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Tag: Constitutional Law

Washington and Lee Law Review - Constitutional Law

Roundtable

If a Fetus Is a Person, It Should Get Child Support, Due Process, and Citizenship

by Carliss N. Chatman

Alabama has joined the growing number of states determined to overturn Roe v. Wade by banning abortion from conception forward. The Alabama Human Life Protection Act subjects a doctor who performs an abortion to as many as ninety-nine years in prison. The law has no exceptions for rape or incest. It redefines an “unborn child, child or person” as “[a] human being, specifically including an unborn child in utero at any stage of development, regardless of viability.”

When states define natural personhood with the goal of overturning Roe v. Wade, they are inadvertently creating a system with two-tiered fetal citizenship. This is because Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey create a federal floor for access to the right to choose—a rule that some ability to abort a fetus exists in the United States. If these cases are overturned, that eliminates only the federal right to abortion access. Overturning Roe would not prohibit a state from continuing to allow access. In a post-Roe world, in states like New York that ensure the right to choose through their constitutions and statutes, citizenship will begin at birth. In states that move the line to define life as beginning as early as conception, personhood and citizenship will begin as soon as a woman knows she is pregnant.

Trying to define citizenship and personhood based on the laws of each state creates some far-fetched and even ridiculous scenarios. If we follow that logic, we will tie our Constitution into a knot no court can untangle.

This Article was originally published in The Washington Post on May 19, 2019. It has been edited and updated prior to its publication in the Washington and Lee Law Review.

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Roundtable

Fetal Equality

by Shaakirrah R. Sanders

I join Carliss Chatman’s call to fully consider the equal protection implications of the conception theory and raise an additional right to which a fetus may be entitled as a matter of equal protection: health care, which implicates state laws that provide civil and criminal exemptions to parents who choose religious healing instead of medical care for their children and minor dependents. The evidence of harm to children from religious healing is well documented. Yet, currently, approximately forty-three U.S. states and the District of Columbia have some type of exemption to protect religious healing parents in civil and criminal cases.

Religious healing is the belief that “prayer” or “spiritual means” rather than modern medicine can cure individuals. Criminal exemptions apply to prosecutions for murder and homicides, child abuse, child endangerment, child neglect, contributing to neglect or deprivation, criminal injury, cruelty, delinquency, failure to provide medical and surgical attention, failure to report suspected child neglect or abuse, manslaughter, nonsupport, and omission to provide for a child. Civil exemptions apply to claims for child abuse, child neglect, contributing to neglect, dependency proceedings, failure to provide medical care or adequate treatment, failure to report, maltreatment, negligence, nonsupport, and temporary or permanent termination proceedings.

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Development

The Right to a Public Trial in the Time of COVID-19

by Stephen E. Smith

Maintaining social distance in the time of COVID-19 is a public health priority. A crowded courtroom is an environment at odds with public health needs. Accordingly, until science determines otherwise, it will be necessary for judges to manage courtroom attendance and exclude the public from trials, wholly or in part. Courtrooms may be closed to the public, despite the Sixth Amendment’s right to a public trial, when the closure is justified by a strong government interest and is narrowly tailored to further that interest. Typically, this heightened scrutiny is applied on a case-by-case basis and turns on a case’s specific circumstances. This Article proposes that in this period of pandemic, with indisputably strong government interests in public health and with few means available beyond closure to satisfy those interests, courtroom closures may be ordered by trial courts, and approved by appellate courts, almost categorically. It further suggests that there are alternative protections available that may be employed by courts to further the Sixth Amendment’s good government purposes in this time of emergency.

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Roundtable

Personhood: Law, Common Sense, and Humane Opportunities

by Helen M. Alvaré

It is pointless to approach Professor Chatman’s argument on its own terms (to wit, “tak[ing] our laws seriously,” or equal application across myriad legal categories of “full personhood” rights) because these terms are neither seriously intended nor legally comprehensible. Instead, her essay is intended to create the impression that legally protecting unborn human lives against abortion opens up a Pandora’s box of legal complications so “ridiculous” and “far-fetched” that we should rather just leave things where they are under the federal Constitution post-Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. This impression, in turn, is a tool to forward Professor Chatman’s personal preference for legal abortion—which she gives away by calling legal abortion by its political name: “the right to choose.”

But her arguments, sounding in law, about the alleged chaos to flow from a law protecting unborn human lives from abortion are false on the grounds of basic legal principles concerning federal constitutional and immigration law, as well as the legal principles underlying state legislation and statutory interpretation. I will set these legal principles out below before turning to the more interesting and legally plausible matter of whether or not lawmakers should choose to take into account both the needs of pregnant women and the humanity of unborn life when crafting laws affecting both, whether the situation involves immigration, incarceration, or women’s need for financial support.

