Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that established the principle of judicial review, meaning that American courts have the power to strike down laws and statutes they find to violate the Constitution of the United States. Decided in 1803, Marbury is regarded as the single most important decision in American constitutional law. It established that the U.S. Constitution is actual law, not just a statement of political principles and ideals. It also helped define the boundary between the constitutionally separate executive and judicial branches of the federal government.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. Usually considered one of the most consequential amendments, it addresses citizenship rights and equal protection under the law and was proposed in response to issues related to formerly enslaved Americans following the American Civil War. The amendment was bitterly contested, particularly by the states of the defeated Confederacy, which were forced to ratify it in order to regain representation in Congress. The amendment, particularly its first section, is one of the most litigated parts of the Constitution, forming the basis for landmark Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) regarding racial segregation, Loving v. Virginia (1967) regarding interracial marriage, Roe v. Wade (1973) regarding abortion, Bush v. Gore (2000) regarding the 2000 presidential election, Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) regarding same-sex marriage, and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) regarding race-based college admissions. The amendment limits the actions of all state and local officials, and also those acting on behalf of such officials.
Robert Heron Bork was an American legal scholar who served as solicitor general of the United States from 1973 until 1977. A professor by training, he was acting United States Attorney General and a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1982 to 1988. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the Senate rejected his nomination after a contentious and highly publicized confirmation hearing.
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for people of color were equal in quality to those of white people, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal". The decision legitimized the many state "Jim Crow laws" re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877. Such legally enforced segregation in the South lasted into the 1960s.
Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996), is a landmark United States Supreme Court case dealing with sexual orientation and state laws. It was the first Supreme Court case to address gay rights since Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), when the Court had held that laws criminalizing sodomy were constitutional.
Yale Law School (YLS) is the law school of Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was established in 1824. The 2020–21 acceptance rate was 4%, the lowest of any law school in the United States. Its yield rate of 87% is also consistently the highest of any law school in the United States.
John Hart Ely was an American legal scholar. He was a professor of law at Yale Law School from 1968 to 1973, Harvard Law School from 1973 to 1982, Stanford Law School from 1982 to 1996, and at the University of Miami Law School from 1996 until his death. From 1982 until 1987, he was the 9th dean of Stanford Law School.
In the United States, the exclusionary rule is a legal rule, based on constitutional law, that prevents evidence collected or analyzed in violation of the defendant's constitutional rights from being used in a court of law. This may be considered an example of a prophylactic rule formulated by the judiciary in order to protect a constitutional right. The exclusionary rule may also, in some circumstances at least, be considered to follow directly from the constitutional language, such as the Fifth Amendment's command that no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself" and that no person "shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law."
The Yale Law Journal (YLJ) is a student-run law review affiliated with the Yale Law School. Published continuously since 1891, it is the most widely known of the eight law reviews published by students at Yale Law School. The journal is one of the most cited legal publications in the United States and usually generates the highest number of citations per published article.
Vikram David Amar is an American legal scholar focusing on constitutional law, federal courts, and civil and criminal procedure. In August 2015, he became dean of the University of Illinois College of Law and the Iwan Foundation Professor of Law. He returned to the University of California, Davis School of Law as a Distinguished Professor of Law in 2023.
Mark Victor Tushnet is an American legal scholar. He specializes in constitutional law and theory, including comparative constitutional law, and is currently the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Tushnet is identified with the critical legal studies movement.
David D. Cole is the National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Before joining the ACLU in July 2016, Cole was the Hon. George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center from March 2014 through December 2016. He has published in various legal fields including constitutional law, national security, criminal justice, civil rights, and law and literature. Cole has litigated several significant First Amendment cases in the Supreme Court of the United States, as well a number of influential cases concerning civil rights and national security. He is also a legal correspondent to several mainstream media outlets and publications.
Jed L. Rubenfeld is an American legal scholar and professor of law at Yale Law School. He is an expert on constitutional law, privacy, and the First Amendment. He joined the Yale faculty in 1990 and was appointed to a full professorship in 1994. Rubenfeld has served as a United States representative at the Council of Europe and has taught as a visiting professor at both the Stanford Law School and the Duke University School of Law. He is also the author of two novels, including the million-copy bestseller, The Interpretation of Murder.
Sanford Victor Levinson is an American legal scholar known for his writings on constitutional law. A professor at the University of Texas Law School, Levinson is notable for his criticism of the United States Constitution as well as excessive presidential power and has been widely quoted on such topics as the Second Amendment, gay marriage, nominations to the Supreme Court, and other legal issues. He has called for a Second Constitutional Convention of the United States.
Paul Brest is an American legal scholar who is a former president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and was dean of Stanford Law School. He is credited with coining the name originalism to describe a particular approach to interpreting the United States Constitution.
In the United States, the right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right protected by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights, and by the constitutions of most U.S. states. The Second Amendment declares:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The Constitutional Accountability Center(CAC) is a non-profit think tank located in Washington, D.C., that seeks to advance a progressive interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. The group has filed numerous lawsuits against former President Donald Trump.
Government by Judiciary is a 1977 book by constitutional scholar and law professor Raoul Berger which argues that the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution contrary to the original intent of the framers of this Amendment and that the U.S. Supreme Court has thus usurped the authority of the American people to govern themselves and decide their own destiny. Berger argues that the U.S. Supreme Court is not actually empowered to rewrite the U.S. Constitution – including under the guise of interpretation – and that thus the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently overstepped its designated authority when it used its powers of interpretation to de facto rewrite the U.S. Constitution in order to reshape it more to its own liking.
The Michigan State Law Review is an American law review published by students at Michigan State University College of Law. By counting “flagship” journals not separately ranked by Washington & Lee School of Law in its Law Journal Rankings, Michigan State Law Review was the 63rd highest-ranked “flagship” print journal in 2022 with a score of 14.55 out of 100 and, per W&L Law, the 99th overall law journal, a dramatic increase from its ranking of 332rd in 2003. The journal hosts an annual academic conference of global legal experts with past events covering issues such as autonomous vehicles, quantitative legal analysis, civil rights, and intellectual property. Professor David Blankfein-Tabachnick has served as Faculty Advisor of the journal since his appointment in 2016. In 2018, the journal began publishing an annual "Visionary Article Series," which features the work of one prominent legal scholar per year.
An unconstitutional constitutional amendment is a concept in judicial review based on the idea that even a properly passed and properly ratified constitutional amendment, specifically one that is not explicitly prohibited by a constitution's text, can nevertheless be unconstitutional on substantive grounds—such as due to this amendment conflicting with some constitutional or even extra-constitutional norm, value, and/or principle. As Israeli legal academic Yaniv Roznai's 2017 book Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments: The Limits of Amendment Powers demonstrates, the unconstitutional constitutional amendment doctrine has been adopted by various courts and legal scholars in various countries throughout history. While this doctrine has generally applied specifically to constitutional amendments, there have been moves and proposals to also apply this doctrine to original parts of a constitution.
