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This is Lawrence Solum's legal theory weblog. Legal Theory Blog comments and reports on recent scholarship in jurisprudence, law and philosophy, law and economic theory, and theoretical work in substantive areas, such as constitutional law, cyberlaw, procedure, criminal law, intellectual property, torts, contracts, etc.

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Monday, May 31, 2004
 
Archibald Cox Archibald Cox, the great scholar of labor and constitutional law, passed away Saturday at the age of 92. Here are some of the stories: Baltimore Sun, NPR (audio), Boston Globe, New York Times. I had Cox for two classes at Harvard Law School, Labor Law and First Amendment. I took Labor Law from Cox my first year as an elective, and Cox made a huge impression one me. My early teaching style drew heavily on Cox as a model. I especially enjoyed his very rigorous, intellectually demanding approach, which required a deep engagement by students who wanted to keep up with Cox. Cox was both a mentor (he wrote many letters of recommendation) and a personal hero. He lived a long life, full of accomplishment and goodness. He was a wonderful teacher and a formidable lawyer. He will be remembered, of course, for his role in Watergate and as Solicitor General of the United States, but I will always remember the kindly face, the old and many times mended suits, and the pick up truck that Cox drove to Harvard. He was a giant.


 
More on the ICANN Budget I found this quite interest. Europe sticks up two fingers at ICANN budget by Kieren McCarthy. Here is a taste:
    In a letter dated 26 May [pdf], and addressed to Paul Twomey, the head of ICANN, this powerful body has revealed its irritation with ICANN's attempt to become a global Internet institution. The three-page missive by CENTR chairman Paul Kane makes it plain that ccTLDs (country code top level domains) are unprepared to offer the additional finance that ICANN wants. Also the letter questions ICANN motives in seeking the budget hike. ICANN knew it was liable to anger the rest of the world's countries by asking them for more money, so it increased the amount it asked from them by less than a third - where most others will have to pay double. ICANN even accepted that ccTLDs would pay less in "ICANN-tax" - 20 cents on a domain rather than the 25 cents for everyone else. This approach has been dismissed out of hand.


 
Weekend Update On Saturday, the Legal Theory Bookworm recommended two classics by Jon Elster and the Download of the Week was Against Global Governance in the WTO by John O. McGinnis and Mark L. Movsesian. On Sunday, the Legal Theory Calendar previewed this weeks talks and conferences and the Legal Theory Lexicon topic was "The Internal Point of View."


 
Monday Calendar
    At Oxford's Moral Philosophy Seminar, Rae Langton (Edinburgh & soon to be MIT) presents Speaker's Freedom and Maker's Knowledge: A Millian Defence of Pornography?


 
McDonnell on the Death Penalty and Terrorism Thomas M. McDonnell (Pace University School of Law) has posted The Death Penalty - An Obstacle to the War against Terrorism? (Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, Vol. 37, No. 353, 2004) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    September 11 seared our collective memory perhaps even more vividly than December 7, 1941, and has evoked a natural demand both for retribution and for measures to keep us safe. Given the existing statutory and judicial authority for capital punishment, the U.S. Government has to confront the issue whether to seek the death penalty against those who are linked to the suicide attacks or to the organization that sponsored them or both. Meting out the death penalty to international terrorists involves difficult moral, legal, and policy questions. The September 11 crimes were not only domestic crimes, but also international ones. The magnitude of these crimes, the killing of over 3,000 innocent people, cries out for redress. Yet most countries in the world, including nearly all our closest allies, have abolished capital punishment. None of the four currently operating international criminal tribunals is authorized to give a death sentence. In addition, the advent of the suicide bomber turns the deterrence justification for the death penalty inside out. Might the death penalty help create martyrs rather than discourage similar attacks? Could our imposing the death penalty increase support in the Islamic world for al Qaeda and other extremist groups? Furthermore, to what extent as a matter of constitutional law and policy, should a secondary actor, one who did not kill, but who was a member of a terrorist conspiracy, be subject to the death penalty? This Article examines these questions in the context of the Zacarias Moussaoui case, the supposed twentieth hijacker, who, on September 11, 2001, had been held in custody for twenty-six days. Note: This article was published just before the Iraq prison scandal broke. The article, however, does discuss torture and the consequences of mistreating captured individuals suspected of committing acts of terrorism.


 
Juergens on Emotion and Community as Factors in Professional Excellence for Lawyers Ann Juergens (William Mitchell College of Law) has uploaded The Role of Emotion and Community in Lawyers' Professional Excellence (Clinical Law Review, Forthcoming). Here is the abstract:
    Originally delivered as a talk at an AALS clinical conference, the author urges teachers in the law clinic to feel and express emotion if they wish to teach students to value and work well with emotional information. She further argues that clinicians must tend their own roots in community and model this to students if they are to convey the importance of client community context to good outcomes.


 
Setiya on the Ethics of Efficiency Kieran Setiya has posted Is Efficiency a Vice?. Here is a taste:
    Questions about the ethics of efficiency have not been much discussed. Aristotle says nothing, or almost nothing, to defend his claims about it. (I assume that efficiency and cleverness are more or less the same.) But the issue is important, not only for its own sake, but for the central place that efficiency has in the philosophy of practical reason. What is often thought of as the dominant or orthodox view, the "neo-Humean" conception of practical reason as purely instrumental, identifies the excellence of the practicalintellect with means-end efficiency, broadly understood. I will argue that efficiency, as it is conceived by the instrumentalist – in particular, as being indifferent to the moral quality of one's ends – not only makes the nasty person worse, but is a defect of character, in general. It follows, I think, that the instrumentalist conception of practical reason is false, just as it stands; at the very least, it must be qualified or revised.


 
Dari-Mattiacci and De Geest on Judgement Proofness Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci and Gerrit De Geest (George Mason University - School of Law and University of Utrecht - Utrecht School of Economics) have posted Judgment Proofness under Four Different Precaution Technologies (Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This study shows that the effects of judgment proofness on precaution depend on whether the injurer can reduce the probability of the accident, the magnitude of the harm, or both. Different legal solutions to the problem are examined: punitive damages, average compensation, undercompensation, accurate compensation and negligence. We find that when the injurer can only reduce the probability of the accident, negligence with average compensation is the best solution, but negligence with perfectly compensatory damages is the desirable solution if the injurer can only or also affect the magnitude of the harm.


 
Krieger on Professionalism and Personal Satisfaction Lawrence S. Krieger (Florida State University College of Law) has posted The Inseparability of Professionalism and Personal Satisfaction (Clinical Law Review, Forthcoming). Here is the abstract:
    This paper addresses the failure of legal education to relate failing professionalism to the problems of depression, addiction, and career dissatisfaction among lawyers. I describe a classroom approach that teaches students about the psychological foundations of well-being, identifies common attorney practices and attitudes that undermine well-being, and further guides students toward meaning and satisfaction in their careers by helping them identify core values. The paper summarizes recent empirical research on law students and general populations as a foundation for the discussion.


 
Call for Papers: Genocide, Collective Guilt and Reparations
    CALL FOR PAPERS Special Issue January 2006 & Book in the Metaphilosophy Series in Philosophy Genocide, Collective Guilt and Reparations Special Editors: Claudia Card, University of Wisconsin, Madison & Armen T. Marsoobian, Southern Connecticut State University The twentieth century has been indelibly marked as the century of genocide. The first modern genocide of this century was that perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks against the Armenians, the last by the Hutus of Rwanda against the Tutsis. The term itself, “genocide,” was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to capture the scope of the Nazi policies of race extermination taking place across the face of Europe. We have now come to rethink our own history through the lens of genocide. Our national policy of slavery and the forcible removal of native Americans from their lands have been reexamined in light of what we now identify as genocide. The Blackwell philosophy journal Metaphilosophy will be publishing a special issue in January of 2006 on the themes of genocide, collective guilt and reparations. This issue will appear in book form in the late spring of 2006. The journal welcomes all submissions of a philosophical nature on these interrelated themes. Some questions that may be addressed include: * Are the current standards of what counts as genocide adequate? * What can moral reflection add to our understanding of genocide? * What is the nature and extent of collective guilt? * Is collective guilt a viable moral concept? * Are reparations for genocide and other large-scale acts of injustice morally mandatory? Who should pay? Who should collect? What good purpose do reparations serve? * Is reconciliation between genocide perpetrators and victims morally desirable? What would be the basis for such a reconciliation? * What roles do truth, memory and forgetting play in the process of reconciliation? Manuscripts in duplicate and not longer than 8,000 words should be sent to: The Editors, Special Issue on Genocide, Metaphilosophy Department of Philosophy Southern Connecticut State University New Haven, CT 06515 USA Telephone: (203) 392-6792 Fax: (203) 392-6338 E-mail: metaphil@southernct.edu Author guidelines can be found on our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com/meta


 
Call for Papers: Journal of Philosophy, Science & Law
    Welcome to the Journal of Philosophy, Science & Law. New in the latest edition of the journal: - A Book Review by Bill Shields from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board: Law and Nature by David Delaney - Yvette Pearson from Old Dominion University, Department of Philosophy: Playing Politics with Bioethics: Now That's Repugnant - Amanda Sarata, Fay Shamanski, Suzanne Goodwin, and Sarah Carr: The Secretary's Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health, and Society: Summary of the October 22-23, 2003 Meeting JPSL is a peer reviewed online journal. The journal is currently accepting submissions from a variety of different fields. It is a forum for scientists, lawyers, philosophers, policy analysts, historians, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, students, and other interested scholars to express and exchange their views. Please forward this e-mail to any friends, colleagues, or students who would be interested in the journal. To receive notices about future articles and updates, please visit the journal's website at http://www.psljournal.com If you have any questions or comments about the journal, please send your inquiries to Jason Borenstein at editor@psljournal.com


 
Legal Theory Calendar
    Monday, May 21
      At Oxford's Moral Philosophy Seminar, Rae Langton (Edinburgh & soon to be MIT) presents Speaker's Freedom and Maker's Knowledge: A Millian Defence of Pornography?
    Tuesday, June 1 Wednesday, June 2
      At the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, today and tomorrow, there is a conference on Democracy and Pluralism.
    Thursday, June 3
      At Florida State, Marie Reilly, University of South Carolina, presents The Bankruptcy Trustee's Power to Avoid Regulated Transfers After BFP v. Resolution Trust Corp.
    Friday, June 4
      At the University of London, today and tomorrow, Scanlon & the Contractualist Picture of Morality.


 
Legal Theory Lexicon: The Internal Point of View
    Introduction How can we look at a legal system? H.L.A. Hart famously deployed the distinction between external and internal perspectives on a legal system in his famous book, The Concept of Law. This post provides a very brief introduction to this distinction for law students (especially first-year law students) with an interest in legal theory.
    Internal and External What is the difference between internal and external perspectives on the law? Obviously, we are dealing with a metaphor here. The idea is that one can look at the law from the inside or from the outside. Even if you have never encountered this distinction before, the intuitive idea is fairly clear. The internal point of view is the perspective of participants in the system. Thus, the internal point of view is paradigmatically the point of view of legal officials (such a judges). The external point of view is the perspective of outsiders. Thus, the external point of view is paradigmatically the point of view of a sociologist or anthropologist from a different culture, who observes the legal system.
    Here are some examples:
      --Doctrinal theories (e.g. a theory of the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution) are usually stated from the internal point of view. This is the kind of theory that law students usually encounter early in their legal education.
      --Causal theories (e.g. a public-choice theory that explains why a particular area of law has come to be the way it is) are usually stated from the external point of view. In first-year law school courses, causal theories are usually stated in a very compact, even off-hand form. There may be a brief classroom discussion of the causal forces that shaped a particular legal doctrine, but it is fairly rare actually to read social science literature on topics like this.
    The General Significance of the Internal Point of View The idea of the internal point of view plays a particular role in H.L.A. Hart's theory of law, but this post is about a related but distinct topic--the more general role that the internal/external distinction plays in legal theory. Newbie legal theorists need to know this distinction in order to avoid a very serious mistake in theory development. That mistake is to slide between the internal and external point of view. This mistake is actually quite easy to make. The theorist is working within the internal point of view--describing a particular legal doctrine from the point of view of lawyers and judges who work within the constraints of the doctrine. Then, the theorist slides into an explanation as to how the law came to be the way it is--describing the operation of political or economic pressures--and then slides back to the doctrinal level--drawing the conclusion that the law should be interpreted differently in light of the causal explanation. Arguments like this can be made to work, but unless the relationship between the causal explanation and the doctrinal consequence is explained carefully, this kind of move can easily involve a category mistake. Causal explanations (of how the law has come to be the way it is) are usually irrelevant from the internal point of view.
    Rules and the Internal Point of View The internal point of view may have additional significance to legal theorists. One can argue that legal rules cannot be described from a purely external point of view. Huh? Imagine that you are an anthropologist from Mars, observing an earthly legal system. You would be able to note various regularities in behavior, but so long as you stuck to the purely external point of view, you would not be able to say anything about the content of the laws. In order to do that, you would need to ask the question "What is the meaning of the these legal texts and actions?" And to say anything about meaning, you would need to assume (at least hypothetically) something like the internal point of view. You would need to ask the question, "What does these behaviors are markings mean to those who are inside the practice of law?"
    If this argument is correct, then important consequences follow. Legal theorists are interested in legal theory. If the internal point of view is a necessary prerequisite for understanding the legal significance of the behavior of legal actors, then it would seem to follow that all legal theory requires that the theorist be able to assume the internal point of view at the stage where the theorist describes the legal phenomenon that are the object of study.
    Let me give an example of this rather abstract point. Suppose you want to develop a causal theory of tort law. You want to argue that there is an economic explanation of the emergence of negligence (as opposed to strict liability) as the primary standard of care in tort. The details of the theory don't matter, but let's assume you believe that inefficient legal standards create incentives for litigation and that a quasi-evolutionary process leads to the selection of efficient standards. And of course, you would need to argue that negligence is efficient. This theory is primarily stated from the external point of view, but it also relies on the legal meaning of the distinction between "negligence" and "strict liability"--concepts that can only be understood from the legal point of view.
    The central idea here is that the external point of view can describe the behavior of legal actors, but the internal point of view is required to understand the meaning of legal actions.
    Conclusion The distinction between the internal and external point of views is one of the basic ideas in legal theory. When you first begin to construct theories about the law, you should ask yourself, "Am I looking at this area of the law from the internal point of view or am I taking a perspective that is external to the law?" For more on theory construction, you might also want to look at an earlier post in the Legal Theory Lexicon series: Legal Theory Lexicon 016: Positive and Normative Legal Theories


Sunday, May 30, 2004
 
Legal Theory Bookworm This week the Legal Theory Bookworm recommends two classics by Jon Elster. The first is Sour Grapes : Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. Here is a description:
    Sour Grapes aims to subvert orthodox theories of rational choice through the study of forms of irrationality. Dr Elster begins with an analysis of the notation of rationality, to provide the background and terms for the subsequent discussions, which cover irrational behaviour, irrational desires and irrational belief. These essays continue and complement the arguments of Jon Elster's earlier book, Ulysses and the Sirens. That was published to wide acclaim, and Dr Elster shows the same versatility here in drawing on philosophy, political and social theory, decision-theory, economics and psychology, as well as history and literature.
And the second is Ulysses and the Sirens : Studies in Rationality and Irrationality. Elster's work had a profound influence on my intellectual development. If you haven't read these two classic books, I urge you to do so!


Saturday, May 29, 2004
 
Download of the Week The Download of the Week is Against Global Governance in the WTO by John O. McGinnis and Mark L. Movsesian (Northwestern University - School of Law and Hofstra University). Here is the abstract:
    This essay argues that the World Trade Organization should not become a forum for global governance in non-trade matters. It responds to those, like Professor Andrew Guzman, who believe that the WTO's success suggests that the organization should be transformed into a forum for "cross-issue" regulatory bargains among member nations on issues, ranging from the environment to human rights, that are not easily resolved in existing international fora. We show that the current focus of the WTO - the reduction of barriers to international trade and the resulting promotion of private contracts - does not require the organization to face the agency problems inherent in regulatory structures. By contrast, global regulatory "deals," even more than domestic legislation, may serve as vehicles for interest-group transfers. We also explain how the WTO's rigorous enforcement mechanism might actually inhibit cross-issue bargaining among member nations. Substantive regulatory bargains would necessarily increase the discretion exercised by WTO dispute settlement tribunals. This increased discretion would entail a lack of predictability that could well be intolerable for WTO members, particularly developing countries. We end by arguing that the WTO can best contribute to the long-run improvement of regulatory standards by deepening its commitment to reducing barriers that prevent trade among the nations of the world.


 
SSRN Top Downloads SSRN is experiencing technical difficulties & their top download lists have not been updated since early. The overall list for all of SSRN is working however, and it includes three papers of interest to legal theorists:


Friday, May 28, 2004
 
Bainbridge on the Martial Virtues Stephen Bainbridge has an intriguing post on Iraq and the martial virtues:
    It is not just that we have become spoiled, it is that we as a people have largely lost the martial virtues. The United States, of course, historically has a far more ambivalent attitude towards those virtues than did, say, the Romans of the Republic or the hoplite Greeks.
Of course, the role of the martial virtues in ancient Athens was the subject of one of the great cultural and philosophical debates in the history of humankind. Here is a very short account of the historical context of the trial of Socrates:
    When Socrates was in his late '30's, the growing power of Athens, which had frightened other Greek states for years, led to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431, in which Athens (and its allies) faced Sparta (and its allies). During the decades-long war, Pericles died in the plague of Athens (429); fortunes of war varied until a truce was made in 421, but this was never very stable and in 415 Athens was persuaded by Alcibiades (a pupil of Socrates’) to send a huge force to Sicily in an attempt to take over some of the cities there. This expedition was destroyed in 413. Nevertheless Athens continued the war. In 411 an oligarchy ("rule by a few") was instituted in Athens in an attempt to secure financial support from Persia, but this did not work out and the democracy was soon restored. In 405 the last Athenian fleet was destroyed in the battle of Aegospotami by a Spartan commander, and the city was besieged and forced to surrender in 404. Sparta set up an oligarchy of Athenian nobles (among them Critias, a former associate of Socrates and a relative of Plato), which because of its brutality became known as the Thirty Tyrants. By 403 democracy was once again restored. It is in the context of Athens' defeat and turmoil after that these tragic events that, in 399 B.C., Socrates was tried by the Athenian government for corrupting the morals of Athenian youth and for religious heresies; it is now believed that his arrest stemmed in particular from his influence on Alcibiades and Critias, who were felt by the defeated populace as having betrayed Athens. He was convicted and, resisting all efforts to save his life, and refusing to accept exile for life from his beloved Athens, willingly drank the cup of poison hemlock given him.
Are the martial virtues true human excellences? How does do the martial virtues relate to the virtues of justice and beneficience? These are deep questions, but surely there are no easy answers. Read Bainbridge!



 
Denning and Ramsey on Executive Preemption in Foreign Affairs Brannon P. Denning and Michael D. Ramsey (Cumberland School of Law and University of San Diego School of Law) have posted American Insurance Association v. Garamendi and Executive Preemption in Foreign Affairs (William & Mary Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    In American Insurance Association v. Garamendi, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated California's Holocaust Victim Insurance Relief Act (HVIRA), which required insurance companies doing business in California to disclose all policies they or their affiliates sold in Europe between 1920 and 1945. According to the Court, the state's law unconstitutionally interfered with the foreign affairs power of the national government. The decision was easily overlooked in a Term filled with landmark cases dealing with affirmative action and sexual privacy. What coverage the case did receive emphasized its federalism aspects, and excited little reaction because the result seemed intuitively appropriate given the federal government's interest in conducting foreign affairs. We argue in this paper, however, that Garamendi is more important - and problematic - when seen as a case about separation of powers. In particular, we argue that the decision expands presidential control over foreign affairs, not only at the expense of the states, but also and more critically at the expense of Congress and the Senate. This arises from the Court's invention of a novel constitutional power of executive preemption - that is, an independent ability of the President to override state laws that interfere with executive branch policies in foreign affairs. Until Garamendi, no one had thought that a mere executive branch policy, unsupported by the formal or even tacit approval of any other branch, could have the effect of preemptive law. As a result, one need not be a defender of foreign policy federalism, nor a critic of executive foreign affairs powers, to have grave reservations about the decision's implications for separation of powers, federalism and constitutional theory. It is uncontroversial that state laws and policies must give way to the foreign affairs objectives of the national government. The critical question, though, is how these overriding federal goals are developed and identified. We argue that the Garamendi decision has at least three separate and substantial ill-effects upon this process. First,executive preemption conveys to the President the power to decide which state laws affecting foreign affairs survive and which do not. This concentrates foreign affairs power in the President in a way not contemplated by the Constitution's Framers, who sought to separate executive power from legislative power. Second, Garamendi seemed to make executive agreements the functional equivalents of congressional statutes; this functional equivalency may hasten the decline of the treaty as a foreign policy-making tool, with a concomitant decline in the opportunities for Congress - the Senate, in particular - to shape foreign policy. Third, the decision implicated the relationship between the states and the federal government in foreign affairs, but did so in a way that provided essentially no guidance for the future. Part I of this Article discusses the factual setting of the Holocaust insurance claims that formed the background of the case. Part II outlines the constitutional law of federal-state relations in foreign affairs as it stood before the Garamendi decision. Part III describes the Supreme Court's decision, and points out its discontinuity with prior decisions. In Part IV we turn to the troubling structural implications of Garamendi, which we regard as occurring primarily in the field of separation of powers. We conclude that the Court ended up far from the text, structure and history of the Constitution. In Part V we address the decision's implications for federalism, particular the dangers of concentrating preemptive power in the executive branch. Part VI relates the Garamendi case to the wider theoretical debates of modern foreign affairs law and constitutional interpretation. In contrast to other federalism and separation of powers cases, the Garamendi Court paid little attention to text or structure in analyzing the constitutional questions presented. More surprising, perhaps, is the Court’s complete lack of interest in what light history might shed on the foreign affairs issues before it. But neither is Garamendi an exercise in common law doctrinal evolution, because it owes essentially nothing to prior cases or practice, except as rhetorical cover. Garamendi's near-exclusive attention to loose interpretations of prior case law and its lack of sensitivity to text, history, and structure, suggest to us a danger in common law constitutional interpretation as a preferred approach to constitutional interpretation and adjudication in foreign affairs controversies.
Download it while its hot!


 
Bainbridge on LLC Veil Piercing Stephen M. Bainbridge (University of California, Los Angeles - School of Law) has posted Abolishing LLC Veil Piercing on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Courts are now routinely applying the corporate law doctrine of veil piercing to limited liability companies. This extension of a seriously flawed doctrine into a new arena is not required by statute and is insupportable as a matter of policy. The standards by which veil piercing is effected are vague, leaving judges great discretion. The result has been uncertainty and lack of predictability, increasing transaction costs for small businesses. At the same time, however, there is no evidence that veil piercing has been rigorously applied to effect socially beneficial policy outcomes. Judges typically seem to be concerned more with the facts and equities of the specific case at bar than with the implications of personal shareholder liability for society at large. A standard academic move treats veil piercing as a safety valve allowing courts to address cases in which the externalities associated with limited liability seem excessive. In doing so, veil piercing is called upon to achieve such lofty goals as leading LLC members to optimally internalize risk, while not deterring capital formation and economic growth, while promoting populist notions of economic democracy. The task is untenable. Veil piercing is rare, unprincipled, and arbitrary. Abolishing veil piercing would refocus judicial analysis on the appropriate question - did the defendant - LLC member do anything for which he or she should be held directly liable?


 
Revesz & Stavins on Environmental Law & Policy Richard L. Revesz and Robert N. Stavins (New York University School of Law and Harvard University - John F. Kennedy School of Government) have posted Environmental Law and Policy on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This paper, which is a preliminary draft of a chapter for the forthcoming Handbook of Law and Economics (edited by A. Mitchell Polinsky and Steven Shavell, and to be published by North-Holland/Elsevier Science), provides an economic perspective of environmental law and policy with regard to both normative and positive dimensions. It begins with an examination of the central problem in environmental regulation: the tendency of pollution generators in an unconstrained market economy to externalize some of the costs of their production, leading to an inefficiently large amount of pollution. We examine the ends of environmental policy, that is, the setting of goals and targets, beginning with normative issues, notably the Kaldor-Hicks criterion and the related method of assessment known as benefit-cost analysis. We examine this analytical method in detail, including its theoretical foundations and empirical methods of estimation of compliance costs and environmental benefits. We include a review of critiques of benefit-cost analysis, briefly examine alternative approaches to analyzing the goals of environmental policies, and survey the efforts of the Federal governmental to employ these analytical methods. The paper also examines in detail the means of environmental policy, that is, the choice of specific policy instruments, beginning with an examination of potential criteria for assessing alternative instruments, with particular focus on cost-effectiveness. The theoretical foundations and experiential highlights of individual instruments are reviewed, including conventional, command-and-control mechanisms, economic incentive or market-based instruments, and liability rules. In the economic-incentive category, we consider pollution charges, tradeable permit systems, market friction reductions, and government subsidy reductions. Three cross-cutting issues receive attention: implications of uncertainty for instrument choice; effects of instrument choice on technological change; and distributional considerations. We identify a set of normative lessons in regard to design, implementation, and the identification of new applications, and we examine positive issues, including three phenomena: the historical dominance of command-and-control; the prevalence in new proposals of tradeable permits allocated without charge; and the relatively recent increase in attention given to market-based instruments. Finally, the paper turns to the question of how environmental responsibility is and should be allocated among the various levels of government. We provide a positive review of the responsibilities of Federal, state, and local levels of government in the environmental realm, plus a normative assessment of this allocation of regulatory responsibility. We focus on three arguments that have been made for Federal environmental regulation: competition among political jurisdictions and the race to the bottom; transboundary environmental problems; and public choice and systematic bias.


 
Anderson on Intuitions in Moral Theory James Anderson (University of San Diego) has uploaded A Critical Role for Intuitions in Moral Theory. Here is the abstract:
    The justificatory role of intuitions in moral reasoning has long been a source of controversy. The problems of intuitionism and empty formalism can be avoided by understanding moral intuitions as nonreflective, but justifiable, moral judgments operating in a model of reflective equilibrium that brings to light the rational structure underlying all moral judgments. One objection to this says that requiring only coherence between intuitions and principles is tantamount to subjectivism. A defense is found in an analogy with the linguistic theory of universal grammar, suggesting an innate capacity to learn how to recognize and make moral judgments. As with language, socially-structured environmental stimulus will determine which moral intuitions we possess. The feminist critique of traditional moral theory can be interpreted in this light: the central values of traditional theory enshrine the moral intuitions possessed by those who were socialized for life outside the domestic sphere.


 
Setiya on Hume on Practical Reason Kieran Setiya has uploaded Hume on Practical Reason (forthcoming in Philosophical Perspectives). Here is a taste:
    It is true that Hume is not an instrumentalist. And there is a sense in which he is a sceptic about practical reason. But the sense is more interesting, and more subtle, than the crudely sceptical reading allows. There are ways of interpreting "practical reason" on which Hume will argue that there is no such thing. But his claim is less radical than it seems. For what he really rejects is a rationalist conception of practical reason. As I will try to show, he does not reject the idea of practical reason altogether. Matters are complicated by the fact that Hume himself is unwilling to speak of "reason" except when a rationalist interpretation is in play, or when he is "speaking with the vulgar" in Book Three. But part of my claim is that we have to be careful in translating from the Humean idiom to our own. Hume's picture of practical reason is not a picture of what he would call "reason" (not even in the "vulgar" sense), but it is a picture of practical reason nonetheless.


 
Basinger on Religious Pluralism David Basinger's article entitled Religious Diversity (Pluralism) is now available on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Here is a taste:
    With respect to many, if not most issues, there exist significant differences of opinion among individuals who seem to be equally knowledgeable and sincere. Individuals who apparently have access to the same information and are equally interested in the truth affirm incompatible perspectives on, for instance, significant social, political, and economic issues. Such diversity of opinion, though, is nowhere more evident than in the area of religious thought. On almost every religious issue, honest, knowledgeable people hold significantly diverse, often incompatible beliefs. Religious diversity of this sort can fruitfully be explored in many ways — for instance, from psychological, anthropological, or historical perspectives. The current discussion, however, will concern itself primarily with those key issues surrounding religious diversity with which philosophers, especially analytic philosophers of religion, are most concerned at present. Specifically, our discussion will focus primarily on the following questions: How pervasive is religious diversity? Does the reality of this diversity require a response? Can a person who acknowledges religious diversity remain justified in claiming just one perspective to be correct? If so, is it morally justifiable to attempt to convert others to a different perspective? Can it justifiably be claimed that only one religion offers a path into the eternal presence of God? The answers to such questions are not simply academic. They increasingly have great impact on how we treat others, both personally and corporately.


 
Faguet on Altruism and Empire Jean-Paul Faguet (London School of Economics - Development Studies Institute & Centre for Economic Performance) has posted Building Democracy in Quicksand: Altruism, Empire and the United States (Challenge, Vol. 47, No. 3, pp. 73-93, June 2004) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    The new era of US empire commenced with decisive military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the aftermath of war has proved surprisingly difficult and violent. Explanations of the US's failure to win the peace have largely overlooked the inherent difficulty of planting democracy in so inhospitable a social environment as Iraq's. This paper examines the prospects for US empire, focusing on the problem of nation building, and in particular the role of a well-functioning civil society in making democracy work.


 
Mullin & Malani on Joint & Several Liabily's Effect on Bankruptcy Charles Mullin and Anup Malani (Vanderbilt University - Department of Economics and University of Virginia - School of Law) have posted The Effect of Joint and Several Liability on the Bankruptcy Rate of Defendants: Evidence from Asbestos Litigation. Here is the abstract:
    If two defendants share a joint and several liability and the first becomes insolvent, his unpaid liabilities are reallocated to the second. While the second defendant's assets may cover its share of liability, they may not cover the first defendant's share. Thus, the one defendant's insolvency may trigger the other's. We quantify this externality in the context of asbestos-related torts. We choose this example because 61 companies with major asbestos liabilities have gone bankrupt since 1982 and nearly 8,000 other companies have been named in asbestos suits. Using data from 10-K forms and asbestos trials, we estimate that payments on asbestos claims grew 5 - 10 percent annually - over 150 percent total - during 1990 - 2002 due to the bankruptcy of jointly liable defendants. We discuss the implications for the priority of tort claimants in bankruptcy and piecemeal tort litigation as a compensation mechanism for mass torts.


Thursday, May 27, 2004
 
Internet Governance Department If you haven't already done so, take a look at ICANN grows up at last by Kieren McCarthy in The Register. Here is a taste:
    What has really prevented out-and-out fury, however, is the budget document. It is, simply, beautifully constructed. ICANN is under new management and there has been a sea-change in its mindset. Gone is the shameless arrogance and empire building of the previous incumbents. Under the new head, Paul Twomey, we have got away from petulant IT types and entered the realm of diplomats and government types. Twomey is creating an institution. And he has three years to do it. If ICANN isn't solid and respected and entrenched by then, the whole organisation could be at risk. The budget document makes this clear to anyone who understands what is going on and it does so with refreshing clarity. The ICANN of old left a trail of vague legal-speak and a few bad-tempered comments before telling you how much it had decided to spend this year. The new approach is forward-looking, positive, honest, coherent, clear. It's no wonder people like it. The problem is that it contains little real justification for the vast increase in resources it has decided to award itself.


