Modules

Why does a court get to say what the Constitution means? Marbury builds the power from nothing; two centuries later, Trump v. United States shows what the Court can do with it. This module sets the three-question template — right, remedy, jurisdiction — that runs through the whole course.

The sources of constitutional decision — text, structure, history, precedent, consequences — and the political levers that discipline the interpreter: appointments, jurisdiction-stripping, impeachment.

The baseline settings: states hold the general police power; the federal government holds enumerated powers read through McCulloch. The Lochner arc shows what happens when courts write economic theory into the defaults.

When regulation becomes confiscation: possessory and regulatory takings, exactions, public use, and just compensation.

The main engine of federal power across three eras — Gibbons's breadth, the New Deal settlement, and the Lopez-line retrenchment.

Anti-commandeering: what the federal government may not make the states do. New York draws the line at legislatures, Printz extends it to executive officers, and Murphy shows the doctrine has no exception for prohibitions.

Congress's checkbook powers and their conditions — from Butler through Dole to the NFIB spending holding.

Youngstown's framework, executive privilege, nondelegation and its revival talk, the major questions doctrine, and the legislative veto.

Who staffs the government and who can fire them — from Myers and Humphrey's Executor to Seila Law.

The executive abroad: Curtiss-Wright's rhetoric, Zivotofsky's discipline, war powers, detention, and the immigration power.

Express, conflict, obstacle, and field preemption — federal law displacing state law under the Supremacy Clause.

Limits on state protectionism that Congress never wrote: discrimination analysis, Pike balancing, and the market-participant exception.

Justiciability, taught after you know what the merits look like: advisory opinions, standing, ripeness, and mootness as the gatekeeping doctrines.

Rights run against governments. The state action doctrine — and its public-function and entanglement exceptions — decides when private power counts.

The three-question EP framework, rational basis and its occasional bite, and the road from Dred Scott through Plessy to Brown.

Brown's aftermath: desegregation remedies and their limits, discriminatory purpose doctrine, and race-conscious admissions through SFFA and Callais.

Intermediate scrutiny and the classifications that never earned heightened review.

What the government owes you before it takes something away: what counts as liberty or property, the entitlement theory, and the Mathews balance. The substantive side of due process moves to First Amendment Law.