Recent WLR Forward Articles
Stategraft: Facilitating Predatory Takings by Eminent Domain
The following Case Study is published as part of the continuing conversation from the Wisconsin Law Review’s 2023 Symposium on Stategraft. Download PDF Tanya Washington The concept of stategraft, as described in Professor Atuahene’s groundbreaking article, frames …
February 6, 2025Court Reform for Progressives: A Primer on Constitutional Considerations
This brief and basically unannotated essay lays out some constitutional considerations associated with prominent (and some not so prominent) proposals for Supreme Court reform circulating among progressives. The essay has four parts, dealing successively with low-hanging fruit (about which there are few constitutional questions—though not none), statutory term limits including “bells-and-whistles” proposals for accomplishing effective term limits, jurisdiction-stripping, and Court expansion. The conclusion: proposals for Court reform raise rather deep questions about the kind of democratic self-governance system we want to have—as does resistance to such proposals (that is, saying that Court reform is a bad idea raises deep questions about the kind of democratic self-governance system we want to have and which the objector believes to be close to what we actually have).
November 6, 2024Conscription of Private Attorneys to Represent Indigent Criminal Defendants in States and Territories
This year marked the sixtieth anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, the seminal case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution guarantee a right to court-appointed counsel to indigent criminal defendants charged with serious offenses. Very few would argue with that basic proposition today. Instead, the contemporary debate is whether to recognize a “civil Gideon,” i.e. a right to court-appointed counsel for indigent civil litigants.
September 11, 2024- More Forward Articles