 
Rappaport on O'Connor Over at The Right Coast, Mike Rappaport has a very nice post on Justice O'Connor's view of federalism. Here is a taste:
    Recently, the Supreme Court decided another important federalism case, Tennessee v. Lane. In Lane, the Supreme Court held that Title II of the ADA (that is, the Americans with Disabilities Act) was authorized by section 5 of the 14th Amendment. By contrast, in a 2001 case, Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v. Garrett, the Supreme Court had held that Title I of the ADA was not authorized by the 14th Amendment. So the 14th Amendment authorizes Title II but not Title I. Why? Because Justice O'Connor says so. But why does Justice O'Connor say so? Always a good question, but this time, at least, I think there is answer. In my view, Justice O'Connor is employing the following federalism principle: The Constitution should not be interpreted to completely eviscerate federalism limitations, but short of that Congress can do pretty much what it wants.
Surf on over to read the rest!



 
Co on Section 337 Patent Cases Catherine Y. Co (University of Nebraska at Omaha - Department of Economics) has posted How Valuable are the Patents Behind Section 337 Cases? (The World Economy, Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 525-539, April 2004) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    A US patent protects the owner of the intellectual property from imitators producing in the US and foreign imitators selling in the US market. There are two venues for filing infringement cases against international infringement of US patents, with the International Trade Commission (ITC) using Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 or with federal district courts. Three indicators of patent value suggest that patents litigated under Section 337 are on average more valuable; however, their values tend to be more variable. The latter suggests that some firms may be using Section 337 not for protection against international infringement of US patents but for protection against imports.


 
Baicker and Jacobson on Forfeiture Katherine Baicker and Mireille Jacobson (Dartmouth College - Department of Economics and University of California, Irvine - Department of Planning, Policy and Design) have posted Finders Keepers: Forfeiture Laws, Policing Incentives, and Local Budgets on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    In order to encourage anti-drug policing, both the federal government and many state governments have enacted laws that allow police agencies to keep a substantial fraction of assets that they seize in drug arrests. By adjusting their own allocations to police budgets, however, county governments can effectively undermine these incentives, capturing the additional resources for other uses. We use a rich new data set on police seizures and county spending to explore the reactions of both local governments and police to the complex incentives generated by these laws. We find that local governments do indeed offset the seizures that police make by reducing their other allocations to policing, undermining the statutory incentive created by the laws. They are more likely to do so in times of fiscal distress. Police, in turn, respond to the real net incentives for seizures, once local offsets are taken into account, not simply the incentives set out in statute. When de facto policies allow police to keep the assets they seize, they seize more. These findings have strong implications for the effectiveness of using financial incentives to solve agency problems in the provision of public goods in a federal system: agents respond to incentives, but so do intervening governments, and the effectiveness of federal and state laws in influencing agents' behavior is limited by the ability of local governments to divert funds to other uses.


Wednesday, May 26, 2004
 
Conference Announcement: Democracy & Pluralism
    The Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem DEMOCRACY AND PLURALISM Conference June 2 - 3, 2004 Wednesday, June 2nd 09:30-11:00 David Heyd (The Hebrew University) Is Toleration a Political Virtue? Commentator: George Fletcher (Columbia University) 11:00-11:30 coffee break 11:30-13:00 Stephen Macedo (Princeton University) Diversity, Reciprocity and Justice Commentator: Jeff Spinner-Halev (University of Nebraska) 13:00-14:30 lunch at Beit Belgia 14:30-16:00 Andrei Marmor (University of Southern California) Democracy and Authority Commentator: David Estlund (Brown University) 16:00-16:30 coffee break 16:30-18:00 Lior Barshack (Inter-Disciplinary Center, Herzliya) Constituent Power as Body: Outline of a Constitutional Theology Commentator: Therese Bjorkholm (Uppsala University Law School) 18:00-19:30 Elizabeth Garrett (University of Southern California) Conditions for Framework Legislation Commentator: Omri Yadlin (Tel Aviv University) Thursday June 3rd 09:30-11:00 Chaim Gans (Tel Aviv University) Jewish State Commentator: Yossi David (The Hebrew University) 11:00-11:30 coffee break 11:30-13:00 Nahshon Perez (The Hebrew University) Universal Justice, Local Norms, the (Sometimes) Pseudo Debate of Human Rights Violations Within Minority Cultures Commentator: Yael Ofarim (Gilo Center, The Hebrew University) 13:00-14:30 lunch at Beit Belgia 14:30-16:00 Jeff Spinner Halev (University of Nebraska) Hinduism Christianity and Liberal Toleration Commentator: Charles Blattberg (Université de Montréal,) 16:00-16:30 coffee break 16:30-18:00 Rajeev Bhargava (Delhi University) Muslim Personal Law and the Majority-Minority Syndrome Commentator: Ruth Zafran (IDC)


 
Eric Muller on Legal Advice & Interrogation in Iraq I am impressed by the Eric Muller's very measured post, here.


 
Wednesday Calendar


 
Layers Principle Hits the Stands The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law by Minn Chung and myself is now available in print (79 Notre Dame L. Rev. 815 (2004)) and on Westlaw. For some commentary, you can surf here, here, and especially from Ed Felten here. You can listen to the audio of a talk I gave at Stanford here.


 
Ellerman on Property Theory David Ellerman (University of California, Riverside - Department of Economics) has posted Introduction to Property Theory on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    A theory of property needs to give an account of the whole life-cycle of a property right: how it is initiated, transferred, and terminated. Economics has focused on the transfers in the market and has almost completely neglected the question of the initiation and termination of property in normal production and consumption (not in some original state or in the transition from common to private property). The institutional mechanism for the normal initiation and termination of property is an invisible-hand function of the market, the market mechanism of appropriation. Does this mechanism satisfy an appropriate normative principle? The normative principle of assigning or imputing legal responsibility according to de facto responsibility is developed on individualist-subjectivist principles in what is essentially a modern explication of the Lockean theory. Then the fundamental theorem of the property mechanism is proven which shows that if Hume's conditions (no transfers without consent and all contracts fulfilled) are satisfied, then the market automatically satisfies the Lockean responsibility principle, i.e., Hume implies Locke. As a major application, the results in their contrapositive form, Not Locke implies Not Hume, are applied to a market economy based on the employment contract. It is shown the production based on the employment contract violates the Lockean principle (all who work in an enterprise are de facto responsible for the positive and negative results) and thus Hume's conditions must also be violated in the marketplace (in spite of the labor contract, de facto responsible human action cannot be transferred from one person to another as is readily recognized when and employer and employee together commit a crime).


Tuesday, May 25, 2004
 
Justifications and Excuses at Rutgers At the Rutgers-Camden Institute for Law and Philosophy, today and tomorrow, there is a conference entitled Justifications and Excuses: Legal and Philosophical Perpsectives. Here are the papers with links:


 
Hatch on the Compromise The Washington Times has a story titled Bush deal for court nominees irks conservatives, but real meat of the story is actually a quote from Senator Hatch:
    Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican, dismissed the idea that Republicans should just try ramming judges through without attempts at negotiation.
    "Those kinds of arguments are beneath the dignity of comment," he said. "We were not going to get any confirmed.
    "The president was not going to make any more recess appointments anyway," Mr. Hatch said. "It was an absolute 'gimme.'"
Hatch is correct of course. The so-called compromise was really no compromise at all, as I argued in a post titled Understanding the Compromise of May 18, 2004


 
Tuesday Calendar


 
Wu on Copyright's Communications Policy The hot download on SSRN is Tim Wu's Copyright's Communications Policy. Here is the abstract:
    This paper suggest that the main challenges for 21st century copyright are not challenges of authorship policy, but rather new and harder problems for copyright's communications policy. Since its inception copyright has set important baselines upon which publishers and their modern equivalents compete.business. As the pace of technological change accelerates, copyright's role in setting the conditions for competition is quickly becoming more important, even challenging for primacy the significance of copyright's encouragement of authorship. The study of copyright's communications policy has both a descriptive and a normative payoff. First, it helps us understand both the existing copyright code and the history of 20th century copyright. Second, it helps us ask whether copyright is in line with other important goals of national communications policy.


 
Fairman on Rule 9(b) Well, this is a topic that I find fascinating! Christopher M. Fairman (Ohio State University - Michael E. Moritz College of Law) has posted An Invitation to the Rulemakers - Strike Rule 9(b) (UC Davis Law Review, Vol. 38, 2004) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Pleading is the gateway into the federal courts. Consistent with the goal of merits determination, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure typically impose only a minimal pleading requirement called "notice pleading." An elevated pleading burden requiring greater factual particularity - heightened pleading - is required only for cases involving fraud or mistake. Despite the limited situations requiring heightened pleading under the Federal Rules, federal courts routinely apply heightened pleading burdens to a myriad of cases. This Essay takes aim at the Federal Rule that spawns the widespread use of heightened pleading - Rule 9(b). Finding scant justification for Rule 9(b) even in the fraud context, this Essay makes the case for eliminating heightened pleading for fraud cases by amending the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The reasons are simple. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 9(b) is more the product of historical accident than anything else. The current rationales for its retention are mere rationalizations that create divergent and unworkable standards in the fraud arena. Unfortunately, Rule 9(b) is not content to stay put. Federal courts routinely apply and extend Rule 9(b) heightened pleading into other substantive areas they deem "fraud-like." This ad hoc judicial rulemaking is in the face of repeated Supreme Court direction to stop. By striking Rule 9(b), heightened pleading can be contained: a rule-based solution to a rule-created problem.


 
Overton on Judicial Review of Campaign Reform Spencer A. Overton (George Washington University - Law School) has posted Restraint and Responsibility: Judicial Review of Campaign Reform (Washington & Lee Law Review, Vol. 61, p. 663, May 2004). Here is the abstract:
    The First Amendment doctrine governing campaign finance law allows judicial outcomes to turn on often unstated political assumptions about the appropriate role of money in campaigns. As illustrated by the conflicting opinions of different U.S. Supreme Court Justices in McConnell v. FEC, current narrow tailoring and substantial overbreadth tests provide inadequate guidance and compel judges to rely on their own political assumptions in balancing the need for regulation against the right of free speech. Judges skeptical of campaign reform err on the side of protecting speech, while judges supportive of reform lean toward tolerating regulations said to prevent corruption. To resolve the conflict and fill the void in current doctrine, this Article identifies four democratic values that judges should balance in deciding whether campaign finance laws restrict too much protected speech: democratic deliberation, widespread participation, individual autonomy, and electoral competition. While political assumptions may influence judicial balancing of these values, this new approach is a better compromise of sensitivity to context, consideration of substantive democratic values, and judicial guidance than the alternatives. Honest exchange about how courts should balance relevant values in particular contexts, rather than a glossing over of tough issues with abstract rhetoric and mechanical categories, will allow for a more coherent doctrine.


 
Gan, Williams and Wiseman Model Hate Crimes Legislation Li Gan , Roberton C. Williams III, Thomas Wiseman (University of Texas at Austin - Department of Economics , Stanford University - Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research , University of Texas at Austin - Department of Economics and University of Texas at Austin - Department of Economics) have posted A Simple Model of Optimal Hate Crime Legislation on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    We present a simple model of the effects of hate crime legislation. It shows that even if the direct harm to victims of hate crime is the same as for other crimes, because of other differences in the effects it may still be optimal to exert more law-enforcement effort to deter or prevent hate crime. These differences also have previously unrecognized effects on the optimal level of effort by potential hate crime victims to avoid being victimized, thus affecting the efficiency of government policies that encourage or discourage such effort. We discuss the implications of these results for optimal hate-crime policy, as well as for policy toward other similar crimes, such as terrorism.


 
Nzelibe on the Uniqueness of Foreign Affairs Jide Nzelibe (University of Chicago - Law School) has posted The Uniqueness of Foreign Affairs (Iowa Law Review, Vol. 89, No. 942, March 2004) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This Article attempts to explain and justify the exceptional treatment that courts accord foreign affairs issues under the political question doctrine. For the most part, academic commentators have attacked the political question doctrine, arguing that the doctrine is both incoherent and inconsistent with the Marbury tradition of judicial review. Challenging the conventional academic wisdom, this Article contends that institutional competence considerations continue to warrant broad application of the doctrine in the foreign affairs context. More specifically, this Article argues that the power-based nature of most international policy decisions continues to constrain the power of the courts to adjudicate on foreign affairs controversies. Nonetheless, the mere involvement of foreign affairs in a legal dispute should not automatically preclude judicial review. Rather, this Article suggests an alternative vision of the judicial function in foreign affairs, which I call the balance of institutional competencies approach. This approach envisions a spectrum of judicial authority in foreign affairs, which depends on whether the underlying foreign affairs controversy implicates individual rights or domestic property interests, or whether Congress has legislated on the particular foreign affairs issue in question. When viewed as a device for the proper allocation of institutional competencies in foreign affairs disputes, this Article contends that the political question doctrine is both doctrinally coherent and, in the proper circumstances, normatively attractive.


 
Moreau on the Wrongs on Unequal Treatment Sophia Reibetanz Moreau (University of Toronto - Faculty of Law) has posted The Wrongs of Unequal Treatment (University of Toronto Law Journal, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    When exactly is it unfair for a government to fail to treat citizens as equals? And what is the nature of the wrong done to individuals who are not treated as equals? The main aim of this paper is to argue that there are a number of quite distinct ways in which individuals may be wronged by unequal treatment, and that these different wrongs are not reducible to a single unifying explanation. I then try to show that the approach to violations of equality rights in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms laid down by the Supreme Court of Canada in Law v. Canada fails to separate out these different wrongs, and I argue that this has rendered the test both conceptually problematic and less able to recognize as discriminatory certain instances in which the claimant has indeed suffered from unfair treatment. In conclusion, the paper explores several ways in which the Law approach might be modified, in order to rectify these problems.


 
Hylton on Calabresi and the Intellectual History of Law and Economics Keith N. Hylton (Boston University School of Law) has posted Calabresi and the Intellectual History of Law and Economics on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This essay traces the vein of thought represented by Calabresi's The Costs of Accidents, both backward in time to examine its sources, and forward to its impact on current scholarship. I focus on three broad topics: positive versus normative law and economics, positivist versus anti-positivist thinking in law, and the assumption of rationality in law and economics.


 
Issacharoff on Democracy in Fractured Societies Samuel Issacharoff (Columbia Law School) has posted Constitutionalizing Democracy in Fractured Societies (Texas Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This article explores the tension between constitutionalism and democratic majoritarianism in the context of emerging democracies characterized by deep ethnic or religious fractures. For many years, the political science orthodoxy prescribed a strategy of "consociationalism" that settled power-sharing arrangements as a bargain between political elites and rendered politics to a perpetual recognition of the primacy of ethnic or religious divides. The history of consociationalist experiments, in countries such as Lebanon and Cyprus, has been one of numerous unfortunate descents into communal warfare. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been a dramatic new round of nation-building in formerly repressive and fractured societies. Rather than turn to consociationalism to constrain the risk of unbridled majoritarianism and the threat of communal war, these countries have by and large employed a form of strong constitutional authority, typically enforced by an independent constitutional court, to prevent democratic politics from consuming itself. This article contrasts the experience of two such countries: South Africa and Bosnia. South Africa presents an example of a judicially-enforced constitutional order that allowed a remarkably stable multiracial society to emerge from the fall of apartheid. Bosnia, by contrast, came into the era of independence through a structured political power-sharing among the various ethnic groups, enforced through the Dayton peace accords. In both cases, the national constitutional courts played a critical role in attempting to secure the transition to stable democratic governance. In the case of South Africa, that was a role directly contemplated by the transitional accords. In the case of Bosnia, however, the Bosnian Constitutional Court was compelled to unwind some of the consociationalist strands of Dayton in order to prevent a renewal of ethnic factional war.


 
Kang on Deliberative Democracy in the Supreme Court John M. Kang (Western Kentucky University - Department of Political Science) has posted The Irrelevance of Sincerity: Deliberative Democracy in the Supreme Court (Saint Louis University Law Journal, Vol. 48, Issue 2, 2004) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Insincerity is regarded as a roguish intruder in democratic discourse where people are expected to speak their minds freely yet with a measure of sincere concern for their fellow citizens. This general cultural response has found formal articulation in the prominent scholarly movement which in recent years has assembled under the heading of "deliberative democracy". Its advocates - who include a diverse mix of some of the most prominent law professors, philosophers and political theorists - argue that people should frame their justifications in terms of the common good or the public generally, and that such justifications, at least sometimes, should be sincere. Against such insistence on sincerity, I argue that sincerity is both logically and practically irrelevant in contributing to a meaningful realm of free speech that can help generate diverse options for an audience to consider in its search for provisional political "truths".


Monday, May 24, 2004
 
Weekend Update On Saturday, the regular features included the SSRN Top Downloads, the Download of the Week (a great new paper by Eugene Volokh), and the Legal Theory Bookworm (recommending Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, edited by Cass Sunstein & Martha Nussbaum). On Sunday, the Legal Theory Calendar previewed the week's talks and conferences and the Legal Theory Lexicon entry was on "Overlapping Consensus and Incompletely Theorized Agreements."


 
Monday Calendar
    At London's Aristotelian Society, Rowland Stout presents Internalising Practical Reasons.
    At Oxford's Moral Philosophy Seminar, Jay Wallace (Berkley) presents Moral Reasons and Moral Motivation. Some Reflections on Rationalism in Ethics.


 
Kysar on Climate Change and Rationality Douglas A. Kysar (Cornell University - School of Law) has posted Climate Change, Cultural Transformation, and Comprehensive Rationality (Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review, Vol. 31, No. 3, 2004) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Economic cost-benefit analysis aims to evaluate regulatory proposals by identifying, monetizing, and comparing the proposals' expected positive and negative consequences. The methodology has been received critically in the area of environmental, health, and safety regulation, where scientific uncertainty, difficulties of valuation, and uncommonly long time horizons are said to render cost-benefit analysis especially problematic. This Essay reviews such criticisms through a discussion of the use cost-benefit analysis in the particular context of climate change policymaking. In this context, generic criticisms of cost-benefit analysis in the environmental, health, and safety area become even more pronounced, raising significant doubt about the methodology's philosophical and practical appropriateness as a guide for climate change policymaking.


 
McGinnis & Movsesian on the WTO John O. McGinnis and Mark L. Movsesian (Northwestern University - School of Law and Hofstra University) have posted Against Global Governance in the WTO (Harvard International Law Journal, Vol. 45) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This essay argues that the World Trade Organization should not become a forum for global governance in non-trade matters. It responds to those, like Professor Andrew Guzman, who believe that the WTO's success suggests that the organization should be transformed into a forum for "cross-issue" regulatory bargains among member nations on issues, ranging from the environment to human rights, that are not easily resolved in existing international fora. We show that the current focus of the WTO - the reduction of barriers to international trade and the resulting promotion of private contracts - does not require the organization to face the agency problems inherent in regulatory structures. By contrast, global regulatory "deals," even more than domestic legislation, may serve as vehicles for interest-group transfers. We also explain how the WTO's rigorous enforcement mechanism might actually inhibit cross-issue bargaining among member nations. Substantive regulatory bargains would necessarily increase the discretion exercised by WTO dispute settlement tribunals. This increased discretion would entail a lack of predictability that could well be intolerable for WTO members, particularly developing countries. We end by arguing that the WTO can best contribute to the long-run improvement of regulatory standards by deepening its commitment to reducing barriers that prevent trade among the nations of the world.


 
Stavins on Kyoto Robert N. Stavins (Harvard University - John F. Kennedy School of Government) has posted Can an Effective Global Climate Treaty be Based on Sound Science, Rational Economics, and Pragmatic Politics? on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    The Kyoto Protocol (1997) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) may come into force without U.S. participation, but its effects on climate change will be virtually non-existent. At the same time, the economic and scientific consensus points to the need for a credible international approach. A reasonable starting point is the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), which was signed by 161 nations and ratified by 50, including the United States, and entered into force in 1994. In this paper, I remain agnostic on the question of the Kyoto Protocol's viability. Some analysts see the agreement as deeply flawed, while others see it as an acceptable first step. But virtually everyone agrees that the Protocol is not sufficient to the overall challenge, and that further, subsequent steps will be required. This is my starting point for proposing a three-part policy architecture: first, all nations would be involved through the use of economic trigger mechanisms, plus growth targets; second, long-term targets would be required - in the short-term, firm, but moderate targets, and in the long-term, flexible, but much more stringent targets; and third, market-based policy instruments would be part of the package - emissions trading, carbon taxes, or hybrids of the two. This overall approach can be made to be scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic.


Sunday, May 23, 2004
 
Legal Theory Calendar


 
Legal Theory Lexicon: Overlapping Consensus & Incompletely Theorized Agreements
    Introduction As law students become more sophisticated, they begin to notice that certain debates seem to repeat themselves over and over again. Disagreements about disparate subjects--in procedure, criminal law, torts, property, and constitutional law--frequently seem to turn on the really big questions of ethics and political theory. On the one hand, the proponents of inviolate individual rights appeal to deontological premises in moral theory or liberal (or libertarian) ideas in political philosophy. On the other hand, the proponents of balancing argue from premises rooted in utilitarianism or welfarism (the economic version of utilitarian moral philosophy).
    For a short time, the ability to see this pattern may be exhilarating. You begin to see big patterns that transcend courses and doctrines. But after a while, exhilaration may give way to depression. If all the great debates in legal theory boil down to debates about the deepest questions of moral and political philosophy, then the question arises, "Can we make any progress?" Because it sure doesn't look like the debates between deontology and consequentialism or between libertarians and communitarians are going to be decisively resolved any time soon.
    And that is where today's Legal Theory Lexicon comes into the picture. Even if the deep debates of moral and political philosophy are irresolvable, there may be other ways to make progress in legal theory. In particular, we may be able to use the ideas of "incompletely theorized agreements" (associated with Cass Sunstein) or "overlapping consensus" (associated with John Rawls) to break the impasse on the deep questions.
    The basic idea is simple. We cannot agree on the deep questions, so go shallow. Find the level at which those who disagree on the deep can nonetheless find common ground. John Rawls calls the idea of common ground by the name "overlapping consensus." Cass Sunstein calls a similar idea, "incompletely theorized agreement." But both Sunstein and Rawls express a similar intuition. When you cannot reach agreement at the deep end of the pool of ideas, head for the shallow end!
    Deep and Shallow I suspect that you've already gotten it! But just to make sure, let's work through the ideas one by one. The first idea we need is the one that I have expressed by the metaphor of deep and shallow reasons. The metaphor is based on the idea that particular applications (e.g. particular questions of legal doctrine) are at the surface, they are in the shallow end of the pool of ideas. Beneath the surface of particular issues in legal doctrine and legislative policy are deeper disagreements. Disagreements about the a surface level question (e.g. the precise contours of the mailbox rule in contract law) lead to beneath-the-surface issues (e.g. the nature of offer and acceptance) and then to still-deeper issues (e.g. the basis for contractual obligation) and finally to the deepest questions (e.g. the nature of moral obligation). You might picture a chain of reasons, stretching from the surface of legal doctrine down to the depths of political and moral philosophy.
    Overlapping Consensus John Rawls developed the idea of an "overlapping consensus" as part of the work that led up to his book Political Liberalism. The idea emerged as part of Rawls's work on what he called the problem of stability. In a society governed by Rawls's theory (justice as fairness), the guarantee of basic liberties would mean that individual citizens would be free to adopt their own views about morality and religion. As a result, Rawls argued, it was likely that a variety of comprehensive religious and moral doctrines would emerge. Rawls believed that this fact of pluralism posed a problem for his theory. How could justice as fairness be stable (or reproduce itself) given the plurality of viewpoints that is bound to emerge and persist under conditions of freedom? Rawls's answer to this question was based on the idea that divergent moral and religious conceptions of the good could (despite their diversity) converge on some common ground. That is, citizens who held a plurality of religious and moral beliefs could nonetheless agree on the constitutional essentials--the basic constitutional principles necessary for a society to satisfy the demands of justice as fairness.
    This meant that different citizens would support justice as fairness for different reasons. Catholics might affirm justice as fairness for reasons found within the Catholic natural law tradition, while secular humanists might affirm the same (or similar) ideas about justice for different reasons. Although a deep consensus might on justice as fairness might be impossible, an "overlapping consensus," Rawls argued, is possible.
    Incompletely Theorized Agreements Cass Sunstein has a related but different idea. Here is a summary from his article in the Harvard Law Review:
      Incompletely theorized agreements play a pervasive role in law and society. It is rare for a person, and especially for a group, to theorize any subject completely -- that is, to accept both a highly abstract theory and a series of steps that relate the theory to a concrete conclusion. In fact, people often reach incompletely theorized agreements on a general principle. Such agreements are incompletely theorized in the sense that people who accept the principle need not agree on what it entails in particular cases. People know that murder is wrong, but they disagree about abortion. They favor racial equality, but they are divided on affirmative action. Hence there is a familiar phenomenon of a comfortable and even emphatic agreement on a general principle, accompanied by sharp disagreement about particular cases.
      This sort of agreement is incompletely theorized in the sense that it is incompletely specified -- a familiar phenomenon with constitutional provisions and regulatory standards in administrative law. Incompletely specified agreements have distinctive social uses. They may permit acceptance of a general aspiration when people are unclear about what the aspiration means, and in this sense, they can maintain a measure of both stability and flexibility over time. At the same time, they can conceal the fact of large- scale social disagreement about particular cases.
      There is a second and quite different kind of incompletely theorized agreement. People may agree on a mid-level principle but disagree both about the more general theory that accounts for it and about outcomes in particular cases. They may believe that government cannot discriminate on the basis of race, without settling on a large-scale theory of equality, and without agreeing whether government may enact affirmative action programs or segregate prisons when racial tensions are severe. The connections are left unclear, either in people's minds or in authoritative public documents, between the mid- level principle and general theory; the connection is equally unclear between the mid-level principle and concrete cases. So too, people may think that government may not regulate speech unless it can show a clear and present danger, but fail to settle whether this principle is founded in utilitarian or Kantian considerations, and disagree about whether the principle allows government to regulate a particular speech by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
      My special interest here is in a third kind of phenomenon -- incompletely theorized agreements on particular outcomes, accompanied by agreements on the low-level principles that account for them. These terms contain some ambiguities. There is no algorithm by which to distinguish between a high-level theory and one that operates at an intermediate or low level. We might consider Kantianism and utilitarianism as conspicuous examples of high-level theories and see legal illustrations in the many (academic) efforts to understand such areas as tort law, contract law, free speech, and the law of equality to be undergirded by highly abstract theories of the right or the good. By contrast, we might think of low-level principles as including most of the ordinary material of legal doctrine -- the general class of principles and justifications that are not said to derive from any particular large theories of the right or the good, that have ambiguous relations to large theories, and that are compatible with more than one such theory. [Cass Sunstein, Incompletely Theorized Agreements, 108 Harv. L. Rev. 1733, 1739-40 (1995)]
    Applications How can you use the idea of an overlapping consensus or incompletely theorized agreement? These conceptual tools are useful when you believe that you have reached a theoretical impasse at some deep level. You've identified an issue, and you can see how the issue can be traced to a deep disagreement in moral or political theory. Now, you have some choices to make. On the one hand, you can try to resolve the deep disagreement. But there is a problem with this option. The deep debates in moral and political philosophy are both ancient and persistent. The world's great thinkers have worked on these problems. If Aristotle, Kant, and Bentham were unable to come up with a knock down argument in favor of their respective moral theories, then it does seem unlikely that you will be able to resolve these debates in an article or book that is mostly focused on another topic or idea. Moreover, the current state of the art in moral and political theory involves a complex field of interconnected arguments. If you need to master these debates before you can complete your work in legal theory, then the work may never be completed.
    The alternative is to see whether you can find a different level at which the dispute can be resolved. One possibility is that you can find convergence at the surface level. It seems as if deontologists and utilitarians disagree, but perhaps you can craft consequentialist arguments that converge with the arguments of fairness. Another possibility is that you will be able to find converged on what Sunstein calls "mid-level principles." For example, both consequentialists and deontologists might be able to agree that contract formation (normally) requires that both parties manifest and intention to be bound--although they would have different reasons for affirming this proposition.
    Conclusion The move to "overlapping consensus" or "incompletely theorized agreements" is one of the niftiest and most useful in contemporary legal theory. Add it your personal legal theory toolbox!


Saturday, May 22, 2004
 
Legal Theory Bookworm Brand new from Oxford is Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, edited by Cass Sunstein & Martha Nussbaum. Here's a description:
    Millions of people live with cats, dogs, and other pets, which they treat as members of their families. But through their daily behavior, people who love those pets, and greatly care about their welfare, help ensure short and painful lives for millions, even billions of animals that cannot easily be distinguished from dogs and cats. Today, the overwhelming percentage of animals with whom Westerners interact are raised for food. Countless animals endure lives of relentless misery and die often torturous deaths. The use of animals by human beings, often for important human purposes, has forced uncomfortable questions to center stage: Should people change their behavior? Should the law promote animal welfare? Should animals have legal rights? Should animals continue to be counted as 'property'? What reforms make sense? Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum bring together an all-star cast of contributors to explore the legal and political issues that underlie the campaign for animal rights and the opposition to it. Addressing ethical questions about ownership, protection against unjustified suffering, and the ability of animals to make their own choices free from human control, the authors offer numerous different perspectives on animal rights and animal welfare. They show that whatever one's ultimate conclusions, the relationship between human beings and nonhuman animals is being fundamentally rethought. This book offers a state-of-the-art treatment of that rethinking.


 
Download of the Week This week, the Download of the Week is Speech as Conduct: Generally Applicable Laws, Illegal Courses of Conduct, Situation-Altering Utterances, and the Uncharted Zones by Eugene Volokh. Here is the abstract:
    Speech, some argue, should sometimes lose its First Amendment protection because it's really just conduct. These arguments have been made for a wide range of speech: (1) racially and sexually offensive speech in workplaces, universities, and places of public accommodation; (2) speech that informs people how certain crimes can be committed; (3) speech that teaches children harmful ideas; (4) speech that lobbies against housing for the disabled; (5) speech that advocates crime; (6) doctors' speech recommending medicinal marijuana to their patients; (7) speech that urges political boycotts; and even (8) public porfanity. This article will discuss several such this speech is really conduct theories. First, it responds to the argument that generally applicable laws, which apply to speech alongside other conduct, should be free from First Amendment scrutiny even when they cover speech because of its persuasive, informative, or offensive content. The article argue that such an argument is unsound, and inconsistent with many leading free speech cases. Restrictions that are content-based as applied should be treated the same way as restrictions that are content-based on their face. Second, the article responds to the argument that various kinds of speech should be punishable because they are part of an illegal course of conduct, speech brigaded with action, or speech act[s] rather than pure speech; such arguments often quote Giboney v. Empire Storage & Ice Co. (1949). The article criticizes Giboney, and concludes that if such an illegal course of conduct doctrine should be recognized, it should be narrow indeed - so narrow that it wouldn't apply to most of the cases where Giboney is cited. Third, the article discusses, and to some extent critiques, Professor Kent Greenawalt's view that certain kinds of statements are situation-altering utterances and thus unprotected conduct. Finally, the article confronts the uncharted zones of free speech - criminal agreements, criminal solicitation, much verbal aiding and abetting, professional speech, and the like - and suggests that these zones are best dealt with by recognizing properly bounded First Amendment exceptions (as the Court has done with regard to libel, incitement, fighting words, and the like), and not by relabeling the speech as conduct.
Download it while its hot!


