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This Article engages the two hundred year history of corporate constitutional rights jurisprudence to show that the Supreme Court has long accorded rights to corporations based on the rationale that corporations represent associations of people from whom such rights are derived. The Article draws on the history of business corporations in America to argue that the Court's characterization of corporations as associations made sense throughout most of the nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, however, when the Court was deciding several key cases involving corporate rights, this associational view was already becoming a poor fit for some corporations. The Court's failure to account for the wide spectrum of organizations labeled "corporations" became increasingly problematic with the rise of modern business corporations that could no longer be fairly characterized as an identifiable group of people acting in association. Nonetheless, the Court continued to apply the associational rationale from early case law and expand corporate rights into the realm of speech and political spending without careful analysis of when the associational approach would be appropriate. We set forth a theoretical framework that we believe is consistent with the underlying logic of the Court's jurisprudence, based on the concepts of derivative and instrumental rights. Specifically, we argue that the Court, to date, has not granted constitutional rights to corporations in their own right. Instead, it has granted rights to corporations either derivatively, when necessary to protect the rights of natural persons assumed to be represented by the corporation, or instrumentally, when necessary to protect the rights of parties outside the corporation. Further, we consider the implications that this framework, with a more nuanced view of the spectrum of corporations in existence, would have if applied to recent corporate rights cases, such as Citizens United. We believe this framework provides a principled path forward for the ...

Legitimacy is the most important property of state power, and the lack of uniformity of the terminology in modern science used significantly complicates the study of this phenomenon. The article considers the concepts of "legitimacy of state power", "grounds of legitimacy", "mechanism of legitimization", "means of legitimization". On the basis of an analysis of the views existing in science, it is concluded that these concepts have different meaning. In addition, the author explores the importance of elections as a mechanism for legitimizing power and concludes that authoritarian regimes are unable to justify their own legitimacy by this means.

Imagine an individual whose friend has allowed him to stay in a bedroom of his trailer home. This individual brings his most treasured and personal possessions along with him. Two police officers, after receiving information of potential criminal activity from an informant, enter the trailer without a warrant. Instead of obtaining a warrant, the officers solicit the consent of a third party and ransack the bedroom-leaving it in complete disarray. They find no evidence of the alleged criminal wrongdoing and seize no property. Although the police do not arrest the individual, they have humiliated him and have invaded his privacy. These state agents acted without a warrant, without the individual's consent, and in the absence of recognized exigent circumstances. The United States Supreme Court has held that this particular type of police conduct does not violate the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution; thus, no Section 1983 claim may be brought against these state officers. Certain state supreme courts, however, have reached a different conclusion, finding similar conduct to violate comparable provisions of their respective state constitutions. These decisions notwithstanding, Section 1983 remains unavailable because, as a federal remedy, it does not extend to violations of state law. Thus, without a direct claim under the state constitution for damages. or a state provision comparable to Section 1983, the plaintiff will go uncompensated for his loss, and he will not have his rights vindicated. Furthermore, the government will go.unpunished for egregious acts that were in direct violation of the state constitution. As a result, the government will be undeterred from future unconstitutional conduct. A direct cause of action for a constitutional. violation will remedy the gap in an individual's ability to seek redress for breaches of constitutional provisions. The concept of a "constitutional tort'' first entered the American legal landscape in Bivens v. Six Unknown Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in ...

Cities in Federal Constitutional Theory seeks to offer a fresh theoretical account of cities as federalism subjects, exploring the increased importance of cities in recent decades from political, economic, socio-cultural, and demographic perspectives.