Saturday, March 6, 2010

Bressler on Jury Nullification and the 14th Amendment

A press release of the Harvard Law School announces the receipt of the Irving Oberman Memorial Prize by Jonathan Bressler (2010) for his paper The Right of Jury Nullification in Reconstruction-Era Originalism: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Constitutionalization of Judicial Precedent. According to the announcement, Bressler discusses "Reconstruction-era judicial practices, legal treatises, dictionaries, Congressional debates, and Congressional legislation in order to explain of how the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers, ratifiers, original interpreters, and original enforcers understood the ‘new’ Constitution and their amendment to affect the right of juries to ‘nullify,’ that is, to refuse to apply existing law in a given case.”