 
SSRN Top Recent Downloads The Social Science Research Network compiles lists of top ten downloads by subject matter. (Click on the category name for the full list of the top ten papers by number of downloads in the past 60 days.) Here are categories and selected papers of interest to legal theorists:


Friday, May 21, 2004
 
Call for Papers: Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, & Public Policy
    Call for Papers Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy The Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy is currently accepting submissions for its 2004–2005 symposia. The Journal will publish an issue on “Security and Liberty” next winter, and an issue on “Media Ethics” will follow in the spring. Both issues will explore a wide range of topics. Topics of interest for the first issue on “Security and Liberty” include: the PATRIOT Act, civil liberties in a time of war, military tribunals, border security and immigration reform, and the pending Supreme Court decisions in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld v. Padilla, and Rasul v. Bush. The second issue on “Media Ethics” may include topics such as F.C.C. broadcast ownership regulation, decency laws, publication of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photographs and other images from the war on terror, politically biased coverage, celebrity trials, the Robert Novak and Valerie Plame affair, and news fabrication. The Journal will consider submissions related to all legal, ethical, and policy-oriented aspects of these two symposium topics. Published by the Thomas J. White Center on Law & Government, the Journal’s mission is to examine public policy questions within the framework of the Judeo-Christian intellectual and moral tradition. The Journal has a national audience, and past contributors include President George W. Bush, President Ronald Reagan, Justice William J. Brennan, Senator Bill Bradley, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Senator Rick Santorum, Representative Henry J. Hyde, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Judge John T. Noonan, Judge Richard A. Posner, Secretary Tommy G. Thompson, John Cardinal O’Connor, Joseph Cardinal Bernadin, Governor Mario Cuomo, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Douglas W. Kmiec, John Finnis, Joseph Raz, Kent Greenawalt, William W. Van Alstyne, and Kenneth L. Karst, among others. Unlike traditional law reviews, the Journal devotes each issue to a single topic of public concern. This approach permits a more comprehensive analysis of each symposium topic. The unique focus of the Journal is widely recognized, as demonstrated in citations to the Journal by various state and federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court. If you are interested in submitting a piece for possible publication, please contact us by e-mail at ndjlepp@nd.edu, or at the telephone number or address provided below. To maintain a high quality publication, the Journal will need to receive a draft of your submission, preferably by e-mail, on or before August 15, 2004. Sincerely, Kate S. O’Scannlain Solicitation Editor


 
Ribstein Reports on the Same-Sex Marriage Conference Over at the excellent Ideoblog, Larry Ribstein reports on the Same-Sex Marriage Conference at Catholic University (The Implications of Lawrence and Goodridge for the Recognition of Same-Sex Marriages and the Validity of DOMA.). Here is a taste:
    In general, Lawrence (the Supreme Court’s recent case striking down the Texas sodomy law) and Goodridge (the Massachusetts same sex marriage case) suggest that states may be constitutionally disabled from banning same sex marriage. Such bans might be deemed to interfere with the freedom to define one’s self and one’s relationships, a liberty interest that the Court now believes is protected under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. It also may contravene homosexuals’ expanded equal protection rights articulated by Justice O’Connor concurring in Lawrence. These cases also indicate that the states may not be able to justify same sex marriage bans merely by citing their moral or religious condemnation of homosexuality. The conference explored many issues, including federalism, the appropriate scope of judicial power, the meaning of the full faith and credit clause, the validity and meaning of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and the potential for new federal laws to deal with these issues.
Surf on over to Ideoblog for more!


 
Lillehammer Reviews Shafer-Landau On Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Hallvard Lillehammer (King’s College, Cambridge University) reviews Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defense, Oxford, 2003, 336pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 0199259755. Here is a taste:
    Analytical metaethics is an area where a great deal of ingenuity is currently required in order to find a distinctive yet plausible position to defend at any length. In this book, Russ Shafer-Landau demonstrates that the task remains possible. Over 300 pages or so, he defends an unorthodox combination of claims, including anti-Humeanism about reasons for action, mind-independent moral realism, moral non-naturalism, moral rationalism, and reliabilist moral epistemology. Shafer-Landau’s book will be useful to any student of philosophy who wants to gain a synoptic view of contemporary metaethics, and also to professionals with a stake in the many ongoing debates to which the book makes valuable contributions.


 
Bradley on Virtue Consequentialism Ben Bradley (Syracuse University) has posted Virtue Consequentialism, forthcoming in Utilitas, on SSRN. Here is a taste:
    In her famous paper ‘Virtues and Vices,’ Philippa Foot writes that ‘virtues are in general beneficial characteristics, and indeed ones that a human being needs to have, for his own sake and that of his fellows.’[ Foot here expresses a view about virtue that we might call ‘virtue consequentialism.’ It has been held, in one form or another, by Hume, Bentham, and G.E. Moore, and more recently by Linda Zagzebski, Judith Thomson and Julia Driver. It has also been widely criticized. Unfortunately, though the basic idea behind the view seems easy enough to grasp, virtue consequentialism has never been properly formulated. In what follows I try to remedy this situation. I take as a starting point the view presented by Driver in Uneasy Virtue, the most detailed and thoroughly defended recent formulation of virtue consequentialism. In light of the problems Driver’s view faces, I suggest that the best version of virtue consequentialism is a contrastivist view -- that is, a view according to which attributions of virtue are really disguised comparisons between two character traits -- and a counterfactualist view -- that is, a view according to which the consequences of a trait in non-actual circumstances may affect its actual status as a virtue or vice.


 
Confernce Announcement: The Publicity of Reasons
    The Publicity of Reasons, Normative Authority and Religious Liberty Saturday, May 29th, 2004 St. Hugh's College, Oxford The Becket Institute is holding a conference to bring together philosophers, political theorists and legal theorists to discuss recent work concerning normativity, the publicity of reasons, and liberalism as applied to the issue of religious liberty and toleration (broadly construed). PROGRAMME 900-930 WELCOME AND COFFEE 930-1100 ROBERT AUDI (Notre Dame) 'Moral Foundations of Democracy, Secular Reasons, and Liberal Neutrality Toward the Good' 1100-1115 BREAK 1115-1245 MARIA FERRETTI (Bologna) 'Having Reasons and Giving Reasons' 1245-200 LUNCH BREAK 200-330 JACK SAMMONS (Mercer) 'A Rhetorician's View on Religious Speech in Civic Argument' 330-345 BREAK 345-515 DAN ROBINSON (Oxford & Columbia) '"Essentialism"(again) and Fitness for the Rule of Law' DISCUSSANTS: Robert Frazier (Christ Church, Oxford) Gerald Land (University College, Oxford) Joan O'Donovan (Christ Church, Oxford) Roger Trigg (Warwick) There is no charge to attend this conference. If you are interested in attending, please email adrian.viens@philosophy.ox.ac.uk to register.


 
Perry on Free Exercise and Establishment Prohibitions Michael Perry (Emory) has posted What do the Free Exercise and Nonestablishment Norms Forbid? Reflections on the Constitutional Law of Religious Freedom. Here is the abstract:
    The Constitution of the United States famously declares, in the First Amendment, that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Yet, it is settled constitutional law that not just Congress but the entire national government - and not just the national government but state government too - may not establish religion or prohibit the free exercise thereof. For Americans today, the serious question is not whether the free exercise norm and the nonestablishment norm - the two principal matrices of the constitutional law of religious freedom - apply to the whole of American government, including state government. They do so apply. The serious question is not even whether the free exercise and nonestablishment norms should apply to the whole of American government. In the judgment of most Americans who bother to think about the matter, they should so apply. It is not surprising, then, that the sovereignty of the two norms over every branch and level of American government is constitutional bedrock. For Americans today, the serious question, regarding the free exercise and nonestablishment norms, is this: What does it mean to say that government, state as well as national, may neither prohibit the free exercise of, nor establish, religion? In particular, what sorts of government action - laws, policies, etc. - do the free exercise and nonestablishment norms forbid? At the risk of understatement: Not every scholar or judge gives the same answer to this question. My aim here is to give the answer that makes the most sense to me.


 
Witte on Establishment John Witte (Emory) has posted From Establishment to Freedom of Public Religion on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This Article juxtaposes the theories of religious liberty developed by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. It argues that Jefferson's notion of a "wall of separation between church and state" was a minority view in his day, and in the century to follow. More commonplace was Adams' view that balanced the freedom of all peaceable private religions with the "mild and equitable establishment" of one public religion. Adam's model of religious liberty dominated much of nineteenth-century law and culture, Jefferson's model a good bit of twentieth-century law and culture. In its most recent cases, the U.S. Supreme Court seems to be developing a new model of religious liberty that draws on the insights of both Jefferson and Adams, but rejects their respective calls for the privatization or the establishment of religion. The Court's formula is that both private and public forms of religion deserve constitutional freedom and support, though neither may be given preferential treatment.
Also from Witte, Moderate Religious Liberty: John Calvin and the Geneva Experiment and Covenant Liberty in Puritan New England.


 
Hirschl on Juristocracy Ran Hirschl has posted Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism. Here is the abstract:
    In countries and supranational entities around the globe, constitutional reform has transferred an unprecedented amount of power from representative institutions to judiciaries. The constitutionalization of rights and the establishment of judicial review are widely believed to have benevolent and progressive origins, and significant redistributive, power-diffusing consequences. Ran Hirschl challenges this conventional wisdom. Drawing upon a comprehensive comparative inquiry into the political origins and legal consequences of the recent constitutional revolutions in Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and South Africa, Hirschl shows that the trend toward constitutionalization is hardly driven by politicians' genuine commitment to democracy, social justice, or universal rights. Rather, it is best understood as the product of a strategic interplay among hegemonic yet threatened political elites, influential economic stakeholders, and judicial leaders. This self-interested coalition of legal innovators determines the timing, extent, and nature of constitutional reforms. Hirschl demonstrates that whereas judicial empowerment through constitutionalization has a limited impact on advancing progressive notions of distributive justice, it has a transformative effect on political discourse. The global trend toward juristocracy, Hirschl argues, is part of a broader process whereby political and economic elites, while they profess support for democracy and sustained development, attempt to insulate policymaking from the vicissitudes of democratic politics.


 
The Forum for Law and Philosophy at Queen's University Belfast I am pleased to pass on news of the Forum for Law and Philosophy at Queen's University Belfas. Here is description of the forum:
    The Forum for Law and Philosophy comprises academic staff members and research students from the Schools of Law, Philosophy, History and Politics with additional membership from outside Queen’s University. It began in 2001 as a reading and discussion group dealing with philosophical issues related to law, and took its first national and international steps with a Workshop on Analytical Jurisprudence in October 2002. Its main aim is to promote research and international discussion in a wide range of areas of concern to the interface between philosophy and law. It achieves this by holding a series of conferences, workshops and public lectures.
The members of the forum are:
    Robert Alexy is Professor for Public Law and Legal Theory at the Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel. Emilios Christodoulidis is Reader in Jurisprudence in the Centre for Law and Society at the Edinburgh Law School. Sean Coyle is City Solicitors’ Educational Trust Lecturer in the Faculty of Laws at University College London. Jonathan Gorman is Professor of Moral Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast and Head of the School of Philosophical Studies. Carsten Heidemann holds a PhD in legal philosophy from the University of Kiel and practices as a barrister in Kiel. Robin Hickey is Lecturer in Property Law and Trusts at Queen's University Belfast. Sir Neil MacCormick is the Regius Professor of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations at the Edinburgh Law School and an MEP since 1999. Emmanuel Melissaris is Lecturer at the Manchester School of Law. John Morison is Professor of Jurisprudence at Queen’s University Belfast and Head of the School of Law. Stanley L. Paulson is William Gardiner Hammond Professor of Law, and Professor of Philosophy, at Washington University School of Law. George Pavlakos is City Solicitors Educational Trust Lecturer in Jurisprudence in the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast. Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco is Lecturer in Jurisprudence at the University of Birmingham. Giovanni Sartor is Professor in Computers and Law at the University of Bologna
And on June 11 & 12, 2004, the Forum will host a Workshop entitled Law and the Possibility of Discourse: Re-opening the discourse-theoretical agenda 25 years after Robert Alexy’s Theory of Legal Argumentation. (I remember how excited I was when Alexy's book first appeared in translation!) The speakers at the workshop include:
    Prof. Dr Robert Alexy, University of Kiel; Prof. Maeve Cooke University College Dublin; Dr Emilios Christodoulidis, Edinburgh University; Prof. Jonathan Gorman, Queen’s University Belfast; Dr Carsten Heidemann, Barrister, Kiel Bar Association; Prof Mattias Kumm, New York University; Dr Augustin Menendez, University of Oslo; Prof Aleksander Peczenik, Lund University; Prof Giovanni Sartor, University of Bologna; Prof Jan-Reinard Sieckmann, University of Bamberg; Dr George Pavlakos, Queen’s University Belfast; Dr Emmanuel Melissaris, University of Manchester
This should be a very exciting event. Follow the links for more information!


 
Friday Calendar No events for today!


Thursday, May 20, 2004
 
Weatherall on the AUSFTA Copyright Provisions Kim Weatherall has good comments on the Australia United States Free Trade Act copyright provisions. Here is a taste:
    If there is an argument in favour of the IP chapter of the AUSFTA (other than the Real Politik argument that "we couldn't get a free trade agreement without one" - which of course is no doubt true, but is only a good argument if we got a good free trade agreement in other areas) - it is that there are benefits to be reaped from harmonisation of IP law. The benefits of harmonisation would be reduced transaction costs for cross-border transactions. People would see IP law the same in the two jurisdictions, thus reducing the "lawyering costs" associated with any investment or purchase by the US of Australian material - and vice versa. In theory, I can see the benefits of this. I really can. The issue I have with this argument is that, in reality, the AUSFTA does not represent harmonisation with US IP law. It represents acceptance of some of the rules from US IP law, but many other rules are not accepted.


 
Crawford on ICANN Susan Crawford has an insightful post about the new ICANN budget on her excellent blog. Here is a taste:
    ICANN should refrain from using the leverage it has as a gate-keeper of new entries into the root zone file to impose complex regulatory policies (and fees) on new tlds. ICANN should not see each new TLD and registrar as another revenue opportunity. That it does so makes other countries wonder whether ICANN is indeed "doing Internet governance." Paul Twomey is very good indeed at explaining ICANN's role as a forum for discussion of minor coordination issues. That explanation doesn't fit this budget.
Karl Manheim and I have argued that ICANN should let the market drive root expansion in our paper An Economic Analysis of Domain Name Policy. One of the difficulties that ICANN faces, however, is a lack of policy expertise. Even a slim and trim ICANN needs the resources to make rational decisions regarding the root, and these decisions require expertise in economics and linguistics, not to mention technical knowledge. If ICANN limits itself to "minor coordination issues," then how will DNS policy be made?
Also on the ICANN front, here is news re the Verisgn v. ICANN lawsuit.


 
Thursday Calendar
    At Florida State, Jim Rossi, FSU College of Law, presents Deregulation and the Incomplete Regulatory Contract.
    At the Oxford Society for Law and Religion, Seminars on Law and Religion, P. Edge presents Official Representation of Religion in National Assemblies or ‘Is half a loaf better than no bread?
    Also at Oxford, Public International Law Discussion Group, Stefan Talmon presents Interdicting Weapons of Mass Destruction at Sea.


 
Mayton on Recess Judicial Appointments William Ty Mayton (Emory University - School of Law) has posted Recess Appointments and an Independent Judiciary (Constitutional Commentary, 2004) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Presidents Clinton and Bush have revived a quiescent executive power, that of recess appointments to the bench. For both Presidents the attractive feature of this route is that it placed their nominees on the bench without Senate confirmation. But because of this by-pass these appointments have been questioned, on political and constitutional grounds. This article is about the constitutional part of the debate and here the questions examined are: (1) whether the present use of the recess appointments clause is so expansive as to exceed the power in fact granted by the clause, thereby infringing the senatorial prerogative of "advice and consent" and (2) whether recess appointments to the bench infringe a right, as derived from Article III of the Constitution, to be heard by judges "free of political domination." As regards the right: Same as all such appointees, recess appointees to the bench receive a temporary appointment, good only until the end of the next session of the Senate. Whether the appointee gains a permanent seat on the bench is contingent upon renomination by the President and confirmation by the Senate. When the appointee hears a case, then, he or she remains subject to this political pressure and therefore acts in face of the right - as may be claimed by any party whose claim the appointee hears - to be heard by a politically independent judge. Both of the above questions, about the scope of the power and (assuming the power) about the exercise of it in face of the right to a judge free of political domination, can straightforwardly be answered by a close examination of the text and purposes of the clause and of Article III requirements respecting judicial autonomy. However, the answers thus provided have been clouded by an unfortunate resort to history, more-or-less according to Justice Frankfurter's dictum that "a systematic, unbroken, executive practice, long pursued to the knowledge of the Congress and never before questioned . . . may be treated as a gloss on 'executive Power'." But the history thus deployed seems wrong, both in content and technique. With this history thus discounted, a return to the answers produced by the text and purposes of the relevant constitutional provisions is in order. These answers, as I take it, show that the present uses of the recess appointments clause exceed the power granted, and that assuming the power the right to a judge free of political domination trumps it.
I find this issue fascinating. I find myself in disagreement with Mayton about the text. Mayton writes:
    Respecting recess appointments, Article II, Sec. II cl. 3 flatly states that “ The President shall have the Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate” and does so without allowance for judges. As flatly, Article III states that judges “shall hold their offices during good Behavior” and does so without allowance for recess appointees. For any number of people, including the judges in United States v. Woodley, these terms established an impasse that cannot be broken by textual analyses.
But "good behavior" is not inconsistent with the recess appointments power. A recess appointee can only be removed for cause during the constitutionally specified term; during that term, the recess appointee does receive the protection of the Good Behavior Clause. The only way to generate a textual conflict is to assume that "good behavior" means "life tenure," but in light of the recess appointments clause, that reading seems implausible.
For more on recess appointments, see Going Nuclear: The Constitutionality of Recess Appointments to Article III Courts.


 
Mitnick on Individual Vulnerability and Cultural Transformation Eric J. Mitnick (Thomas Jefferson School of Law) has posted Individual Vulnerability and Cultural Transformation (Michigan Law Review, Vol. 101, p. 1635, 2003) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Liberal theory today, for the most part, has come round to the view that some degree of state accommodation of minority cultural practice is required as a matter of justice. Debate thus shifts to determining the best justification for, and the appropriate extent of, differentiated policy. Too often lost amid these discussions is the plight of vulnerable members of accommodated cultural groups: individuals subject to repression within their cultural groups, but loss of a critical aspect of their identities upon exit; individuals who would retain their cultural membership, but also their fundamental rights as individuals. In her new book on multiculturalism, however, Ayelet Shachar takes the plight of vulnerable cultural group members as her primary focus. Part I of this review seeks to locate Shachar's work within the broader framework of liberal-multicultural theory. Although Shachar attempts to distance herself from the predominant autonomy perspective in liberal-multicultural theory, the most sensible reading of Shachar's approach is as an institutionalization of that perspective. Part II takes up Shachar's analysis of the relationship between state accommodationist policy and cultural repression. Shachar describes ways in which the vulnerability of categories of persons, particularly women, is often deeply encoded in cultural traditions. While others have described repressive aspects of cultural practices, Shachar's thorough treatment of cultural vulnerability as it arises in the area of family law helpfully contextualizes the problem. Shachar's solution to the problem of cultural vulnerability, described in Part III of this review, is an innovative scheme of competitive joint governance. Shachar proposes a system in which jurisdiction is divided between state and cultural sources of authority, but in which the choice of jurisdiction on critical issues is left to individual members. Such a scheme, Shachar suggests, would have the virtue not only of enabling vulnerable members to exercise their rights without sacrificing their cultural identities, but also of engendering competition between jurisdictions and thereby inducing transformation of repressive cultural practices. Shachar's prescription is genuinely innovative but also underdeveloped. It presupposes negotiation between jurisdictions without describing parameters, leaves unexamined state indifference to cultural vulnerability, and presumes individual agency precisely in those situations where agency is least likely to exist. Nonetheless, Shachar's prescriptive work represents an important institutional turn in liberal-multicultural theory, an opening which theorists should seize upon and further develop.


 
Keller on Economic Rights Linda M. Keller (University of Miami - School of Law (Visiting) has posted The American Rejection of Economic Rights as Human Rights & the Declaration of Independence: Does the Pursuit of Happiness Require Basic Economic Rights? (NYLS Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 19, p. 557, 2003) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This article explores the economic dimension of the Pursuit of Happiness in the Declaration of Independence and how it undercuts the notion that economic and social rights under international human rights law are somehow un-American. The United States government seems to believe that economic rights are not truly human rights, but rather radical Cold War era entitlements advocated by communists. The minimum-needs conception of the pursuit of happiness suggests that economic rights are enshrined in a document considered part of the foundation of democracy. Part I evaluates the rejection of economic rights in the United States, focusing on international commitments. Part II turns to the Declaration of Independence, specifically, the Pursuit of Happiness. Drawing on eighteenth-century political thought, it asserts that the pursuit of happiness establishes an inalienable right that includes an economic dimension. Part III argues that the right to pursue happiness entails a concomitant governmental duty: the duty to facilitate the pursuit of happiness by providing minimum economic means. Although the Declaration of Independence has not been interpreted as legally enforceable, the principles of the Declaration form the basis for the government and must be followed by it. The article shows how this obligation to ensure basic economic rights is also contained in various international instruments. Far from being foreign to American political thought, this duty is provided for and must be fulfilled under the principles of the Declaration of Independence.


 
Savirimuthu on Online Contract Formation Joseph Savirimuthu (University of Liverpool - Liverpool Law School) has posted Online Contract Formation: Taking Technological Infrastructure Seriously (University of Ottawa Law and Technology Journal, 2004) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Mention online contract formation and students and academics intuitively turn to the legal rules. This interpretive community seems less than convinced that the distinctive features of the virtual environment have new insights to offer. Whether that is likely to be the case cannot be ascertained if we continue to map our understanding of online contract formation in accordance with the textbook tradition of contract law. An illustration of this pattern of analysis can be seen by the way discussions and analysis of online contract formation frequently focus on two issues: (i) the applicability of contract principles; (ii) the shortcomings of the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002. A consideration of the value of consent and its role in contract formation and operative factors, with regard to the way obligations are characterised, suggests that the overemphasis on the process/method distinction is misleading. The paper will demonstrate that (a) to the extent that the rules on contract formation are relevant, they provide a preliminary and not a final point of understanding; (b) the dominant role of computers in structuring and processing communications makes it critical to identify the values embedded in the technological infrastructure; (c) the narrative of values in the technological infrastructure provides a better route to understanding online contract formation. Illustrations will be provided to support the hypothesis. The layer principle, it is suggested, provides an appropriate narrative for reconciling contract doctrine with the central role of Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002. The paper concludes that attempts to understand the governance challenges for online contract formation through legal rules are misplaced. To understand the contemporary role of contract we need to integrate the communications system of hardware and software into our narrative of what it is that gives commitments their binding character.


Wednesday, May 19, 2004
 
Understanding the Compromise of May 18, 2004
    Introduction: A Break in the Downward Spiral of Politicization Yesterday, President Bush reached a compromise with Senate Democrats on the impasse in the judicial selection process. Bush agreed to refrain from further use of his recess appointments power. The Democrats agreed to confirm 25 named judicial nominees. The compromise broke an impasse triggered by President Bush's use of the recess appointments power to name Charles Pickering and William Pryor to federal appellate judgeships. Bush's use of the recess appointments power was a response to the Democratic filibuster of Pickering and Pryor along with Priscilla Owen, Carolyn Kuhl, Janice Rogers Brown, and Miguel A. Estrada. And of course, the filibuster was part of a larger pattern, which I have called "a downward spiral of politicization."
    Here is an exerpt from the Washington Post story:
      The White House pledged yesterday that President Bush will not bypass the Senate in appointing federal judges for the next eight months as part of a bipartisan deal to break a seven-week impasse over votes on Bush's judicial nominees.
      Under the agreement, Bush will not use his constitutional power to give temporary appointments to judicial nominees during congressional recesses for the rest of his current term ending Jan. 20 -- a power he exercised twice in recent months, infuriating Democrats.
      In return, Democrats, who had been holding up action on all of Bush's judicial choices since March to protest the recess appointments, agreed to allow votes on 25 mostly noncontroversial nominations to district and appeals court posts over the next several weeks.
    Here are stories from the Los Angeles Times and here is Byron York's piece for National Review Online. Here and here are two posts by Volokh.
    What does the "Compromise of May 18, 2004" mean? Is it a victory for Bush? For Democrats? Did Bush's use of the Recess Appointments Clause advance or hinder his judicial appointments agenda? Why was this compromise reached?
    What If? To understand the compromise, we will need to examine counterfactuals. That is, we need to ask two What If questions. First, what would have happened if this compromise had not been reached? Second, what would have happened if President Bush had never used the Recess Appointments Clause to appoint Pryor and Pickering?
    Of course, What If questions are tricky. We barely know what actually happened. (My assumption is that there is a real chance that much of the real substance of the Compromise of May 18, 2004 is beneath the surface.) We hardly have a set of well-confirmed laws of social science that enable us to predict reliable the judicial selection process. So there is likely to be a fair amount of uncertainty about our answers to the crucial What If questions.
    What Would Have Happened If The Compromise Had Not Been Reached? What if the compromise had not been reached? What would have happened then? The first step in answering these questions is to identify the players. This is really a three party game, with (1) the President, (2) the Senate Republican Majority, and (3) the Senate Democratic Minority at the table. What options were open to each of these players:
      The President The President can nominate or he can make recess appointments. More nominations would have no real effect on the process--all of his nominations are being held up. That leaves the recess appointments move, of which there are three possible variations:
        Option 1. Make No Recess Appointments Option 2. Make Selective Recess Appointments of Filibustered Nominees Option 3. Make Wholesale Recess Appointments of Senior Status Judges and/or Academics
      Option 2 assumes that there are filibustered nominees willing to take a recess appointment. In all likelihood, there were none. Based on what we know about the process, it appears that Bush offered recess appointments to all of the six filibustered nominees. Pickering and Pryor accedpted the offer, and the rest declined. So option 2 was out.
      Option 3 was proposed by Randy Barnett in an NRO op/ed entitled Benching Bork. There is no evidence that the Administration has seriously considered this proposal. Wholesale use of the recess appointments power is a much more attractive option under two conditions: (1) the President is politically strong and hence willing to accept the consequence of activating the Democratic base, and (2) the President is likely to win reelection. If condition two does not hold, then recess appointees are likely to be replaced by a Democratic President.
      In the current political climate, my guess is that there is uncertainty about the President's reelection and hence Option 3 is less attractive. On the other hand, given that we are in a Presidential election year and the war is already activating the Democratic base, it is possible that wholesale recess appointments wouldn't generate much political capital for the Democrats.
      The Senate Democratic Minority The Senate Democrats control a veto gate. They can defeat a cloture vote, and hence veto any judicial nominee--unless the rules on cloture for judicial nominees are changed. So the Democrats have three options:
        Option 1: Veto all nominees. Option 2: Veto selectively. Option 3: Do not veto.
      Essentially, the Democrats had chosen Option 1 (veto all nominees) as thier response to the President's choice of his Option 2 (recess appoint selectively). The compromise involved a move back to Option 2 (veto selectively) in exchange for the President's move to his Option 1 (make no recess appointments).
      The Senate Republican Majority The Senate Republican Majority cannot break the Democratic filibuster of judicial nominees without changing the cloture rule (Rule 22). (For an explanation as to why the Republicans can't use the 24/7 option, go here.) Sure the Republicans can force votes, but they can't force the Democrats to confirm nominees. So that leaves the Republicans with only two options:
        Option 1: Change the Cloture Rule Option 2: Do Not Change the Cloture Rule
      The Republican's have threatened to use Option 1 (change the cloture rule), but that threat has been ineffective? Why? Because the Democrats know that if the Republicans change the cloture rule, that the Democrats have a wide array of effective countermoves. Most simply, they can simply decline unanimous consent for the day-to-day business of the Senate. Moreover, the Republicans do not have a guarantee of permanent majority status in the Senate. Republicans benefit from the filibuster veto when they are in the minority. Moreover, the filibuster veto enhances the power of individual Senators who are not in the leadership. The House is essentially a Dictatorship of the Leadership; individual members of the House outside the Leadership have dramatically less political power than do individual Senators.
      Thus, for a variety of reasons, the Senate Republican Majority has opted for Option 2 (do not change the cloture rule).
      A Rediscription of the Compromise of May 18, 2004 Let's take another look at what happened yesterday. Essentially, the history has three phases:
        Phase One: The President makes no recess appointments, the Senate Minority selectively vetos, and the Senater Majority allows the veto.
        Phase Two: The President makes selective recess appointments, the Senate Majority vetos all (non-recess appointment) nominees, and the Senatre Minority allows the veto.
        Phase Three: The same as phase one.
      Suppose that Phase Two had gone differently, i.e. that the Democrats had not vetoed all nominees. In that case, the President would likely have opted for Option 1 (no recess appointments), because none of the filbustered nominees were willing to accept recess appointments. Hence phase three would still have been identical to Phase 1. Hold that thought! We have one more step to complete.
    What Would Have Happened If President Bush Had Never Used The Recess Appointments Clause? We still need to ask one more question. What would have happened if President Bush had never exercised Option 2 (selective recess appointments). In that case, we would have remained in Phase 1 (no recess appointments, selective vetos, no change in the cloture rules), which is exactly where we are now.
    So what net effect did the President's recess appointments of Pickering and Pryor have? There were two effects:
      Effect 1: Pickering and Pryor got recess appointments.
      Effect 2: The Democrats vetoed all nominees for a period of a few weeks.
    In other words, the President's selective use of the recess appointments power had no lasting effect at all, but did have two temporary effects (recess terms for two nominees plus a short delay in the confirmation process).
    What Does This Mean? So what does this all mean? I'm sure you see this coming. There was no Compromise yesterday. If the Democrats wanted to veto all the President's nominees, they could have done so before Phase 2 (before Pickering and Pryor got recess appointments). Vetoing all nominees could not force Pickering and Pryor off the bench, and, of course, they will both remain on the bench. Vetoing all nominees did not force the President to forgo use of Option 2 (selective recess appointments), because there were no more judges to get recess appointments. The compromise announced yesterday was simply an announcement by the President and the Democratic Minority that both sides would revert to doing what was in their own perceived long-term interests.
    If that's so, why did the Democrats temporarily stall the process? There are many possible explanations: (1) They were angry at the recess appointments and were simply acting out; (2) They hoped to provoke the President into a counter-reaction that would actually hurt the President's chance for reelection, (3) They were playing to their base; (4) They didn't think things through, and thought they could actually force the President to make some other concession; (5) They were imposing a minor punishment on the President (i.e. tit for tat). And I'm sure you can think of other explanations.
    How do you know that the Democrats weren't planning to stall all the nominees until after the election (in the hope that Kerry replaces Bush)? I don't know for sure, but all the evidence points against this. If the Democrats wanted to do this, why did they back down? What threat did Bush have? Even if Bush did make use of the recess appointments power between now and 2005, those appointments would expire during Kerry's first term (assuming Kerry was elected).
    In other words, nothing happened yesterday. Or to be more precise, nothing much happened. We simply moved back to Phase 1--the long-run stable pattern given the curren constellation of political forces.
    The Long Run What about the long run? What will happen next? In the long run, judicial nominations are pretty simply. There are two scenarios. First, if the same party controls the Presidency and a filibuster proof Senate, that party gets the judges it wants. Second, if one party controls nominations and the other party holds a veto, then (absent logrolling of nominations as part of some other political deal) then the selection of judges will follow a fairly simple pattern. Let's just focus on ideology for the moment. Here is a very simple model:
    A Simple Model of Political Acceptability
    Figure One: One Dimensional Model: Political Ideology ____________________________ Left--------------------Right
    According to the simiple model, each judicial candidate's attitudes (or dispositions) occupy a point on a real line from right (right-wing political ideology) to left (left-wing political ideology).
    Given this simple model, we can model the judges who will be acceptable to the right as a region of the line:
    Figure Two: One Dimensional Model: Acceptable to the Right _____________________________ Left--------------------Right
    The red portion of the line represents the candidates who are acceptable to the right. Likewise, we can model the zone of candidates who are acceptable tot he left:
    Figure Three: One Dimensional Model: Acceptable to the Left _____________________________ Left--------------------Right
    The region marked out by the blue portion of the line represents the candidates acceptable to the left. Combining the two lines, we get a confirmation zone:
    Figure Four: One Dimensional Model Acceptable to Both Parties _____________________________ Left--------------------Right
    The yellow portion of the line represents the candidates acceptable to both parties or the confirmability zone. This is not the end of the story. The President is the first mover, and hence we would expect the President to pick judges from the right-most part of the confirmation zone:
    Figure Five: One Dimensional Model The First Mover Advantage _____________________________ Left--------------------Right
    The green region of the line represents the candidates that will actually be nominated and confirmed, given the President's first mover advantage.
    Complications Of course, this is a very simple story. I've assumed that judicial attitudes and dispositions are one dimensional. Of course, in the real world political ideology is multi-dimensional. Moreover, as I've argued elsewhere, judges vary in the extent to which they consider themselves bound by the rules laid down, and hence we could supplement the ideological model with a second dimension that measured judges along a realist-formalist axis. But this is a blog and this post is already long, so I am going with the simplest model that gets my point across.
    Conclusion: After the Election One more thing. All of this can change after the election. First, the political constellation can change. The Democrats could gain control of the Presidency and/or the Senate. It is even possible that either the Republicans or Democrats could gain control of 60 seats in the Senate, although that seems unlikely. And the stakes can change, because a seat (or multiple seats) on the Supreme Court is much more important than a few seats on the United States Court of Appeal. This might bear on the decision of the Senate Majority (whether Repubican or Democrat) whether or not to change the cloture rules.
    But in the meantime, it is business as usual. Nothing happened yesterday, and I expect that this holding pattern will continue until after the election.
    Update: Reaction here from Chris Geidner on De Novo.


