Category: Volume 49

In Reed v. Town of Gilbert, Ariz., 135 S. Ct. 2218 (2015), the Supreme Court held that the temporary non-commercial sign regulations of a local sign code violated the First Amendment because they were content based and did not survive strict scrutiny. On its face, the Court’s holding was not extraordinary and was unanimously supported,…

The Supreme Court’s decision in Knick v. Township of Scott changed the landscape for regulatory takings cases. In this decision, the Supreme Court reversed one of the few bright-line rules in regulatory takings cases: the state-litigation requirement. Now, property owners with inverse condemnation claims are no longer forced to exhaust state-court remedies before suing in…

The Florida Constitution was ratified in 1968 at the dawn of modern environmental law. This Article identifies the wide range of constitutional provisions and gives an historical context for each. Florida’s organic legal document contains broad aspirational statements, unique governmental structure, authorization for incentives and programs to protect environmental resources, and the largest environmental funding…

The influence of money in national and state politics is hardly a new phenomenon, and it is starting to become more prevalent at the local level. In October 2017, the City of St. Petersburg, Florida passed a historic ordinance seeking to regulate political spending in its local elections. The Ordinance was popularly known as a…

The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act (S.B. 7026) is a legislative enactment seeking to make Florida schools safer and keep firearms out of the hands of mentally ill and dangerous individuals. The rationale is simple, S.B. 7026 was a necessary step in preventing another mass shooting like the one that unfolded at…

Mapp v. Ohio tells the remarkable story of Dollree Mapp and her encounter with the Cleveland, Ohio, police during a search of her home. Although they were there on suspicion of criminal activity unrelated to her, Dollree eventually became the center of the Warren Court’s inquiry into expanding the Exclusionary Rule to the states. A…

Procedural fairness and equal protection were the core of Gideon’s reasoning for a right to counsel for indigent criminal defendants. Under the same constitutional values, there should be a right to legal assistance of counsel for indigent civil litigants, especially in adversarial proceedings. This Article outlines the constitutional basis for a civil right to counsel.…

This Article examines the Supreme Court’s landmark In re Gault decision of 1967, in which the Supreme Court ushered in the “due process era” of juvenile justice in America by determining that juveniles were entitled to the right to counsel and other procedural safeguards during delinquency proceedings. But this Article continues with a critical focus…

More than sixty years ago in Griffin v. Illinois, Justice Hugo Black opined that equal justice cannot exist as long as “the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has.” While Griffin dealt with the limited issue of the inability of a defendant to pay for an appellate transcript,…

The Warren Court is celebrated for revolutionizing protection of individual liberty. While Chapman v. California might seem to stand in stark contrast with this view, a closer look reveals it is consonant with the Warren Court’s progressive jurisprudence. Chapman held that violations of constitutional rights may be subject to harmless error analysis, however it created…