The Roundtable
Welcome to the Roundtable, a forum for incisive commentary and analysis
on cases and developments in law and the legal system.
on cases and developments in law and the legal system.
 By Habib Olapade
Habib Olapade is a senior at Stanford University studying political science. The White House Counsel is often described as the President’s lawyer. This appellation is misleading, however, because the Attorney General, with a few irrelevant exceptions, is the sole individual possessing statutory authorization to advise the executive on constitutional and legal matters. Since the creation of the Counsel’s office in 1941, it has been difficult to definitively describe the Counsel’s duties because each advisor has played a different role in every administration. At various points in time, the President’s Counsel has been charged with reviewing legislation and signing statements, overseeing Presidential appointments, handling pardons, writing speeches, drafting legislation, developing programs, or rendering advice on foreign policy matters. Some things are clear about the Counsel’s office, however. First, it has become securely institutionalized in the White House’s structure primarily because of statutory requirements imposing onerous record-keeping burdens on the executive. Second, the White Counsel has taken over some of the Justice Department’s advisory functions.
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 By Habib Olapade
Habib Olapade is a senior at Stanford University studying political science. The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) exercises the Attorney General’s authority under the Judiciary Act of 1789 to provide the President and executive agencies with advice on legal questions. This power is significant for three reasons. First, the post-New Deal expansion of the federal government’s scope of administrative capacities allows the OLC to render advice on a diverse range of matters including aspects of foreign U.S. military involvement, executive appointments that modify traditional democratic processes, and legislative compliance (i.e. the use of force in Libya to the propriety of recess appointments to compliance with the notice requirements in the Administrative Procedure Act.) Second, many OLC opinions are not subject to judicial review because of rules limiting the invocation of the judicial power; these loopholes in the check-and-balance structure of the U.S. government meant to limit the power of each branch include judicial concepts such as standing, mootness, ripeness, as well as the political question doctrine. OLC opinions, therefore, can be just as binding as Supreme Court rulings because they are not always subject to judicial appeal. Finally, every agency in the executive branch must comply with issued OLC opinions; in other words it defines the executive branch’s role in government.  By Habib Olapade
Habib Olapade is a rising senior at Stanford University studying political science. The framers designed the Senate so that it would provide a check on the House of Representatives by engaging in careful deliberation over measures passed by the lower chamber. The six year terms, equal state representation, and per capita voting scheme set out in Article I, Section 3 of the constitution ensured that senators would take a more far sighted perspective on national issues and protect state’s rights while preventing senators from becoming too beholden to the legislative bodies that elected them. Today, however, none of these institutional characteristics are the primary means by which a disgruntled senator prolongs debate on a pending measure. Instead, Senate Rule XXII, a parliamentary procedure whereby the consent of 60 senators is necessary to end debate on a piece of legislation, has taken center stage. Several constitutional law scholars have argued that Rule XXII is repugnant to the fundamental charter because it is not specifically authorized in the document, violates the norm of majority rule, impedes the president’s nominating authority, and impermissibly binds future Senates. A close inspection of each of these arguments, though, reveals serious flaws. The first argument that detractors of Rule XXII regularly propound is that the procedure is unconstitutional because the document specifically sets forth seven situations where the Senate can act only with a supermajority: impeachment, expulsion of a Senator, overriding vetoed legislation, ratification of treaties, constitutional amendments, declarations of presidential disability, and removal of individual disability to serve in Congress. In other words, the expression of one thing, is the exclusion of the other. For instance, if I asked someone to purchase fruits for me, a necessary implication of my request would be that I was not asking the same person to purchase vegetables because those articles were not included in the request. If the framers wanted to authorize the Senate to adopt more supermajority requirements such as Rule XXII, the argument runs, they would have explicitly provided such a mechanism instead of painstaking enumerating seven scenarios where a supermajority vote was required.  By Habib Olapade
Habib Olapade is a junior at Stanford University studying political science. If the past three years have taught us anything, it’s that there is nothing that scares a neo-Dixiecrat quite like a person of color waiting in front of a voting booth. Indeed, since the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, most individuals outside the former Confederacy (and a substantial number within it) have known this but have treated it like a carefully guarded family secret. The continuing fallout from the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, a case that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s main enforcement mechanism, has made the elephant in the room all the more visible. [1] First, some background: the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed in part to stop Southern jurisdictions from preventing African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and Native Americans from exercising their Fifteenth Amendment rights. Section five, a critical portion of the law, allowed federal officials to preempt southern shenanigans by requiring states and certain jurisdictions across the country to gain approval for prospective changes in voting regulations before they could be put into effect. [2] This move was a drastic yet necessary one, as southern states could otherwise easily disenfranchise minority voters. Indeed, because federal lawsuits are not known for their brevity, these states could violate the Fifteenth Amendment time and again as long as they had a viable back-up plan and were willing to delay litigation. For example, in 1957, the Alabama state legislature decided that it was tired of sharing political power with the African-American population in Tuskegee and redrew the map so as to exclude all but five registered African-American voters from city limits. Somehow, the local political bosses managed to keep all Caucasian residents inside the municipality.  By Habib Olapade
Habib Olapade is a junior at Stanford University studying political science. On November 22, 2014, at 3:26 pm Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, two Cleveland police officers, responded to a 911 call about an African-American male brandishing what appeared to be a pistol in Cudell Commons Park. [1] In that same 911 call, the caller commented that the gun was “probably fake” because there was a plastic orange ring on the weapon’s exterior and that the male appeared “to be a juvenile.” [2] The woman working the dispatch, however, did not relay these pieces of important qualifying information to Lohemann and Garmback, and both officers proceeded to drive towards the Commons. [3] Four minutes later, the patrol car approached Tamir Rice. Rice reached for his ‘gun,’ and Loehmann fired two shots into Rice’s torso four seconds before the patrol car had even stopped, killing him. [4] In the aftermath of the shooting, it was revealed that Rice was actually a twelve-year-old boy playing with a toy gun in a park, and every major news outlet not owned by Rupert Murdoch expressed outrage over the incident. [5] A Cleveland grand jury, however, deviated from the public’s overwhelming consensus on Loehmann’s criminal culpability, and decided that the evidence against the police officer did not even warrant a trial. [6]  By Habib Olapade
Habib Olapade is a junior at Stanford University studying political science. 2015 has been marked by scenes of students rallying against various forms of institutionalized racism at colleges across the nation. [1] In particular, some students of color have insisted, with good reason, that fraternity parties restricted to “white girls only,” and university presidents who deliberately avoid responding to complaints about racially motivated public belittling do little to make minority students feel welcome on campus. [2] In the midst of this tense environment, it is only fitting that the Supreme Court is getting ready to decide Fisher v. University of Texas, a case whose results will determine whether colleges across the U.S. will be able to keep the race-based affirmative action programs that allow admissions offices to use a student’s race as a factor in the admissions process. [3] The plaintiff, Abigail Fisher, is a white, twenty-five year old female who hails from Sugarland, Texas, an extremely affluent Houston suburb that is well-connected to Texas’ largest oil and healthcare firms. [5] Fisher attended Stephen F. Austin High School, one of the best public secondary schools in the state, and ranked in the top twelve percent of her class. [6] However because the University of Texas at Austin only provides guaranteed acceptance to students who rank in the top eight percent of their high school class, Fisher had to apply for admission under the regular admissions process in 2008. [7] |
