State Constitutional Law. School Funding. Ohio Supreme Court Declares State's Public School Financing System Unconstitutional. DeRolph v. State, 677 N. E.2d 733 (Ohio 1997)

1998 ◽  
Vol 111 (3) ◽  
pp. 855 ◽  
1935 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 610-630
Author(s):  
Charles G. Haines

Validity of Constitutional Amendments. The courts continue to scan with rather meticulous care the procedure for the adoption of constitutional amendments. Where the sole purpose of a proposed constitutional amendment under the initiative provisions of the constitution was to provide for the levy of a “syncrotax,” or a tax on the basis of gross receipts in lieu of all other state taxes, a petition with a short title reading “initiative measure providing for adoption of gross receipts act” was held fatally defective in view of the requirement that every initiative petition have a short title showing the nature of the petition and the subject to which it relates. But according to the supreme court of Florida, a proposal to amend the constitution need not have a title, need not be read on different days or at different times, and need not be concurred in by the governor. And the dissenting justices protested that the majority failed to uphold the requirement that a proposed amendment shall be entered upon the respective journals of the two houses with the yeas and nays, showing a three-fifths vote in favor of the amendment. There must be, however, a violation of express constitutional requirements for the courts to interfere with the procedure in the adoption of amendments.


1934 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-627
Author(s):  
Charles G. Haines

More than ten years ago, the Earl of Birkenhead, former Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, speaking before the American Bar Association, expressed the belief that it was a question for the future to determine whether the barriers which the framers of the constitutions placed upon the complete freedom of legislative assemblies in the United States will prove equal to the emergencies as they arise and will be as adaptable to the stress and strain of political exigencies as the more flexible and more democratic arrangements of the British constitution. “Your constitution,” he remarked, “is expressed and defined in documents which can be pronounced upon by the Supreme Court. In this sense, your judges are the masters of your executive. Your constitution is a cast-iron document. It falls to be construed by the Supreme Court with the same sense of easy and admitted mastery as any ordinary contract. This circumstance provides a breakwater of enormous value against ill-considered and revolutionary changes.” On the other hand, so far as England is concerned, the genius of the Anglo-Saxon people has, rightly or wrongly, refused to shackle in the slightest degree the constitutional competence of later generations. Any law of Great Britain can be altered by Parliament and no court may challenge the constitutional force of an act of Parliament. It is on the whole premature, thought Lord Birkenhead, to decide whether you or we have been right.


1942 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 667-688
Author(s):  
Charles Aikin

Executive Reorganization. In long and highly controversial opinions, the majorities of the Indiana and Louisiana supreme courts invalidated state administrative reorganization plans of a type whose constitutionality might conceivably have been treated as political questions. The Indiana controversy grew out of the repeal, over a Democratic governor's veto, of the Executive-Administrative Act of 1933. In place of an administration consolidated into eight departments, each directly responsible to the governor, the Republican legislative majority substituted an organization of four departments—state, audit and control, treasury, public works and commerce—each headed by a hybrid board composed of the governor and two elective administrative officers, or one administrative officer, the governor, and the lieutenant-governor. Existing tenures were terminated and powers of appointment were expressly given to the respective three-man boards.Upon adjournment of the legislature, this sweeping “reorganization” was immediately attacked on the grounds that it wrested authority from the governor and unconstitutionally delegated executive power to ministerial officers. Operation of the acts was enjoined in the lower court. On appeal, a divided supreme court declared the repealing statute unconstitutional. The heart of the majority opinion was the syllogism that under the Indiana constitution executive power, “including the administrative,” is vested, not in the executive department, but in the governor; that the appointive function is an exercise of the executive power; and hence only the governor may appoint.


1989 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-386
Author(s):  
Melvin I. Urofsky

Recalling his years as a student at the Columbia Law School, William O. Douglas (1898–1980) wrote that one of his teachers, Thomas Reed Powell (1880–1955), was “then an iconoclast. He was the offbeat intellectual who could cut the Supreme Court into ribbons in any field of constitutional law.” Although the two men later drifted apart, they remained good friends for more than two decades, and their correspondence is a remarkable window not only into their agile and creative minds, but into the constitutional and academic issues of their times as well.


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