 
Wednesday Calendar
    At Oxford's All Souls College, Dr. Piero Pinzauti (Florence) presents Marx's Commodity Fetishism and Wittgenstein's Grammatical Confusion.
    At Oxford, Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers University), presents The Ontological Status of Persons: Why it Matters, the 2004 Dasturzada Dr Jal Pavry Memorial Lectures.


 
McGowan on Metaphors David McGowan (Minnesota) has posted The Trespass Trouble and the Metaphor Muddle on SSRN. Here is the real abstract, replacing one that belonged with a different paper:
    This article argues that a claim often advanced in the debate over Internet regulation is unsound. The claim asserts that metaphors such as space or place or property cause judges to think of the Internet as similar to physical property, in which persons may stake private claims the law protects from encroachment. Thinking of the Internet this way confuses or constrains judicial reasoning. I call this the metaphor claim. The article uses cases involving the trespass to chattels tort to test the claim. It argues that such cases show judges do understand that the key to the cases is intangible information rather than that the information is stored on or conveyed through physical property. Judges have not been confused or constrained. Instead, they have engaged in more comprehensive cost-benefit analysis than critics of the trespass tort, or those who advance the metaphor claim. The article also argues that the metaphor claim serves to trivialize judicial reasoning without refuting it (though this is not the intention of those who advance the claim), and to divert attention from severe weaknesses in academic criticism of the trespass tort. The article concludes that it is in fact trespass critics and metaphor claimants who insist on the thing-ness of property, and judges who have gone beyond that conception to adopt a more comprehensively utilitarian analysis.
Highly recommended!


Tuesday, May 18, 2004
 
Brown & the 14th Amendment There is more from Volokh on Paul Craig Roberts's unsupportable claim that Brown v. Board was not based on the 14th Amendment. My post on this subject is here.


 
Tuesday Calendar
    At Oxford's Jurisprudence Discussion Group, Luc J. Wintgens presents Legisprudence: A New Theory of Legislation. Here is a taste:
      Summarizing, rule following behaviour includes a cognitive and a volitional aspect. The volitional aspect of the internal point of view, however, is not a pure act of will. It is, so to say, replete with theory that is not contained within the rule if you wish. It is contained in the analytical theory of the legal system saying why rules are preferable to commands, and so why freedom and equality are preferable to arbitrariness, and why therefore it is preferable that the powers in political space are separated, and so on. From that perspective, the analytical theory of the legal system orients the choice of acceptable theories of interpretation, that is, theories to determine the meaning of rules of the legal system result in the legal system making sense as a whole. In short, the analytical theory of the legal system is what makes the legal system a legal order.
      On the thesis that the legislator, like the judge, is a rule follower, a similar account can be given of his activity. Like the rules of the legal system are not self-interpreting, the rules of the constitution rarely contain a positive indication as to the substance of legal rules issued by the legislator. His rule following behaviour is then confined to not violating the rules he is supposed to follow. Following rules however includes more than the minimalist duty not to violate them.
    Also at Oxford, Peter Oliver presents Constitutional Theory: Sovereignty and Legal Systems at the Faculty of Law.
    At Oxford's Ockham Society, Daniel Came (Lady Margaret Hall) presents Nietzsche and the Moral Interpretation of Existence.


 
Welcome to the Blogosphere . . ., belatedly, to Susan Crawford blog.


 
Volokh on Speech as Conduct Eugene Volokh (UCLA) has posted Speech as Conduct: Generally Applicable Laws, Illegal Courses of Conduct, Situation-Altering Utterances, and the Uncharted Zones on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Speech, some argue, should sometimes lose its First Amendment protection because it's really just conduct. These arguments have been made for a wide range of speech: (1) racially and sexually offensive speech in workplaces, universities, and places of public accommodation; (2) speech that informs people how certain crimes can be committed; (3) speech that teaches children harmful ideas; (4) speech that lobbies against housing for the disabled; (5) speech that advocates crime; (6) doctors' speech recommending medicinal marijuana to their patients; (7) speech that urges political boycotts; and even (8) public porfanity. This article will discuss several such this speech is really conduct theories. First, it responds to the argument that generally applicable laws, which apply to speech alongside other conduct, should be free from First Amendment scrutiny even when they cover speech because of its persuasive, informative, or offensive content. The article argue that such an argument is unsound, and inconsistent with many leading free speech cases. Restrictions that are content-based as applied should be treated the same way as restrictions that are content-based on their face. Second, the article responds to the argument that various kinds of speech should be punishable because they are part of an illegal course of conduct, speech brigaded with action, or speech act[s] rather than pure speech; such arguments often quote Giboney v. Empire Storage & Ice Co. (1949). The article criticizes Giboney, and concludes that if such an illegal course of conduct doctrine should be recognized, it should be narrow indeed - so narrow that it wouldn't apply to most of the cases where Giboney is cited. Third, the article discusses, and to some extent critiques, Professor Kent Greenawalt's view that certain kinds of statements are situation-altering utterances and thus unprotected conduct. Finally, the article confronts the uncharted zones of free speech - criminal agreements, criminal solicitation, much verbal aiding and abetting, professional speech, and the like - and suggests that these zones are best dealt with by recognizing properly bounded First Amendment exceptions (as the Court has done with regard to libel, incitement, fighting words, and the like), and not by relabeling the speech as conduct.


 
Leiter on the Prospects for Philosophy Graduate Students Brian Leiter puts the scare stories about graduate school as a career optinon into perspective here.


 
Forbath on Charles Black William E. Forbath (University of Texas at Austin - School of Law) has posted Lincoln, the Declaration, and the 'Grisly, Undying Corpse of States' Rights': History, Memory, and Imagination in the Constitution of a Southern Liberal (Georgetown Law Journal, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    As a constitutional theorist, Charles Black had no use for history. To the originalist, Black said, the language of the Constitution "'belongs in usufruct to the living.'" No other proponent of the "living" Constitution, however, has felt so deeply and written so feelingly about historical commitments, conflicts, and betrayals in the constitutional past and their consequences in the present. The presence of the past confronts - "haunts," "threatens," "nourishes," "compels" - Black and his forward-looking constitutional arguments. Its "ghosts" and its "grisly, undying corpses," as well as its "sacred memories," are active in them. This is no surprise: few other notable constitutional theorists have been white liberals from the South who grew up in and then fought against the social order of Jim Crow; fewer still have been poets. It is a poet's voice, in pieces like The Lawfulness of the Segregation Decisions, that relies for its authority not on historical evidence but on personal and historical memory and imagination. Likewise, this essay (written for a Symposium in Black's memory) suggests, it was as a poet and friend of the New Critics, also southern writers at Yale, that Black found affirmation of - and perhaps inspiration for - his trademark interpretive theory. The New Critics on poetry, like Black on the Constitution, favored the practiced reader's direct conversation with the texts in the canon, attuned to internal structures and relations and to the ways the texts echo and engage one another across generations and centuries. Certainly, many readers of poetry but no other constitutional theorists share Black's confident interpretive precept that we can leave historical "stuff altogether alone" and simply, imaginatively read centuries-old texts like the Declaration or the Constitution and know just what their authors "were saying" and what they had in mind with their "phrasal echoes" and allusions. From the 1980s onward, Black devoted his interpretive energies to three texts, the Declaration of Independence, the Ninth Amendment, and the citizenship and privileges or immunities clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. The historian may bristle at Black's claims about direct access to what the authors had in mind, but in fact, Black's interpretations of these three texts are uncannily close to the accounts of many of our most perspicacious historians, those most steeped in the "scraps of collateral discourse" Black scorned. The convergence is uncanny because these are not familiar interpretations. They run against more than a century's worth of doctrinal understandings and constitutional common sense. So, the middle part of this essay distills Black's intertwined readings of his three old and "unredeemed" texts and compares them to the historians'. Showing how and why they converge reveals something more general about the interplay of history, memory, and imagination in the field of constitutional law and politics. It was the constitutional right to a decent livelihood that Black aimed, above all, to rest on his new textual foundations. But Black's interpretive energies ran thin at this point. So, the final part of the essay takes inspiration from Black and uses history in his spirit, not as a constraint on the "living Constitution," but to "refresh the reader's memory" and to flush out the "grisly, undying corpse of states' rights" that stalked national efforts to enact a right to livelihood, as it did national efforts to enact racial justice. Constitutional history pursued in Black's fashion, with an eye for historical betrayals and broken constitutional promises and their consequences, offers no binding conclusions shorn of present normative judgments, but such history provides rich support, from a quarter Black would not have expected, for his claim of the "constitutional justice of livelihood."
And Forbath has also posted Not So Simple Justice: Frank Michelman on Social Rights, 1969–Present.


 
Wilkins on Diversity David B. Wilkins (Harvard University - Harvard Law School) has posted From Separate is Inherently Unequal to Diversity is Good for Business: The Rise of Market-Based Diversity Arguments and the Fate of the Black Corporate Bar (Harvard Law Review, Vol. 117, No. 5, March 2004) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Fifty years after John W. Davis, one of America's premier corporate lawyers, took on the defense of segregation in Brown v. Board of Education as a pro bono case, corporate America appears to have firmly embraced the mantra that "diversity is good for business." In this Article, I examine this surprising turn of events by investigating the rise of "market-based" diversity arguments in the legal profession itself. Specifically, I examine how black lawyers seeking to integrate corporate law firms have increasingly staked their claim on the contention that diversity is good for the business of law firms and clients. Although it is not surprising that diversity advocates have been drawn to such arguments, I argue that whether these claims will actually produce greater opportunities for black lawyers – and whether the resulting diversity will in turn further Brown's other goal of promoting social justice through law for all Americans – depends upon a closer examination of the connection between "diversity" and "business" than most proponents of the business case for diversity in the legal profession have been willing to undertake or even to acknowledge. As a preliminary matter, advocates must confront the profession's deep commitment to the idea that it is actually homogeneity that best serves firms and clients – a commitment that may be even harder to shake in law firms than it apparently has been in corporate America. At the same time, advocates must also be aware of the danger that market-based diversity arguments will encourage various forms of "race-matching," "pigeonholing," and "moral evasion" that can end up harming the cause of diversity by marginalizing and alienating minority lawyers. Ironically, taking note of these complexities may also hold the key to making progress on Brown's social justice goals as well. Integrating the corporate bar is a social justice issue of considerable importance. Nevertheless, if bringing diversity to the elite ranks of the American legal profession is going to do more than accentuate the yawning gap between the legal haves and have-nots, then those who come to occupy these positions of power must have normative commitments that both shape and constrain the business interests of their powerful clients. Contrary to the gloomy predictions of diversity advocates who urge abandoning social justice arguments for diversity altogether, however, there are good reasons to believe that black lawyers who maintain a normative understanding of diversity that goes beyond corporate self-interest may, paradoxically, have important advantages in building a credible "business case" for diversity in their own careers.


 
Druey on Owning Information Jean Nicolas Druey (Harvard University - Berkman Center for Internet & Society) has posted Information Cannot Be Owned on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Apart from technology, the information age has up to now badly served its idol. It has failed sufficiently to recognize specific features of information. This is shown with respect to the question whether legal rights on information can take the form of ownership. The answer is negative considering that communication by its very nature is free and constitutes a basic value, and furthermore that law is itself information and cannot systematically dispose of information flows. Analyzing the phenomenon of information, the differences of its properties as compared with those of a physical object are illustrated and assessed as fundamental; ownership would therefore be for information a Procrustean bed leading to mere arbitrariness. Intellectual property, although granting exclusive rights concerning information is not by itself opposed to these findings. But the conflict arises, if its purpose of shaping competitive advantages is spoiled to the detriment of information flows by lack of neutrality in two senses: the lack of balance between the title holder's value generation and the reward, and of neutrality towards the various kinds of communicative relationships.


 
Nash on Deference to Lower Federal Court Interpretations of State Law Jonathan Remy Nash has posted Resuscitating Deference to Lower Federal Court Judges' Interpretations of State Law (Southern California Law Review, Vol. 77, 2004) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This Article examines the propriety of having federal courts afford deference to state law interpretations reached by lower federal court judges. Two Supreme Court decisions from the 1990s seemed substantially to circumscribe such deference. But in fact subsequent Court cases continue to afford deference. Moreover, such deference can be normatively valuable. This Article argues in favor of the use of deference in appropriate circumstances, including situations where district court and court of appeals agree on the proper interpretation of state law, and where answers to state law questions are obtained through an intrafederal certification regime.


Monday, May 17, 2004
 
Paul Craig Roberts
    Eugene Volokh has engaged in an exchange with Paul Craig Roberts over the question whether Brown v. Board was based on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Here (or here) is Roberts's column. And here is Volokh's most recent post, follow the links for more. Volokh's refutation of Roberts's odd claims about Brown is convincing, but understated.
    In an email posted by Volokh, Roberts claims, "Brown was not argued as a 14th amendment case." This is simply false. Read the Brief for Appellants and the Brief for the United States as Amicus Curiae. Then look at this transcript of the oral argument. The notion that Brown was not argued as a 14th amendment case is a complete and utter fabrication, without any support in the briefs or the transcript of the oral arguments.
    Roberts column also contains this assertion:
      Americans have forgotten that Brown was based in sociology, not in law. This was widely recognized at the time. “A Sociological Decision: Court Founded Its Segregation Ruling On Hearts and Minds Rather Than Laws,” read a New York Times headline on May 18, 1954.
    The headline in question is the title of an op/ed by Reston criticizing Brown, not the headline of the New York Times story reporting the decision. That story is available here. The actual New York Times report on the decision includes the following:
      The Supreme Court adopted two of the major premises advanced by the Negroes in briefs and arguments presented in support of their cases.
      Their main thesis was that segregation, of itself, was unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendment, which was adopted July 28, 1868, was intended to wipe out the last vestige of inequality between the races, the Negro side argued.
    Paul Craig Roberts should be embarassed and ashamed.


 
Bolling v. Sharpe Check out this post by Will Baude on Bolling v. Sharpe, the companion case to Brown that applied the substance of the Equal Protection Clause to the federal government via the Due Process Clause of the 5th Amendment.


 
Weekend Update On Saturday, I rounded up the SSRN top downloads, and the regular Download of the Week was Does History Defeat Standing Doctrine? by Ann Woolhandler and Caleb Nelson. The Legal Theory Bookworm recommended The New Constitutional Order by Mark Tushnet. On Sunday, the Legal Theory Lexicon entry was on indeterminacy and the Legal Theory Calendar previewed this weeks talks, workshops, and conferences. Also, late on Friday, you will find my Precedent and High Politics, replying to Jack Balkin's recent post, which included the following statement: "[I]f [Solum] accepts the common law tradition as part of what he means by formalist judging, then it's not clear how much he and I disagree, and I'm proud to sign on as a formalist."


 
Monday Calendar
    At the University of Chicago, Special symposium on Violence Against Women as a Crime Against Humanity, sponsored by the Legal Philosophy Workshop jointly with the Center for Comparative Constitutionalism. Speakers will include Catharine MacKinnon and Martha Nussbaum.
    At Oxford's Moral Philosophy Seminar Agnieszka Jaworska (Princeton) presents Caring and Internality.


 
So if you are going to law school and . . . Over at Crescat Sententia, Jeremy Blachman has a very good post for those who will start law school in August or September.


 
Academic Placement by Law School JD Programs Based on the incomplete data gathered here, here are the top ten law schools ranked by placements of JD graduates in entry-level tenure-track positions on law school faculties in the United States for the 2004-05 academicy year. The first list provides the actual number of reported placements (multiply by three to get a rough estimate of total placements). The second list provides a rough estimate of the percentage of graduates placed in tenure-track academic jobs.
    Rank by Reported Number of Reported Placements
      1. Yale-19 2. Harvard-17 3. Stanford-10 4. Chicago-6 5. UC Berkeley-5 6. Columbia-4 6. Georgetown-4 6. Michigan-4 6. Penn-4 6. Virginia-4
    Rank By Estimated Percentage of Graduates Placed
      1. Yale-29.6% 2. Stanford-17.2% 3. Chicago-9.0% 4. Harvard-9.0% 5. UC Berkeley-5.1% 6. Penn-4.5% 7. Virginia-3.2% 8. Columbia-3.0% 9. Michigan-2.9% 10. Georgetown-2.0%
These numbers are imprecise for many reasons. My sample was not random. Only 1/3 of law schools reported their entry-level hiring for next year. The percentage is obviously based on several different graduating classes up through 2003. I estimated the percentage of placement based on (1) an extrapolation of the total number of students placed from my sample (essentially multiplying by slightly less than 3), and (2) an estimate of average class size based on the most recent data reported by the LSAC. The true percentages could be significantly higher and lower, and the list of the top-ten schools could change. (Texas would be the most likely school to move into the top ten.)


 
Gillette on Rolling Contracts Clayton P. Gillette (New York University Law School) has posted Rolling Contracts as an Agency Problem (Wisconsin Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Rolling contracts involve terms that sellers include with delivery of goods and that purport to affect the rights of the parties to a contract. They have become common in contracts concluded in telephone or on-line transactions, and controversial because buyers often do not explicitly assent to them and are highly unlikely even to read them. In this article, I suggest that it is appropriate to evaluate the effectiveness of rolling terms, and of standard form contracts generally, as a principal-agent problem. When buyers do not represent themselves in the process of drafting a contract, their interests may still be internalized by sellers in competitive markets, by courts that adjudicate the terms that the contract drafter selected, or by government agencies that mandate or prohibit certain contract terms. I suggest that the best agent for nonreading buyers is likely to vary for different clauses. In some, but not all situations, sellers have incentives to include terms that serve buyer interests. In other situations, sellers may insert clauses that appear to serve seller interests, but sellers may invoke their rights under those clauses only when it is likely that buyers are acting exploitatively. Sellers who use clauses to avoid such observable, but nonverifiable acts of buyer misbehavior may actually serve the interests of the majority of buyers. Sellers will not have incentives to consider buyer interests with respect to other clauses, however. In those cases, courts or agencies may be superior surrogates for buyers. Nevertheless, courts and agencies suffer from their own biases, so that the legal rules that they impose will not necessarily reflect the interests of buyers at large. Thus, rather than approve or condemn the practice of rolling contracts generally, the proper analysis requires a nuanced view that identifies when market mechanisms are likely to internalize the interests of nonreading buyers and when legal actors can better fulfill that role.


 
Benoliel on Cyberspace & Privacy Daniel Benoliel (University of California, Berkeley - School of Law (Boalt Hall)) has posted Law, Geography and Cyberspace: The Case of On-Line Territorial Privacy on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Territorial privacy, one of the central categories of privacy protection, involves setting limit boundaries on intrusion into an explicit space or locale. Initially, the Restatement (Second) of Torts, which defined the privacy tort of intrusion, as applied by courts, most notably designated two classes of excluded areas: "private" places in which the individual can expect to be free from governmental intrusion, and "non-private" places, in which the individual does not have a recognized expectation of privacy. The designation of an area as "private" then also protected the personal information located there from governmental seizure. In the real world, courts ultimately held almost uniformly that the tort of intrusion could not occur in a public place or in a place that may be viewed from a public place. Cyberspace, on the other hand, was not left with a public sphere nor has a balanced territorial privacy policy so far been established. Instead, based on the category of database privacy protection, only an ownable-based private privacy legal rule was adopted and too widely so. One of the main explanations for this anomaly, in fact, derives from cyberspace's unique architecture. While the real world is subject to a default rule of a continuous public sphere that is then subject to distinct proprietary private sphere allotments; Cyberspace architecture, on the other hand, imbeds a different structure. In the latter, apart from the Internet's "public roads" or backbone transit infrastructure, which is regulated according to telecommunications and antitrust law, the present default rule contains a mosaic of private allotments - namely, neighboring proprietary web sites. This anomaly is even more acute given that the U.S government, the FTC and theoreticians alike, thus far, have developed neither comprehensive nor supportive boundary theory that could maintain territorial privacy. All three, instead, have implicitly or explicitly only considered technocentristic boundary approaches. From a legal perspective the factual truths or scientific hypothesis underlying the existence of on-line spatiality, as discussed notably in the works of Johnson and Post, Lessig, Hunter, Lemley and others, should, instead, be only a parameter in establishing legal truth. In compliance with what is an alternat ive localist boundary approach, this study suggests that law, indeed, could construct a legal fiction of on-line locales, through which territorial privacy, ultimately, could be integrated into cyberspace privacy policy at large.



 
Call for Papers: Theoretical Inquiries in Law
    Theoretical Inquiries in Law http://www.bepress.com/til/ Publisher: The Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the Law of the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law The Journal specializes in the application to legal problems of insights developed in other disciplines, such as moral and political theory, epistemology, social sciences, economics and game theory, probability theory, and cognitive psychology. The range of issues dealt with by the Journal is virtually unlimited, in line with its commitment to cross-disciplinary cultivation of ideas. Contributors to the Journal are distinguished legal scholars working in different "law and ..." areas. The Journal strives to offer a forum for contributions to legal theory by scholars working in disciplines outside of law. The electronic version appears continuously, whereas the paper version is published twice a year, in January and July. The journal publishes articles that are presented at international conferences organized by the Cegla Center in Tel Aviv. ISSN: 1565-3404 Email: cegla@post.tau.ac.il Abstracts available online. Articles available as PDF files. Current Issue: Volume 5 Number 1 2004 Date: 11 May 2004


Sunday, May 16, 2004
 
Legal Theory Calendar
    Monday, May 17
      At the University of Chicago, Special symposium on Violence Against Women as a Crime Against Humanity, sponsored by the Legal Philosophy Workshop jointly with the Center for Comparative Constitutionalism. Speakers will include Catharine MacKinnon and Martha Nussbaum.
      At Oxford's Moral Philosophy Seminar Agnieszka Jaworska (Princeton) presents Caring and Internality.
    Tuesday, May 18
      At Oxford's Jurisprudence Discussion Group, Luc J. Wintgens presents Legisprudence: A New Theory of Legislation.
      Also at Oxford, Peter Oliver presents Constitutional Theory: Sovereignty and Legal Systems at the Faculty of Law.
      At Oxford's Ockham Society, Daniel Came (Lady Margaret Hall) presents Nietzsche and the Moral Interpretation of Existence.
    Wednesday, May 19
      At Oxford's All Souls College, Dr. Piero Pinzauti (Florence) presents Marx's Commodity Fetishism and Wittgenstein's Grammatical Confusion.
      At Oxford, Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers University), presents The Ontological Status of Persons: Why it Matters, the 2004 Dasturzada Dr Jal Pavry Memorial Lectures.
    Thursday, May 20
      At Florida State, Jim Rossi, FSU College of Law, presents Deregulation and the Incomplete Regulatory Contract.
      At the Oxford Society for Law and Religion, Seminars on Law and Religion, P. Edge presents Official Representation of Religion in National Assemblies or ‘Is half a loaf better than no bread?
      Also at Oxford, Public International Law Discussion Group, Stefan Talmon presents Interdicting Weapons of Mass Destruction at Sea.


 
Legal Theory Lexicon: Indeterminacy
    Introduction It all depends on your first year section, but many law students begin to get a sinking feeling about the law early in their first year. Does the law actually make any difference to the way cases are decided? Before law school, most of us would answer "Yes, of course." And many law students start law school with the assumption that they will "learn the rules." But in contemporary American legal education, many students encounter a thesis that goes something like this:
      The laws have nothing to do with how cases come out. They are just window dressing that skillful lawyers and judges can manipulate to justify any decision they please.
    This counterintuitive position is a version of the claim that law is indeterminate, or what we might call the indeterminacy thesis.
    The Indeterminacy Debate The indeterminacy thesis is associated with legal realism, but in its most strident form, it is most strongly identified with the Critical Legal Studies movement--a loose and multifaceted cluster of legal scholars that became very prominent in the 1980s.
    The indeterminacy debate is about the claim that the law does not constrain judicial decisions. Put differently, the claim is that all cases are hard cases and that there are no easy cases. The strongest version of the claim is the notion that any result in any legal dispute can be justified as the legally correct outcome, but the thesis can be modified or weakened in various ways.
    What does the indeterminacy thesis mean? Let's call the claim that the laws (broadly defined to include cases, regulations, statutes, constitutional provisions, and other legal materials) do not determine legal outcomes the indeterminacy thesis. Because there are many different versions of the indeterminacy thesis, our approach will be to identify clearly the distinct versions of the indeterminacy thesis and then to consider each version of the thesis on its own merits.
    Indeterminacy versus Underdeterminacy The next step in clarifying the indeterminacy debate is to distinguish between "indeterminacy" and "underdeterminacy" of law. Thus far, we have accepted the implicit assumption that indeterminacy and determinacy are exhaustive categories, i.e. that the decision of a case is either determined by the law or it is indeterminate. This assumption is not correct. A legal dispute may be constrained by the law, but not determined by it.
    Roughly, an case is underdetermined by the law if the outcome (including the formal mandate and the content of the opinion) can vary within limits that are defined by the legal materials. This approximation can be made more precise by considering the relationship between two sets of outcomes of a given case. The first set consists of all possible results — all the imaginable variations in the mandate (affirmance, reversal, remand, etc.) and in the reasoning of the opinion. The second set consists of the outcomes that can be squared with the law — the set or legally acceptable outcomes. The distinctions between indeterminacy, underdeterminacy and determinacy of the law with respect to a given case may be marked with the following definitions:
    • The law is determinate with respect to a given case if and only if the set of legally acceptable outcomes contains one and only one member.
    • The law is underdeterminate with respect to a given case if and only if the set of legally acceptable outcomes is a nonidentical subset of the set of all possible results.
    • The law is indeterminate with respect to a given case if the set of legally acceptable outcomes is identical with the set of all possible results.
    Hard Cases The notion of a "hard case" can now be explicated with reference to the idea of underdeterminacy. A case is a "hard case" if the outcome is underdetermined by the law in a manner such that the judge must choose among legally acceptable outcomes in a way that changes who will be perceived as the "winner" and who the "loser." The point is that the outcomes of an case need not be completely indeterminate in order for it to be a hard case; a case in which the results are underdetermined by the law will be "hard" if the legally acceptable variation makes the difference between loss or victory for the litigants. The distinction between indeterminacy and underdeterminacy is rarely observed in the indeterminacy debate, but it is nonetheless important to assessing the debate. Claims that the law is radically indeterminate are implausible, but more modest claims about underdeterminacy may both be defensible and play a role in a radical critique of liberal legal theory.
    Is the law radically indeterminate? The strongest (the most ambitious) claim about the indeterminacy of law is the claim that in every possible case, any possible outcome is legally correct. In other words, the strong indeterminacy thesis is the claim that the law is radically indeterminate:
      The Strong Indeterminacy Thesis: In any set of facts about actions and events that could be processed as a legal case, any possible outcome — consisting of a decision, order, and opinion — will be legally correct.
    To falsify the strong indeterminacy thesis one needs to establish that there is at least one possible case in which at least one possible outcome is legally incorrect. This refutation would disprove the strong indeterminacy thesis only in the sense stipulated here; it would not establish that the law is always, usually, or even frequently determinate.
    The Argument from Easy Cases One way to establish that there is at least one possible case in which at least one outcome is legally incorrect has been called "the argument from easy cases" by Fred Schauer. In its simplest form, the argument from easy cases points to a hypothetical case in which at least one outcome is legally incorrect. The following discussion attempts to formulate one such easy case:
      Consider the following case, consisting of facts, a legal rule, and a legal event. First, postulate the following set of events and actions: Ben visited Point Magu State Beach in Ventura County, California between the hours of 12:30 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, February 14, 2004. Second, consider the following legal rule: Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act states, "Every person who shall monopolize or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony . . ." (26 Stat. 209 (1890)). Third, consider the following claim about a possible case: Ben's visit to the beach on the date and time specified would not constitute a violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. In order fully to convince you of this, I would need to tell you more about what went on at the beach on that day. The details will include Ben's looking at the ocean, speaking with friends about politics, reading a book, and so forth. Children flew kites; a friend grilled chicken and hot dogs. You might want to know whether Ben discussed any business dealings at the beach: he did not. But no matter how many questions you asked, no matter how hard you tried, you would not be able to make out a legally valid case that the Sherman Act was violated. If a prosecution were filed against Ben based only on the events specified, a verdict of guilty would be legally incorrect. This is not to deny that it is possible that things would go wrong in some way. Perjury might be committed; the judge assigned to the case might be deranged. Our system of justice is hardly foolproof, but that does not entail the further conclusion that any result is legally correct.
    The upshot of this example of an easy case is this: there is at least one possible case in which at least one possible outcome is legally incorrect. Therefore, the strong indeterminacy thesis (as I have defined it) is false. Notice my argument is not that the outcome of an antitrust prosecution based on the facts I outline is predictable. Rather, my claim is that one possible outcome, i.e. conviction, would be legally incorrect. If the law is correctly applied and the witnesses testify truthfully, the prosecution should fail.
    Changing the Hypothetical Of course, we can easily change the hypothetical so that the legally correct outcome would change. Just add a conspiratorial conversation at the beach that does violate the Sherman Act. But the fact that the hypothetical can be changed so as to change the legally correct outcome is not responsive to the argument from easy cases. Let us stipulate for the sake of argument that it is always be possible to add facts to an easy case such that the addition of the new facts will change the legally correct outcome of the case. This does not demonstrate that there are no easy cases. Quite the contrary, the fact that the advocate of the strong indeterminacy thesis needed to add facts to the easy case in order to change the legally correct outcome shows that as originally stated the easy case was not indeterminate. If the strong indeterminacy thesis were true, then a reasonable legal argument should be available on the facts as originally stated in the hypothetical. The additional facts should not be necessary. That facts must be added to transform an easy case into a hard one demonstrates that the law does constrain the set of legally correct outcomes.
    Is a modest version of the indeterminacy thesis defensible? If the strong indeterminacy thesis cannot be supported, is there a more modest claim about indeterminacy that is defensible and has critical bite? One modest version of the indeterminacy thesis might be the following: in most (or almost all) of the cases that are actually litigated, the outcome is underdetermined by the law. This claim about indeterminacy is not refuted by the argument from hypothetical easy cases. Confirmation of the actually-litigated underdeterminacy thesis would require empirical investigation, but there are some good reasons to believe that cases which actually proceed to filing, trial, or appeal will frequently be underdetermined by the law. Litigants will rarely have an incentive to settle easy cases. For example, in a civil dispute where the law gives a determinate answer to the question of who will win and what the amount of their judgment will be, the parties to litigation will usually prefer to settle, rather than incur the expenses of litigation. Uncertainty about the law is one of the factors that selects which cases will be filed, go to trial, and be appealed. This point should not be exaggerated, however: litigation may proceed for any number of reasons, including an irrational overconfidence in a hopeless case, uncertainty about facts in a case in which the law is clear, and so forth.
    Important Cases Another modest version of the indeterminacy thesis claims that while many ordinary cases are roughly determinate, all the really important cases are indeterminate. Put more precisely, the claim might be that the important issues in important cases are underdetermined by the law. If true, this claim might preserve almost all of the critical force of the strong indeterminacy thesis. Yes, there are easy cases, but those cases are unimportant.
    One difficulty with the important case version of the indeterminacy thesis is its potential circularity. Our concept of what counts as an important case may have indeterminacy as a component. Part of what makes a case important is that the result is not certain or predictable; if we all knew how the case would come out, we would not be interested. Likewise, the Supreme Court may select cases in part on the basis of their legal indeterminacy.
    Conclusion I have just begun to scratch the surface of the indeterminacy debate, but I hope that I've provided enough perspective so that you can begin to think about this important question on your own. As I'm sure you know by now, I am not a fan of the radical indeterminacy thesis, but I also think it is important to recognize that the law is underdeterminate in important ways.
    For more on the indeterminacy debate, see Lawrence On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical Dogma, 54 University of Chicago Law Review 462 (1987). (online here)
For a complete collection of the Legal Theory Lexicon posts with a table of contents, click here.


