Steven D. Schwinn is a professor of law at John Marshall Law School in Chicago. Students of the Constitution can be excused for scratching their heads at the anti-commandeering doctrine.
Prisoner-rights litigation can often raise some tricky issues. Navigating them can mean the difference between keeping a claim alive in federal court, and losing it – and thus the difference between enforcing federal civil rights, and not.
If you read the briefs in Simmons v. Himmelreich, you know that it could be tricky to figure out when a court’s dismissal of a federal prisoner’s Federal Tort Claims Act case forecloses his parallel Bivens claim.
Federal prisoners who seek redress for civil rights violations face an infamous thicket of rules, regulations, statutes, and case law. Prisoners have to navigate often-complicated prison rules and regulations to file an administrative claim in the first instance.
Steven D. Schwinn is an Associate Professor of Law at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago. In early 2014, Oklahoma had a problem. The state planned to execute Clayton Lockett with a three-drug lethal injection cocktail, but its sources for its critical first drug dried up.
The Supreme Court ruled today that Congress can require a former member of the Air Force to register as a sex offender, and to punish his failure to register, for a sex crime he committed while he was in the Air Force.
Any time the Court considers a question of congressional authority, it will be concerned about limits. That’s because the Constitution grants Congress only certain enumerated powers, and the Court worries that any particular exercise of congressional authority could be a step down a slippery slope to a generalized federal police power.
Background In June 1999, Anthony Kebodeaux, an airman stationed at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, was convicted by a special court-martial of committing “carnal knowledge” of a “female under the age of 16” in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).
If Court-watchers are looking for some clue on the constitutional issues around the federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), they’ll have to wait. The Court’s ruling this week on SORNA marks the third time in as many years that the Act has reached the Court.
We knew going into oral argument this week that the statute at issue in Reynolds v. United States was hazy. After all, what does it mean for Congress to authorize the Attorney General to “specify the applicability of” the registration requirements for pre-enforcement sex offenders under the federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA)?
The federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, or SORNA, has been percolating in the lower courts since its enactment in 2006. Convicted sex offenders seem to have attacked its registration requirements every which way, leaving a trail of lower court opinions that address everything from congressional authority to enact SORNA to the Tenth Amendment and related federalism concerns.
The John Marshall Law School’s Steven D. Schwinn explores Tenth Amendment arguments about the Affordable Care Act.