Suchergebnisse

The worst case of domestic terrorism in our country's history, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, led to the enactment of a landmark antiterrorism statute. Not surprisingly, several of the statute's provisions strengthen federal power in extraordinary & unprecedented ways to counter the threat of terrorism. But other provisions radically restrict the ability of federal courts to enforce the federal constitutional rights of state prisoners. How could Congress miss the apparent irony of responding to the destruction of a federal courthouse with its own assault on federal judicial power? This article argues that the role of federal habeas corpus has changed substantially over the past three decades. Whereas federal habeas had emerged during the Warren Court as a general forum for supervising state court compliance with constitutional norms, it has now become primarily a forum for death penalty litigation. Congress appears to have recognized this transformation, & the antiterrorism statute confirms that Congress views federal habeas through the lens of the death penalty rather than the lens of federalism. This article explores the costs of the "capitalization" of habeas & the subtle relationship between federalism, federal habeas, & the death penalty. 7 References. Adapted from the source document.

"Unique among Western democracies in refusing to eradicate the death penalty, the United States has attempted instead to reform and rationalize state death penalty practices through federal constitutional law. Courting Death traces the unusual and distinctive history of top-down judicial regulation of capital punishment under the Constitution and its unanticipated consequences for our time. In the 1960s and 1970s, in the face of widespread abolition of the death penalty around the world, provisions for capital punishment that had long fallen under the purview of the states were challenged in federal courts. The U.S. Supreme Court intervened in two landmark decisions, first by constitutionally invalidating the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia (1972) on the grounds that it was capricious and discriminatory, followed four years later by its restoration in Gregg v. Georgia (1976). Since then, by neither retaining capital punishment in unfettered form nor abolishing it outright, the Supreme Court has created a complex regulatory apparatus that has brought executions in many states to a halt, while also failing to address the problems that led the Court to intervene in the first place. While execution chambers remain active in several states, constitutional regulation has contributed to the death penalty's new fragility. In the next decade or two, Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker argue, the fate of the American death penalty is likely to be sealed by this failed judicial experiment. Courting Death illuminates both the promise and pitfalls of constitutional regulation of contentious social issues"--

Both the US & the Federal Republic of Germany have mechanisms by which their component jurisdictions -- states or Lander -- can either implement federal law or resist such implementation. The authors describe the different constitutional mechanisms by which the two federal regimes induce state cooperation & protect state autonomy. They then offer some speculations as to how such constitutional rules might effect cooperative federalism in the two nations, arguing that the German system provides more categorical & therefore more secure protection of the Lander, whereas the US system provides for a more flexible system of cooperative federalism. This flexibility of the US system, the authors suggest, allows for vertical competition between the federal government & the states, which may provide a valuable tool to combat inefficiency in policy implementation. 26 References. Adapted from the source document.