The Constitution empowers and restricts different officials differently. A constitutional claim is a claim that a particular government actor has exceeded a grant of power or transgressed a restriction. But because different government actors are vested with different powers and bound by different restrictions, one cannot determine whether the Constitution has been violated without knowing who has allegedly violated it.…
By the time Congress enacted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, roughly two dozen states had already passed fully enforceable employment discrimination laws and engaged in nearly two decades worth of enforcement efforts. But this early state-level scheme was very different from what most lawyers know as Title VII. Title VII vests primary enforcement…
The standard measure of a federal circuit court’s judicial performance is its reversal rate—how often the Supreme Court reverses the circuit when reviewing decisions from that circuit. This Note introduces an alternative way to measure circuit performance: circuit split resolutions. When circuits disagree (“split”), the Supreme Court often intervenes to resolve the issue. Even though several circuits might…
This Note argues that the hallmark of illegal punishment under the Bill of Attainder Clause is the targeted deprivation of life, liberty, or property. While many have highlighted the due process function of prohibiting legislative punishment, no commentator has paid adequate attention to the substantive rights that this prohibition was designed to protect. The result has been widespread…
This Note proposes a solution to the long-standing debate among federal courts scholars as to where to draw the limits of congressional power to strip appellate jurisdiction from the Supreme Court and to strip original jurisdiction from the lower federal courts. Although the Supreme Court has rarely addressed the possibility of limitations on congressional jurisdiction-stripping power, the few determinative…
