In the four decades since Monroe v. Pape, the Supreme Court has crafted a vast body of law on money damages for violations of constitutional rights. This essay argues that Monroe was wrong. The error lay not in the result, which was admirable, but in the attribution of that result to a Reconstruction-era statute applicable indifferently to all rights. Treating the availability of damages as a transsubstantive exercise in statutory interpretation obscures important differences among rights and suppresses clear thinking about remedies. A better strategy would abandon "one-size-fits-all" and adapt remedies to specific kinds of constitutional violations. The availability of money damages would then depend on an assessment of their role in enforcing particular rights - and especially on the availability of alternative remedies that make damages more or less needful.
For the over half-million people currently homeless in the United States, the U.S. Constitution has historically provided little help: it is strongly...
The Environmental Law and Community Engagement Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law filed this amicus brief on behalf of San Bernardino...
Who has the legal right to challenge decisions by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration? And should the moral umbrage of a group of anti-abortion...
President Joe Biden promised during his State of the Union address on March 7, 2024, that he would make the right to get an abortion a federal law.
“If...
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...
On December 15, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued its decision in Illumina, Inc. v. FTC. Although the court vacated and...
On January 17, the Supreme Court heard arguments in what are potentially the most significant commercial law cases of the last decade. In the...
Constitutional review is the power of a body, usually a court, to assess whether law or government action complies with the constitution. Originating...
This Article introduces the Jurist-Derived Judicial Ideology Scores (JuDJIS), an expert-sourced measure of judicial traits that can locate nearly...
Three established torts require the defendant’s behavior to be “offensive” or “highly offensive” in order to be actionable: offensive battery, public...
It is widely believed that President Donald Trump’s judicial appointments reflected a strategy of appeasing evangelical Christians and other religious...
Cyber stalking involves repeated, often relentless targeting of someone with abuse. Death and rape threats may be part of a perpetrator’s playbook...
We apply a dynamic influence model to the opinions of the U.S. federal courts to examine the role of the U.S. Supreme Court in influencing the...
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...
This Article develops a new way of understanding the law in order to address contemporary debates about judicial practice and reform. The...