Saturday, May 15, 2004
 
Taxing Punitive Damages Over at That's News to Me, check out Punitive Damages in the Extended Sphere. Here's a taste:
    Governor Schwarzenegger's new budget includes a provision giving state government (through a trust) 75% of any punitive damage award. A representative for the Governor justifies this idea by arguing that "the money should go to the public good." I think this fits with some views on punitive damages, but not the Supreme Courts'.


 
Bertram on the Best in Recent Political Philosophy Anyone who reads LTB will want to look at Chris Bertram's post on Crooked Timber Best political philosophy/theory papers Here is his list:
    Thomas Pogge, “An Egalitarian Law of Peoples”, Philosophy and Public Affairs (1994). G.A. Cohen, “Where the Action Is” , Philosophy and Public Affairs (1997). Michael Ridge, “Hobbesian Public Reason”, Ethics (1998). Elizabeth Anderson, “What is the point of equality?” Ethics (1999). David Schmidtz, “How to Deserve”, Political Theory (2002).
Be sure to check out the comments to Bertram's post.


 
Legal Theory Bookworm This week, the Legal Theory Bookworm recommends The New Constitutional Order (linked fixed) by Mark Tushnet (Amazon here):
    In his 1996 State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton announced that the "age of big government is over." Some Republicans accused him of cynically appropriating their themes, while many Democrats thought he was betraying the principles of the New Deal and the Great Society. Mark Tushnet argues that Clinton was stating an observed fact: the emergence of a new constitutional order in which the aspiration to achieve justice directly through law has been substantially chastened. Tushnet argues that the constitutional arrangements that prevailed in the United States from the 1930s to the 1990s have ended. We are now in a new constitutional order--one characterized by divided government, ideologically organized parties, and subdued constitutional ambition. Contrary to arguments that describe a threatened return to a pre-New Deal constitutional order, however, this book presents evidence that our current regime's animating principle is not the old belief that government cannot solve any problems but rather that government cannot solve any more problems. Tushnet examines the institutional arrangements that support the new constitutional order as well as Supreme Court decisions that reflect it. He also considers recent developments in constitutional scholarship, focusing on the idea of minimalism as appropriate to a regime with chastened ambitions. Tushnet discusses what we know so far about the impact of globalization on domestic constitutional law, particularly in the areas of international human rights and federalism. He concludes with predictions about the type of regulation we can expect from the new order. This is a major new analysis of the constitutional arrangements in the United States. Though it will not be received without controversy, it offers real explanatory and predictive power and provides important insights to both legal theorists and political scientists.
Tushnet is one of the very best. Highly recommended!


 
Download of the Week This week, the Download of the Week is Does History Defeat Standing Doctrine? by Ann Woolhandler and Caleb Nelson. Here is the abstract:
    Although the modern Supreme Court claims historical support for refusing to let private parties who have suffered no concrete private injury ask federal courts to redress harms to the public at large, academic critics have insisted that the law of standing is a twentieth-century invention of federal judges. In earlier eras, the critics argue, the recognized forms of action might have required plaintiffs to have particular injuries in order to make out specific claims, but there was no generalized standing law, and certainly no constitutional requirement of individualized injury for people challenging governmental action. This article disagrees. In the nineteenth century, courts enforced an active law of standing (although not so called) that cut across various causes of action, and that reflected the distinction between public and private rights. Courts regularly designated some areas of litigation as being under public control and others as being under private control. What is more, and contrary to the standing critics, the Supreme Court often did discuss these issues in constitutional terms, particularly in actions against federal and state governmental officials. We do not claim that history compels acceptance of the modern Supreme Court’s vision of standing, or that the constitutional nature of standing doctrine was crystal clear from the moment of the founding on. The subsistence of qui tam actions alone might be enough to refute any such suggestion. We do, however, argue that history does not defeat standing doctrine; the notion of standing is not an innovation, and its constitutionalization does not contradict a settled historical consensus about the Constitution's meaning.
Download it while its hot!


 
SSRN Top Recent Downloads The Social Science Research Network compiles lists of top ten downloads by subject matter. (Click on the category name for the full list of the top ten papers by number of downloads in the past 60 days.) Here are categories and selected papers of interest to legal theorists:


 
Welcome to the Blogosphere . . . to Public Defender Dude.


 
National Transparency Day Read all about it on TaxProf Blog.


Friday, May 14, 2004
 
Minor Updates to Entry Level Hiring Post I've made a few minor changes, adding just a bit more data to the report on Entry Level Hiring.


 
Precedent and High Politics
    [I]f [Solum] accepts the common law tradition as part of what he means by formalist judging, then it's not clear how much he and I disagree, and I'm proud to sign on as a formalist.--Jack Balkin.
    Introduction What is the relationship between the doctrine of precedent and theories that maintain that changes in constitutional meaning are (and should be) the result of political struggles over ideologies and values? In 2001, Jack Balkin and Sandy Levinson published an important article titled Understanding the Constitutonal Revolution, 87 Va. L. Rev. 1045 (2001) (online version here), in which they wrote:
      It is perfectly normal for Presidents to entrench members of their party in the judiciary as a means of shaping constitutional interpretation. That is the way most constitutional change occurs.
    But not all constitutional change through partisan entrenchment is legimate:
      We should make a distinction between two kinds of politics--"high politics," which involves struggles over competing values and ideologies, and "low politics," which involves struggles over which group or party will hold power. In [Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v.] Garrett the five conservatives seem to be clearly *1063 engaged in "high politics"--the promotion of certain core political principles in constitutional doctrine. By contrast, Bush v. Gore seems to involve "low politics"--with the five conservatives adopting whatever arguments were necessary to ensure the election of the Republican candidate, George W. Bush.
    And this distinction is important:
      The distinction between high and low politics is important because it suggests two different sorts of criticisms that one might make about the Court's behavior during a period of constitutional revolution. As we shall argue in more detail later on, constitutional revolutions always concern "high politics"--the promotion of larger political principles and ideological goals. This was true during the New Deal and it is true today. . . . But the objection to Bush v. Gore is quite different. The result in Bush v. Gore is not easily explained as the promotion of principles of "high politics."
    One very interesting question about Balkin and Levinson's theory concerns the relationship between high political campaigns for constitutional change and the doctrine of precedent (or stare decisis). So I was especially delighted to see Jack Balkin's recent post Formalism and High Politics (prompted by a recent post by Matthew Yglesias and my not-so-recent Getting to Formalism.)
    High Political Respect for Precedent Balkin writes:
      I've never thought that respect for precedent is at all inconsistent with my (and Sandy Levinson's) view that constitutional judging reflects differences of constitutional vision that get worked out in constitutional doctrine-- what we have called "high politics"-- and that constitutional change often occurs through doctrinal developments that further those constitutional visions. The reason is simple: There's usually more than one way to argue from existing precedents in most important and controversial cases in constitutional law. "More than one," by the way, doesn't mean an infinite number. It means, simply, more than one. There are many arguments that are completely off the wall given existing precedents, and the existing configuration of legal doctrine, but the fact that many answers are off the wall doesn't mean that only one answer is not. (Nor do I assume that Larry would ever suggest such a thing). Rather, existing precedents usually underdetermine the results of the sorts of cases that tend to come before the Supreme Court. On this I assume both Larry and I are in full agreement.
    Before we go any further, let me say that with respect to the underlined point, Balkin and I are in full agreement. In fact, my very first law review article [On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical Dogma, 54 University of Chicago Law Review 462 (1987)] made exactly that point and introduced the term "underdetermination" to describe the phenomenon.
    What is "Respect for Precedent"?
      Step One: Distinguishing Force and Content But what does Balkin mean by "respect for precedent"? No surprise, that turns out to be quite a question! There are two different dimensions to the question what does respect for precedent mean. We might call the first dimensions force and the second dimensions content. By referring to the force of precedent, I mean to refer to ability of a precedent (whatever its content) to constrain. By referring to the content of precedent, I mean to refer to the rule that a precedent provides. These dimensions are related but conceptually independent. We could have a narrow view of content combined with a strong view of force or vice versa.
      Step Two: The Force of Precedent If we want to know what "respect for precedent" means, we need to know something about different ways in which we might view the "force of precedent." That is, suppose we know what the content of a binding prior decisions is. We know what would count as a decision that is consistent with the decision, and we know what would count as inconsistent. That leaves a further question: "Is the content of the precedent irrelevant, merely persuasive, binding, or something else. We could slice and dice the categories in various ways, but here is one way to categorize the options:
      • No Force. Precedent might have absolutely no authority at all. This view is obviously inconsistent with affirmation of "respect for precedent."
      • Presumptive Force. A second possibiity is that the existence of a precedent might create a rebuttable presumption in favor of the rule announced by the precedent. In its weakest form, this would be a "bursting bubble" presumption, which could be overcome by any reason to depart from the precedent.
      • Prudential Force. A third possibility is that the existence of a precedent might provide prudential reasons for following the existing rule. These prudential reasons would include, for example, (i) the disutility of upsetting existing expectations, (ii) the cost of rethinking the issue and formulating a new rule, (iii) the costs of disseminating and implementing the new rule, and (iv) the long-range benefits and generalized benefits of sticking to the old rule on this occasion and hence reinforcing the general perception that precedents can be relied upon for planning purposes. Prudential force is not "authority," it is simply giving due weight to the fact that a rule exists and that rule changes are costly.
      • Gravitational Force. Borrowing a metaphor from Dworkin, we might think that precedents have something like "gravitational force." As I am using the metaphor, I mean it to represent the idea that a precedent tugs in a certain direction. This is more than mere presumptive or prudential force--the tug is real or "weighty" independent of the costs and benefits of adhering to the precedent. But gravitational force is not binding; it is not a content-independent preemptory reason for action.
      • Binding Force. Finally, we might view precedent as binding. That is, we might view precedents as providing reasons for action that are content independent and preemptory. This is the way that lower courts are (in theory) obliged to treat the decisions of higher courts.
      So I am particularly interested in the question, what force does Balkin believe that precedents have? It seems to me that if Balkin is to sign up as a formalist, he must opt for some kind of force that is at least as strong as "gravitational force," but Balkin is very very smart, and he may suggest a new and illuminating way of looking at the question of force.
      I should be clear. My own view of force is quite strong. I believe in a strong doctrine of stare decisis, and hence in some version of the view that precedent has binding force. This is not the place to discuss my theory of mistake, but for the record, I do have such a theory.
      Step Three: Content Once we have settled the force question, we can move on to content. Let me first quote Balkin and then add some ideas of my own. Balkin writes:
        [A]s Karl Llewellyn pointed out many years ago, lawyers have a wide variety of techniques for reading precedents broadly and narrowly, drawing analogies from existing precedents, and formulating new principles from older precedents. All of these techniques are generally called "following precedent." But they sometimes lead to very different results. Indeed, much of constitutional adjudication involves dueling examples of Llewellyn's catalogue of precedental techniques, so that it is very often the case that both sides of a dispute can plausibly claim that they are following precedent, (while insisting that the other side is not, because they are using those techniques quite differently and with a different result).
        Now it is not clear to me whether Larry wants to contend that some subset of Llewellyn's catalogue of common law practices of precedental argument is illegitimate for formalist judges. If he does not, and if he accepts the common law tradition as part of what he means by formalist judging, then it's not clear how much he and I disagree, and I'm proud to sign on as a formalist at least to that extent. However, if he thinks that substantial parts of this catalogue of precedental techniques are illegitimate, then he has a lot of explaining to do in showing how his theory of judging fits the actual practices of judges over the last several centuries. Put another way, my claim is that the actual practices of what lawyers call "following precedent" are quite flexible. The politicization of the judiciary that Larry decries has not occurred outside of those practices. To the contrary, it has occurred largely within them. And the reason why the work of precedental argument is so flexible is that over the years it has served a variety of different functions. One of those functions is allowing strong conflicts of political principle to be mediated by and worked out through professional discourses of law.
      Well, it all depends on what you mean by "quite flexible," doesn't it? I am inclined to agree with Balkin that Llewellyn is an imporant source of insight on this question, and I assume that Balkin means to endorse what might be called Llewellyn's mature position (although a good case can be made that it was his true position all along). Here is the way that Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman described the mature Llewellynian theory of precedent in her Llewellyn Revisted, 70 Tex. L. Rev. 771, 773-74 (1992):
        On the case law side, [Karl Llewellyn] tried to persuade lawyers and judges respectively to understand and to craft the law so that the "fixed core" of any precedent could be reasonably clearly discerned. On the other hand, broader dicta connecting underlying principles with a concrete factual situation might give guidelines for future development down the open- ended lane of precedent. Llewellyn was distressed that, as he saw it, a crisis of confidence in the law had developed. Indeed, it is likely that he had something of a guilty conscience about it, since the notion that anything goes in law had perhaps been given some impetus by realism. His last book aimed to put the record straight, to restore confidence by showing that his message was misunderstood. Rule skepticism was never a doubt about the possibility or desirability of rules, only a campaign against the wrong approach to reading the materials for the rules they expressed and against a wooden style of setting or applying precedents from the bench.
      If I might be permitted to translate Llewellyn's crucial point into the language of virtue jurisprudence, Llewellyn is making a plea for practical judgment (which he called "situation sense"). In order to apply a rule, you need what I have called "legal vision," the ability to what rules are salient in particular fact situations and to see the point of the rule. Following precedent is not a matter of deaf adherence to wooden formulations or mechanical application of the rule implied by the sentence that begins, "We hold that . . ." Following precedent requires an understanding of the factual and legal context of the prior decision and an ability to discern its relevance to the current controversy. Truly following precedent requires that the judge be a phronimos and nominos. Phronesis is the virtue of practical wisdom, the quality of character and intellect that is in part captured by Llewellyn's idea of situation sense. A judge with the virtue of justice is a nominos, disposed to respect and follow the law and social norms of her culture (see my The Aretaic Turn in Constitutional Theory for a fuller statement).
      I want to identify one more point upon which I suspect that Balkin and I agree. By respect for precedent, I do not mean respect for legislative pronouncements introduced by the phrase "We hold that . . ." That is, I hold a narrow view of content combined with a strong view of force.
      Step Four: Questions for Balkin With this groundwork laid, I can now ask Balkin my queston: "What is your view of the force and content of precedent?" In particular, what happens when a high political program of constitutional change runs into a substantial body of opposing precedent? Can the precedent be swept away in a constitutional revolution motivated by ideology and value? Or should constitutional revolution be escewed in favor of constitutional evolution, a gradual process of change that works within (rather than around) the precedent? Do you agree with Llewellyn that "the 'fixed core' of any precedent [can] be reasonably clearly discerned" or do you think that flexibility implies that there is no 'fixed core'?
    When Precedent Runs Out I am very happy to welcome Jack Balkin to the formalist camp, but if there is a "big formalist tent," then I suspect that we belong in different corners. In particular, I wonder how far Balkin's formalism extends beyond his respect for precedent. For example, how does Balkin view the relationship between high political constitutional change and the constitutional text? And what role, if any, does he think that originalism (particularly original-meaning originalism) play in interpreting the constitutional text? Does Balkin accept that there is a "fixed core" of meaning for the written constitution? Or does he believe in a "flexible core" that bends with the high political winds?
    Conclusion It's always a pleasure to read one of Jack Balkin's posts on constitutional theory! And if you haven't done so already, I urge you to download Balkin and Levinson's article.
    P.S. For a prior exchange with Balkin on formalism and high politics, see Fear and Loathing in New Haven and A Neoformalist Manifesto.


 
Friday Calendar No events on the calendar today, as terms are winding down.


 
Modeling Judicial Attitudes
    Introduction In post entitled Feasible Choices and a follow up titled Improving the Model, Matthew Yglesias raises questions about the model of judicial dispositions that I advanced in Majoritarianism, Formalism, and the Feasible Choice Set. That post presented a much shortened version of the position in an earlier post Understanding the Confirmation Wars: The Role of Political Ideology and Judicial Philosophy and further developed in a working paper entitled Judicial Selection: Ideology versus Character. Yglesias writes:
      [Solum models judicial dispositions] on a two-dimensional scale with one axis representing their left-right political views and another axis representing their formalist-realist jurisprudential inclinations. A moment's reflection will reveal that this is a simplification -- famously, there's more to politics than simply left vs. right, and this is especially the case in the judiciary. Similarly, there is no "formalist" camp in the world of judging, but rather a variety of purportedly formalist schools of thought, of each which believes itself to [be] The One True Formalism.
    Yglesias's description of the model, although incomplete, is essentially correct. Here is the visual representation of the model (to which Yglesias objects)
_____________________Two Dimensions of Judging __________Realist__| ___________________| ___________________| ___________________| ___________________| ___________________| ___________________| ___________________| ___________________| ________Formalist__|__________________________ ___________________Left___________________Right
    The origin of the horizontal political ideology line represents the extreme left; the terminus represents the extreme right. The origin of the vertical judicial philosophy line represents prefect realism--the disposition to decide cases entirely on the basis of political ideology; the terminus represents prefect legal formalism--the disposition to decide cases entirely on the basis of the legal sources, with no influence from political ideology. Actual judges, of course, will rarely even approach the most extreme positions, much less occupty the origin or the terminus on either line.
    In Defense of the Two Dimensional Model Although I shall decline Yglesias’s invitation to discontinue use of the two dimensional model, I want to thank him for his thoughtful critique. Yglesias reaises two interesting questions:
      Can political ideology be modeled as a point on a left to right real line? The answer to this question is "yes" and "no." From the point of view of political philosophy, the one dimensional model of judicial attitude is ludicrously oversimplified--a point that I've made in several prior presentations of the model but omitted in the post to which Yglesias responded. In fact, I was quite worried about this point myself, until I began to interact with sophisticated political scientists and to read the relevant literature. As a matter of fact, political scientists find that the one dimensional model works in studying similar issues. In other words, a one-dimensional model predicts and explains behavior almost as well as a more sophisticated multi-dimensional model. It is an interesting question as to why the model works so well, but for my purposes, the fact that it does work seems sufficient.
      There is another reason why the one-dimensional model of political ideology serves my purposes well enough. A multidimensional model, although it makes representation vastly more difficult, does not actually change the nature of the problem in a fundamental way. One way to see this is to observe that each dimension in a multidimensional model of judicial philosophy can be used be extracted and plotted against judicial philosophy. For each component dimension of the multi-dimensional political ideology the problem of describing the confirmation zone is essentially the same as for the aggregated one-dimensional model. When the components are aggregated within individual actors and then among actors in the complex group decision-making process, the result approximates the one-dimensional model.
      More intuitively, the one-dimensional model does, more or less, provide a good approximation of the actual pattern of conflict over judicial confirmation. This is reflected in the very close approximation between party affiliation and voting in the judicial selection process.
      Can judicial philosophy be modeled as a point on a real line? Once again, I agree with Yglesias that the model simplifies—as I’ve repeatedly pointed out repeatedly in prior work on this topic. There are, of course, different versions of legal formalism. If I might be permitted to extend Yglesias’s argument, this could be crucial if some versions of legal formalism falsify one of the basic assumptions of the model—that formalist legal decisions have a mean value near the center of the political ideology line. If, for example, legal formalism actually produces outcomes that produce outcomes with a mean that plots at either extreme of the ideology line, then the judicial selection process could only produce formalist judges when the formalist party controls both the Presidency and a supermajority of the Senate sufficient to overcome the filibuster veto gate.
      So this leads to an interesting question: does formalism tilt? In my recent exchange with Bainbridge, I addressed this issue (see Formalist Constitutionalism or Quasi-Parliamentarianism? with comments by Yglesias in his post Improving the Model). But I clearly need to say more about this topic. If I might be permitted to write a promissory note, I believe that it can be shown that: (1) any formalism that respects the the rule-of-law values that provide the normative grounding for principled formalism will approximate political neutrality over the long run; (2) short-run deviations from political neutrality should be viewed in the context of the very large benefits of the rule of law and the very large costs of a downward spiral of politicization that undermines the rule of law.
    An Example: The Barnett Nomination Yglesias uses the potential nomination of Volokh Conspirator Randy Barnett to the United States Supreme Court as an illustration of his points:
      [W]ould someone with Randy Barnett's [libertarian] views be highly confirmable? There's a sense in which he's politically moderate -- he adheres to some, but not all, of the agenda of both of America's two major political coalitions. He maintains that his views on the constitution are the height of formalistic goodness. And yet, it's hard to imagine a set of views that would make a person less confirmable for a spot on the Supreme Court. He believes that judges should feel free to overrule long-established precedents in order to restore the "Lost Constitution" of original meaning. The policy outcomes that would result from his understanding of the constitution's original meaning would render him unacceptable to both major political coalitions.
    I’ve underlined the key passage, about which I should like to make three points:
      First, Yglesias has not accurately represented Barnett’s views with respect to the role of precedent in constitutional adjudication. Barnett has been stated on a variety of occasions that he has not yet formulated a position on stare decisis.
      Second, I have argued in depth that legal formalism requires a strong doctrine of stare decisis, even at the level of the Supreme Court. (On this, see The Case for Strong Stare Decisis, or Why Should Neoformalists Care About Precedent? Part I: The Three Step Argument, Part II: Stare Decisis and the Ratchet, and Part III: Precedent and Principle as well as Getting to Formalism) So, while I agree with Yglesias that there are competing versions of formalism in the broad sense, I do not believe that I need to accept that all formalisms are created equal for the purposes of modeling the judicial selection process. If I have suggested that the model holds for all possible forms of formalism, let me know clarify: that is not my view.
      Third, but there is, nonetheless, something important about Yglesias’s intuition. My view of legal formalism is embedded in my general legal theory, virtue jurisprudence. From the point of view of that theory, the ultimate normative grounding of legal formalism is aretaic (arête is the Greek for virtue or excellence). A judge with the virtue of justice must be both a phronimos (practically wise) and a nominos disposed to act in accord with the nomoi, which include both the written laws and the fundamental social norms of the community. I take it that Yglesias believes that one might be a legal formalist but reject the fundamental social norms of the community in which the written laws are embedded. Such a judge could produce radical decisions that would upset rather than reinforce the rule of law. We can quibble about labels, but that is not the form of legal formalism that I mean to be discussing.
    The Yglesias Multidimensional Model Finally, I would like to consider Yglesias’s final point:
      A more accurate model would not support the conclusion Solum wants. The Solum model requires that formalism be (a) unitary and (b) without any political valence. Both are false. Formalist doctrine comes in several varieties each of which supports a distinct set of policy outcomes. The true shape of the feasible choice set is unlikely to bear a great resemblance to Solum's.
    I am very interested in alternative models of the judicial disposition space and the confirmation zone, and I would very much welcome Yglesias’s development of a richer and more robust model. If I might be permitted a point of disagreement, I should like to suggest that it easy to make an assertion about the “true shape of the feasible choice set” but a bit more difficult to actually produce a model that backs up this assertion. In my recent exchange with Bainbridge, I suggested that legal theory out to eschew reliance on intuitions about feasibility (See Majoritarianism, Formalism, and the Feasible Choice Set.) in favor of rigorous arguments. I hope that Yglesias will continue the discussion and provide the more complex, multidimensional model that will help confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis that formalist judges are outside the feasible choice set.
    Update: Yglesias's most recent post went up after I had finished composing this reply to his earlier post. Be sure sure to read Improving the Model.


