In the fall of 1912—while one of the most consequential presidential campaigns in United States history raged around them — William Howard Taft, Felix Frankfurter, and a handful of officials within the federal government initiated a process to remove two members of the Board of General Appraisers (“Board”) for inefficiency, neglect of duty, and malfeasance in office. The process culminated in President Taft’s for-cause dismissal of the two members, Thaddeus Sharretts and Roy Chamberlain, on the very last day that he served as President, after he received a report recommending their firing from a “committee of inquiry” that included Frankfurter.

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* Associate Professor, University of Virginia School of Law. For helpful comments and encouragement, I owe thanks to Divya Bamzai, Emily Blair, Kate Boudouris, John Duffy, John Harrison, Tom Nachbar, Caleb Nelson, Sai Prakash, George Rutherglen, and the editors of the University of Richmond Law Review. All errors are my own. This article is adapted from a talk given at the University of Richmond Law Review Symposium: Defining the Constitution’s President Through Legal & Political Conflict (Oct. 27, 2017).

This article invites feminists to leverage the #MeToo Movement as a critical analytical tool to explore the longevity of the enduring rape crisis framing of victim services. Long before the #MeToo Movement, victim services in communities nationwide were framed around a crisis model. For nearly half a century, victims have visited rape crisis centers, called rape crisis hotlines, and mobilized rape crisis response teams to provide services and support. This enduring political and social framing around rape as a crisis is opaque, has prompted a political backlash, and risks distorting hard-fought feminist legal, social, and political battles. It has yielded underreporting, underutilization, and recurring risks of budgetary cuts. Yet, this model and terminology have gone virtually unchanged for nearly half a century.

The issue of pretrial detention is part of a larger, national conversation on criminal justice reform. However, no single issue permeates the landscape of criminal justice like the treatment of pretrial defendants. The policies and practices around pretrial detention have contributed to the country’s mass incarceration numbers; created a crisis for local jail management; generated unsustainable budgets; and raised important questions about race, class, and the constitutional implications of incarcerating people because they are too poor to pay a money bond. Legal scholars have written about the issue, highlighting the inequities and constitutional difficulties with such a system. Much of the discussion has surrounded solutions involving the implementation of and reliance on evidence-based practices to determine pretrial detention, rather than solutions involving reliance on money. These evidence-based practices usually take the form of pretrial assessment tools and pretrial supervision systems. Because the politics involved in criminal justice reform often paralyze reform attempts, the method by which these practices are implemented is often litigation. However, due to procedural impediments in federal court and the polit- ical realities of state courts, litigation often results in incomplete remedies that do not fully address, rectify, or prevent the range of harms inflicted by the money bail system.

In 1971, in the midst of the Vietnam War, the United States Su-preme Court decided that to qualify as a conscientious objector (“CO”) one must oppose all war, and not just a particular war. The Court’s decision in Gillette v. United States turned on its interpretation of section 6(j) of the Military Selective Service Act.2 Section 6(j) provided, in relevant part, that no person shall “be subject to combatant training and service in the armed forces of the United States who, by reason of religious training and belief, is conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form.” According to the Court, “an objection involving a particular war rather than all war would plainly not be covered by § 6(j).” Consequently, the Court construed the exemption from combatant military service in section 6(j) not to extend to so-called “selective conscientious objectors” (“SCOs”).

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* Associate Professor, Elon University School of Law. The author would like to thank Sue Liemer and William A. Eagles for their feedback on drafts of this article. The author also thanks Timaura Barfield for her outstanding work as a research assistant.