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Roundtable

Under Ten Eyes

by Anthony Michael Kreis

Carliss Chatman’s If a Fetus Is a Person, It Should Get Child Support, Due Process and Citizenship brilliantly captures the moment America is in, where abortion rights hang in the balance as state legislators, like those in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, and elsewhere clamor to embrace fetal personhood. But, as Professor Chatman illustrates, legislators have expressed no interest in the full logical extent of this policy or the rights that should attach to a fetus if their measures ultimately become effective. The article incisively demonstrates how fetal personhood is singularly focused on ending abortion in the United States and is gaining traction notwithstanding the fact that its advocates have not reasoned through the “unintended and potentially absurd consequences” of their policy positions.

The forces laboring to suppress reproductive rights are wielding axes against Roe v. Wade and its progeny, rather than scalpels to eat away at the fringe of abortion rights as states have attempted to do for decades. And all of this comes just years after similar attempts failed with some of the most conservative statewide electorates in the United States. The recent anti-reproductive justice sledgehammers lack nuance and are not fully reasoned through, as Professor Chatman illustrates, because these initiatives are about much more than abortion—they are about the fervor to consolidate counter-majoritarian power before a rapidly closing window of opportunity ends. Legislators and activists are engaged in social engineering unmoored from any popularly embraced social movement in a contentious moment in constitutional time.

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Article

Extraterritorial Rights in Border Enforcement

by Fatma E. Marouf

Recent shifts in border enforcement policies raise pressing new questions about the extraterritorial reach of constitutional rights. Policies that keep asylum seekers in Mexico, expand the use of expedited removal, and encourage the cross-border use of force require courts to determine whether noncitizens who are physically outside the United States, or who are treated for legal purposes as being outside even if they have entered the country, can claim constitutional protections. This Article examines a small, but growing body of cases addressing these extraterritoriality issues in the border enforcement context, focusing on disparities in judicial analyses that have resulted in at least two circuit splits. Specifically, the Article explores differences in courts’ selection and application of the Supreme Court’s main extraterritoriality tests; various ways of conceptualizing the interaction between the Court’s extraterritoriality jurisprudence and the plenary power doctrine, which one appellate court described as “competing” constitutional fields; and contrasting approaches to the role of separation of powers as a limiting structural principle, given the ambiguity of the Constitution’s text regarding its geographic scope. The separation of powers analysis reflects particular concern about the Executive Branch’s manipulation of the border as a legal construct, as well as its manipulation of national security as an illusory threat, in order to evade accountability. The Article concludes that extending constitutional protections, preserving judicial review, and critically examining demands for deference are crucial in this context in order to avoid creating a law-free zone just beyond our southern border.

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Note

Limited Privacy in “Pings:” Why Law Enforcement’s Use of Cell-Site Simulators Does Not Categorically Violate the Fourth Amendment

by Lara M. McMahon

This Note proposes four factors courts should consider when asked to determine whether law enforcement’s use of a cell-site simulator constituted a Fourth Amendment search. The first asks courts to consider whether the cell-site simulator surveillance infringed on a constitutionally protected area, such as the home. The second asks courts to consider the duration of the cell-site simulator surveillance. The third asks courts to consider whether the cell-site simulator surveillance was conducted actively or passively. The fourth asks courts to focus on the nature and depth of the information obtained as a result of the cell-site simulator surveillance. If, after analyzing these four factors, a court concludes that law enforcement officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search, the court must then ask whether the search was reasonable. Cell-site simulators are generally used in the “enterprise of ferreting out crime.” Thus, if law enforcement’s use of a cell-site simulator amounts to a Fourth Amendment search, that search should be considered unreasonable, and therefore violative of the Fourth Amendment, if it was conducted without a warrant.

The Note also provides background information regarding the development and use of cell-site simulators at the federal, state, and local levels. Part II lays out a general framework for analyzing Fourth Amendment search and seizure cases. Part II.A concludes that law enforcement’s use of a cell-site simulator does not constitute a Fourth Amendment seizure, but Part II.B argues that it may constitute a Fourth Amendment search. Part II.B then delves into Fourth Amendment search case law, chronicling several key Supreme Court decisions that apply both the traditional, physical trespass test and the Katz reasonable expectation of privacy test to various electronic surveillance techniques. Part II.B next analyzes the three cell-site simulator cases referenced earlier in this Part—Maryland v. Andrews, United States v. Lambis, and Jones v. United States—and concludes that the courts in Andrews and Jones (D.C.) came to overly broad conclusions in holding that law enforcement’s use of cell-site simulators categorically violates individuals’ expectations of privacy. Part III proposes four factors courts should consider to determine whether, on a case-by-case basis, law enforcement’s use of a cell-site simulator constitutes a Fourth Amendment search. Part IV addresses the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness requirement and concludes that the warrant preference model for determining reasonableness is best-suited to cell-site simulators.