Thursday, May 13, 2004
 
The Ninth Amendment Debate: Liberty versus Popular Sovereignty
      The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
    Introduction I've been very fortunate over the course of the past several months to gain a unique perspective on what promises to be a historic debate over the meaning of the Ninth Amendment. It just so happens that the two major protagonists Kurt Lash and Randy Barnett are both friends, and that I have had many opportunities to discuss the arguments and evidence with both of them. Randy Barnett is the author of Restoring the Lost Constitution, two anthologies on the Ninth Amendment (The Rights Retained by the People: Volume One and Volume Two), and a seminal article, Reconceiving the Ninth Amendment. Kurt Lash is the author of two unpublished but already influential articles on the Ninth, forthcoming from the Texas Law Review (The Lost History of the Ninth Amendment (I): The Lost Original Meaning and The Lost History of the Ninth Amendment (II): The Lost Jurisprudence).
    Barnett and Lash come from different places. Barnett is a libertarian (a leading figure in libertarian legal theory); Lash would lean more on the social conservative side of the spectrum. My own politics are quite different: Jim Lindgren at Northwestern called me a "virtue liberal," the other day, and I guess that enigmatic label is as good as any. But despite our political differences, Barnett, Lash, and I all share a commitment to originalism as an approach to constitutional theory.
    It is very important that I express two caveats about what is about to follow. First, Lash and Barnett are both immersed in the primary sources. I know this debate mostly through their eyes (and articles). Second, this post will frequently make claims about what Lash and Barnett believe, and I make those claims in good faith based on extensive reading and conversation, but these are my interpretations of Lash and Barnett’s views and in some cases my rational reconstructions of what I think their views must be. You may interpret them differently, and they may well have changed their views. And of course, it is likely that my understanding of points that both Lash and Barnett have made in conversation departs from what they mean to say. So when I say “Barnett believes” or “Lash believes” please mentally add the qualification that this is Solum’s interpretation and not their own statements of their views.
    In this post, I am going to make a few comments about their debate over the Ninth Amendment. My aim is not to intervene in the debate, but to shed light on it--to uncover some of the fundamental assumptions that drive Lash and Barnett to make conflicting claims about the meaning of the Ninth.
    Rights and Federalism What is the Ninth Amendment debate about? At one level it appears to be about two conflicting interpretations of the Ninth Amendment. On the one hand, there seems to be a rights interpretation: the Ninth Amendment protects retained, individual, natural law rights. On the other hand, there is a federalism interpretation: the Ninth Amendment limits federal power by negating a latitudinarian interpretation of Congress's enumerated powers. At a very superficial level, the Ninth Amendment debate seems to be about two opposed and inconsistent interpretations of the meaning of the Ninth Amendment.
    Appearances Are Deceiving But that isn't what the debate is really about at all. What? Why not? The first key to understanding the Ninth Amendment debate is to see that Barnett and Lash actually agree on a great deal. Barnett is usually seen as a proponent of the rights interpretation, but Barnett fully embraces the idea that the Ninth Amendment operates as a constraint on federal power in general and that it operates to negate latitudinarian interpretations of Congress's enumerated powers in particular. That is, Barnett fully accepts that the Ninth Amendment operates as a federalism provision. And on the other hand, Lash does not deny that the Ninth Amendment by operating as a limit on federal power has the effect of curtailing Congress's ability to invade rights retained by the people, including individual rights, natural rights, and personal rights.
    Hold on there. You are making it sound like Barnett and Lash actually agree. If that's so, what is all the fuss about? There is a real disagreement between Barnett and Lash, but in order to understand what they disagree about, we first need to get a handle on what they agree about. And this requires be to introduce an important distinction, which I shall articulate in terms of the difference between meaning and effect.
    Meaning and Effect Both Barnett and Lash can see the (partial) truth in the other's point of view. Barnett sees that the Ninth Amendment limits the national government and hence protects the states against the growth of national power. Lash sees that the Ninth Amendment limits the national government and hence protects individual rights against federal encroachment. But this does not mean they agree about why the Ninth functions in these two ways.
    Let's distinguish between the meaning and effect of the Ninth Amendment. The meaning of the Ninth is provided by an interpretation--operationally, by a paraphrase that resolves the generality and ambiguity of the Ninth Amendment's language. The effect of the Ninth Amendment encompasses the way the meaning impacts on important constitutional values, such as federalism and rights.
    The story I am about to tell is schematic and simplified, but I think it captures something very important. Barnett believes that the meaning of the Ninth Amendment focuses on individual rights, and that an effect of the Ninth Amendment is to limit the power of the national government and hence to protect the powers of the states. Lash believes that the meaning of the Ninth Amendment focuses on federalism, and that an effect of the Ninth Amendment is to protect individual rights from invasion by the national government. Lash and Barnett agree that Ninth functions to limit national power, preserve state power, and to protect individual rights. They disagree why and how the Ninth functions in these ways; the why and the how have to do with the meaning of the text.
    Two Interpretations of "Rights Retained by the People" All of that was very abstract, can you be more specific? Just how do Barnett and Lash disagree about meaning? Here is one simple way of expressing what I see as the core of their disagreement:
      Barnett believes that the rights retained by the people are fundamentally individual rights.
      Lash believes that the rights retained by the people are fundamentally political rights.
    I used the word "fundamentally" for a reason. If you read very carefully, I think you will find that Barnett admits that some of the "retained rights" may be political rights that are retained by the people in a collective sense: thus, the people retain the right to change their form of government, a political right. And likewise, if you read Lash carefully, I think you will find that he does not deny that the rights retained by the people may include individual rights, even natural rights, analogous to the individual rights that are enumerated in what are now the first eight Amendments to the Constitution. But for Lash, the political rights are primary--they are the point of the Ninth. Whereas for Barnett, the individual rights are primary--those are the point of the Ninth. For Lash, the fact that retained rights may include individual rights has the implication that such rights are reserved to the control of the people—via their governments at the state level in the first instance and ultimately in their sovereign capacity to make constitutional changes.
    The Unavailability of Decisive Cases Assume we are operating with an originalist paradigm, and in particular, within the theoretical assumptions of original meaning originalism. Who is right, Lash or Barnett? As I see it, there is a real problem with finding decisive evidence to adjudicate between their two views. Because their views overlap with respect to the powers of the federal government, almost all of the particular evidence can be explained by both Lash and Barnett. When Lash points to evidence that the Ninth was intended to function to limit federal power, Barnett says, “Of course, that’s what I said.” And when Barnett points to evidence that the Ninth protected individual rights by constraining the scope of federal power, Lash can say, “Of course, that’s what I said.”
    What is needed is a test case--a case in which the two different accounts of the meaning of the Ninth Amendment actually conflict with each other at the level of application. And we would need that test case to have occurred early on in the history of the Ninth Amendment. But so far as I can tell, there is no such test case. Perhaps Lash and Barnett both believe that the Bank of the United States (and Madison’s speech) is such a test case, but, if so, they would both be wrong. Lash and Barnett’s two theories of the meaning and effect of the Ninth Amendment both produce the same result for the question whether Congress has the power to create a Bank. They both say that the Ninth provides an argument against the power to create the bank, although (I think), they would both agree that it is only a supporting argument and that most of the real work is done by analysis of Article I and in particular by the Necessary and Proper (or Sweeping) Clause. So both Barnett and Lash can explain Madison’s position on the Bank.
    It is no accident that there is no test case. Lash and Barnett’s theories about the meaning of the Ninth Amendment do not clash at the level of application. They do clash, and I will explain how their theories clash in just a bit, but the clash does not occur at the level of application, and hence decisive evidence is simply not available.
    The Text of the Ninth Amendment
      The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
    If you read this blog frequently, you probably are wondering why I haven’t yet said anything about the text of the Ninth Amendment. It’s time to remedy that.
    Let’s begin by observing that the Ninth Amendment has a direct and binding effect on Courts (and others charged with constitutional interpretation):
      The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
    Rights are enumerated in the Constitution. It could be argued that the enumeration of these rights has the implication that the people do not retain other rights. That implication might in turn be used to support a construction of the Constitution that would expand the power of Congress. For example, it might have been argued that any exercise of Congressional power that was not explicitly forbidden by the rights in Article I, Section 9, and the first eight amendments of the Bill of Rights is by implication permitted under the necessary and proper clause. The Ninth Amendment operates to forbid such constructions. Call this the direct role of the Ninth Amendment.
    The direct role of the Ninth Amendment is quite limited. It operates only as a rule of construction operates to constrain the power of the national government, particularly Congress. Given the limited nature of this direct role, there is simply no likely scenario in which a difference in application between the federalism interpretation and the rights interpretation could arise in a concrete controversy.
    The Direct Role and the Evidentiary Role The direct role of the Ninth Amendment is as a rule of constitutional interpretation forbidding latitudinarian constructions of the powers of the national government. But the Ninth Amendment may also have a second role, which I shall call the evidentiary role. The evidentiary role of the Ninth Amendment also flows from the text:
      The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
    The phrase “others retained by the people” in context clearly refers back to rights. Hence it is uncontroversial that the phrase may be expanded to “other rights retained by the people.” The next move is very straightforward. From the Constitution’s mention of “other rights retained by the people,” one may infer that “other rights [in addition to the certain rights enumerated in the Constitution] are retained by the people.”
    Although straightforward, this second move is controversial. In particular, the second move rules out the following alternative interpretation, which I shall spell out in full:
      The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others [rights, which may or may not be] retained by the people.
    The second move marks a crucial divide among interpreters of the Ninth Amendment. If one rejects the second move and adopts the “may or may not be retained” view, then the Ninth Amendment is limited to only one role in constitutional interpretation, the role that I have called the direct role. If one makes the second move, then the Ninth Amendment plays a second role in constitutional interpretation, the role that I have called the evidentiary role.
    Both Lash and Barnett seem to accept the second move. That is, both Lash and Barnett accept that the Ninth Amendment plays an evidentiary role. But Lash and Barnett disagree about what the evidentiary role is. That is, they disagree about what the constitutional proposition
      [O]ther rights [in addition to the certain rights enumerated in the Constitution] are retained by the people.
    means. As I understand Barnett and Lash, they do not entirely disagree. Lash believes that the focal meaning of “other rights retained by the people” refers to political rights retained collectively by “We the People” in our states and in our sovereign capacity to institute, disband, or change our governments, but Lash also believes that retained rights include individual or natural rights. Lash believes that the individual or natural rights are subject to control by the people collectively. Barnett believes that the focal meaning of “other rights retained by the people” refers to natural rights retained by the people as individuals. Barnett also believes that retained rights may include a collective right to revolution and/or to peacefully change the form of government, but that right is subordinate to and qualified by the individual natural rights that it is designed to protect.
    The Ninth and the States I’ve been reading quite a bit about the Ninth Amendment recently, and one of the issues that comes up most frequently is the question whether the Ninth Amendment limits the power of State governments. Both Barnett and Lash agree that the Ninth plays no direct role in limiting state power. But at the evidentiary level, Barnett believes that the Ninth provides evidence that State power is limited by natural rights retained by individuals, but Barnett contends that these rights did not receive federal protection against state infringement until the adoption of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment. Lash believes that the Ninth Amendment actually protects state Power, creating what I shall anachronistically label “islands of state rights of sovereignty” that are protected against federal interference, but not against “We the People” with our sovereign power to institute, abolish, or change our governments. Lash has not provided a full-fledged theory of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th, but he has intimated that he believes that when the Privileges or Immunities Clause is construed in light of the Ninth, the Ninth actually limits the extent to which the Privileges or Immunities Clause confers rights on individuals against the people operating through their states. Barnett believes that the evidentiary role of the Ninth reinforces his view that the Privileges or Immunities Clause protected natural rights that are retained by the people as individuals as against the states.
    In other words, Barnett and Lash disagree radically about the evidentiary role of the Ninth Amendment and their disagreement is revealed by comparing their views about the interaction between the Ninth Amendment and the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment.
    A Deeper Level of Disagreement: Liberty and Popular Sovereignty Once we have distinguished between the direct role and the evidentiary role of the Ninth Amendment, we can begin to see that the disagreement between Barnett and Lash is only partially and superficially about the Ninth Amendment. Yes, they disagree about the evidentiary role of the Ninth, but that points to a much larger disagreement about the meaning of the whole Constitution.
    That deeper disagreement is about the fundamental principles that stand behind individual rights and political rights. At this deeper level, Barnett believes that the Constitution is best understood as a Charter of Liberty. His book, Restoring the Lost Constitution, is subtitled The Presumption of Liberty and his earlier book was The Structure of Liberty. Barnett can find support for his natural law interpretation of the Constitution in the Declaration of Independence and the Lockean strands of thought that clearly were shaping forces in the process that led to the Constitution of 1789 and the Bill of Rights.
    Lash’s views at the deeper level are less transparent, in part because, unlike Barnett, he has not written about political theory and has not yet produced an integrated work of constitutional theory that would reveal his full view of the Constitution. (I hope very much that we shall see such a work from Lash before too many years go by.) Nonetheless, there are strong clues about Lash’s larger commitments. His work has consistently drawn on idea about popular sovereignty, frequently couched in Ackermanian/Amarian “We the People” rhetoric. Lash seems to understand the Constitution’s fundamental commitment as a commitment to popular sovereignty—to the superior authority of “We the People” and the subordinate role of government, especially the national government.
    The Burdens of Reason and Deep Commitments John Rawls introduced the idea of the burdens of reason to explain the fact of pluralism. One of his observations is that those who hold different deep commitments will view the same evidence in different ways. The historical evidence about the deep meaning of the Constitution does not decisively endorse either liberty or popular sovereignty as the fundamental constitutional value. Both liberty and popular sovereignty were important to the founding generation. Thus, both Barnett and Lash can find ample evidence for their own view. Given the burdens of reason it is not surprising that Barnett and Lash view the same evidence in different ways. Lash believes that the events surrounding Virginia’s delay in ratifying the Bill of Rights point decisively in favor of his interpretation of the Ninth; Barnett believes that these same events actually favor his interpretation. Disagreements of this sort about the meaning of particular pieces of evidence usually point to other disagreements at a deeper and more fundamental level.
    Mutual Inclusion Moreover and importantly, each of these two ideas incorporates the other in important ways. Thus, a commitment to liberty entails the collective right of the people to change an oppressive government that violates natural rights of liberty. And a commitment to liberty provides strong reasons to oppose the Hobbesian idea of absolute sovereignty for government and hence to support the notion that ultimate (but not absolute) political power should be dispersed among the people. And popular sovereignty theory can embrace the idea that the liberty of the people should be protected. This flows both directly from the notion that government is the mere agent of the sovereign people, and indirectly from the idea that the effective exercise by the people of the powers of popular sovereignty requires that political rights be supported by others, including many of the individual rights that are viewed as central by the friends of liberty. Because each view incorporates the other in a subordinate role, both Lash and Barnett have a ready explanation for each piece of evidence that seems to support the other. It all depends on how you view the evidence.
    This is not to say that there are no tensions between liberty and popular sovereignty as fundamental explanatory paradigms in the context of American constitutional theory. There are many tensions, exemplified by the dispute between Barnett and Lash. But given the substantial overlap between these views and given the fact that both views were influences on the founding generation, it is hardly surprising that both the friends of liberty and the champions of popular sovereignty find confirmation for their interpretation of the overall point and purpose of the Constitution in the historical record.
    Theory and Practice This historical ambiguity is reinforced by another fact. The significant actors in the framing of the Constitution of 1789 and the proposal and ratification of the Bill of Rights were men of action. They were concerned with the art of the possible and the real dangers that faced the young republic—much more concerned with these practical exigencies than with the niceties of political theory. Kurt Lash’s work relates the story of Randolph’s objections to the Bill of Rights on the ground that the Ninth Amendment had departed from the Virginia proposal in a way that seemed to tilt away from an explicit focus on state’s rights. Madison attempted to reassure Randolph that the function (deliberately neutral between meaning and effect) of the Ninth as drafted was equivalent to the function of the counterpart provision in Virginia’s proposal. But Madison’s comments (as I read them) also reveal a certain impatience with Randolph’s objection, which was too theoretical for Madison’s taste, given that the difference in language did not seem to make any practical difference in application.
    In one sense, the lesson of history is that Randoph was right and Madison was wrong. In the long run, the ambiguity in the text has had practical effects as the Ninth Amendment has influenced the larger enterprise of integrating the Constitution as a coherent whole.
    The Hermeneutic Circle Because the meaning of the whole constitution is gleaned from the meaning of each part (and likewise the meaning of each part reflects the meaning of the whole), the evidentiary function of the Ninth Amendment has had an enduring importance. The constitutional debate that is conducted in the culture at large is reflected in and reflects the constitutional debate in the legal academy. And so, when Barnett and Lash dispute particular pieces of evidence in a debate that seems to be about the Ninth Amendment, their clash represents a much larger struggle—an ongoing debate about the meaning of the American Constitution at the deepest and most fundamental level.
    Conclusion These great debates are not won or lost on the basis of particular pieces of evidence. Even if one side or another were to prevail about the Ninth Amendment, the debate would simply shift to other grounds. The grand theories of constitutional meaning stand or fall as a whole. Such theories usually gain adherents from among the undecided, students of constitutional law and theory. Although adherents are occasionally lost to the rare “conversion experience,” it is more common that such views lose support through the grim attrition of professional inactivity, retirement, and death.
    So I do not expect the Barnett-Lash debate to produce a clear victor or a settled meaning for the Ninth Amendment. By saying this I do not mean to imply that such debates are not productive; nor do I mean to say there won't be better and worse arguments. But the effects of such debates are primarily manifested as adjustments made within constitutional paradigms rather in wholesale shifts from one paradigm to another.
    How fortunate we are to have two such able representatives for two great constitutional theories, Barnett, the friend of liberty, and Lash the champion of popular sovereignty, reenact that great debate in the here and now, with the Ninth Amendment, the Delphic oracle of constitutional theory, as the platform they share.


 
Thursday Calendar
    At Florida State, B.J. Priester, FSU College of Law, presents Return of the Great Writ: Judicial Review of the Detention of Alleged Terrorists as Enemy Combatants.
    At Santiago de Compostela (Spain), there is a conference entitled Hilary Putnam's Pragmatism.


 
Barnett's Challenge On the Volokh Conspiracy, Randy Barnett has a post entitled Originalist Sacrifices. Here is a taste:
    A commitment to a written Constitution, however, requires either that one put the law represented by the Constitution ahead of one's even deep-seated desires, or that one candidly reject the Constitution as so morally deficient as to lose its status as binding authority. What is improper is both to jettison the written Constitution AND to wrap oneself in its mantle.
And Barnett then offers an example of a way in which originalism goes against his own libertarian views--the establishment clause,he argues, does not support his libertarian views on the relationship between church and state:
    I do not believe that the First Amendment mandates the separation of church and state much as I wish it did. The very words of the First Amendment belie this claim. It says that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Unless I discovered evidence to the contrary--and I have done no independent originalst research on this issue--this merely commands that Congress not itself establish an official religion, nor interfere with state governments that do establish religion. Making "no law respecting" is a command for complete hands off on the subject of establishment, one way or the other.
So Barnett issues the following challenge:
    I also pose the following challenge to those who favor state endorsement of religion at the state level: if you are willing to modify your commitment to the entire Constitution when parts of it get in your way--in order to reach, e.g., private homosexual conduct--can you offer a principled reason why I could not use your interpretive method to evade the original meaning of the Establishment Clause and the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to effectuate a separation of church and state that conflicts with the original meaning of both?


 
Symposium Announcement: Empirical Measures of Judicial Performance
    Empirical Measures of Judicial Performance: A Florida State University Law Review Symposium Issue
    The availability of data on the judiciary presents a fertile opportunity for the empirical study of judges and courts. In the political realm, claims of merit are regularly made in the process of vetting judicial appointments, but these claims are rarely evaluated against the empirical evidence. One of the more provocative studies of the topic, by Professors Stephen J. Choi and Mitu Gulati, argues that the availability of data and techniques for study of judges should give rise to a tournament of judges, in which promotions to the U.S. Supreme Court consider quantitative measures, as well as qualitative claims, of merit. Choi and Gulati raise the issue in their article A Tournament of Judges?, forthcoming in CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW (Jan. 2004). In a more recent article, Choi and Gulati present the empirical results of their tournament for federal appellate judges. For an earlier empirical study focusing on citation of federal appellate judges, see William M. Landes, Lawrence Lessig & Michael E. Solimine, Judicial Influence: A Citation Study of Federal Courts of Appeals Judges, 27 JOURNAL OF LEGAL STUDIES 271 (1998). Inspired by efforts such as Choi and Gulati’s, the editors of Florida State University Law Review will devote an entire issue of an upcoming volume to essays and articles that address the topic of empirical measures of judicial performance. Papers published in the symposium issue are expected to address the following questions:
      -Is it appropriate to measure and rank judicial performance? -How should one do these measurements? -What would be the incentive effects of doing this?
    Contributions are expected to in the range of 30 double-spaced pages. Papers should be received by September 1, 2004. It is expected that this symposium issue will be published in Spring 2005. Contributors:
      -Mita Bhattacharya & Russell Smyth, Monash University Department of Economics -James J. Brudney, Ohio State University College of Law -The Honorable Jay Bybee, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit -Stephen Choi & Mitu Gulati, Boalt Hall School of Law -- UC Berkeley & Georgetown University Law Center -Brannon Denning, Samford University, Cumberland School of Law -Lee Epstein & Nancy Staudt, Washington University-St. Louis School of Law -Daniel Farber, Boalt Hall School of Law -- UC Berkeley -Tracey George, Northwestern University School of Law -Michael Gerhardt, William & Mary School of Law -Steven Gey, Florida State University College of Law -Steven Goldberg, Georgetown University Law Center -John V. Orth, University of North Carolina School of Law -The Honorable Richard Posner, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit -B.J. Priester, Florida State University College of Law -Jim Rossi, Florida State University College of Law -The Honorable Bruce Selya, U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit -Michael Solimine, University of Cinncinatti School of Law -Lawrence Solum, University of San Diego School of Law -Ahmed Taha, Wake Forest University School of Law -David Vladeck, Georgetown University Law Center


 
Call for Papers: Trade as the Guarantor of Peace, Liberty, and Security
    CALL FOR PAPERS AMERICAN SOCIETY OF INTERNATIONAL LAW, INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC LAW INTEREST GROUP (IELG) ANNUAL MEETING February 24-26 2005 Washington D.C. TRADE AS THE GUARANTOR OF PEACE, LIBERTY AND SECURITY? "Trade is the principal guarantor of peace in the World." John Stuart Mill The 19th century French economist, legislator and writer Claude Bastiat is widely quoted as saying "if goods do not cross borders, armies will." The view of free trade as a promoter of peace and liberty has been embraced by many Philosophers, from Immanuel Kant ("The spirit of trade cannot coexist with war.") to Ralph Waldo Emerson ("The philosopher and lover of man have much harm to say of trade; but the historian will see that trade was the principle of liberty.") This conference examines the validity of this belief, from both historical and modern day perspectives. The aim of the conference is to explore the relationships between the ideology of free trade and ideals of liberty, human dignity and peace. Does the modern day experience with international trade and business support the view that trade is a guarantor of peace and liberty? For example, does the fact that certain regions of the world, such as the Middle East, are largely excluded from the current multilateral trading system support or conflict with the vision of trade as a guarantor of peace? Is the metamorphosis of the European Steel and Coal Community into the European Union an anomaly or the future paradigm? If business is a cultural artifact, do rules that promote transnational business enhance sharing or imperialism? Is there a tension between regionalism and globalism? In addition to peace, is there a relationship between trade and concepts such as unity or equality? Are new organizations required to manage a relationship between trade and peace and liberty? To what extent do the rules and underlying policies of the current multilateral trading system help promote global peace? If Justice is a prerequisite to Peace, to what extent, if any, does trade address Justice? To what extent is or should a "democracy clause" be included in trade agreements? Is the inclusion of such a clause based on the view that democracies do not go to war with one another? PAPER SUBMISSIONS: This call for papers invites submissions that relate to the general theme of the conference. All types of submissions including interdisciplinary work are welcome. Papers can be historical, theoretical, or empirical, and can address broad linkages or specific questions, global regimes or regional structures. SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: Submissions of abstracts of papers (no more than three (3) pages in length) should be sent to the following current IELG Co-Chairs no later than Friday May 21, 2004: CONTACT: Padideh Alai Professor of Law American University Washington College of Law 4801 Mass Ave. Suite 330 Washington D.C. 20016 Fax: (202) 274-4130 Email: MAILTO:palai@wcl.american.edu AND CONTACT: Phil Nichols Associate Professor of Legal Studies The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania 3702 Walnut Street Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104 Fax: (215) 573-2006 Email: MAILTO:nicholsp@wharton.upenn.edu The IELG Annual Meeting Planning Committee will review the papers and the authors of the abstracts that are picked for presentation at the annual conference and possible subsequent publication in a symposium journal will be informed by no later than the end of June 2004.


Wednesday, May 12, 2004
 
Formalist Constitutionalism or Quasi-Parliamentarianism?
    Introduction Stephen Bainbridge and I have been engaged in a debate about the alternatives to an empowered realist judiciary. It started with my followed by Bainbridge's which prompted my to which Bainbridge replied in leading to my follwed by Bainbridge's final words in Clash and Consensus Bainbridge and I agree on an important point: unbounded judicial interpretation of the constitution threatens the rule of law, but we disagree about how to respond. I've argued for a revitalization of legal formalism and the appointment of judges with the virtue of justice--a disposition to follow the rules laid down and not to rely on one's own views about what the law should be. Bainbridge has argued for a quasi-parliamentary system of legislative supremacy, brought about, not through constitutional amendment, but instead through judicial nullification of the general and abstract provisions of the constitution that confer individual rights (e.g. freedom of speech, due process, equal protection, and privileges and immunities) and constrain government powers (e.g. the system of enumerated powers in Article I). Interestingly, our debate has not been focused on the normative question (which system is better?), but instead has centered around the question of comparative feasibility (which system is more likely to be a real and actual practical possibility?).
    Bainbridge argues that a return to legal formalism simply isn't feasible and that there is a real practical possibility of judicial transformation of our system into a quasi-parliamentary system. I've argued that there are structural obstacles to such a transformation and that a return to formalism is within the feasible choice set--at least in the long run.
    What I've Learned From my point of view, this has been a most satisfying exchange, because the disagreement between Bainbridge and myself has grown more focused, arguments have been extended, and new lines of argument have emerged. This will be my final post in the exchange, with comments on a few points, with a special emphasis on what I've learned from the exchange:
      The Role of the Legal Academy One of Bainbridge's really nice points is that a revitalization of legal formalism would require a transformation of the legal academy. As Bainbridge puts it, "Fixing legal education is critical because it is where the opinions of future judges are forged. Would Solum deny that the vast majority of modern legal elites have been inculcated with realism?" I agree with both points. Legal education is critical because it has a shaping effect on the legal culture, and realism currently dominates the legal academy. Of course, Bainbridge's point applies with substantial force to his own preferred alternative--a transition to a quasi-parliamentary system. Why? Because the same realist heritage that poses an obstacle for neoformalism also has inculcated "judicial supremacy" as a basic tenet of our legal culture. One way of seeing this point is to think about Brown v. Board. The unshakeability of Brown is deeply engrained in our legal culture, but quasi-parliamentarianism (in any truly consistent form) would require that Brown be overruled. Of course, its more than Brown, it is the entire corpus of free speech jurisprudence, the privacy cases (with Griswold rather than Roe as the decision that is considered untouchable). And I haven't yet mentioned the strong allegiance of (much of) the academic right to the Supreme Court's new federalism cases.
      But having conceded the real force of Bainbridge's point, I want to observe that radical academic transformations are not only possible, they are actually encouraged by important features of academic culture. The academy loves a paradigm shift, in which an older generation of scholars is pushed aside by adherents of a new paradigm. This occurred in the legal academy when the realists pushed aside an older generation of formalists.
      In my view, the realist program in legal theory is analagous to what the philospher of science, Imre Lakatos, called a "degenerating research program." The problems for legal realists continue to stack up, ignored or buried with elaborate rationalizations. Much of the most vibrant work in legal theory rejects the realist paradigm. This is most clearly the case in constitutional theory, where originalists of the left (Ackerman) and right (a whole host) hold center stage. Of course, paradigm shifts take years and decades, not weeks and months, but surely that is also the time frame for any possible transition to Bainbridgean quasi-parliamentarianism.
      The Path to Bainbridgean Quasi-Parliamentarianism In his most recent post, Bainbridge takes up the challenge to offer a specific mechanism for the transition to a quasi-parliamentary system, given the reality that judges who adhere to this radical paradigm must be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate (with the filibuster creating a veto gate for a minority party with effective control over 41 votes). Here is Bainbridge's suggestion:
        The nuclear option. Section 2 of Article III of the Constitution provides: "In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make." Let Congress exercise that power.
      In other words, Congress could deprive Supreme Court of appellate jurisdiction in order to prevent the Court from invalidating legislation. This could be done selectively (no jurisdiction in cases involving the Pledge of Allegiance or School Prayer) or across the board (no jurisdiction in cases involving a challenge to an Act of Congress). Wow! As Bainbridge undoubtedly knows, this option raises a host of issues. The use of the exceptions power might be struck down as a violation of the separation of powers if used to provide a "rule of decision," i.e. to determine the outcome of cases rather than for procedural purposes. Congress would also have to close the lower federal courts, or judicial power would simply be relocated from the Supreme Court to the Courts of Appeal. Even if all of the federal courts were closed, state courts would remain open, and additional complex constitutional questions are posed by any attempt to close all courts to a class of constitutional claims.
      And how would this legislation get through the Senate? (Let's assume the President supported it.) As Bainbridge predicted, "Prof. Solum will respond that any such attempt would be subject to Presidential vetoes and/or Senate filibusters. I'll concede in advance that it would be really tough to surmount those obstacles. Yet, I still think it would be easier than reviving formalism." But there is no possibility of the Democratic minority not filibustering such a jurisdiction stripping bill. There are structural reasons why Senators will not eliminate the filibuster (roughly, because the filibuster is an integral part of the system of Senatorial perogatives that enhance the power of each and every individual Senator).
      In other words, the elimination of judicial review through ordinary jurisdictional legislation is "pie in the sky," unless there is a fundamental realignment of political forces.
      The Feasibility of Formalism Of course, even if I'm right about the barriers to Bainbridgean quasi-parliamentarianism, there is still the very serious question whether a formalist revival is real and actual practical possibility. One of the nice things about the exchange is that I've learned that Bainbridge (and presumably many others) have a firm and abiding conviction that the possibility of formalist judging has been irretrievably lost. Here are my reactions to two of Bainbridge's specific points:
        Is Formalism Tilted? In Majoritarianism, Formalism, and the Feasible Choice Set, I presented a model of the judicial selection process. The model predicts that formalist judges are in the feasible choice set. Although the right prefers right-realist judges and the left prefers left-realist judges, both left and right can compromise on formalist judges who are somewhere in the political center. Bainbridge challenges one of the premises of the model with the following argument:
          [F]ormalism will be perceived as having an ideological component, then Solum's feasibility argument collapses because formalists will be perceived (often wrongly) by the left as being unconfirmable rightwingers.
        This is an important move--one that I've encountered in many conversations about neoformalism. If legal formalism favors the right, then the left will exercise its control over various veto gates (e.g. filibuster of judicial nominees) to prevent a transition to formalism. A thorough discussion is the topic of a separate post (or law review article), but in my opinion, the key to the issue is the role of precedent in a neoformalist theory of constitutional interpretation. If neoformalist judges begin with the tradition notion of respect from strong stare decisis, formalism is a live option for bo the left and the right. I believe that the strongest version of neoformalism does incorporate a very muscular doctrine of precedent. You can find my arguments for this thesis in a series of three posts The Case for Strong Stare Decisis, or Why Should Neoformalists Care About Precedent? Part I: The Three Step Argument, Part II: Stare Decisis and the Ratchet, and Part III: Precedent and Principle. Very roughly, formalism that incorporates stare decisis would lead to a gradual transition from the current mixed Warren-Burger-Rehnquist court legacy to an originalist constitutional jurisprudence over a period of several decades.
          Update: Matthew Yglesias makes a related point in a post entitled Feasible Choices (about which I may have more to say later), asking whether someone like Randy Barnett would be in the confirmation zone? Of course, Barnett has no track record as a judge creating information problems. But suppose we had a Barnett counterpart, who had served as a Court of Appeals judge or state supreme court justice. My view is that under the right political conditions the confirmability of a candidate like Barnett would depend on the candidate's attitude towards precedent. Barnett himself has not articulated his theory of the relationship between precedent and original meaning, but as a judge he would have been prompted to do this on many occasions.
        Has the Virtue of Justice Vanished? Bainbridge has another objection to the feasibility of a neoformalist revival: "Prof. Solum seems to be operating on faith - belief in things unseen. Specifically, faith that there is a pool of formalists who would be appointable and acceptable to both sides of the partisan divide." Or as he asked in an email, Is there "really is a pool of formalists out there?" Great question!
        From my point of view, Bainbridge's question can be reformulated as: "Does anyone posssess the virtue of justice--the disposition to decide cases on the basis of the rules laid down and to resist the temptation to decide on the basis of one's own view of what the law should be?" Or to put the question a bit differently, "Has the prevalence of legal realism and the politicization of the judicary so degraded the character of American lawyers and judges so that the vice of legal realism has become pervasive?" This is, of course, a complex empirical question. In this post, I can only offer personal testimony. My sense is that many lawyers and judges have the virtue of justice. But I also think that in the current political environment, the ordinary lawyer or judge who believes in decision on the basis of the rules laid down rather than political ideology is very unlikely to receive much attention from the legal academy or from those who screen candidates for the Supreme Court.
        Moreover, the virtue of justice will flourish when it is supported and wither in a hostile environment. Commitment to the rule of law begins to look foolish when ideological judging is the norm, but in an environement where the virtue of justice was supported and reinforced, one would expect that the complex dispositions that constitute the virtue would become stronger and more prevalent. Thus, we would expect that the appointment of a neoformalist majority on the Supreme Court would establish the conditions where formalism could flourish among the judges of the lower federal courts.
      A Meta-Theoretical Point About Feasibility There is one final point where the exchange with Bainbridge has been edifying. How should legal theorists argue about feasibility? I suggested:
        Bainbridge’s argument relies in a crucial way on our intuitive sense of what is feasible and what is utopian. But feasibility isn’t really an intuitable quality!
      Bainbridge replied:
        What else do we have to rely on? Solum and I agree that the system is broken. Solum says: Let's try "Aretaic Judicial Selection." I say "It won't work." We're both making predictions. We both must make our best guess as to what the future would hold under specified conditions. If politics is the art of the possible, we have to use our informed intuition as to what is possible.
      I don't want to reply, but I do want to make an observation. I'm convinced of two points: (1) Arguments about feasibility often do the crucial work in superficially normative disputes within legal theory, and (2) Well-grounded theories should replace intuitions (informed or not) as the basis for resolving feasibility issues. Clearly, I have not been able to communicate these points in a manner that Bainbridge finds persuasive. The lesson for me is that more work is required on this issue.
    Conclusion By way of conclusion, let me simply thank Bainbridge for his generosity as a partner in this extended exchange. He has been uniformly fair and especially responsive to some very long posts! Be sure to read his lastet post in full!


 
Forbath on Ferejohn & Sager William E. Forbath (University of Texas at Austin - School of Law) has posted The Politics of Constitutional Design: Obduracy and Amendability - A Comment on Ferejohn and Sager (Texas Law Review, Vol. 81, p. 1966, 2003) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    John Ferejohn and Larry Sager's contribution to this Symposium on Precommitments offers an elegant and important argument in praise of Article V and the obduracy of the United States Constitution. I think it is wide of the mark. For them, the key purpose served by obduracy is this: A constitution as hard to amend as ours will be more likely than others to assure the realization of that constitution's substantive normative commitments - more likely, that is, to bring to earth the constitution's commitments to liberty, equality, and the like. But Ferejohn and Sager's argument is too categorical to persuade. True, a significant degree of obduracy may help attain the constitutional goods they highlight: broadly worded justice-seeking amendatory language, and constitutional courts authorized and able to make the commitments workable and real. However, both logic and experience suggest that amendment rules need not be remotely as obdurate as ours to provide what support such rules can offer to securing those goods. More than that, obduracy on the order of the U.S. Constitution may actually erode and thwart a nation's capacity for realizing many of its deepest constitutional commitments. Ferejohn and Sager's commitment-centered case on behalf of Article V rests on a court-centered model of how the Constitution's substantive commitments have been elaborated and enforced. According to this model, popular challenges to judicial interpretations have been a threat to the realization of those commitments. Because popular oversight of the process of constitutional interpretation and enforcement is a threat, we are fortunate that Article V makes such involvement and oversight an extremely daunting, protracted and procrastinating process. But this model is too simple by half. Popular constitutional politics, including popular challenges to judicial interpretations, have had a more complex relationship to judge-made constitutional law. Popular political challenges have been both a threat to and an essential source of the justice-seeking elaboration of the Constitution's substantive commitments. Social movements, including popular efforts to amend the Constitution, have proved an indispensable crucible of the very judicial interpretations Ferejohn and Sager prize. A Constitution too obdurate can and, in several important cases, has stifled this generative process. If that is the case, then the design objective Ferejohn and Sager invoke in defense of obduracy demands instead a balancing of obduracy and amendability; or so this essay argues, via whirlwind tour of twentieth-century U.S. constitutional history and a comparative coda that takes a glimpse at how well the experience of other nations seems to square with Ferejohn and Sager's thesis.


