Volume 103

Toward an International Right Against Self-Incrimination: Expanding the Fifth Amendment’s “Compelled” to Foreign Compulsion

Today, the United States is routinely involved in cross-border criminal investigations. Unlike just a few years ago, however, foreign nations have begun their own investigations as well, in many instances probing the same (mis)conduct as the United States. While a welcomed change to some, intersections between U.S. and foreign investigations have triggered novel constitutional issues for American actors. For the first time, this Note will discuss a question that arises from these intersections: is testimony independently compelled by a foreign sovereign, under threat of sanction, “compelled” under the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment?

This Note argues that it is. To arrive at this conclusion, this Note first engages with the same-sovereign rule, a rule endorsed by the Supreme Court’s recent venture into the extraterritoriality of the Fifth Amendment. Finding that the rule creates an interpretive tension with other terms in the Self-Incrimination Clause (the “Clause”), this Note suggests an alternative rule, one that achieves harmony among terms within the Clause. Following this interpretation, this Note argues that foreign compulsion triggers the Fifth Amendment, even when the United States is in no way involved in the compulsion.

After finding that foreign compulsion is “compelled,” this Note moves on to decide how American courts should treat that testimony. While testimony compelled by U.S. authorities is owed use and derivative use immunity, this Note, upon noting the lack of absolute commitment to any one immunity standard in the Court’s precedents, decides if a lesser immunity standard, such as use only immunity, is more fitting. Acknowledging the weighty concerns to the contrary, this Note concludes that foreign-compelled testimony is owed use and derivative use immunity, but with the caveat that the government may make nonevidentiary uses of foreign-compelled testimony.

The Constitutional Right to Collateral Post-Conviction Review

For years, the prevailing academic and judicial wisdom has held that, between them, Congress and the Supreme Court have rendered post-conviction habeas review all but a dead letter. But in its January 2016 decision in Montgomery v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court may have dramatically upended that understanding in holding—for the first time—that there are at least some cases in which the Constitution itself creates a right to collateral post-conviction review, i.e., cases in which a prisoner seeks to enforce retroactively a “new rule” of substantive constitutional law under the familiar doctrine of Teague v. Lane.

On the surface, Montgomery held only that state courts are required to employ Teague’s retroactivity framework when and if they adjudicate habeas petitions relying on new substantive rules of federal law. But, in reaching that conclusion, the Court clarified that Teague’s holding that new substantive rules of federal law are retroactively applicable on collateral review was grounded in the Constitution, rather than common law or the federal habeas statute—a holding that, as we explain, was both novel and important.

We next consider which courts—state or federal—have the obligation to provide the constitutionally required collateral review recognized in Montgomery. Either way, the implications of Montgomery are far-reaching. To conclude that the state courts must provide collateral review would run counter to the conventional wisdom that states are under no obligation to permit collateral attacks on convictions that have become final. On the other hand, the conclusion that federal courts must have jurisdiction to grant such collateral review is in significant tension with the Madisonian Compromise. In our view, the Supreme Court’s Supremacy Clause jurisprudence establishes that the constitutionally required collateral remedy recognized in Montgomery must be available, in the first instance, in state courts, even if the state has not chosen to provide collateral post-conviction relief for comparable state law claims. The state courts also have the constitutional power and duty to afford such relief to federal prisoners, but Congress has the power to withdraw such cases from the state courts by giving the federal courts exclusive jurisdiction over such claims (and should be presumed to have done so). Thus, we conclude that the state courts are constitutionally obligated to afford collateral post-conviction review to state prisoners in the circumstances covered by Montgomery, and the federal courts should be presumed to have the statutory obligation to afford such review to federal prisoners.

Finally, we examine some of the important questions raised by the conclusion that state and federal prisoners have a constitutional right to collateral relief. Although the questions are complex, and not all of the answers are clear, the uncertainties surrounding some of the contours of the remedy recognized in Montgomery should not obscure the fact that this seemingly innocuous holding about the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction actually upends a half-century’s worth of doctrinal and theoretical analyses of collateral post-conviction review, a result that should have a significant impact on both commentators’ and courts’ understanding of the relationship between collateral post-conviction remedies and the Constitution.

The Law Presidents Make

The standard conception of executive branch legal review in the scholarship is a quasi-judicial Office of Legal Counsel (“OLC”) dispensing formal, written opinions binding on the executive branch. That structure of executive branch legalism did have a brief heyday. But it obscures core characteristics of contemporary practice. A different structure of executive branch legalism—informal, diffuse, and intermingled in its approach to lawyers, policymakers, and political leadership—has gained new prominence. This Article documents, analyzes, and assesses that transformation. Scholars have suggested that the failure of OLC to constrain presidential power in recent publicized episodes means that executive branch legalism should become more court-like. They have mourned what they perceive to be a disappearing external constraint on the presidency. Executive branch legalism has never been an exogenous or external check on presidential power, however. It is a tool of presidential administration itself. Exploring changes in the structure of executive branch legal review sheds light on the shifting needs of the presidency, the role of law and lawyers in its institutional web, and the institutional variants of presidential control.

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