Balkinization

The rule of law means, at its core, that those who govern may not simply issue decrees.   Their actions must be based on reasons that are pu...

For the Balkinization Symposium on The Chevron Doctrine through the Lens of Comparative Law Carlos Ari Sundfeld & Yasser Gabriel   Defer...

For the Balkinization Symposium on The Chevron Doctrine through the Lens of Comparative Law Paul Daly I am a committed comparativist — in ...

Griffin's Case  is getting a lot of attention in the Section Three debate. In that circuit decision, Chief Justice Chase denied a writ o...

For the Balkinization Symposium on The Chevron Doctrine through the Lens of Comparative Law Susan Rose-Ackerman & Oren Tamir Constitut...

       Although the federal government will not shut down for another five days, pretty much anyone who is paying attention has known for so...

Suppose you thought that current proposals for Supreme Court reform were merely politically motivated and ill-advised. How might you react t...

In a previous post I explained how we might achieve the effective equivalent of term limits for Supreme Court Justices by changing the rule...

Thus far, state Secretaries of State are basically saying two things about the Section 3 issue: 1. The Supreme Court should resolve this que...

  The persons responsible for Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment would have laughed at the suggestion that past or future presidents ...

       John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Nancy Pelosi all seem rather happy as former Speakers of the House.   Yet Kevin McCarthy seems fiercely ...

I understand three of the broad positions on the civil and criminal cases against Trump. One is that these cases should not be brought at al...

Friedrich Hayek, one of the foundational theorists of the American right, warned us about the demonization of transgender people. I explain ...

Just to recap briefly where we are: Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, was not physically present at the Capitol on January 6, 20...

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial today entitled "The 14th Amendment Trump Panic" that argues against applying Section Thre...

The Rehnquist Center is pleased to announce the sixth annual National Conference of Constitutional Law Scholars. This year’s event will be h...

Today’s Supreme Court is so predisposed to find discrimination against religion that it declared it to be present in a case where the discri...

(coauthored by David S. Schwartz) Anti-Federalist advocacy during the ratification debates has been sorely neglected in the applied original...

  The qualifications for officeholding are among the undemocratic, or at least antimajoritarian features of the Constitution of the United S...

I want to respond to an argument, exemplified by Ross Douthat's recent column in The New York Times , against using Section Three to di...

(coauthored by David S. Schwartz) As we explained in a previous post , Anti-Federalist advocacy during the ratification debates sheds signif...

(coauthored by David S. Schwartz) “Enumerationism” is the doctrine that the Constitution limits the United States government to its enumerat...

Ross Douthat has  waded into the Section Three conversation, siding with Eric Segall against his fellow conservatives Will Baude and Micha...

One objection to applying Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to Donald Trump is that democracy requires that he be permitted to run. ...

(coauthored by David S. Schwartz) The question of speaker sincerity has been curiously neglected in the originalist literature. But it is cr...

One comment that people make about Section Three is that an insurrection only involves an attempt to overthrow the government or widespread ...

(coauthored by David S. Schwartz) The two of us have just published “ Interpreting Ratification ” in the new peer-reviewed Journal of Americ...

In 1867, Senator Charles Sumner described the Guarantee Clause as "a sleeping giant" awakened by the Civil War that gave Congress ...

The paper is here . The New York Times article is here . Here is the Abstract: Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids holding off...

In two new papers , David Schwartz and I attempt to show that the original public meaning of the Constitution’s enumeration of powers is fu...

Sandy Levinson and I have posted a draft of our latest essay, Frederick Douglass as Constitutionalist , on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Frede...

A narrative is emerging that the criminal cases against Donald Trump mean that the next election will be about whether the voters want to pa...

       We are still more than two months away from the end of the federal fiscal year on October 1, yet imagining a way to avoid a partial g...