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The Right to Amend State Constitutions

This Essay explores the people’s right to amend state constitutions and threats to that right today. It explains how democratic proportionality review can help courts distinguish unconstitutional infringement of the right from legitimate regulation. More broadly, the Essay considers the distinctive …

Essay

From Sovereignty and Process to Administration and Politics: The Afterlife of American Federalism

Announcing the death of dual federalism, Edward Corwin asked whether the states could be “saved as the vital cells that they have been heretofore of democratic sentiment, impulse, and action.” The federalism literature has largely answered in the affirmative. Unwilling to aband…

Article

Uncooperative Federalism

118 Yale L.J. 1256 (2009). 

This Essay addresses a gap in the federalism literature. Scholars have offered two distinct visions of federal-state relations. The first depicts states as rivals and challengers to the federal government, roles they play by virtue of being autonomous policymakers outsid…

Note

Grutter at Work: A Title VII Critique of Constitutional Affirmative Action

115 Yale L.J. 1408 (2006)

This Note argues that Title VII doctrine both illuminates internal contradictions of Grutter v. Bollinger and provides a framework for reading the opinion. Grutter's diversity rationale is a broad endorsement of integration that hinges on the quantitative concept of critical…