights: Why, indeed whether, we have some obligation to respect those rights even when we disagree with them. The Second Amendment brings that question front and center in a way arguably not seen since the demise of the Fugitive Slave Clause 150 years ago. Like that infamous clause, the Second Amendment features relatively specific text—protecting a “right . . . to keep and bear Arms”—that itself is sufficient to provoke controversy, regardless of precisely how that text is interpreted. Americans who disagree with a “right” to abortion can take some comfort
in the belief that the Supreme Court, in construing the Due Process Clauses, got the meaning of “liberty” wrong. But Americans who disagree with a “right . . . to keep and bear Arms” have no one to blame but the Constitution itself.
Should these Americans nonetheless treat the Second Amendment as authoritative, and if so, why? In seeking to answer that question, the analysis in this Article suggests some important truths about constitutional rights more generally. It suggests, first of all, that justifying the authority of constitutional rights is not as easy as is often assumed. Most accounts of constitutional authority are substantive in nature: they tell us to obey the Constitution because of what the Constitution commands. The author contends that none of these substantive accounts are plausible. The authority of the Constitution must be justified procedurally—based not on what it commands, but on how it commands us—or not at all.
Most interpretations of the Second Amendment, however, do not comport with a procedural understanding of constitutional authority. A procedural account does not justify Heller’s individual-self-defense reading of the Amendment or the various “anti-tyranny” readings common in popular discourse. Only the “structural federalism” interpretation advanced by the dissenters in Heller is arguably consistent with a procedural account of constitutional authority.
The implications of this conclusion extend well beyond the Second Amendment itself. They imply a jurisdictional principle of constitutional law, according to which other constitutional provisions and doctrines—including, the author suggests, the abortion right and other aspects of “substantive” due process—might lack a valid claim to constitutional authority. They also suggest a principle of constitutional interpretation: all else being equal, the Court should interpret a constitutional provision in the way that best justifies its authority over us
The Sweeney Legacy: A Tribute to the District Court of Maryland\u27s First Chief Judge
Get PDFMany changes have been made during my first eighteen months as the Chief Judge of the District Court of Maryland. For example, we have added a brand new program to provide all indigent defendants with representation at initial appearances before Commissioners. We have also converted the judiciary from paper filing to an electronic filing and case management system and moved the location of the district court headquarters.
All of these endeavors have been challenging, but something special came when packing up the old office and moving next door. In the accumulation of folders, documents, and other miscellaneous office supplies, I found two ordinary file folders hidden amongst the many records accumulated by the district court over the years. These files, however, were anything but ordinary. What I found was not only history of the district court, but also history of its first Chief Judge – the man who sat in my position, over forty years ago. Looking through these folders that contained speeches, convocations, and publications, I not only received first-person insight to the beginnings of a new court, but of the man behind it all – the Honorable Robert F. Sweeney