The Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Sell v. United States declared that situations in which the state is authorized to forcibly medicate a criminal defendant to restore competency to stand trial “may be rare.” Experience since Sell indicates that this prediction was wrong. In fact, wittingly or not, Sell created three exceptions to its holding…
Category: 89:6
Court-Mandated Story Time: The Victim Narrative in U.S. Asylum Law
The Unwarranted Weight of a “Paper Barrier”: A Proposal to Ax the Apex Doctrine
Response—Factions for the Rest of Us
This response paper highlights the author’s three objectives in writing Liberty‟s Refuge: one diagnostic, one historical, and one normative. The diagnosis highlights difficulties with the current doctrine of intimate and expressive association. The history excavates the prominent role that the right of assembly occupies in our constitutional and popular past. The normative theory contends that…
Commentary—Liberty’s Forgotten Refugees? Engendering Assembly
This paper addresses three specific issues: Professor Inazu‘s treatment of the always-contested divide between public and private, his overly narrow reading of the Supreme Court‘s intimate association doctrine, and his failure to distinguish exclusion from subordination. Although asking the woman question illuminates some of what is absent from Professor Inazu‘s analysis, the paper offers these…
Commentary—How Necessary Is the Right of Assembly?
As a political culture seemingly hard-wired for the full-throated championing of individual rights, we are not quite sure what to do with liberty claims by groups. Whether we are talking about corporate speech rights, the treatment of religious student groups at public universities, the limits of the ministerial exception, the Boy Scouts‘ right to discriminate,…
Commentary—Liberty’s Refuge, or the Refuge of Scoundrels?: The Limits of the Right of Assembly
Liberty’s Refuge is an important book with a lot of original and interesting things to say about the First Amendment. In many ways, however, the best thing about this book is not just what it says, but how it says it. Impressively, while advancing strong and controversial positions, Professor Inazu somehow avoids the trap into…
Introduction—Entering Liberty’s Refuge (Some Assembly Required)
This brief discussion of a book I greatly admire, by an author I am fortunate to know as a colleague and a friend, cannot hope to capture all of the book’s important and interesting contributions. I will simply describe three of the book’s primary facets. Liberty’s Refuge is, first, a work of intellectual history: Inazu…
Linking the Questions: Judicial Supremacy As a Matter of Constitutional Interpretation
This Article explains that what has been missing from the debate between advocates of popular constitutionalism and defenders of judicial supremacy is any account of the practice of constitutional interpretation. Without a clear sense of what constitutional interpretation involves, one cannot assess the prevailing assumption that the Supreme Court is uniquely positioned to interpret the…
Rebellious State Crimmigration Enforcement and the Foreign Affairs Power
The propriety of a new breed of state laws interfering in immigration enforcement is pending before the Supreme Court and the lower courts. These laws typically incorporate federal standards related to the criminalization of immigration (“crimmigration”), but diverge aggressively from federal enforcement policy. Enacting states argue that the legislation is merely a species of “cooperative…
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