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In 1958, U.S. Representative James Delaney of New York added a proviso to the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act declaring that the Food and Drug Administration cannot approve any food additive found to induce cancer in a person or animal.

Thirteenth Amendment optimism is the view that the Thirteenth Amendment may be used to reach doctrinal outcomes neither specifically intended by the amendment's drafters nor obvious to contemporary audiences. In prominent legal scholarship, Thirteenth Amendment optimism has supported constitutional rights to abortion and health care and constitutional powers to prohibit hate speech and domestic violence, among other things. This article examines the practical utility of Thirteenth Amendment optimism in the face of dim prospects for adoption by courts. I argue that Thirteenth Amendment optimism is most valuable, both historically and today, as a means of motivating the political process to protect affirmative constitutional rights.

Thirteenth Amendment optimism is the view that the Thirteenth Amendment may be used to reach doctrinal outcomes neither specifically intended by the Amendment's drafters nor obvious to contemporary audiences. In prominent legal scholarship, Thirteenth Amendment optimism has supported constitutional rights to abortion and health care and constitutional powers to prohibit hate speech and domestic violence, among other things. This Essay examines the practical utility of Thirteenth Amendment optimism in the face of dim prospects for adaption by courts. The Essay argues that Thirteenth Amendment optimism is most valuable, both historically and today, as a means of motivating the political process to protect affirmative constitutional rights.

Conventional wisdom suggests that a constitutional right should be defined so as to effectively constrain government actors. A right defined in terms of what state actors routinely do would seem to impose in practice an ineffectual brake on much intrusive state action—and so seems pointless. Nevertheless, in defining Fourth Amendment rights, the Supreme Court frequently draws on the practice of contemporaneous government actors to define the constitutional floor for police action. The actions of the regulated thus define the content of regulation. This Article isolates and analyzes this seemingly paradoxical judicial practice, which it labels "Fourth Amendment gloss," by analogy to methodological practices elsewhere in constitutional law. The latter is examined through a comparison to a similar, albeit not identical, mode of reasoning used in separation of powers cases. The justifications for gloss in the latter domain are more fully developed and hence provide useful benchmarks for evaluation of Fourth Amendment gloss. The Article's first aim is descriptive—to catalog the various ways in which "gloss," or official practice, is deployed across the Court's search and seizure case law. This exercise shows that many frequently exercised search and seizure powers have been constitutionally defined in terms of official practice. The Article's second aim is to ask whether judicial reliance on such gloss can be justified. There are three general justifications for the use of official practice as a source of law in constitutional interpretation. These can be labeled the acquiescence, Burkean, and settlement justifications. A careful examination of the empirical and theoretical contexts of the Fourth Amendment suggests, however, that none of these three justifications supports gloss's use as a way to define lawful searches and seizures. If gloss persists today, therefore, it is for institutional and ideological reasons—not because it is theoretically warranted. Given this conclusion, the Article offers ways to limit the ...

The term "sanctuary" has long expressed a sympathy for immigrants' rights and resistance to federal immigration enforcement. Recently, the word has become associated with another divisive political topic, as local governments have begun declaring themselves "Second Amendment Sanctuaries" in defiance of statewide gun-control measures they deem unconstitutional. This gun-rights resistance movement not only flips the political script on the nature of sanctuaries, but also presents important and challenging questions about local–state power sharing, the proper scope of "subfederal commandeering," and the role of coordinate branches in constitutional decision-making. This Article provides the first scholarly treatment of Second Amendment Sanctuaries. In doing so, it explores both the unique facets of this new localism and the broader implications for sanctuary movements generally. Most early commentary dismisses Second Amendment Sanctuaries as purely symbolic and presumptively invalid pursuant to state preemption principles and the judicial supremacy model of constitutional interpretation. This Article challenges that narrative and articulates a theory of limited viability for Second Amendment Sanctuaries and other local intrastate resistance movements more broadly. The theory this Article presents proceeds in three parts, with each part presenting a novel approach to local–state governmental conflict that contributes to the existing literature. First, localities can resist broad state preemption in limited circumstances via the state's "home rule" provisions when local regulation of a particular issue is rooted in history and has normative policy appeal. Second, localities may passively resist statewide regulation through a form of "subfederal anticommandeering" analogous to the Tenth Amendment's anticommandeering principles protecting states from federal overreach, so long as the locality takes no affirmative steps to frustrate state enforcement. Third, local enforcement officers may defend their resistance on ...

Part of the Murthy v. Missouri challengers' claim is that the First Amendment bans the government from even "substantially encouraging" private entities to block user speech. And as I noted in the post below, I appreciate the difficulties with this claim (though I also appreciate its appeal). Here, though, I wanted to repeat one narrow observation…