supreme court

Georgia Law Professor Nathan S. Chapman’s article “Due Process Abroad” cited by U.S. Supreme Court

University of Georgia School of Law Professor Nathan S. Chapman’s articles “Due Process Abroad” (112 Northwestern University Law Review 377 (2017)) and “Due Process as Separation of Powers” (121 Yale Law Journal 1672 (2012) (with M.W. McConnell)) were cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in Fuid v. Palestine Liberation Organization.

Below is the abstract from “Due Process Abroad”:

Defining the scope of the Constitution’s application outside U.S. territory is more important than ever. In February, the Supreme Court heard oral argument about whether the Constitution applies when a U.S. officer shoots a Mexican teenager across the border. At the same time, federal courts across the country scrambled to evaluate the constitutionality of an Executive Order that, among other things, deprived immigrants of their right to reenter the United States. Yet the extraterritorial reach of the Due Process Clause—the broadest constitutional limit on the government’s authority to deprive persons of “life, liberty, or property”—remains obscure.

Up to now, scholars have uniformly concluded that the founding generation did not understand due process to apply abroad, at least not to aliens. This Article challenges that consensus. Based on the historical background, constitutional structure, and the early practice of federal law enforcement on the high seas, this Article argues that the founding generation understood due process to apply to any exercise of federal law enforcement, criminal or civil, against any person anywhere in the world. Outside the context of war, no one believed that a federal officer could deprive a suspect of life, liberty, or property without due process of law— even if the capture occurred abroad or the suspect was a noncitizen.

This history supports generally extending due process to federal criminal and civil law enforcement, regardless of the suspect’s location or citizenship. This principle has immediate implications for cross-border shootings, officially sponsored kidnappings and detentions abroad, the suspension of immigration benefits, and the acquisition of foreign evidence for criminal defendants.

Chapman currently serves as the law school’s associate dean for faculty development and holds the Cleveland Distinguished Chair of Law. He writes and teaches about constitutional law, especially constitutional rights, and law and religion. Most recently, he is the author, with Michael W. McConnell, of Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Promotes Religious Pluralism and Protects Freedom of Conscience (OUP, 2023).

Georgetown Law Professor Cliff Sloan discusses “The Court at War” at Georgia Law

Georgetown Law Professor Cliff Sloan recently discussed his new book, The Court at War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made, in an event sponsored by the Dean Rusk International Law center here at the University of Georgia School of Law.

Sloan was joined in conversation by two of the law school’s professors: Nathan S. Chapman, Pope F. Brock Professor of Law; and Diane Marie Amann, who is Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and the Center’s Faculty Co-Director.

Below is a description of the book:

By the summer of 1941, in the ninth year of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt had molded his Court. He had appointed seven of the nine justices—the most by any president except George Washington—and handpicked the chief justice.

But the wartime Roosevelt Court had two faces. One was bold and progressive, the other supine and abject, cowed by the charisma of the revered president.

The Court at War explores this pivotal period. It provides a cast of unforgettable characters in the justices—from the mercurial, Vienna-born intellectual Felix Frankfurter to the Alabama populist Hugo Black; from the western prodigy William O. Douglas, FDR’s initial pick to be his running mate in 1944, to Roosevelt’s former attorney general and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson.

The justices’ shameless capitulation and unwillingness to cross their beloved president highlight the dangers of an unseemly closeness between Supreme Court justices and their political patrons. But the FDR Court’s finest moments also provided a robust defense of individual rights, rights the current Court has put in jeopardy. Sloan’s intimate portrait is a vivid, instructive tale for modern times.

Sloan joined Georgetown – where he teaches constitutional law, criminal justice, and death penalty litigation – following a distinguished legal career, in all three branches of the federal government, at leading law firms, and in-house at the Washington Post.  He is also the author of The Great Decision: Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court, a 2009 history of the Court’s foundational decision in Marbury v. Madison.