 
Yuracko on Trait Discrimination Kim Yuracko (Northwestern University School of Law) has posted Trait Discrimination as Sex Discrimination: An Argument Against Neutrality (Texas Law Review, Vol. 83, 2004) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Title VII prohibits discrimination whereby women or men are denied employment opportunities because of their status as such. Much of the employment discrimination taking place today, however, targets not all women or men, but only those with particular traits or characteristics - for example, women who are aggressive, or men who are effeminate. This article addresses the question of when, if ever, "trait discrimination" is actionable sex discrimination under Title VII. The dominant response advocated by scholars has been to require employers to act in a rigid and formalistically sex-neutral manner toward their employees. If an employer allows female employees to wear dresses, the employer must allow male employees to wear dresses as well. To do otherwise is actionable sex discrimination. This paper suggests a new response to trait discrimination that returns to Title VII's original focus on ending status-based hierarchy. The power/access approach advocated in this paper treats trait discrimination as actionable sex discrimination only when it stems from gender norms and scripts that are themselves incompatible with sex equality in the workplace. The paper contends, in contrast to most current argument, that rigid sex neutrality is neither required by Title VII nor socially desirable.


 
Lash Responds to Barnett Kurt Lash responds to Randy Barnett's post entitled The Stubbornness of Facts: Judicial Conservatives and the Ninth Amendment (responding to Kurt's email posted at Lash on Barnett & the Ninth Amendment). Here are the comments that Kurt emailed for posting:
    Randy Barnett has responded to my encouragement that he address newly discovered (or newly understood) evidence regarding the original meaning of the Ninth Amendment. Neither Randy nor I can fully develop our points within the confines of the blogsphere (I fear I cannot even claim to have a blog of my own). I'm sure both Randy and I hope that those who are interested will consult not only our work, but the actual historical documents.
    But before proceeding further in a mini-debate, I want to acknowledge the very important work Randy Barnett has done on the Ninth Amendment. His two-volume compilation of essays on the Ninth focused scholarly attention on an amendment which, since 1937, had been largely forgotten. Although Randy has departed somewhat from his original arguments regarding the Ninth, he has developed new and significant theories regarding the necessary and proper clause and limits on federal power. For this reason, his latest book is an important work and it deserves to be read.
    But Randy's work on the original meaning of the Ninth Amendment was penned before significant historical evidence came to light. This evidence not only illuminates the original meaning of the Ninth, it also casts a very different light on evidence which Randy continues to rely upon in his critique of other scholars. My post on Larry Solum's website was intended to encourage Randy to acknowledge this evidence and its significance for anyone interested in the original meaning of the Ninth Amendment.
    I believe the evidence suggests that the Ninth Amendment originally was understood to limit the construction of federal power in order to maximize the people's freedom to regulate all non-delegated subjects at a state level. This is how Madison understood the Ninth Amendment, and this is how courts construed the Ninth Amendment for close to two hundred years. The very first Supreme Court opinion discussing the Ninth Amendment, written by Justice Joseph Story, applied the Ninth Amendment in just this manner. I have presented this evidence in two articles, both currently posted on the SSRN website and both are to be published in the Texas Law Review. Randy is correct: The articles are long and they have "gobs of footnotes."
    In his post, Randy makes essentially three points about my first article. First, he associates my work with that of Caplan and McAffee. There is nothing to say about this beyond noting that Caplan and McAffee also have done important work on the Ninth Amendment. Randy knows my argument is based on historical fact and that I do not "dismiss" the Ninth or call for it to be ignored, but present it as a textual basis for judicial enforcement of federalism.
    Randy's second point is that I have vastly over-stated the novelty of the evidence in the first article (Randy does not discuss the second piece). Once again, this seems more rhetorical than substantive. In the article, I make clear that some of the evidence I present is new, while other evidence has been known about, but now can be viewed in a new light given newly discovered evidence. Randy concedes that some of the evidence I present is in fact "new and interesting." In fact, there is more than Randy mentions. Together, the two articles discuss the state precursors to the Ninth (which Randy has not discussed), the Virginia debate (which no one has), Roger Sherman's version of the Ninth (which Randy has not discussed), Madison's draft veto of the Bank Bill (which no one has addressed but which seriously calls into question Randy's analysis of Madison's Bank speech), the first Supreme Court opinion discussing the Ninth (which no one has even known about), and over one hundred years of jurisprudence (which no one has discussed). And this does not include how this new evidence sheds significant light on previously known materials like Madison's letters and speeches. Perhaps I have vastly over-stated the novelty of all this, but I don't think so. In the end, however, it is not novelty that matters, but whether this "lost history" helps to illuminate the original meaning of the Ninth Amendment and its relationship to the Fourteenth Amendment.
    This leaves Randy's third response. He writes that the "centerpiece" of my article involves a "new an interesting" debate regarding the Ninth Amendment which occurred in the Virginia Assembly and which until now, as Randy points out, has "gone unexamined in the literature." Readers unfamiliar with Ninth Amendment scholarship may not fully grasp Randy's comments or why the Virginia debates might be important. In this forum I can only briefly trace the issue.
    Up until now, one of the few pieces of evidence scholars had regarding Madison's vision of the Ninth Amendment was a letter Madison sent to President Washington. In that letter, Madison reported that Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph objected to the final language of the Ninth Amendment. Randolph preferred Madison's original draft of the Ninth which had used language similar to that suggested by the Virginia ratification convention. Madison's original draft included a rule of interpretation which prohibited the constructive enlargement of federal power, while the final draft spoke only of guarding retained rights. Randolph feared that the effect of the Ninth had been altered. Madison, however, believed that Randolph's fear was unwarranted (altogether fanciful). In his letter, Madison wrote that both the original and final drafts accomplished the same thing: "[I]f a line can be drawn between the powers granted and the rights retained, it would seem to be the same thing whether the latter be secured by declaring that they shall not be abridged, or that the former shall not be extended."
    A number of scholars, including Randy, have struggled with this letter, for it appears to adopt what some have called the "rights-powers" fallacy whereby limiting power amounts to the same thing as protecting rights. Randy in particular has argued that Madison did not mean to embrace such a fallacy, but was merely noting two complementary strategies for protecting individual rights-and the final version of the Ninth adopted the strategy of protecting (non-enumerated) retained rights.
    Whether or not one finds Randy's argument plausible (the letter does seem to adopt the "fallacy"), what is surprising is that no Ninth Amendment scholar had previously explored Randolph's objections. Randolph's preference was for the Virginia convention's drafts of what would become our Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Those drafts prohibited expansive interpretations of federal power and further declared "that each state in the Union shall respectively retain every power, jurisdiction and right, which is not by this constitution delegated to the congress of the United States." Madison did not respond to Randolph's concerns by denying states retained every power jurisdiction and right. Instead, he argued that Randolph's distinction between the original and final version of the Ninth was "altogether fanciful." Both the original and final draft of the Ninth accomplished Randolph's desired objective.
    To Randolph, however, Madison's arguments were no more than "plausible." In fact, Randolph initially halted Virginia's drive towards ratification of the Bill of Rights due to his concerns about the Ninth Amendment. The Virginia Senate ended up drafting a report calling on Congress to clarify whether the final version of the Ninth was meant to track Virginia's original federalist proposal or whether it was some kind of effort to protect individual rights. The preference of the Virginia Assembly was obvious. Unfortunately, anti-federalists in Virginia managed to exploit Randolph's concerns (which he soon withdrew) and delay ratification for two years. During that time, Madison-Virginia's Representative--delivered a major speech on the Bank of the United States in which he expressly linked the Ninth with the Tenth Amendment, both standing as guardians of state autonomy. Virginia was entitled to rely on this description of the Ninth Amendment and, months later, Virginia ratified ten amendments, including the Ninth.
    The Virginia debate is significant for a number of reasons. Randolph wanted an amendment which adopted Virginia's (and other states') demand that construction of federal power be limited in order to preserve autonomy of the states. Madison's statement that the final language of the Ninth accomplished the same thing as Randolph's preferred version suggests that Madison shared a federalist reading of the final Ninth Amendment (a point confirmed in Madison's speech on the Bank of the United States). The Virginia debate not only helps to clarify Madison's letter, it also reveals that the key state of Virginia demanded a "federalist Ninth" and ratified only after a public speech by Madison in which he declared that the proposed Ninth in fact stood as an expression of federalism. Finally, the controversy arose only in one state, suggesting that the other states were not similarly concerned that the effect of the amendment had changed from its initial to its final draft. As much as Randy might want to focus on the changed language of the Ninth and Virginia's complaint, the fact remains that Madison's original version of the Ninth satisfied those who called for a federalist provision, Madison described the final version as satisfying those concerns, and he gave a major speech in which he publicly explained (to, among others, a state assembly thinking about ratifying the amendment) that the final version of the Ninth worked alongside the Tenth Amendment to preserve state autonomy.
    But the story does not end with Madison. In the first Supreme Court opinion to discuss the Ninth Amendment, Joseph Story followed the lead of James Madison (who had appointed Story) and described the Ninth as a provision which limited the construction of federal power in order to preserve the concurrent powers of the states. This federalist reading of the Ninth Amendment was repeated by court after court for two hundred years. All of this is presented in the second article.
    This is but a brief summary of the evidence and the arguments I lay out in my articles. There is much more. I encourage those who are interested to explore the historical record-whether in my articles or in Randy's books-and come to their own conclusions.
    Two final points, however: First, the above refers mainly to the original meaning of the Ninth Amendment and does not address the impact of the Fourteenth Amendment. I discuss this issue in the second article. Secondly, I have referred to several examples of Founders linking either an early draft or the final version of the Ninth to principles of federalism. There is no historical evidence that any Founder referred to the Ninth Amendment as protecting unenumerated individual natural rights.
    Again, I appreciate Randy's willingness to address the evidence and I look forward to our further discussions.
A very interesting debate!


 
Conference Announcement: Reasonable Questioning: Scanlon & the Contractualist Picture of Morality
    University of London School of Advanced Study PHILOSOPHY PROGRAMME presents a Two-day Conference REASONABLE QUESTIONING: SCANLON AND THE CONTRACTUALIST PICTURE OF MORALITY 10.00 A.M. TO 5.45 P.M., FRIDAY 4 & SATURDAY 5 JUNE 2004 THIRD FLOOR, SENATE HOUSE, LONDON WC1 with the generous support of MIND and the British Academy PROGRAMME Running schedule to be determined shortly please check webpage below for updates. To Register please email philprog@sas.ac.uk with 4/5 June as the subject header. Special Fees Apply to be taken on the first day. Confirmed Speakers
      Stephen EVERSON (York) Frances KAMM (Harvard) Jimmy LENMAN (Sheffield) Veronique MUNOZ-DARDE (UCL) David OWENS (Sheffield) T M SCANLON (Harvard) Andrew WILLIAMS (Reading)
    Confirmed Respondents
      Mark KALDERON (UCL) Hallvard LILLEHAMMER (Cambridge) Mike MARTIN (UCL) Martin O'NEILL (Harvard) Mike OTSUKA (UCL)
    Convened by Veronique Munoz-Darde TWO DAY FEES SCHEDULE (please settle on first day) MEMBERS-CONCESSIONS (Students, Retired, Unwaged) £10 STANDARD £20 (including London Faculty) NON-MEMBERS- CONCESSIONS (Students, Retired, Unwaged) £25 STANDARD £30 MEMBERS Individual Philosophy Programme Subscribers OR Current Staff and Students of the Philosophy Departments at the following Universities: University of London (Birkbeck, Heythrop, Kings, LSE, UCL, IoE); APU; Birmingham; Bristol; Cambridge Hertfordshire; Keele; Kent; Manchester; Middlesex; Nottingham; Open; Oxford; Reading; Southampton; Surrey; Sussex; UEA; Warwick; York Cheques (on day) payable to "UNIVERSITY OF LONDON" http://www.sas.ac.uk/philosophy/REASONABLE_QUESTIONING.htm


 
Call for Papers: Studies in the History of Ethics
    Studies in the History of Ethics (SHE) is a new peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing articles and critical discussions that not only meet the highest standards of historical scholarship, but also contribute to the philosophical understanding of perennial problems within ethics. SHE welcomes submissions of manuscripts addressing any of the following from a historical perspective:
      • ethical theory/normative ethics • metaethics • applied ethics • moral psychology • social and political philosophy • legal philosophy
    SHE will publish its first volume in fall 2004. To be included in this first issue, submissions should reach the editors by July 15, 2004. Please visit SHE at www.historyofethics.org for more information. Thank you! Michael Cholbi Department of Philosophy, Cal Poly Pomona mjcholbi@csupomona.edu


 
Wednesday Calendar
    At Oxford's Jurisprudence Discussion Group, Timothy Endicott presents The One True Interpretation.


Tuesday, May 11, 2004
 
Woolhandler & Nelson on Standing Ann Woolhandler and Caleb Nelson (University of Virginia - School of Law and University of Virginia - School of Law) have posted Does History Defeat Standing Doctrine? (Michigan Law Review, Vol. 102, February 2004) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Although the modern Supreme Court claims historical support for refusing to let private parties who have suffered no concrete private injury ask federal courts to redress harms to the public at large, academic critics have insisted that the law of standing is a twentieth-century invention of federal judges. In earlier eras, the critics argue, the recognized forms of action might have required plaintiffs to have particular injuries in order to make out specific claims, but there was no generalized standing law, and certainly no constitutional requirement of individualized injury for people challenging governmental action. This article disagrees. In the nineteenth century, courts enforced an active law of standing (although not so called) that cut across various causes of action, and that reflected the distinction between public and private rights. Courts regularly designated some areas of litigation as being under public control and others as being under private control. What is more, and contrary to the standing critics, the Supreme Court often did discuss these issues in constitutional terms, particularly in actions against federal and state governmental officials. We do not claim that history compels acceptance of the modern Supreme Court’s vision of standing, or that the constitutional nature of standing doctrine was crystal clear from the moment of the founding on. The subsistence of qui tam actions alone might be enough to refute any such suggestion. We do, however, argue that history does not defeat standing doctrine; the notion of standing is not an innovation, and its constitutionalization does not contradict a settled historical consensus about the Constitution's meaning.


 
Carrier on Curbing Intellectual Property Michael A. Carrier (Rutgers University School of Law - Camden) has posted Cabining Intellectual Property Through a Property Paradigm (Duke Law Journal, Vol. 54, P. 1, October 2004) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    One of the most revolutionary legal changes in the past generation has been the "propertization" of intellectual property (IP). Rights, duration, and subject matter expand without limit, and courts and companies treat IP as absolute property, bereft of any restraints. But astonishingly, scholars have not yet recognized that propertization can also lead to the narrowing of intellectual property. In contrast to much of the literature, which criticizes the propertization of IP, this Article takes it as a given. For the transformation is irreversible, sinking its tentacles further into public and corporate consciousness (as well as the IP laws) with each passing day, and precluding the likelihood that we will return to the pre-propertization era. This Article therefore ventures onto a new path, one that follows property into unexpected briar patches of limits. The secret here is that property is not as absolute as it is often claimed to be. After surveying fifty-five doctrines in property law, Professor Carrier synthesizes limits based on development, necessity, and equity. He then utilizes these limits to construct a new paradigm for intellectual property. The paradigm facilitates the reorganization of defenses currently recognized by courts as well as a more robust set of defenses, which include (1) a new tripartite fair use doctrine in copyright law, (2) a new defense for public health emergencies and a recovered experimental use defense and reverse doctrine of equivalents in patent law, (3) a development-based limit to trademark dilution, and (4) a functional use defense for the right of publicity. By adopting the paradigm of property, intellectual property has opened the door to limits. The time has come to rediscover these limits. The future of innovation and democracy lie in the balance.


 
Spiro Reviews Aleinikoff Peter J. Spiro (Hofstra University School of Law) has posted The Impossibility of Citizenship (Michigan Law Review, Vol. 101, pp. 1492-1511) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This essay reviews T. Alexander Aleinikoff's Semblances of Sovereignty: The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship (Harvard University Press, 2002). The book considers the constitutional marginalization of Native Americans, aliens, and residents of Puerto Rico and other unincorporated territories. In Aleinikoff's view, citizenship supplies both the explanation for and the answer to the subordination of these communities. Citizenship has been a powerfully equalizing force in the American constitutional tradition for those within the circle. Insofar as rights have been made contingent on citizenship status, however, those outside are left without constitutional armor. Aleinikoff suggests a reconception of citizenship, extending core constitutional status to those for whom citizenship is not a constitutional entitlement (namely, Native Americans and territorial residents) as well as to some who are not citizens at all (permanent resident aliens). With citizenship as a baseline, the argument is a powerful one. But one might at a more fundamental level question the continuing utility of that baseline and of citizenship as an institution. An emerging body of postnational scholarship is challenging citizenship and the nation-state as delimitations of human community, posing instead diasporas, social movements, and other nonstate groupings as competing locations of identity and governance. Aleinikoff brackets the postnational assault; he is seeking to transform citizenship, not transcend it. In this respect, the analysis presents more of an exercise in recentering citizenship than - as claimed - one of decentering it. But the postnational challenge is unavoidably implicated in any attempt to deploy citizenship as an institutional vehicle. Even as an expansive and benign quantity, Aleinikoff's vision of citizenship may suffer the same problems as its exclusionary predecessors: however the circle is drawn, many are left out, including many with deep attachments to the national community. To the extent, on the other hand, that the circle is drawn ever more widely, the tie that citizenship is understood to represent grows ever thinner. This dynamic would seem to present an inescapable dilemma for the institution of liberal citizenship, and perhaps for liberalism itself.


 
Zaring on Institutional Reform Litigation David T. Zaring (New York University - School of Law) has posted National Rulemaking Through Trial Courts: The Big Case and Institutional Reform (UCLA Law Review, Vol. 51, No. 1015, 2004) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Institutional reform lawsuits - big cases involving the structural reform of local government entities such as prisons and housing authorities - have traditionally been analyzed in two ways: either as unique exercises of judicial power or as party-driven examples of small-scale government by negotiation. To these traditional descriptive approaches, this article adds a third. If examined through a wider lens, institutional reform litigation has national, systemic implications, and, indeed, can create uniform federal law. This law is not imposed vertically, by appellate tribunals, but rather spreads horizontally, from trial court to trial court, like nodes in a nationwide network. The article accordingly focuses on the structural character of institutional reform litigation from a national perspective. As it turns out, the system operates through information exchanges by repeat players who participate in multiple institutional reform cases, most commonly as counsel or expert witnesses, but also as parties (or, occasionally, judges) involved in multiple lawsuits. These participants facilitate the adoption of common standards by preferring familiar remedies, by valuing interoperability between cases, and by succumbing to the inertial momentum that these preferences, when placed in the context of the system, can create. The result is a different kind of law, one low on reasoned elaboration and high on best-practices-style copying. The article describes the phenomenon and analyzes it through two qualitative case studies. It also reviews the prior literature on institutional reform litigation and compares the network to other examples of regulatory standardization from below. Although principally descriptive, the article concludes with a brief evaluation of the implications of ad hoc standardization through trial court litigation.


 
Petit on the Ninth, Glorious or Otherwise Over at Scrivener's Error, C.E. Petit has a post entitled The Not-So-Glorious Ninth, commenting on recent posts by Bainbridge and myself.


 
Barnett on Lash Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Randy Barnett assesses Kurt Lash's recent scholarship on the Ninth Amendment in a post entitled The Stubbornness of Facts: Judicial Conservatives and the Ninth Amendment. As readers of this blog know, I'm a big fan of both Kurt and Randy's work. Randy's post is just the first move in what is likely to be a very illuminating debate--most of which will likely be conducted in the law journals rather than the blogosphere.


 
Tuesday Calendar
    At the University of Chicago's law and economics series, Roberta Romano, Yale Law School, presents Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Making of Quack Corporate Governance
    At Oxford, David Wiggins presents the Hart Memorial Lecture.
    At Texas, Louise Weinberg (University of Texas) presents Back to the Future: The New General Common Law.


Monday, May 10, 2004
 
Moving Day Displacement of Concepts has a new URL: http://lawblog.uea.ac.uk/


 
More on the Privileges and Immunities Clause Judge Michael McConnell (in my view one of the very best appellate judges on the federal bench) writes to remind me that my post on Originalism & Liberty left out one the major interpretation of the privileges or immunities of citizens: that it protects rights recognized by a consensus of the states (not unanimous) over a reasonably long period of time. Judge McConnell has labeled this traditionalist interpretation. He defends it in The Right to Die and the Jurisprudence of Tradition, 1997 Utah L Rev. 665 and Originalism and the Desegregation Decisions, 81 Va L Rev 947, esp 990-1043. I have always been attracted by this interpretation. My sense is that on the state-consensus interpretation of the Clause, Lawrence might be considered premature--incorporating the right before the consensus among the states was sufficiently wide and deep.


 
Majoritarianism, Formalism, and the Feasible Choice Set
    Introduction Stephen Bainbridge has a characteristically thoughtful reply to my post entitled The Bainbridgean Argument for Judicial Nullification of the Constitution. The context for our exchange is the minor blogosphere eruption that centers around Randy Barnett’s defense of the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas (see my prior posts here and here. When it comes to the abstract and general provisions in the Constitution, Bainbridge is properly worried about the problem of unconstrained discretion.
    Bainbridge’s Radical Suggestion As I wrote in my prior post:
      [Bainbridge’s] position implies that because such abstract and general provisions (even when read in light of evidence of their original meaning) do not sufficiently constrain judicial discretion, they should be subject to judicial nullification. . . . Bainbridge's argument would give judges authority to transform a constitution that was intended to provide the federal government limited power further constrained by broad and abstract rights (both enumerated and retained) into a constitution of plenary power, constrained only by the limited and narrowly cabined rights, such as those provided by the Second, Third, and Thirteenth Amendments. In other words, Bainbridge has a theory of constitutional interpretation that would give judges the authority to enact Bainbridge's preferred political theory into constitutional law.
    Essentially, Bainbridge would have judges engage in a process of construction that would transform the American system of checks and balances, enumerated federal power, and constitutional protection of individual rights (freedom of speech, equal protection, due process, privileges and immunities, and retained rights) into something like the English system of parliamentary supremacy, that is unlimited legislative power without constitutional protection for individual liberty.
    I am quite sure that Bainbridge does not offer this radical suggestion lightly. He is responding to a real problem in American constitutional theory and practice. The politicization of the judiciary plus the general and abstract language of the individual rights, separation of powers, and federalism provisions of the United States Constitution slowly but surely created a judiciary that sometimes views constitutional interpretation as the appropriate vehicle for enacting personal beliefs about what the law should be into binding constitutional law. This is a real worry, and it is not surprising that it would produce radical proposals, like Bainbridge’s proposal for judicial rewriting of the Constitution. From the other end of the political spectrum, Sandy Levinson and Jack Balkin propose that constitutional interpretation should be conducted as “high politics,” with political factions struggling to control the judiciary in order to enact their constitutional agendas into constitutional law.
    There is an important sense in which Bainbridge’s radical legislative-supremacy proposal shares a deep assumption with the high-politics notion advanced by Balkin and Levinson. Both of these radical suggestions are premised on the idea that a written constitution with general and abstract provisions is not susceptible to formalist interpretation. Both positions suggest that law be replaced with politics. Both ideas are based on a loss of constitutional faith.
    Trying Times In candor, I must admit that these are trying times for those who place their faith in the rule of law. The rule of law is threatened. Important political actors have openly abandoned even the pretence that constitutional adjudication is law application and not law making. Perhaps the most prominent example is Senator Charles Schumer’s op/ed Judging by Ideology which argued for the proposition that political ideology and not character or competence should be the explicit basis for Democratic opposition to Republican judicial nominees. Applying a little bit of game theory, one is tempted to say: “The other side is attempting to entrench their agenda as constitutional law by politicizing the judiciary. We would be suckers not to do the same.” Of course, if both sides conceptualize the problem in this way, we have a classic prisoner’s dilemma.
    The Formalist Alternative In my post replying to Bainbridge, I suggested that constitutional faith might be restored, if we could change our practices of judicial selection:
      [O]ur practices of judicial selection must be changed. For our constitutional system to work, judges must be selected for excellence (or judicial virtue) and not on the basis of their political ideology. In particular, judges should be selected for their possession of the virtue of justice--the disposition to decide cases on the basis of the rules laid down and not on the basis of their own theory of what the law should be. If I might be permitted a rhetorical flourish, realism is not a theory, it is a vice--a defect of judicial character.
    I have recently defended this idea at length in two essays: The Aretaic Turn in Constitutional Theory and Judicial Selection: Ideology versus Character.
    Bainbridge’s Reply: The Feasibility Objection The core of Bainbridge’s reply to my suggestion is to argue that a return to formalist is not feasible. Here is what Bainbridge wrote. I quote at length, with some added highlighting:
      Unfortunately, like a lot of attractive visions, I believe his solution suffers from what Harold Demsetz calls the Nirvana fallacy. Economist Demsetz developed the fallacy as a response to those who advocate government intervention whenever there is a perceived market failure. The fallacy assumes that government actors are disinterested, fully informed, and endowed with perfect foresight. Because these assumptions do not hold in the real world one cannot assume government intervention will be superior to imperfect markets.
      Believing we can get to Solum's attractive vision of the judiciary requires us to assume that Presidents can be induced to make disinterested and fully informed decisions about judicial nominations - that they will in fact nominate judges who can be predicted with confidence to hold to the formalist approach. Then you have to believe that the incredibly broken Senate process of advice and consent can be reformed so that disinterested Senators will make fully informed decisions to approve only those judges who can be counted on (with perfect foresight) to adhere to the formalist approach. Finally, you have to assume that judges will be disinterested decisionmakers who can apply the formalist approach with perfect information and foresight.
      I trust Prof. Solum will forgive me for believing that we cannot get there from here. We would not only have to fix the nomination process, his vision likely would require radical changes not just to politics but also to legal education itself. I believe it was Judge Richard Posner who claimed: we are all realists now. Legal realism is the sworn enemy of Prof. Solum's formalism, which is a problem for him because legal realism is the dominant model of legal thought in the academy and profession.
      If we can't get there from here, I would prefer a parliamentary system in which democratic majorities acting through Congress and the President can trump judicial decisions. As imperfect as the political process is in a world of campaign finance abuses and gerrymandering, legislators are still more accountable than unelected judges.
      Can we get there from here? I don't know. Congress and Presidents have learned that it is easy to duck hard questions and leave them to courts. Courts have learned that the people and their representatives will simply roll over and play dead no matter how much of American life is swept into the judicial arena. My guess, however, is that it would be easier to get to a quasi-parliamentary system than to a regime of legal formalism.
    I find Bainbridge’s remarks to be wonderfully illuminating. So let’s dig deep into his idea that we should prefer a quasi-parliamentary constitutional system over a formalist system on the grounds that the former is comparatively more feasible than the latter.
    The Feasible Choice Set By invoking feasibility as the basis for choice between competing solutions to the problem of discretion, Bainbridge has raised one of the most interesting and under theorized notions in contemporary legal theory. When it comes to normative argument, the standards of legal theory are demanding. There is a rich tradition of sophisticated normative arguments made within particular normative legal theories (e.g., normative law and economics, deontological legal theory, virtue jurisprudence, etc.). When it comes to feasibility, however, the situation is a bit different. Lots of feasibility arguments are made by legal theorists. Think about how frequently one hears or reads the catch phrase “second best” and references to the distinction between ideal and nonideal theory.
    But arguments about feasibility rarely have the depth and sophistication that is now routine in normative legal argumentation. Bainbridge’s recent post is a good example. Recall that he wrote:
      Believing we can get to Solum's attractive vision of the judiciary requires us to assume that Presidents can be induced to make disinterested and fully informed decisions about judicial nominations - that they will in fact nominate judges who can be predicted with confidence to hold to the formalist approach. Then you have to believe that the incredibly broken Senate process of advice and consent can be reformed so that disinterested Senators will make fully informed decisions to approve only those judges who can be counted on (with perfect foresight) to adhere to the formalist approach. Finally, you have to assume that judges will be disinterested decisionmakers who can apply the formalist approach with perfect information and foresight.
    And why are these assumptions unrealistic:
      [W]e cannot get [to formalist judges] from here. We would not only have to fix the nomination process, his vision likely would require radical changes not just to politics but also to legal education itself. I believe it was Judge Richard Posner who claimed: we are all realists now.
    If you read gobs and gobs of legal scholarship (as I do), this kind of move will be quite familiar to you. Bainbridge does a terrific job, but you will notice that he doesn’t actually provide arguments as to why the various assumptions he notes are unrealistic. Moreover, he fails to provide a warrant for his implicit assumptions that (1) we cannot fix the judicial nomination process, and (2) we cannot make radical changes to legal education.
    The Role of Feasibility Intuitions in Bainbridge’s Argument So Bainbridge’s argument relies in a crucial way on our intuitive sense of what is feasible and what is utopian. But feasibility isn’t really an intuitable quality! When legal theorists appeal to a normative intuition in such a casual, off-handed, way, they are properly called to account: What normative theory grounds your intuition? and What argument can you produce for that normative conclusion? Feasibility judgments are complex modal judgments about possible states of affairs. These judgments are entangled with facts about the world as it is, and with counterfactual propositions about what would happen given certain assumptions. These counterfactual propositions cannot simply be plucked out of the air. They must be given some grounding. For that grounding to be rigorous and well-supported, it must relate is an appropriate way to the social sciences—to game theory, public choice theory, or sociology, for example. When a legal theorist asserts, that option Y should be preferred to option X, because Y is feasible and X is infeasible, the theorist should be prepared to provide the warrant for the assertion in the form of some theory or account of feasibility.
    Comparative Feasibility: Bainbridgean Legislative Supremacy versus Aretaic Judicial Selection Sorry about the long-winded wind up. Let’s now get to the heart of the matter. Recall Bainbridge’s crucial claim:
      [I]t would be easier to get to a quasi-parliamentary system than to a regime of legal formalism.
    This is the heart of the issue. How does Bainbridgean Legislative Supremacy stack up against Aretaic Judicial Selection with respect to the criterion of feasibility? Like Bainbridge (who was very fair and careful in his statement of his claims), I want to acknowledge that there is room for disagreement, and that I will put forward claims and arguments that are plausible and that I believe are best supported by the evidence. I will proceed as follows. First, I will make an observation about feasibility in relationship to historical change. Second, I will advance a three step argument against Bainbridge’s assertion that legislative supremacy is politically more feasible than formalist judging. So here goes:
      An Observation About Feasibility and Historical Change Let me begin with an observation. Our intuitions about feasibility seem to be historically contingent. Thus, one can readily imagine a constitutional theorist in the 1980s making the claim that revitalization of the federalism limits created by the Commerce Clause of the Constitution was simply not feasible. But only a few years later, Lopez and Morrison (the two “new federalism” cases) were decided by the Supreme Court and our judgments about what is feasible and what isn’t have to be radically revised. In other words, it is quite natural for us to mistake historically contingent circumstances for inevitable limits on the feasible choice set. My point here is quite modest: we should be suspicious of our intuitions about feasibility. What seems out of the question at time T1 may be within the feasible choice set at time T2.
      A Three Step Approach to the Question of Comparative Feasibility With this observation in place, our analysis of the question of comparative feasibility can proceed in three steps:
        1. Is Legislative Supremacy Feasible? The first question we need to ask is whether judicial creation of a quasi-parliamentary system is politically feasible. Bainbridge didn’t actually provide an argument for his assumption that it is, so we will need to reconstruct the arguments that are available to him. Certainly, one might argue that we did, in fact, approach a quasi-parliamentary regime early in late 1930s through the 1940s. That is, in the period after the Supreme Court began routinely to uphold federal and state economic legislation against a variety of challenges. Of course, even during this era some of the general and abstract limits on legislative power continued to be enforced: the first amendment freedoms of speech and religion might be one example.
        But a good deal of water has passed under the bridge since then. In particular, we are now in an era where Brown v. Board is taken as a fixed point, and Roe v. Wade is vigorously defended. Griswold v. Connecticut, although not the subject of much public attention, is usually regarded as untouchable in the contemporary era. Given that Democrats (or Democrats plus moderate/liberal Republicans seem likely to control 41 seats in the Senate for the indefinite future, is it really likely that the judiciary could be remade in a way that would result in reversals of Brown and Griswold?
        But there is a more fundamental reason there are feasibility barriers to transition to a quasi-parliamentary system of judicial deference to legislative supremacy. Our system is structurally quite different from parliamentary systems without federalism. In a parliamentary system, there is a guarantee that the legislature and the executive are controlled by the same faction. In our system, the President can be at odds with the one or both houses of Congress. Moreover, the filibuster (which I believe is structurally entrenched) gives a Senate minority with 41 votes control of a veto gate with respect to judicial nominations. This pattern is complicated by the lack of a structural mechanism for Congressional override of judicial decisions, and the existence of federalism, which may give a national minority power an entrenched position in State governments.
        In my judgment, all of these differences between our system and parliamentary nonfederal systems make it difficult to institute legislative supremacy through judicial decision. At any particular point in history, the move to legislative supremacy will disadvantage a faction that is likely to control a veto gate over the judicial selection process. Moreover, when a party does gain control over all the veto gates (i.e. the Presidency plus 60 or more Senate seats) that party would have a powerful incentive to end the regime of legislative supremacy in order to entrench its own program through the Supreme Court.
        None of this is to say that I have demonstrated that there is no route from the status quo to a Bainbridgean quasi-parliamentary system. Rather, my claim is simply that Bainbridge owes us an explanation as to how these obstacles could be overcome!
        2. Is the Revitalization of Formalism Feasible? Now for the other half of the equation. Is the revitalization of formalist constitutional interpretation feasible? Let me admit at the outset that this question is not easy. Given the downward spiral of politicization that has characterized the judicial selection process, the path to virtue is uncertain. Nonetheless, I believe that there a plausible and a cogent case for the feasibility of selecting judges who possess the virtue of justice can be made.
        I have already blogged about this topic in a post entitled Getting to Formalism. Here is a summary of the argument that I presented there:
          The first step in my argument is based on the premise that judicial selection is conducted under conditions where each party has at least a veto (or controls a “veto gate” as game theorists put it) over the selection of judges. Given the current set of rules for judicial nomination and confirmation, this condition holds if the party that does not control the Presidency can block a cloture vote in the Senate (e.g. can muster 41 votes).
          The second step in my argument is a model of judicial attitudes (or dispositions). That model assumes that judicial attitudes can be measured in two dimensions: (1) political ideology (modeled as a point on a real line from 0 (far left) to 1 (far right), and (2) judicial philosophy (modeled as a point on a real line from 0 (perfectly realist) to 1 (perfectly formalist). A given judge then occupies a position in this two dimensional space, as illustrated in the following figure:
_____________________Two Dimensions of Judging __________Realist__| ___________________| ___________________| ___________________| ___________________| ___________________| ___________________| ___________________| ___________________| ________Formalist__|__________________________ ___________________Left___________________Right
            The third step in my argument is a representation of the zone of acceptability of the party of the left and the party of the right in this two dimensional space. The intuitive idea behind the model is simple. If you are the party of the right, you will find judges who are realists acceptable only if you agree with their political ideology. As their ideology moves to the left, you will veto their selection unless the move towards formalism on the judicial philosophy line. The preferences of the left are symmetrical and opposite to those of the right. The Original Version of this Post had a chart at this point, but the inclusion of the chart created formatting problems. I have now removed the chart. You can view the chart on the Legal Theory Annex at this link.
            The fourth step in my argument is simply to observe that highly formalist judges are in the confirmation zone. This is simply a fancy way of saying that the selection of formalist judges is feasible. If both the left and the right have a veto over judicial selection, then two kinds of judges are confirmable. One kind consists of realist political moderates. The other kind consists of legal formalists. Indeed, moderate legal formalist judges are the best bet for compromise selection once we relax the assumption of perfect information about the position candidates occupy in the two-dimensional attitude space. If you make an error estimating the position of a politically moderate formalist in the two dimensional space, then true position is likely to be within your confirmation zone unless you made a very large error. However, if you make an error estimating the position of a politically moderate realist, a much smaller error would place the candidate outside your confirmation zone.
            The fifth and final step in my argument is simply to draw the conclusion. The selection of formalist judges is politically feasible given the model of the judicial selection process that I have offered. Of course, my argument is not decisive. My claim, however, is that model has sufficient plausibility to shift the burden of persuasion back to Bainbridge. He now needs to redeem his unsupported claim that aretaic judicial selection is infeasible with a rigorous argument of some kind.
          3. Comparative Feasibility This brings us to question of comparative feasibility. Is it the case that Bainbridgean legislative supremacy is comparatively more feasible than formalist constitutional adjudication? I should like to suggest that I have made a prima facie case that the answer to this question is “no.” That is, I have offered an argument that a transition to a quasi-parliamentary system is relatively difficulty, given the structure of the system, and that a transition to formalist judging is a real and actual possibility, given that same structure. Of course, these not knock-down arguments. I fully expect that Bainbridge will have counter arguments. My claim at this stage is simply that the ball is in his court.
      Conclusion Let me end by emphasizing the large zone of agreement between Bainbridge and myself. We both acknowledge the real dangers of unconstrained judicial discretion. We both acknowledge the desirability of formalist constitutional adjudication as a matter of ideal theory. We disagree over an equally important question: what should be done about that danger? And I, for one, have certainly learned from Bainbridge’s views about that crucial issue.


