Blackman on Presidential Subpeonas during the Burr Trial

Josh Blackman, South Texas College of Law Houston, has posted Presidential Subpoenas during the Burr Trials:

Aaron Burr (LC)

Between March and October of 1807, Aaron Burr stood for two treason trials arising from the same set of facts: the first, for a felony charge, and the second, for a misdemeanor charge. Chief Justice John Marshall presided over the proceedings in the Circuit Court for Virginia in Richmond. During this period, Marshall issued seventeen written opinions, and delivered several shorter decisions from the bench, that spanned over two-hundred pages in the reporter. In the end, based on Marshall’s narrow construction of the crimes of treason, the jury acquitted Burr of both the felony and the misdemeanor charges. Marshall’s rulings, however, were not limited to technical aspects of criminal law. In both trials, Aaron Burr asked the court to issue a subpoena duces tecum to President Jefferson. Such a subpoena would have required the witness to appear in court, and bring a specific document. Specifically, Burr wanted Jefferson to produce a letter authored by General Wilkinson, dated October 21, 1806. Burr insisted that this transmission to the President was material to his defense. Moreover, the Defendant demanded that Jefferson produce the original copy of Wilkinson’s letter. The United States Attorney, George Hay, would only offer to provide a redacted copy of the letter, with certain portions excluded.

As the deliberations proceeded, Hay would frequently write to the President, who traveled between the White House and Monticello. Jefferson, who took a keen interest in the case, would usually write back immediately. The correspondences between Jefferson and Hay outside of court can shed light on the interactions between Hay and Marshall in court. That is, the government’s positions were based on direct instructions from the President himself. In the felony trial, Marshall ordered that Jefferson was required to submit the original copy of the letter, without redaction. Jefferson did not comply with this order. In the misdemeanor trial, Jefferson would provide a redacted copy of the letter.

Because of the lengthy nature of the proceedings — in which Marshall and Jefferson took different positions at different junctures — it is difficult to draw too many broad conclusions from the prosecution as a whole. This essay will walk through each phase of the proceedings, with an eye towards understanding the limits on presidential subpoenas.

--Dan Ernst

Williams on Personal Jurisdiction and the Declaration of Independence

Ryan C. Williams, Boston College Law School, has posted Personal Jurisdiction and the Declaration of Independence:

(NYPL)

The Declaration of Independence accuses the King of having “obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.” But despite the seemingly natural resonance of this particular charge with the legal profession, legal scholars have displayed remarkably little interest in exploring its factual foundations. This Essay traces the colonists’ complaint to a somewhat surprising and unexpected source — a dispute about personal jurisdiction.

During the late eighteenth century, the administrative officials responsible for overseeing Britain’s North American possessions adopted an increasingly restrictive view of judicial jurisdiction, seeking to stamp out the custom of foreign attachment of nonresidents’ property that had proliferated throughout the colonies. The elected officials of North Carolina pushed back against the Crown’s efforts to deprive them of their privilege of foreign attachment by refusing the Governor’s insistence that a provision authorizing the procedure be stricken from a bill renewing authorization for the colony’s court system. The resulting impasse effectively terminated judicial authority in North Carolina and left the residents of the Colony without a fully functioning court system for more than three years. The Declaration of Independence, drafted amidst the North Carolinians’ showdown over foreign attachment, incorporated their complaint as one of the twenty-eight charges of royal abuse that the colonists claimed justified their claim to independence.

Ironically, the restrictive ethos that animated Britain’s late eighteenth-century hostility to foreign attachment and that provided the grounds for the colonists’ complaint finds echoes in the modern Supreme Court’s restrictive approach to personal jurisdiction. This Essay uses the experience of the Founding-era showdown over personal jurisdiction as a lens through which to examine modern efforts by the Court to cut back on the jurisdictional reach of state courts. Although this Essay does not propose a specific framework to replace the Court’s existing doctrine, it urges the Court to abandon its defendant-centric emphasis in favor of an approach that gives more meaningful credence to the sovereign interests of the respective states in determining the jurisdictional reach of their own courts. 

--Dan Ernst

Meyn on Separate and Unequal Courtrooms

Ion Meyn (University of Wisconsin Law School) has posted on SSRN a forthcoming article coming out in the Arizona Law Review in 2020. Here's the abstract for "Constructing Separate and Unequal Courtrooms," which is a University of Wisconsin Legal Studies Research Paper No.1600: 

 Today, the criminal system and the civil system operate as distinct institutional settings with very different rules. But this was not always so. Indeed, prior to the 1940s, both domains operated in similar ways. This changed when federal reform created the Federal Rules of Civil and Criminal Procedure. The Article is the first to contend that federal reform, which took place within the overarching project of Jim Crow, wrote race into procedure and contributed to the construction of separate and unequal courtrooms.

The new rules empowered civil litigants, virtually all of them white, to exercise agency over their case. But rules governing the criminal forum gave control over facts and law to just one party, the prosecutor. The new regime empowered the prosecutor to serve as a fiduciary to the entrenchment of prejudice, permitting him to distribute or withhold facts according to the race of the defendant. This account complicates the prevailing view that the Supreme Court intervened in the 1930s to temper Jim Crow practices in the criminal arena. While the Court's due process doctrine mitigated the ways in which states trampled the rights of black defendants, the Court also superintended the development of new rules that, in every case, rendered black defendants more vulnerable to state oppression.

The Article finally observes that our state and federal procedural systems today operate pursuant to key features of this Jim Crow blueprint, and considers a legacy that still distributes burdens and benefits in racially salient ways.

Further information is available here.

--posted by Mitra Sharafi