This article recaptures a now-anachronistic approach to standing law that the Supreme Court followed in the middle decades of the 20th Century and explains how and when it died. It then speculates about why the federal courts retreated from the doctrine when they did. The now-anachronistic view of the permissible scope of standing, which is called here 'standing for the public,' permitted Congress to authorize parties who had no cognizable legal rights to challenge government action, in order to, as the Supreme Court itself said 'represent the public' and bring the government’s legal errors before the courts. Ironically, the federal courts retreated from this approach to standing law in the 1960s and 1970s, the very period that is best known for its doctrinal innovations that liberalized standing law. The article tells the (complicated) tale of how the courts erased the standing for the public principle from the case law, places those actions action in context by looking at contemporaneous developments in the legal profession and Congress, and speculates about why this approach to standing law died when it did.
For the over half-million people currently homeless in the United States, the U.S. Constitution has historically provided little help: it is strongly...
Gradualism should have won out in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, exerting gravitational influence on the majority and dissenters alike. In general...
Today, legal culture is shaped by One Big Question: should courts, particularly the US Supreme Court, have a lot of power? This question is affecting...
Constitutional review is the power of a body, usually a court, to assess whether law or government action complies with the constitution. Originating...
We live in a golden age of student surveillance. Some surveillance is old school: video cameras, school resource officers, and tip lines. Old-school...
During times of crisis, governments often consider policies that may promote safety, but that would require overstepping constitutionally protected...
The United States has granted reparations for a variety of historical injustices, from imprisonment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War...
Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...
This Article develops a new way of understanding the law in order to address contemporary debates about judicial practice and reform. The...
In an era defined by partisan rifts and government gridlock, many celebrate the rare issues that prompt bipartisan consensus. But extreme consensus...
Working hand-in-hand with the private sector, largely in a regulatory vacuum, policing agencies at the federal, state, and local level are acquiring...
The decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard [SFFA], invalidating the use of race in college admissions, reignites...
In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Justice Thomas’s majority opinion announced that the key to applying originalist methodology...
How should judges decide hard cases involving rights conflicts? Standard debates about this question are usually framed in jurisprudential terms...
This article argues that the fact that an action will compound a prior injustice counts as a reason against doing the action. I call this reason The...
In Poland, Venezuela, Rwanda, and several other countries, governments have in the past years altered basic rules of their constitutional system to...
In Chile, many commentators, academics and political leaders have spent years arguing that the limited nature of the social rights in the national...