Beginning in 1981 and continuing into the mid-1990s, The Alledger was the student newspaper of the Boston College Law School. The Alledger published both serious and satirical articles on topics related to student life at the law school. Frequent topics include the arrival and departure of faculty members, profiles of candidates for leadership positions in student government, and previews of lectures given by noteworthy speakers.

The publication consistently poked fun at the law student experience, making professors and classmates alike the targets of good-natured parody. The Alledger featured an annual April Fool’s Day issue which consisted entirely of satirical articles.

The Alledger is a record of the school’s history, offering evidence of an increasingly competitive environment for law schools in the form of extensive coverage of a 1995 dispute related to the U.S. News and World Report law school rankings. The newspaper also recorded changes in the demographics of the student body, as well as frequent discussion of tuition increases and the financial relationship of the law school to the university. Moreover, the humorous and frank tone of The Alledger provides real insight into the lives of law students in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Alledger was digitized from the collection of the Boston College Law School Library. Issues missing from this collection are not owned by the law library; due to frequent inconsistencies in the numbering of issues, the law library is not sure how many issues are missing from this collection.

The Alledger

Boston College Law Review is Boston College Law School's flagship scholarly publication.

The Review, ranked in the top 25 law journals by Washington & Lee, publishes eight issues each year featuring articles and essays by prominent authors addressing legal issues of national interest.

In addition to articles written by outside academics, the Review prints the work of its student staff, many of whom publish notes during their third year. The Review’s second-year staff members also prepare short comments on recent federal circuit court decisions, which may be published in the Review's Electronic Supplement.

Visit the Boston College Law Review website at <a href="http://bclawreview.bc.edu">bclawreview.bc.edu</a>.

Boston College Law Review

Boston College Law Library collects the publications of Law School faculty, and, when possible, makes them available through this collection. Organized by year and tagged with authors and subject areas, this resource reflects the school and the library’s commitment to open access while at the same time serving as a valuable institutional record.

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Boston College Law School Lectures and Presentations

A paradox marks the rule of law in modern constitutional democracies. In theoretical discourse, the rule of law has reached its zenith. It has become jurisprudence’s Procrustean bed, the chosen field where lasting theoretical insights become sedimented. At the same time, the practical impact of these theories has been limited, despite a growing need to put the development of rule of law doctrines in battered constitutional democracies around the world on firm theoretical foundations. These almost parallel trajectories of theory and practice are forcing a fundamental re-thinking of the rule of law. No longer abstracted from the larger political structure, the rule of law is reconnecting with the underlying conceptions of the form and purposes of government. This shift is welcome, if long overdue. It is also slow and arduous as it entails fundamental recalibrations in jurisprudence writ large. My aim in this brief symposium introduction is to reflect on this shift and on the tensions and riddles against which it unfolds.

Rule of Law Riddles

According to the doctrine of transnational constitutional norms, transnational norms are the subset of peremptory (ius strictum) constitutional norms that are constitutive of the democratic form of government. That is the criterion for immunizing constitutional norms from constitutional deselection, which I define as the impermissible alteration or replacement of the democratic form of government through derogation from peremptory norms. Judicial independence, or at least some of its elements, are such peremptory norms. Thus, the erosion of judicial independence at the hands of legislative majorities from Turkey to Israel and from Hungary to Brazil, United States and beyond is constitutionally impermissible because it results in the replacement of the democratic form of government by the people’s representatives – as opposed to by the people themselves. However, and crucially, merely labeling select constitutional norms as peremptory is not sufficient to confer heightened immunity. Such protection comes from a legal doctrine that operationalizes the complex – domestic and transnational – nature of these norms. The transnational dimension of norms intercedes from within, rather than from outside, to protect the integrity of the democratic form of government.

My argument proceeds as follows. Section 1 discusses existing criteria for establishing hierarchies of constitutional norms. Section 2 argues for peremptory constitutional norms as a preferable criterion. For this purpose, it retrieves from the history of constitutional thought the form of government as a concept of constitutional analysis alongside an understanding of democracy as not only a political value but also a form of government. Section 3 takes judicial independence as a case study for the transnational nature of peremptory constitutional norms. It shows that the method for identifying peremptory transnational norms combines normative elements, in the form of an argument for how a particular norm relates to the democratic form of government, with descriptive elements, namely the degree of its prevalence across jurisdictions that share in that form of government. Section 4 places the doctrine of transnational constitutional norms in the tradition of cosmopolitan constitutionalism and argues that the doctrine reveals a new dimension of public law in models of Kantian inspiration.


Elements of a Doctrine of Transnational Constitutional Norms

At the turn of the century, an effervescence of cross-constitutional references in judicial decisions from new constitutional democracies in Hungary and South Africa to more established systems such as Canada, Italy, and the United States marked what, at the time, looked like a new constitutional era. Complex processes of globalization seemed capable of infiltrating not only economics and public policy but also the realms of constitutional discourse and perhaps even doctrine, which in the past had been somewhat more insulated from transjurisdictional stimuli. In most constitutional systems, such transnational references were incorporated without much contestation. The fierce and deeply polarized debate that ensued in the United States around judicial practices of invoking foreign law that were significantly more sparse than in other jurisdictions, seemed at first as yet another American constitutional oddity. And so it was, except that the American debate captured normative concerns that, while muted elsewhere, are undeniably relevant to modern constitutionalism. For instance, it is not self-evident why foreign law has or should have normative weight in the process of interpreting and applying a democracy’s charter of constitutional self-government. Nor is it apparent how such practices can be deployed in the principled fashion we expect from courts of law. The canon of transnational constitutional engagement took shape around these questions.

