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Forthcoming 2019
Forthcoming 2019 is a section from the Everyday Evidence Legal Blog that highlights recent papers from attorneys and professors from across the legal spectrum. These recent and soon-to-be publications offer readers a chance to see a wide range of issues from different legal fields.
Today’s Forthcoming 2019 features two articles:
The Privileges or Immunities Clause Abridged: A Critique of Kurt Lash on the Fourteenth Amendment
(Notre Dame Law Review (forthcoming))
Abstract
From SSRN:
"The Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was virtually eliminated by the Supreme Court in three cases: The Slaughter-House Cases, Bradwell v. Illinois, and United States v. Cruikshank. Today, most constitutional scholars agree that this was a terrible mistake, the effects of which continue to reverberate through our constitutional law. But, as evidenced by the Court’s decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago, both the “left” and “right” sides of the Court are reluctant to open the “Pandora’s Box” of uncertainty created by the phrase “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” Scholars have not yet arrived at a consensus about its original meaning — much less about how to implement that meaning in constitutional practice.
In this article, we clear the field of a competing interpretation offered by Professor Kurt Lash. In an impressive series of articles and monograph, Lash avoids the Pandora’s Box by contending that the “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” are limited to the rights enumerated in the text of the Constitution, and do not include any unenumerated rights. While we agree with Lash that the enumerated rights are indeed among the “privileges or immunities” of U.S. citizens, we demonstrate his failure to establish that these are the only rights of U.S. citizens that state legislatures may not abridge.
In future work, we will present evidence of a more capacious original meaning of “privileges or immunities” of U.S. citizens, as well as a practical means for judges to identify these rights and apply them to cases and controversies. It suffices for now to say that we side with Michigan Senator Jacob Howard’s explanation of “privileges or immunities” over Lash’s."
The Enumerated Rights Reading of the Privileges or Immunities Clause: A Response to Randy E. Barnett and Evan D. Bernick's 'The Privileges or Immunities Clause, Abridged: A Critique of Kurt Lash on the Fourteenth Amendment'
(Notre Dame Law Review (forthcoming))
Abstract
From SSRN:
"In prior scholarship, I have argued that the historical evidence suggests that the public originally understood the Privileges or Immunities Clause as protecting enumerated constitutional rights, including (though not limited to) those rights listed in the first eight amendments, but not as protecting absolute enumerated rights such as the unenumerated right to contract protected in cases like Lochner v. New York. In a recent article, Randy Barnett and Evan Bernick canvass more than two decades of my historical work on the Fourteenth Amendment and claim that I have failed to present a persuasive argument in favor of what they call the “Enumerated Rights Only” reading of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. In particular, they argue that (1) antebellum evidence suggests that the term “privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States” was understood to include unenumerated rights, (2) the man who drafted the Privileges or Immunities Clause, John Bingham, described the clause as protecting unenumerated absolute rights, (3) the debates of the Thirty-Ninth Congress suggest that most members would have understood the Privileges or Immunities Clause as transforming the relative rights of Article IV, Section 2 (the Comity Clause) into absolute unenumerated rights, (4) Reconstruction-era references to the “Bill of Rights” as representing the rights of national citizenship are unreliable due to that fact that there was no fixed meaning to the term at that time and (5) because my account fails to explain how the Privileges or Immunities Clause authorized the 1866 Civil Rights Act, it cannot stand as a persuasive reading of the Clause.
In this article, I respond to all of these arguments and synthesize the evidence I have gathered over the years which I believe supports the Enumerated Rights reading of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. In brief: The only antebellum voices describing the rights of national citizenship as including unenumerated absolute rights were proponents of slavery who insisted they had an unenumerated “right” to own slaves. The abolitionist voices most likely to influence Reconstruction Republicans uniformly described the rights of national citizenship as enumerated constitutional rights. The most significant of these Republicans, John Bingham, always described the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States as involving constitutionally enumerated rights, and never as unenumerated absolute rights. Bingham’s colleagues in the Thirty-Ninth Congress were well-informed about, and shared a consensus view of, Article IV, Section 2 and cases like Corfield v. Coryell as protecting nothing more than the relative rights of equal treatment in regard to a limited set of “fundamental” rights. Thus, when Jacob Howard named Corfield and the enumerated rights of Article IV as “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” he and his audience understood the limited relative nature of those rights. On the other hand, when members like Bingham and Howard referred to the federal Bill of Rights as privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, listeners in and outside of Congress would have understood this to be a reference to enumerated constitutional rights. In particular, this is how the public would have understood Bingham’s insistence that he sought to enforce the Bill of Rights against the states and nothing more. Finally, there is no need to force a reading onto the Privileges or Immunities Clause that authorizes the Civil Rights Act. As John Bingham explained, the Civil Rights Act represented an effort to enforce the equal right not to be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law—rights covered by the final two clauses of Section One."
Barnett's and Bernick's article can be found here. ( Barnett, Randy E. and Bernick, Evan D., The Privileges or Immunities Clause Abridged: A Critique of Kurt Lash on the Fourteenth Amendment (March 7, 2019). Notre Dame Law Review, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3348680 )
Lash's article can be found here. ( Lash, Kurt T., The Enumerated Rights Reading of the Privileges or Immunities Clause: A Response to Randy E. Barnett and Evan D. Bernick's 'The Privileges or Immunities Clause, Abridged: A Critique of Kurt Lash on the Fourteenth Amendment' (March 12, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3351142 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3351142 )