Dear Reader: The Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy proudly presents the first issue of Volume 22. This issue features a selection of articles on pressing, timely legal and policy issues including a series of articles presented at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution’s Ninth Annual Salmon P. Chase Distinguished Lecture and Faculty Colloquium. […]

When Frederick Douglass became an abolitionist lecturer in 1841, he joined a movement that had grown radical and militant. “Let us glory in the name of revolutionists,” declared the flagship American Anti-Slavery Society, led by William Lloyd Garrison, in an 1844 statement.1 This was a departure from the sentiment prevalent among most of the prominent […]

Debates over common good constitutionalism often revolve around the question of whether the empowerment of government agencies or the protection of individual rights is the more effective means to attain the common good. What warrants greater attention in this dialectic is the critical function of social associations that lie between the individual and the state […]

In May 1851, downtown Syracuse bore witness to many dramatic events that would help to shape the course of slavery from thereon out, not just in that one city in central upstate New York, but also across the nation. Famously, when Secretary of State Daniel Webster took to the balcony of the Frazee Building on […]

“We the People of the United States . . .” This ostensibly trivial phrase was the main source of Frederick Douglass’s hope for the future of blacks in the Union. Douglass had a vision of what justice required for blacks—that vision was inexorably intertwined with the idea of what it meant to be a citizen […]

In an action almost as momentous as his original escape from enslavement, Frederick Douglass adopted an anti-slavery interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. That 1851 decision took Douglass from a platform avowedly “outside that piece of parchment” to a platform insistently faithful to the words on the page.1 Influenced by the literalism of Lysander Spooner, Gerrit […]

After an appellate court announces its opinion and judgment, it issues the “mandate,” returning jurisdiction to the lower court and commanding it to implement the judgment. In the time between judgment and mandate, appellate judges have power to “hold” the mandate, or to order that the mandate not issue until further notice. This is usually […]

Legal protection for private property owners against trespass has an ancient lineage in Anglo-American common law, a principle that retains its vitality today. Indeed, a property owner’s right to exclude anyone deemed unwelcome has been characterized as a “fundamental aspect of property ownership,” if not “the “sine qua non” feature of property. Governments, whether local, […]

Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employee’s International Union (SEIU), was fired up. In May 2023, she gave an interview to Restaurant Dive.1 Her union was then embroiled in a fight over AB 257, a California law that created a labor council for fast-food workers.2 The union had sponsored the law and helped steer […]

Annoying robocalls, the sharing of personal health information, polluted water, the misleading marketing of credit rates by financial institutions. These are issues nearly every American faces. To its credit, Congress has responded to (some of) these issues with (occasionally) robust consumer protection legislation. For example, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act—aimed at curbing robocalls—authorizes the recovery […]

America was principally designed to operate under a majoritarian government, administered by the will of the majority of its citizens with safeguards erected to protect the rights of minority populations. This ideal is encapsulated in a quote from the Constitution’s author, James Madison, emphasizing that “no other rule exists . . . but the will […]

Intellectual property (IP) theft costs the United States hundreds of billions of dollars a year, a figure that has only grown since the passage of the Economic Espionage Act (EEA) in 1996.1 U.S. adversaries—especially the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia—are repeat perpetrators, stealing secrets to undercut America’s national security. And yet, the U.S. […]