Suchergebnisse

This Essay contends that the Trump Administration's ban on transgender individuals serving in the military is based on prejudice and bias, lacking any legitimate justification. As such, the transgender military ban cannot be justified on legal grounds. Nor can it be justified based on health and safety. Engaging a robust empirical record, the authors show that the ban cannot be justified based on matters of efficiency, preparedness, or combat readiness—arguments used by the Trump Administration to justify the ban. Despite transgender individuals serving openly in the military in recent years, the Trump Administration has not been able to offer in reports or court documents proof of its claims that transgender service members undermine combat readiness and thus pose a risk to the military. Given this, the authors argue, the Supreme Court's intervention to lift the preliminary injunctions bodes poorly for how the Court will address this issue and other LGBTQ rights issues to come. The Essay identifies several problems with the Trump Administration's policy to ban transgender individuals from serving in the U.S. military. First, the policy is unjustifiably discriminatory on the basis of gender identity. Second, it perpetuates harmful stereotypes and stigmas that have serious consequences in society generally, and specifically, for transgender service members and their families. Third, the policy singles out transgender members of the military through what ultimately can be understood as coercion and shaming, forcing trans military service members to obtain a psychological diagnosis of gender dysphoria and to do so rather abruptly in order to continue in their military employment. The Essay shows how the transgender military ban perpetuates historical patterns of discrimination in the military, which reach back to race- and sex-based discrimination. The authors conclude that promoting equality in the military will only occur when those who wish to, and are qualified to, serve are permitted to do so with dignity and ...

Why originalism is a flawed, incoherent, and dangerously ideological method of constitutional interpretation. Originalism, the view that the meaning of a constitutional provision is fixed when it is adopted, was once the fringe theory of a few extremely conservative legal scholars but is now a well-accepted mode of constitutional interpretation. Three of the Supreme Court's nine justices explicitly embrace the originalist approach, as do increasing numbers of judges in the lower courts. Noted legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky gives a comprehensive analysis of the problems that make originalism unworkable as a method of constitutional interpretation. He argues that the framers themselves never intended constitutional interpretation to be an inflexible and shows how it is often impossible to know what the "original intent" of any particular provision was. Perhaps worst of all, though its supporters tout it as a politically neutral and objective method, originalist interpretation tends to disappear when its results fail to conform to modern conservative ideology--

"The Supreme Court's decisions on constitutional rights are well known and much talked about. But individuals who want to defend those rights need something else as well: access to courts that can rule on their complaints. And on matters of access, the Court's record over the past generation has been almost uniformly hostile to the enforcement of individual citizens' constitutional rights. The Court has restricted who has standing to sue, expanded the immunity of governments and government workers, limited the kinds of cases the federal courts can hear, and restricted the right of habeas corpus. Closing the Courthouse Door, by the distinguished legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, is the first book to show the effect of these decisions: taken together, they add up to a growing limitation on citizens' ability to defend their rights under the Constitution. Using many stories of people whose rights have been trampled yet who had no legal recourse, Chemerinsky argues that enforcing the Constitution should be the federal courts' primary purpose, and they should not be barred from considering any constitutional question"--Jacket

Introduction : The Constitution touches everyone -- Separate and unequal schools -- The imperious presidency -- Dismantling the wall separating church and state -- The vanishing rights of criminal defendants -- The erosion of individual liberties -- Closing the courthouse doors -- Conclusion : Reclaiming the Constitution