The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, most frequently called the Federalist Society, is an organization of conservatives and libertarians that advocates for a textualist and originalist interpretation of the United States Constitution. It features a student division, a lawyers division, and a faculty division. The society currently has chapters at more than 200 United States law schools. The lawyers division comprises more than 70,000 practicing attorneys in ninety cities. The society is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Through speaking events, lectures, and other activities, it provides a forum for legal experts of opposing views to interact with members of the legal profession, the judiciary, and the legal academy. It is one of the United States's most influential legal organizations.
Antonin Gregory Scalia was an American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the Court's conservative wing. For catalyzing an originalist and textualist movement in American law, he has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century, and one of the most important justices in the Supreme Court's history. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018, and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University was named in his honor.
Stephen Gerald Breyer is an American lawyer, jurist, and legal scholar who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President Bill Clinton on May 17, 1994 and has served since August 3, 1994.
Randy Evan Barnett is an American legal scholar and lawyer. He serves as the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University, where he teaches constitutional law and contracts, and is the director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, he tried many felony cases as a prosecutor in the Cook County States’ Attorney's Office in Chicago. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies and the Bradley Prize, Barnett has been a visiting professor at Penn, Northwestern and Harvard Law School.
In the context of United States law, originalism is a concept regarding the interpretation of the Constitution that asserts that all statements in the constitution must be interpreted based on the original understanding "at the time it was adopted". This concept views the Constitution as stable from the time of enactment and that the meaning of its contents can be changed only by the steps set out in Article Five. This notion stands in contrast to the concept of the Living Constitution, which asserts that the Constitution should be interpreted based on the context of the current times, even if such interpretation is different from the original interpretations of the document. Living constitutionalists sometimes argue that we cannot apply an original understanding of the Constitution because the document is too old and too cryptic.
In the United States, strict constructionism is a particular legal philosophy of judicial interpretation that limits or restricts judicial interpretation.
Cass Robert Sunstein FBA is an American legal scholar, particularly in the fields of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and law and behavioral economics. He is also The New York Times best-selling author of The World According to Star Wars (2016) and Nudge (2008). He was the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2012.
Eugene Volokh is a Ukrainian-American legal scholar known for his scholarship in American constitutional law and libertarianism as well as his prominent legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy. He is the Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, and is an academic affiliate at the law firm Mayer Brown.
Orin Samuel Kerr is a professor of law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. He is known as a scholar in the subjects of computer crime law and internet surveillance. Kerr is one of the contributors to the law-oriented blog titled The Volokh Conspiracy.
The Lochner era is a period in American legal history from 1897 to 1937 in which the Supreme Court of the United States is said to have made it a common practice "to strike down economic regulations adopted by a State based on the Court's own notions of the most appropriate means for the State to implement its considered policies". The court did this by using its interpretation of substantive due process to strike down laws held to be infringing on economic liberty or private contract rights. The era takes its name from a 1905 case, Lochner v. New York. The beginning of the era is usually marked earlier, with the Court's decision in Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897), and its end marked forty years later in the case of West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), which overturned an earlier Lochner-era decision.
The Volokh Conspiracy is a blog co-founded in 2002 by law professor Eugene Volokh, covering legal and political issues from an ideological orientation it describes as "generally libertarian, conservative, centrist, or some mixture of these."
In United States constitutional interpretation, the living Constitution or loose constructionism is the claim that the Constitution and other constitutions, holds a dynamic meaning, evolving and adapting to new circumstances, without being formally amended. A living Constitution is said to develop alongside the needs of a society, providing a more malleable tool for governments. The idea is associated with views that contemporaneous society should be taken into account when interpreting key constitutional phrases. The constitution referred to as the living law of the land as it is transformed according to necessities of the time and situation.
The unitary executive theory is a theory of United States constitutional law which holds that the President of the United States possesses the power to control the entire executive branch. The doctrine is rooted in Article Two of the United States Constitution, which vests "the executive power" of the United States in the President. Although that general principle is widely accepted, there is disagreement about the strength and scope of the doctrine. It can be said that some favor a "strongly unitary" executive, while others favor a "weakly unitary" executive. The former group argue, for example, that Congress's power to interfere with intra-executive decision-making is limited, and that the President can control policy-making by all executive agencies within the limits set for those agencies by Congress. Still others agree that the Constitution requires a unitary executive, but believe this to be harmful, and propose its abolition by constitutional amendment. Plural executives exist in several states where, in contrast to the federal government, executive officers such as lieutenant governor, attorney general, comptroller, secretary of state, and others, are elected independently of the state's governor. The Executive Branch of the Texan state government is a textbook example of this type of executive structure. Another type of plural executive, used in Japan, Israel, and Sweden, though not in any US state, is one in which a collegial body composes the executive branch – however, that collegial body does not comprise multiple members elected in elections, but is rather more akin to the US Cabinet or UK Cabinet in formation and structure.
Judicial minimalism refers to a philosophy in United States constitutional law which promotes itself as a politically moderate viewpoint such as that of retired Judge Sandra Day O'Connor. It is often compared to other judicial philosophies such as judicial activism, judicial originalism, and judicial textualism. Judicial minimalism takes its approach from a limited method of decision-making conceived by Edmund Burke.
Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule is an American legal scholar, currently a law professor at Harvard Law School. He founded the book review magazine The New Rambler.
The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy is a law review for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship. It was established by Harvard Law School students Spencer Abraham and Stephen Eberhard in 1978, leading to the founding of the Federalist Society, for which it is the official journal. It is one of the top five most widely circulated law reviews in the United States.
Ontario v. Quon, 560 U.S. 746 (2010), is a United States Supreme Court case concerning the extent to which the right to privacy applies to electronic communications in a government workplace. It was an appeal by the city of Ontario, California, from a Ninth Circuit decision holding that it had violated the Fourth Amendment rights of two of its police officers when it disciplined them following an audit of pager text messages that discovered many of those messages were personal in nature, some sexually explicit. The Court unanimously held that the audit was work-related and thus did not violate the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
United States constitutional law is the body of law governing the interpretation and implementation of the United States Constitution. The subject mainly concerns the scope of power of the United States federal government as compared to the individual states and the fundamental rights of individuals. As the ultimate authority on matters of constitutional interpretation, the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States make up a large portion of constitutional law.
National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 (2012), was a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in which the Court upheld Congress' power to enact most provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly called Obamacare, and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act (HCERA), including a requirement for most Americans to pay a penalty for forgoing health insurance by 2014. The Acts represented a major set of changes to the American health care system that had been the subject of highly contentious debate, largely divided on political party lines.
