Federal jurisdictional doctrines have served as instruments of racial subjugation, territorial dispossession, and sanctioned violence. Yet this pattern is absent from how Federal Courts doctrine is taught. Leading casebooks exclude cases like the Chinese Exclusion Case, Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, and Giles v. Harris from the political question canon. Reconstruction-era cases are taught without the Lost Cause narratives that...
Legitimacy
The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an unprecedented increase in unilateral lawmaking by governors under each state’s emergency executive power statute. These actions have been met with controversy and a significant amount of resistance. This Note argues that the resistance to COVID-19 rules in the United States may be partially attributable to the way state emergency power statutes concentrate virtually all the power to enact emergency rules...
Scholars have long worried about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. But commentators have largely overlooked the inferior federal judiciary—and the potential tradeoffs between Supreme Court and lower court legitimacy. This Essay aims to call attention to those tradeoffs. When the Justices are asked to change the law in high-profile areas—such as abortion, affirmative action, or gun rights—they face a conundrum: To protect the legitimacy...