Federal jurisdiction refers to the legal scope of the government's powers in the United States of America. See the 1962 Federal Report titled "JURISDICTION OVER FEDERAL AREAS WITHIN THE STATES".
In common law legal systems, precedent is a principle or rule established in a previous legal case that is either binding on or persuasive for a court or other tribunal when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts. Common-law legal systems place great value on deciding cases according to consistent principled rules, so that similar facts will yield similar and predictable outcomes, and observance of precedent is the mechanism by which that goal is attained. The principle by which judges are bound to precedents is known as stare decisis. Common-law precedent is a third kind of law, on equal footing with statutory law and subordinate legislation - that is, delegated legislation or regulatory law.
Article Three of the United States Constitution establishes the judicial branch of the federal government. Under Article Three, the judicial branch consists of the Supreme Court of the United States, as well as lower courts created by Congress. Article Three empowers the courts to handle cases or controversies arising under federal law, as well as other enumerated areas. Article Three also defines treason.
The Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution addresses rights, retained by the people, that are not specifically enumerated in the Constitution. It is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment reads:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In the United States, strict constructionism refers to a particular legal philosophy of judicial interpretation that limits or restricts judicial interpretation.
The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution each contain a due process clause. Due process deals with the administration of justice and thus the due process clause acts as a safeguard from arbitrary denial of life, liberty, or property by the government outside the sanction of law. The Supreme Court of the United States interprets the clauses broadly, concluding that these clauses provide four protections: procedural due process, substantive due process, a prohibition against vague laws, and as the vehicle for the incorporation of the Bill of Rights.
Michael William McConnell is a constitutional law scholar who served as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit from 2002 until 2009. Since 2009, McConnell has served as Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. He is also a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and Senior Of Counsel to the Litigation Practice Group at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
Original intent is a theory in law concerning constitutional and statutory interpretation. It is frequently used as a synonym for originalism; while original intent is indeed one theory in the originalist family, it has some salient differences which has led originalists from more predominant schools of thought such as original meaning to distinguish original intent as much as legal realists do.
The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), Pub.L. 106–274, codified as 42 U.S.C. § 2000cc et seq., is a United States federal law that prohibits the imposition of burdens on the ability of prisoners to worship as they please and gives churches and other religious institutions a way to avoid zoning law restrictions on their property use. It also defines the term "religious exercise" to include "any exercise of religion, whether or not compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief." RLUIPA was enacted by the United States Congress in 2000 to correct the problems of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993. The act was passed in both the House of Representatives and the Senate by unanimous consent in voice votes, meaning that no objection was raised to its passage, so no written vote was taken. The S. 2869 legislation was enacted into law by the 42nd President of the United States Bill Clinton on September 22, 2000.
In United States constitutional interpretation, the living Constitution is the claim that the Constitution has a dynamic meaning or it has the properties of an animate being in the sense that it changes. The idea is associated with views that contemporaneous society should be taken into account when interpreting key constitutional phrases.
Textualism is a formalist theory in which the interpretation of the law is primarily based on the ordinary meaning of the legal text, where no consideration is given to non-textual sources, such as: intention of the law when passed, the problem it was intended to remedy, or significant questions regarding the justice or rectitude of the law.
In the context of United States constitutional interpretation, original meaning is the dominant form of the legal theory of originalism today. It was made popular by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and contends that the terms of the United States Constitution should be interpreted as meaning what they meant when they were ratified, which is to say, it asks the question: "What would a reasonable person living at the time of ratification have understood these words to mean?"
The purposive approach is an approach to statutory and constitutional interpretation under which common law courts interpret an enactment within the context of the law's purpose.
This is an index of articles in jurisprudence.
The law of the United States comprises many levels of codified and uncodified forms of law, the supreme of which is the United States Constitution, the foundation of the federal government of the United States. The Constitution sets out the boundaries of federal law, which consists of Acts of Congress, treaties ratified by the Senate, regulations promulgated by the executive branch, and case law originating from the federal judiciary. The United States Code is the official compilation and codification of general and permanent federal statutory law.
United States constitutional law is the body of law governing the interpretation and implementation of the United States Constitution.
In United States constitutional law, the penumbra includes a group of rights derived, by implication, from other rights explicitly protected in the Bill of Rights. These rights have been identified through a process of "reasoning-by-interpolation", where specific principles are recognized from "general idea[s]" that are explicitly expressed in other constitutional provisions. Although researchers have traced the origin of the term to the nineteenth century, the term first gained significant popular attention in 1965, when Justice William O. Douglas's majority opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut identified a right to privacy in the penumbra of the constitution.
Law and corpus linguistics (LCL) is a new academic sub-discipline that uses large databases of examples of language usage equipped with tools designed by linguists called corpora to better get at the meaning of words and phrases in legal texts. Thus, LCL is the application of corpus linguistic tools, theories, and methodologies to issues of legal interpretation in much the same way law and economics is the application of economic tools, theories, and methodologies to various legal issues.
