Supreme Court recusal is one of the most timely and hotly contested issues in American law. Recent debate over when justices should be precluded from deciding certain cases has included public calls for the exclusion of Justices Thomas and Kagan from any future cases addressing the constitutionality of the controversial Affordable Care Act, the congressional testimony of two sitting justices, a letter from over 130 law professors successfully prodding Congress to introduce a new Supreme Court recusal reform bill, and numerous editorials in national print and electronic media outlets. Among the wide variety of voices in the discussion, a singular theme has emerged - more rigorous congressional regulation of Supreme Court recusal practice is needed to protect the integrity and legitimacy of the Court.

This discussion, however, misses the point. Lost in the impassioned debate about when justices should recuse themselves is a far more important and fundamental constitutional question: who should make that decision? This issue is at the core of our constitutional separation of powers and federalism principles, and should take center stage in the debate over Supreme Court recusal. This Article is the first to comprehensively apply separation of powers principles to the question of Supreme Court recusal, and argues that the Constitution requires that the Supreme Court be the sole arbiter of its own recusal standards. This argument shifts the focus of the debate from an ineffectual and unrealistic congressional command model, based primarily on notions of judicial ethics, to a more fundamental constitutional inquiry into the proper exercise of legislative and judicial authority. While this Article represents a significant break from current orthodoxy, it is imperative to situate the Court’s recusal decisions within the proper normative framework. Understanding the unconstitutionality of Supreme Court recusal standards should yield a more useful and transparent dialogue about the Court’s recusal practices going forward.

The debate over teaching evolution in public school science classes is changing rapidly. States have recently adopted new anti-evolution policy measures that represent a significant departure from previous efforts to curtail the teaching of evolution. These new measures employ what I describe in this Article as the “distributive model” of evolution education. The distributive model shuns legislative or regulatory prescriptions in favor of higher-order policy statements encouraging educators to promote critical thinking about scientific questions, including evolution. These policy statements empower individual educators to judge for themselves how best to engage in a critical review of evolution on a case-by-case basis. The emergence of the distributive model is critical to the future of evolution instruction because it portends a paradigmatic shift in the way we view evolution education policy. Prior to the introduction of the distributive model, courts consistently invalidated efforts to curtail evolution instruction under the Establishment Clause. This Article identifies the emergence of the distributive model and argues for a brand new way of looking at evolution instruction policy through the lens of administrative, rather than merely First Amendment, law. This new perspective is important because it offers a more holistic view of the distributive model’s highly dynamic policy environment than that provided by the Establishment Clause. More specifically, viewing the distributive model in accord with principles of administrative law reveals a number of significant political and legal issues independent from, and potentially preclusive of, Establishment Clause analysis.

The alleged misuse of scientific information to support public policy decisions has become one of the most prominent and controversial topics in American politics. Perceived government misuse of scientific data in highly controversial areas such as global warming, environmental protection, stem cell research, and contraception threatens to lead us not only toward policy positions that are inconsistent with scientific reality, but perhaps more importantly into a political environment where science-based policy decisions are no longer viewed as legitimate within our constitutional democracy. Due in part to these concerns about scientific integrity in administrative decisions, there is also a significant amount of attention being paid to scientific peer review in the administrative process ("administrative peer review"), a movement highlighted by a 2005 OMB bulletin mandating that administrative agencies obtain peer review of all important scientific information that they disseminate to the public.

This article addresses the cross-section of these two issues through a normative analysis of peer review's impact on administrative legitimacy. To date, commentary on peer review in the administrative context has been limited to treating peer review either descriptively or as a largely monolithic enterprise. This article departs from that approach by asking the next logical questions - what model(s) of peer review are available to administrative agencies, and which of these is best suited to promote legitimacy in administrative decisions - and by creating a framework for answering them, first through the development of four distinct models of administrative peer review, and then by establishing a series of normative approaches, including a cost-benefit analysis, through which to evaluate each of the models. In addition to providing a new theoretical context in which to consider peer review, the results of the analyses are interesting in that they overwhelmingly support the multifaceted treatment of peer review developed here and raise serious questions about the most commonly used model of administrative peer review.

The debate over evolution instruction in public schools has become one of the most important and contentious debates in America. At the heart of that debate is the controversy over the use of evolution disclaimers, statements that challenge the veracity of evolution as an explanation of human origins. In evaluating the constitutionality of these disclaimers under the Establishment Clause, courts have applied a variety of different standards, including the three-part test articulated by the Supreme Court in Lemon v. Kurtzman. These standards, however, all fail to adequately reflect the proper scope of the Establishment Clause by being either overbroad, under-inclusive, or both. This problem is magnified by the recent development of disclaimers that are facially neutral with regard to religion. The emergence of facially neutral disclaimers necessitates a new standard that is free of the shortcomings of preexisting doctrine while offering a consistent and reliable method of evaluating future generations of disclaimers under the Establishment Clause. This Article proposes such a standard, modeled on the disparate impact test used to evaluate facially neutral discriminatory statutes under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. It concludes that the disparate impact model constitutes a stable, objective approach that not only alleviates the weaknesses of existing Establishment Clause doctrine, but brings needed structure to an active and important area of law.

The Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Morrison represents a continuation of the judicial constriction of Congress' Commerce Clause power that began in United States v. Lopez. Rather than simply distinguishing Lopez and Morrison from its more recent decisions, the Lopez and Morrison Courts revisited interpretive approaches to the Commerce Clause that had lain dormant for more than six decades. This Article first considers Lopez and Morrison in light of the Court's interpretive history with the Commerce Clause. An analysis of this history reveals three dominant interpretive themes, and concludes that the Court's decisions in Lopez and Morrison depart markedly from the interpretive approach taken by the Court since the New Deal. The Article goes on to demonstrate how Morrison in particular signals the resurrection of an interpretive methodology that is more rigidly formalistic and designed to promote more broadly the notion of traditional spheres of state autonomy. Having identified this theoretical shift, the Article discusses the potential implications of this re-emerging, formalistic theory of Commerce Clause jurisprudence for federal civil rights legislation through an analysis of recent constitutional challenges to existing environmental laws.