Hugo Lafayette Black was an American lawyer, politician, and jurist who served as a U.S. Senator from Alabama from 1927 to 1937 and as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1937 to 1971. A member of the Democratic Party and a devoted New Dealer, Black endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt in both the 1932 and 1936 presidential elections.
Legal formalism is both a descriptive theory and a normative theory of how judges should decide cases. In its descriptive sense, formalists maintain that judges reach their decisions by applying uncontroversial principles to the facts; formalists believe that there is an underlying logic to the many legal principles that may be applied in different cases. These principles, they claim, are straightforward and can be readily discovered by anyone with some legal expertise. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., by contrast, believed that "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience". The formalist era is generally viewed as having existed from the 1870s to the 1920s, but some scholars deny that legal formalism ever existed in practice.
Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled that it is unconstitutional for state officials to compose an official school prayer and encourage its recitation in public schools, due to violation of the First Amendment. The ruling has been the subject of intense debate.
Douglas Howard Ginsburg is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a senior U.S. circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He is also a professor of law at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School.
The Harvard Law Review is a law review published by an independent student group at Harvard Law School. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the Harvard Law Review's 2015 impact factor of 4.979 placed the journal first out of 143 journals in the category "Law". It is published monthly from November through June, with the November issue dedicated to covering the previous year's term of the Supreme Court of the United States. The journal also publishes the online-only Harvard Law Review Forum, a rolling journal of scholarly responses to the main journal's content. The law review is one of three honors societies at the law school, along with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau and the Board of Student Advisors. Students who are selected for more than one of these three organizations may only join one.
Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that applied the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to state law. Before this decision, the clause, which states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion", imposed limits only on the federal government, while many states continued to grant certain religious denominations legislative or effective privileges.
Guido Calabresi is an Italian-born American jurist who serves as a senior circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He is a former Dean of Yale Law School, where he has been a professor since 1959. Calabresi is considered, along with Ronald Coase and Richard Posner, a founder of the field of law and economics.
Leonard Williams Levy was an American historian, the Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont Professor of Humanities and chairman of the Graduate Faculty of History at Claremont Graduate School, California, who specialized in the history of basic American Constitutional freedoms.
Kermit Roosevelt III is an American author, lawyer, and legal scholar. He is a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a great-great-grandson of United States President Theodore Roosevelt and a distant cousin of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
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.
Michael C. Dorf is an American law professor and a scholar of U.S. constitutional law. He is the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. In addition to constitutional law, Professor Dorf has taught courses in civil procedure and federal courts. He has written or edited three books, including No Litmus Test: Law Versus Politics in the Twenty-First Century, and Constitutional Law Stories. He is also a columnist for Findlaw.com and a regular contributor to The American Prospect. Dorf is a former law clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Charles James Ogletree Jr. was an American legal scholar who served as the Jesse Climenko Professor at Harvard Law School, where he was the founder of the school's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. He was also the author of books on legal topics.
Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule is an American legal scholar who is currently the Ralph S. Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. He is an expert on constitutional and administrative law, and, since 2016, has voiced support for Catholic integralism. He has articulated this into his theory of common-good constitutionalism.
Geoffrey R. Stone is an American legal scholar and noted First Amendment scholar. He is currently the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.
Anti-Catholicism in the United States concerns the anti-Catholic attitudes which were first brought to the Thirteen Colonies by Protestant European settlers, mostly composed of English Puritans, during the British colonization of North America. Two types of anti-Catholic rhetoric existed in colonial society and they continued to exist during the following centuries. The first type, derived from the theological heritage of the Protestant Reformation and the European wars of religion, consisted of the biblical Anti-Christ and the Whore of Babylon variety and it dominated anti-Catholic thought until the late 17th century. The second type was a variety which was partially derived from xenophobic, ethnocentric, nativist, and racist sentiments and distrust of increasing waves of Catholic immigrants, particularly immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, Germany, Austria and Mexico. It usually focused on the pope's control of bishops, priests, and deacons.
The movement for compulsory public education in the United States began in the early 1920s. It started with the Smith-Towner bill, a bill that would eventually establish the National Education Association and provide federal funds to public schools. Eventually it became the movement to mandate public schooling and dissolve parochial and other private schools. The movement focused on the public's fear of immigrants and the need to Americanize; it had anti-Catholic overtones and found support from groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
Richard H. Pildes is the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at the New York University School of Law and a expert on constitutional law, the Supreme Court, the system of government in the United States, and legal issues concerning the structure of democracy, including election law. His scholarship focuses on public law and legal issues affecting democracy.
Constitutional avoidance is a legal doctrine of judicial review in United States constitutional law that dictates that United States federal courts should refuse to rule on a constitutional issue if the case can be resolved without involving constitutionality. In Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority (1936), the Supreme Court of the United States established a seven-rule test for the justiciability of controversies presenting constitutional questions:
- Collusive lawsuit rule: The Court will not [rule] upon the constitutionality of legislation in a friendly, nonadversary, proceeding, declining because to decide such questions "is legitimate only in the last resort, and as a necessity in the determination of real, earnest and vital controversy between individuals. It never was the thought that, by means of a friendly suit, a party beaten in the legislature could transfer to the courts an inquiry as to the constitutionality of the legislative act."
- Ripeness: The Court will not "anticipate a question of constitutional law in advance of the necessity of deciding it."
- Minimalism: The Court will not "formulate a rule of constitutional law broader than is required by the precise facts to which it is to be applied."
- Last resort rule: The Court will not [rule] upon a constitutional question, although properly presented by the record, if there is also present some other ground upon which the case may be disposed of. ... [I]f a case can be decided on either of two grounds, one involving a constitutional question, the other a question of statutory construction or general law, the Court will decide only the latter.
- Standing; Mootness: The Court will not [rule] upon the validity of a statute upon complaint of one who fails to show that he is injured by its operation.
- Constitutional estoppel: The Court will not [rule] upon the constitutionality of a statute at the instance of one who has availed himself of its benefits.
- Constitutional avoidance canon: "When the validity of an act of the Congress is drawn in question, and even if a serious doubt of constitutionality is raised, it is a cardinal principle that this Court will first ascertain whether a construction of the statute is fairly possible by which the question may be avoided."
David B. Wilkins is the Lester Kissel Professor of Law and faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School. He is a senior research fellow of the American Bar Foundation, the Harvard Law School's vice dean for global initiatives on the legal profession, and a faculty associate of the Harvard University Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics.
Matthew Caleb Stephenson is the Eli Goldston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School where he teaches he administrative law, legislation and regulation, anti-corruption law and the political economy of public law. His research interests include the application of positive political theory to public law.