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Article

Personal Jurisdiction and National Sovereignty

by Ray Worthy Campbell

State sovereignty, once seemingly sidelined in personal jurisdiction analysis, has returned with a vengeance. Driven by the idea that states must not offend rival states in their jurisdictional reach, some justices have looked for specific targeting of individual states as individual states by the defendant in order to justify an assertion of personal jurisdiction. To allow cases to proceed based on national targeting alone, they argue, would diminish the sovereignty of any state that the defendant had specifically targeted.

This Article looks for the first time at how this emphasis on state sovereignty limits national sovereignty, especially where alien defendants are involved. By requiring an antecedent “top of mind” focus on the forum state when actions that lead to litigation are taken, the Court would exclude from U.S. litigation activities that bear a close relationship to the forum and that would provide a basis for jurisdiction in many, if not most, other nations. This matters especially because the U.S. conducts so much of its national regulation through litigation in state courts and through litigation based on state causes of action. This Article gives fresh emphasis to the notion that states are members of a shared sovereignty, and that state actions implicate national sovereignty as much as actions by the federal branch of government.

The problem is compounded by the incoherency of the Court’s “our federalism” state sovereignty analysis. Other commentators have not focused on how the Court’s assumption in recent personal jurisdiction cases that states are in purely rivalrous relationships contrasts with reality, which is increasingly recognized to involve overlapping, reinforcing, sometimes coordinated spheres of jurisdiction. Rather than treating the states as rivals involved in a zero-sum game, where an assertion of power by one undercuts the power and dignity of another, this Article looks at the polycentric, pluralistic nature of U.S. governance, where state members of a “more perfect union” coordinate, collaborate, pursue shared goals independently, and only sometimes compete.

State sovereignty ultimately is national sovereignty. To exaggerate concepts of state rivalry and exclusiveness in a modern age of legal pluralism serves only to diminish the regulatory reach of individual states, and, ultimately, the nation as a whole. The Court’s narrow focus on sovereignty threatens to make the scope of U.S. jurisdiction far narrower than that of other nations, and by Constitutionalizing that scope to make adjustments in rapidly changing circumstances difficult.

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Article

Secret Conviction Programs

by Meghan J. Ryan

Judges and juries across the country are convicting criminal defendants based on secret evidence. Although defendants have sought access to the details of this evidence—the results of computer programs and their underlying algorithms and source codes—judges have generally denied their requests. Instead, judges have prioritized the business interests of the for-profit companies that developed these “conviction programs” and which could lose market share if the secret algorithms and source codes on which the programs are based were exposed. This decision has jeopardized criminal defendants’ constitutional rights.

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Note

Left with No Name: How Government Action in Intra-Church Trademark Disputes Violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment

by Mary Kate Nicholson

The United States was founded in part on the principle of freedom of religion, where citizens were free to practice any religion. The founding fathers felt so strongly about this principle that it was incorporated into the First Amendment. The Free Exercise Clause states that “Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . .” The Supreme Court later adopted the neutral principles approach to avoid Free Exercise violations resulting from courts deciding real property disputes. Without the application of the same neutral principles to intellectual property disputes between churches, however, there is real danger of violating the Free Exercise Clause. This Note seeks to answer the question: Does the government’s role in approving and enforcing trademark rights in intra-church disputes violate the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment?

Part II of this Note provides an overview of Supreme Court church property jurisprudence and describes the evolution of the neutral principles approach. This Note primarily focuses on property disputes between hierarchical churches, as their governing structure leaves them most vulnerable to Free Exercise implications. Part III outlines how an entity, secular or religious, registers a trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The section details infringement actions and provides examples of registered church trademarks. Part IV concerns the constitutional implications of church trademark adjudication, specifically through the lens of the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. Part IV.A concludes that the USPTO’s registering of church trademarks does not violate the Establishment Clause. Part IV.B analyzes Free Exercise implications concerning the adjudication of trademark infringement suits. Because of the neutral principles approach and the inherently ecclesiastical nature of church trademarks, Part IV.B concludes that current court action violates the Free Exercise Clause. Part V suggests that courts should uniformly apply the neutral principles approach to real and intellectual property disputes alike. This section theorizes that such an approach would prevent future Free Exercise violations.

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