This chapter turns to and on that canon. Its derisory sketch of alternative jurisprudential worldviews has failed to stabilize and support the practice of using foreign law in constitutional interpretation. Without support, transnational constitutional engagement of this type became victim to the vicissitudes of political and socioprofessional factors that had brought it about in the first place. It is not only in American constitutional law that engagement with foreign law has dried up over the past decade or so. Elsewhere, including in South Africa, such engagement has greatly diminished in extent and purpose. Nowhere, it seems, has transnational engagement delivered the doctrinal transformation that its proponents once saw as its promise.

I start by introducing the constitutional world of two death penalty cases as examples of transnational constitutional engagement: Roper v. Simmons (2005) in the United States and S v. Makwanyane (1995) in South Africa. Both cases attracted significant attention, yet their doctrinal and social legacies are complex. Section II explores those legacies through later cases involving life imprisonment without parole. Not only Roper’s detractors but also its own heirs undermined the promise of aligning American constitutionalism to norms of global constitutionalism as a mechanism for protecting children from cruel and disproportionate punishments. The next two sections connect the failures of constitutional engagement to the faulty theories offered in its support. The most common and weakest is pragmatism. A more promising but limited and ultimately unconvincing theory is Jeremy Waldron’s conception of foreign law as the new jus gentium.

The Hollow Canon of Transnational Constitutional Engagement

Since running for president in 2016, Donald Trump has consistently used social media to question the legitimacy of the American election system. This strategy came to a head in 2021 when his supporters—falsely believing that President Joseph Biden fraudulently stole the 2020 presidential election from former President Trump—stormed the U.S. Capitol Building in a deadly and unprecedented attack on American democracy. Yet, although election misinformation has become prominent in American politics, this problem is not exclusive to the United States. Many other countries, including Brazil and Canada, have had their elections questioned or threatened by actors looking to sow mistrust in democratic institutions. Unlike the United States, however, the governments of those countries have taken steps to combat such misinformation. This Note analyzes the policies adopted in other nations to limit and counter election misinformation on social media to determine what actions the U.S. government could and should take to do the same. The Note argues that a non-partisan approach is vital to the success of any such policy, and that the Canadian approach in particular is the most useful guide for American policymakers. Moreover, this Note argues that a more direct, and arguably more effective, approach will necessarily involve reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to better reflect the role the internet plays in modern society, and to allow the federal government to ensure social media companies are accountable for the roles they play in shaping our democracy.

The Man Who Cried Rigged: Analyzing Global Efforts to Combat Election Misinformation to Inform Recommendations for National Reform

2018, in Trump v. Hawaii, the Supreme Court held that former President Donald J. Trump’s “travel ban” did not violate the Establishment Clause because national security was a “facially legitimate and bona fide” justification. The Court grappled with how to balance its divided Establishment Clause precedent under the McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky reasonable observer test with the plenary sovereign-inherent immigration power precedent under Kleindienst v. Mandel. In relying on the facially legitimate and bona fide standard, the majority wholly placed immigration in the arena of national security review, distinguishing all Establishment Clause precedent as only applying to the domestic context. Nevertheless, for the first time, the Court applied some semblance of review of the immigration power, not considering political question deference. While acknowledging the significance of this review, this Note argues that the majority arbitrarily distinguished all Establishment Clause precedent, ignoring the ramifications that a First-Amendment-void immigration power can create. On the other hand, the dissent’s reliance on the reasonable observer standard remains too flexible and subjective, and thus unpredictable. Instead, Congress should codify into the Immigration and Nationality Act the compelling government interest standard found in the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act of 1993. Doing so would sufficiently protect citizens’ constitutional rights while continuing to acknowledge the importance of and compelling interest in the federal government’s unhindered ability to address national security concerns.

Theocratic Exclusion: SCOTUS Opens the Door to Establishment Clause Limits on Immigration Power but Errantly Refuses to Walk Through It

The 1972 amendments to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which required employers to reasonably accommodate their employees’ religious beliefs if doing so did not cause an undue burden, did not settle the ongoing debate about balancing an employee’s right to practice their religion with an employer’s right to run their business. One ongoing controversy involves whether an employer can accommodate their employee in such a way that the employee also must compromise on their sincerely-held religious belief. A recent Third Circuit case, Groff v. DeJoy, further added to the circuit split by holding that an employer cannot offer a reasonable accommodation that requires the employee to compromise on their belief—a circuit split which the Supreme Court has yet to resolve, even after it reversed the Third Circuit in Groff. The Third Circuit’s reading of the statute is not in line with the plain meaning of the statute, nor the congressional intent behind such a statute. Instead, the courts should look with an eye toward the good-faith standard in labor law and hold that a reasonable accommodation is one offered by an employer in a good faith attempt to accommodate the employee.

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The Alledger

Boston College Law Review

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

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Rule of Law Riddles

Elements of a Doctrine of Transnational Constitutional Norms

The Hollow Canon of Transnational Constitutional Engagement

The Man Who Cried Rigged: Analyzing Global Efforts to Combat Election Misinformation to Inform Recommendations for National Reform

Theocratic Exclusion: SCOTUS Opens the Door to Establishment Clause Limits on Immigration Power but Errantly Refuses to Walk Through It

A Good-Faith Attempt at Defining Reasonable Accommodations After Groff v. DeJoy

Welcome to LIRA@BC Law!

Featured Collections

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The Alledger