 
Monday Calendar
    At Chicago's Law and Philosophy series, Barbara Fried (Stanford) is speaking.
    At Oxford's Moral Philosophy Seminar, Brian Ellis (Melbourne) presents Social Eudemonism.


 
Cramer Sense
    Introduction Clayton Cramer has responded to my post, Originalism & Liberty, with his most recent post in this exchange, entitled What Is Nonsense?. In a prior post, Cramer had suggested that Randy Barnett’s interpretation of the privileges and immunities clause (offered in defense of the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas) is nonsense. Before I go any further, perhaps I should point out that Barnett’s defense is widely acknowledged as an important scholarly defense of Lawrence by serious constitutional scholars who are not sympathetic to Barnett’s position. (Take a look at Nelson Lund and John O. McGinnis’s Lawrence v. Texas and Judicial Hubris, which is forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review.)
    Nonsense The notion that a serious piece of scholarship by one of the most distinguished constitutional theorists is “nonsense” seems prima facie implausible, and my post suggested that it was a rhetorical exaggeration. By “nonsense,” I suggested, Cramer more likely meant “clearly wrong.”
    If you haven’t read my prior post, the legal issue is whether the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment can be interpreted to lend support to the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence. Barnett argued that it could, and Cramer now writes:
      I was going to replace the word "nonsense" with "clearly wrong," but after reading what I wrote, I stand by the word "nonsense." Yes, I understand what Barnett means--and it makes no sense to argue that what was universally felonious in 1868 should be understood as a constitutionally protected right. The members of Congress who debated the Fourteenth Amendment would not have considered a universal felony to be a right. Imagine if someone argued that the right to have sex with children was protected by the Fourteenth Amendment--even though this was a felony in 1868. This is nonsense--a complete reversal of the notion of "right."
    I hardly no where to begin, but let’s try to sort Cramer’s argument out:
      First, Cramer’s assertion that he stands by the word “nonsense,” is difficult to fathom. Given that he stands by nonsense as having a different meaning than “clearly wrong,” the most natural reading of his statement would be that he means that Barnett’s claim is either (1) meaningless or (2) self-contradictory. But then Cramer tells us that he understands what Barnett means; so possibility (1) is off the table. That leads to possibility number (2), that Barnett’s claim is nonsense because it is internally inconsistent or self-contradictory. But Cramer does not produce an argument to that effect, and, in fact, Barnett’s argument is internally consistent. So possibility (2) is off the table. But what is left? Cramer says “it makes no sense to argue that what was universally felonious in 1868 should be understood as a constitutionally protected right.” This is no help, because the word “sense” is used in this sentence.
      As far as I can tell Cramer was simply unwilling to qualify his claim, and so he repeated it, hoping that emphatic repetition might somehow add conceptual cogency to a mere rhetorical exaggeration. Cramer is certainly entitled to assert that Barnett’s argument is “nonsensical” in the rhetorical sense of “contradicted by the evidence” or “clearly wrong,” but to then pointedly refuse to accept this clarification of meaning while failing to provide alternative criteria for the meaningful application of the term “nonsense” is simply to argue very badly. In my book, this kind of sloppy argumentation simply undermines credibility.
      Second, Cramer’s basic argumentative move is fallacious. He asserts, “The members of Congress who debated the Fourteenth Amendment would not have considered a universal felony to be a right.” But this is quite obviously false. The abolition Congressmen thought that the paradigm case of a right—the right to freedom from slavery and the attendant right to control one’s own movement and to freely contract for one’s labor—had been universally denied legal recognition. Exercising the right of freedom from slavery was a felony both under the laws of the southern states and under federal law prior to the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th amendment to the Constitution. More generally, whenever a constitutional amendment reverses national law, what was once legally correct becomes, by virtue of the trumping force of the Constitution, legally incorrect. Escaping from slavery, once a felony, becomes a right, because the law has changed. Of course, the case of slavery and the case of private sexual conduct are distinguishable. But Cramer’s argument was general in form, because it needed to be. He was attempting to show that Barnett’s position was “nonsense,” and hence he needed to show that Barnett was wrong is some deep way. In this regard, his argument is a complete failure.
      Third, Cramer’s illustrative example actually undermines his position. Here is the example: “Imagine if someone argued that the right to have sex with children was protected by the Fourteenth Amendment--even though this was a felony in 1868.” Of course, this example actually supports Barnett’s interpretation of the privileges and immunities clause. Children are not of the age reason; they cannot meaningfully consent to sex with an adult. Hence, given Barnett’s interpretation of the privileges and immunities clause, laws prohibiting sex with children would clearly not infringe on the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States. By appealing to an example that illustrates the intuitive appeal of Barnett’s theory, Cramer undermines his own position in general. But this move by Cramer does more than that. It also illustrates rather neatly the way in which Barnett’s position (whether right or wrong) is a sensible position.
      Fourth, Cramer’s post ignores the key argument from my prior post. Let me repeat that argument here:
        The Supreme Court’s decision of [the Slaughterhouse Cases cases is notorious, because it essentially wrote the P or I clause out of the Constitution. . . . Because of the Slaughterhouse Cases, the historical practice with respect to the 14th Amendment is a particularly problematic source of evidence about its original meaning.
        * * * [I]t easy to see why judicial nullification makes the early historical practice a poor guide to the meaning of the clause. Because the clause was nullified before it “got off the ground,” courts and legislatures were not presented with concrete circumstances in which the meaning of the clause had real practical significance. The primary source of insight into the meaning of the clause could only come from commentators, writing critically about the Slaughterhouse Cases. Barnett, of course, relies on such commentators, but this source of insight into original meaning, while valuable, has the disadvantage that it illuminates the understanding of the few, rather than the many, and that given the culture of legal scholarship at the time, there is not a rich exchange, back and forth, that would have exposed the ambiguities and weaknesses in the views of particular commentators.
      Cramer does not attempt to answer this argument. Now, my argument may be correct or it may not. But it certainly establishes a prima facie case that the early historical practice with respect to the privileges or immunities clause of the 14th amendment is a poor guide to its meaning. When Cramer fails acknowledge (much less answer) this argument, but repeats his position that because of historical practice, Barnett’s interpretation of the 14th amendment is “nonsense,” his manner of argument approaches the limits of responsible advocacy.
    Exact Opposite In addition to suggesting that Cramer has used “nonsense” for rhetorical purposes, I suggested that he was imprecise when he made a second claim. Here is what I wrote:
      In addition, Cramer’s argument that Barnett’s meaning is “exactly opposite to what its authors understood it to mean” is also a rhetorical exaggeration. There is no sense of “exact opposite” in which this claim could be correct. Cramer’s claim, if reconstructed so as to be plausible, would be something like: The original understanding of the P or I Clause was such that it was not perceived as relevant to Sodomy laws. Therefore, it is unlikely that any interpretation of the P or I Clause that would invalidate such laws is correct. Barnett’s claim is inconsistent with this argument (or even more accurately, in tension with it), but not its “exact opposite.”
    Cramer replies:
      What Solum does not seem to have grasped is my point that something that was felonious in 1868 could not qualify as a right to the legislators who passed the Fourteenth Amendment in Congress, or ratified it in the state legislatures. A felony is exactly opposite a right. Is there anything more clear than this?
    Before dealing directly with the substance of this point, we should note that Cramer once again has engaged in rhetorical exaggeration. If you read my prior post (as Cramer has), it would simply be impossible to reach the conclusion that I did not “grasp” Cramer’s point. I engage in a lengthy exposition and refutation of precisely this point—a refutation to which Cramer made no response. When Cramer writes “Solum does not seem to have grasped,” the most charitable interpretation of his claim is “Solum is not persuaded despite the compelling strength of my argument.” The other possibility is that Cramer meant his claim literally. If so, then he is attempting deliberately to mislead his readers.
    So what about Cramer’s point that “a felony is exactly opposite a right”? Several points need to be made:
      First, this is a shift in position. In his original post, Cramer wrote: “Professor Barnett wants the Privileges and Immunities clause to mean something today that is exactly opposite to what its authors understood it to mean back then.” If Cramer were correct and “a felony is exactly opposite a right,” that point is conceptually distinct from his original point. Even if a felony were the exact opposite of a right, it would not follow that Barnett’s interpretation of the Privileges or Immunities Clause is the exact opposite of the original meaning of the Clause. Moreover, the former “exact opposition” does not imply the latter. This kind of shift in position, when presented as a defense of one’s original position, is irresponsible argument. When you change your position, you owe it to your readers to make this clear. When you defend one position by taking a superficially similar but conceptually distinct position, the result is that you mislead your readers.
      Second, there is an ambiguity in Cramer’s position. One meaning of “felony” is very close to “serious moral wrong.” One meaning of “right” is morally correct. In those senses, felony is the “exact opposite” of “right.” But those senses of “felony” and “right” are not relevant to Cramer’s claim re the meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. For that claim, Cramer would need to use the legal meaning of felony and right. In particular, Cramer would need to claim something like:
        The status of a type of action as a felony is the exact opposite of the status of an action that is protected by a constitutional right.
      But of course, once the precise sense of Cramer’s assertion is made clear, then it also becomes apparent that exact opposite is being used in a very loose or metaphorical sense. A given action can both be classified as a felony and classified as protected by a constitutional right. There is nothing unusual about this; legislatures have on many, many occasions classified constitutional protected actions as felonious. It is simply wrong to say that the two categories (felony and right) are exact opposites. They are certainly different categories. The two categories interact legally; if X is a protected constitutional right, then a statute classifying X as a felony is invalid. But I cannot provide a meaningful sense of the phrase “exact opposite,” in which these two categories would fall under the concept represented by that phrase. Cramer has asserted that they are “exact opposites,” but he has not provided what is required to redeem that assertion. Cramer simply has not provided a criterion (or criteria) for the application of “exact opposite” that would make it the case that felony and right are exact opposites.
    Sense, Nonsense, Cramer Sense Clayton Cramer seems to have a predeliction for “digging in his heels.” In some contexts, that is quite an admirable quality, but not in all contexts. In debate and discussion, there are times when “digging in your heels” forces one into ever more tenuous and indefensible positions. In my original post, I simply suggested that Cramer had exaggerated for rhetorical effect. In response to this charge, Cramer insists that his claims were not rhetorical exaggerations, but instead were more or less literally correct. Although I disagreed with Cramer’s original positions, I thought I could see the points he was trying to make. With his heels dug in, Cramer makes Cramer Sense.


Sunday, May 09, 2004
 
Cramer Tomorrow Clayton Cramer has a post up entitled What Is Nonsense? replying to my Originalism & Liberty. Look for a reply by me on Monday morning.


 
Legal Theory Calendar
    Monday, May 10
      At Chicago's Law and Philosophy series, Barbara Fried (Stanford) is speaking.
      At Oxford's Moral Philosophy Seminar, Brian Ellis (Melbourne) presents Social Eudemonism.
    Tuesday, May 11
      At the University of Chicago's law and economics series, Roberta Romano, Yale Law School, presents Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Making of Quack Corporate Governance
      At Oxford, David Wiggins presents the Hart Memorial Lecture.
      At Texas, Louise Weinberg (University of Texas) presents Back to the Future: The New General Common Law.
    Wednesday, May 12
      At Oxford's Jurisprudence Discussion Group, Timothy Endicott presents The One True Interpretation.
    Thursday, May 13
      At Florida State, B.J. Priester, FSU College of Law, presents Return of the Great Writ: Judicial Review of the Detention of Alleged Terrorists as Enemy Combatants.
      At Santiago de Compostela (Spain), there is a conference entitled Hilary Putnam's Pragmatism.
    Saturday, May 15
      At Oxford's Department of Politics and International Relations, Hassan Bubacar Jallow presents The Rwandan Genocide and Transitional Justice: Commemorating the 10th Anniversary of the Genocide.


 
Legal Theory Lexicon: Strict Construction & Judicial Activism
    Introduction This entry in the Legal Theory Lexicon is a bit unusual. Rather than explicating concepts that are important to legal theory, the point of this post is to debunk two concepts that are unimportant (or even meaningless), strict construction and judicial activism.
    Strict Construction Strict construction is short hand for the idea that the United States Constitution should be strictly construed. The phrase appears to have become popular as a campaign slogan used by Richard Nixon when he ran for President in 1968. Nixon promised that he would appoint judges who were "strict constructionists" as opposed to the "judicial activism" that characterized the Warren Court.
    The question is: what does strict construction mean? Is there really a method of constitutional interpretation described by the phrase "strict construction" or is this a mere political slogan? The confusion engendered by the term is illustrated by the following definition (offered on law.com):
      strict construction (narrow construction) n. interpreting the Constitution based on a literal and narrow definition of the language without reference to the differences in conditions when the Constitution was written and modern conditions, inventions and societal changes. By contrast "broad construction" looks to what someone thinks was the "intent" of the framers' language and expands and interprets the language extensively to meet current standards of human conduct and complexity of society.
    This definition borders on incoherence, opposing "strict construction" to both originalism and to the notion of a living constitution--ideas that might be thought antithetical to one another. So can we offer a better definition of strict construction? One way to approach this question is via the method of separation of cases. What are the possible meanings of strict construction?
    • Strict Construction as "Textualism". One possibility is that strict construction refers to textualism--the idea that all constitutional interpretations must be grounded in the text of the Constitution. There are two difficulties with this suggestion. First, almost all of the Warren Court jurisprudence to which strict constructionism was opposed was rooted in the text of the Constitution in some way. Even the "unenumerated rights" jurisprudence (e.g. the right to privacy at issue in Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade) was grounded in the text of the 14th amendment. Second, this definition provides no content to the idea that constructions must be "strict."
    • Strict Construction as "Literalism". Another possibility is that strict construction involves literal rather than purposive interpretations of the constitutional text. Perhaps, a strict construction is one that reads each clause of the Constitution to mean what the plain language says and nothing more. This idea is more promising than textualism, because it gives some real bite to the idea of "strictness" in construction. The difficulty is that the proponents of "strict construction" (and others) have rarely advocated a thorough-going literalism. That approach would, for example, mean that the First Amendment to the Constitution applies only to Congress (and not to the states, the executive, or to common-law doctrines). Other provisions of the Constitution don't seem to have any determinate literal meaning--the due process clause, the privileges and immunities clause, and the republican form of government clause come to mind.
    • Strict Construction as "Originalism". Yet another possibility is that strict construction refers to some form of originalism, either original-intention originalism or original-meaning originalism. (The former looks to the intentions of the framers, whereas the latter looks to the way the text would have been understood by citizens when it was adopted.) Original-intentions originalism does not fit well with the label "strict constructionism" as it would allow courts to take into account intentions of the framers that are not "strictly speaking" in the constitutional text. The latter is a much better fit with the idea of strict construction, but the label "strict construction" is simply not very descriptive of the idea that the constitutional text should be read today in a way that fits the way it would have been read at the time it was adopted.
    • Strict Construction as a "Presumption of Constitutionality". Yet another possibility is that the constitution should be construed against challenges to the constitutionality of legislation or executive action. The idea of a presumption in favor of the constitutionality of challenged action is certainly a coherent idea, but it is not clear why such a presumption should be called "strict construction." One might naturally assume that a strict construction of the constitution would invalidate government action that contravened the meaning of the constitutional text.
    We could go on, but I think you will now see the point. It simply isn't clear what "strict construction" means. Once you actually give content to the idea of strict construction, then the label isn't particularly description and better names can be given to the view that strict construction could name. For this reason, most serious constitutional theorists avoid using the phrase "strict construction." If you think you have a good reason to continue using this phrase, you might give serious consideration to offering a very careful definition when you first introduce the term.
    Judicial Activism In conservative political discourse in the United States, "strict construction" is good and "judicial activism" is bad. But what is judicial activism? Once again, it is not clear that this phrase has any real meaning. The standard argument against the use of the term "judicial activism" is that it translates best as "judicial decision making with which I disagree." To see why this is so, once again let us consider the possible interpretations of the phrase:
    • Judicial Activism as Nonabstention. One idea would be that activist judges decide cases, whereas passive judges abstain. This would make sense of "judicial activism," but it is completely unattractive as a normative ideal. Judges need to decide cases; they need to be active in the sense that they resolve controversies.
    • Judicial Activism as Exercise of the Power of Judicial Review. A second possibility is that judicial activism means striking down statutes or invalidating executive action. A passive judge approves the conduct of the other branches of government; an active judge strikes such conduct down. Once again, this interpretation is coherent, but hardly anyone thinks that it is per se wrong for judges to invalidate unconstitutional governmental action. Very few critics of "judicial activism" would criticize a court that struck down a federal statute requiring every American to attend the services of a particular denomination. Nor would many critics of judicial activism endorse a judicial decision that upheld a law reestablishing slavery. So activism is not meant to be equated with "deciding to strike down a statute or executive action."
    • Judicial Activism as Incorrect Exercise of the Power of Judicial Review. What is usually meant by judicial activism is not simply judicial activity or judicial activity invalidating action by the political branches. Rather, judicial activism means judicial activity that wrongfully invalidates action by the political branches. This naturally leads to the question, "What makes an exercise of the power of judicial review wrongful?" The answer to that question is a theory of constitutional interpretation. Different theories authorize different sets of invalidations. So, adherents of different constitutional theories would apply the label "judicial activism" to different sets of decisions.
    And that's the problem with the phrase "judicial activism." One can define judicial activism in a way that doesn't boil down to "wrong," but those definitions make the phrase useless as a term of criticism. Or one can define judicial activism in such a way that it has real critical bite, but then the phrase ends up as a synonym for incorrect. Either way, "judicial activism" is not a useful term for constitutional theorists.
    Conclusion This post has had two goals. The first is to convince you that "strict construction" and "judicial activism" are simply not very useful as theory terms for academic constitutional lawyers. The second is to illustrate the importance of clear explication of constitutional concepts. Constitutional theory is a value-laden activity. Debates about positions in constitutional theory are frequently extensions of debates in moral and political theory generally. For that reason, it is very important for constitutional theorists to be very careful about their use of language.
    Many readers of Legal Theory Blog will be finishing their first year of law school next week or are a few days into their first summer break. Congratulations on completing the first year of law school. The Legal Theory Lexicon will continue throughout the summer. If you have a few moments to spare from your summer job, I hope you will surf on over!


 
The Bainbridgean Argument for Judicial Nullification of the Constitution
    Introduction Stephen Bainbridge has a measured post that replies to my Originalism & Liberty Here is the kernel of his point:
      Should judges actively use the 9th Amendment or the P&I clause to strike down laws passed by Congress or state legislatures? The libertarian case for judicial activism claims that that those provisions incorporate the harm principle (e.g., Kennedy's opinion in Lawrence) or some modified and more modest version thereof (which I take to be Prof. Barnett's position). As Solum's own post makes clear, however, that position rests on highly contested foundations. First, libertarian judicial activism purports to be based on an originalist approach to Constitutional interpretation. Yet, as Solum points out, there are multiple versions of originalism. And, of course, many critics reject originalism on various grounds. [Personally, I see the principal virtue of originalism as providing some ability to cabin judicial discretion where evidence of original intent is available and uncontestable. The problem with originalism, as I see it, is that evidence rarely meets those standards. Hence, I don't think originalism adequately prevents judges from simply acting on their own personal policy preferences.] Second, the libertarian case for judicial activism claims to have identified coherent content for the 9th Amendment and the P&I clause. In contrast, Robert Bork famously referred to the 9th Amendment as an "inkblot," into which judges and justices read their own policy preferences. Solum's own post suggests, at least to me, that the P&I clause is just as much of an inkblot as the 9th Amendment. Solum identifies three interpretations of the P&I clause that "can be mixed and matched in various ways." In sum, the libertarian variant of judicial activism is at least as contestable as the left-liberal variant. Yet, it provides cover from the right for judicial activists of all stripes. As such, it contributes to the current atmosphere in which no area of American life is immune from the personal policy preferences of a bunch of unelected old men and women in robes. And that is why I think it deserves criticism.
    Bainbridge's Interesting Question Bainbridge raises a very interesting question. What should judges do when the constitutional text plus evidence of original meaning underdetermine the meaning of the constitution? That question is particularly acute in the case of the sweeping provisions with general and abstract language: "regulate commerce," "freedom of speech," "privileges and immunities," and so forth. As I interpret Bainbridge (remember this is my interpretation), his position implies that because such abstract and general provisions (even when read in light of evidence of their original meaning) do not sufficiently constrain judicial discretion, they should be subject to judicial nullification. I assume that because Bainbridge relies heavily on democratic majoritarianism in his critique of judicial activism, that he would nullify different provisions in light of a presumption favoring democratic action. So, the first and fourteenth amendments to the Constitution should simply be nullified simpliciter (or perhaps confined to the core, indisputable meaning--I suspect that this would be the equivalent of nullifcation). When it comes to power-conferring provisions, I would guess that Bainbridge would nullify the limit on power rather than the power itself. Rather than denying Congress any power over Commerce, Bainbridge would give Congress plenary legislative power. Thus, Bainbridge's argument would give judges authority to transform a constitution that was intended to provide the federal government limited power further constrained by broad and abstract rights (both enumerated and retained) into a constitution of plenary power, constrained only by the limited and narrowly cabined rights, such as those provided by the Second, Third, and Thirteenth Amendments. In other words, Bainbridge has a theory of constitutional interpretation that would give judges the authority to enact Bainbridge's preferred political theory into constitutional law.
    Taking Bainbridge Seriously Bainbridge's argument should be taken seriously. And, in fact, it is taken seriously in various ways by different political actors. Thus, the New Deal Court did engage in Bainbridgean nullification of the enumerated powers scheme of Article I of the Constitution. And that same court engaged in Bainbridgean nullification of the economic liberties that had been held by prior courts to be implied by the general and abstract individual rights provisions of the Constitution. And some conservative critics of the Court have suggested that this program of nullificaiton should be extended to the civil, social, and political rights guaranteed by those same abstract and general provisions.
    Is There An Alternative to Bainbridgean Constitutional Nullifiation Given the fact of final judicial authority, is there any sensible alternative to this program of nullification? One alterantive is that suggested by Jack Balkin and Sandy Levinson. They argue that it is a normal part of the democratic political process for political movements to promote agendas of "high politics" throught the judicial appointments process. Thus, the struggle over Roe v. Wade is, for Balkin and Levinson, a struggle of high politics, conducted through Presidential and Congressional elections. They see this as a democratic process--although it is not simple majoritarianism. In two posts (A Neoformalist Manifesto and Fear and Loathing in New Haven), I've argued against the high-politics theory of constitutional interpretation and change and for neo-formalism. Interestingly, I think that Bainbridge has a great deal in common with Balkin and Levinson. Like Balkin and Levinson, Bainbridge eschews formalist constitutional interpretation and argues for judicial authority to change the constitution. Like Balkin and Levinson, Bainbridge appeals to the value of democratic process as the normative foundation for his antiformalism. Like Balkin and Levinson, Bainbridge lacks "constitutional faith," the belief that an enforceable written constitution represents a fundamentally sound approach to protection of human liberty and and promotion of human flourishing.
    The Politicization of the Judiciary I disagree with Bainbridge, Levinson, and Balkin. I believe that judicial enforcement of a written constitution--even a constitution with general and abstract powers and liberties is possible and desirable. But like Bainbridge, Levinson, and Balkin, I recognize that the ideal of a formalist constitution--a constitution that constrains judges as well as the political branches--has been eroded and degraded by the ascendency of legal realism and the politicization of the judiciary. The downward spiral of politicization that has characterized both judicial selection and the practice of judging cannot be ignored. We are faced with choices. We can embrace politicization of the judiciary--Levinson and Balkin. We can attempt to confine politicization to the political branches by nullifying the written constitution and going for majoritarian democracy--Bainbridge. Or we can try to reinvigorate the idea of formalsit interpretation of the written constitution.
    Getting to Formalism How could we get to formalism? (See my Getting to Formalism for more.) As long as we have realist judges, we will have realist interpretation of the Constitution. Indeed, if the judges are realist, then realism will infect the entire constitution--not just the general and abstract rights and powers. Realist judges could read the conclusion that the right of the people to bear arms means the government has the power to prohibit the bearing of arms. Realist judges could read a provision that eliminates diversity jurisdiction between a state and citizens of a different state to prohibit federal question jurisdiction in suits where a citizen of a state sues the state of which he is a citizen.
    In a parliamentary system without a written constitution, judges can be constrained by the structural mechanism of parliamentary authority to override judicial decision. But if you want a written constitution that constrains legislative power, this structural mechanism will not work. It would simply make the legislature the court of last resort--hardly a recipe for depoliticizaton of the process of constitutional interpretation.
    We should take Bainbridge (and Levinson & Balkin) seriously. The politicization of the judiciary is real problem for anyone who advocates a judicially enforceable written constitution. The problem of politicization cannot be finessed or avoided. It must be taken head on. And that leads me to the conclusion that our practices of judicial selection must be changed. For our constitutional system to work, judges must be selected for excellence (or judicial virtue) and not on the basis of their political ideology. In particular, judges should be selected for thier possession of the virtue of justice--the disposition to decide cases on the basis of the rules laid down and not on the basis of thier own theory of what the law should be. If I might be permitted a rhetorical flourish, realism is not a theory, it is a vice--a defect of judicial character.
    Read Bainbridge's fine post!


 
Lash on Barnett & the Ninth Amendment Yesterday, I put up a post entitled Originalism & Liberty. Today, Kurt Lash writes:
    It could be true that blogsphere critics of Randy Barnett have not sufficiently acknowledged the subtleties of Randy's theory or current scholarship regarding the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Randy Barnett, however, has not yet acknowledged historical evidence that seriously challenges his vision of the Ninth Amendment and its potential significance in interpretations of the Fourteenth. Randy's early work presented the Ninth Amendment as a natural rights provision, the underlying theory of which Randy believed easily dovetailed with a natural rights reading of the Fourteenth. His evidence relied mainly on a copy of Roger Sherman's draft Bill of Rights and a speech by James Madison on the Bank of the United States in which Madison referenced the Ninth Amendment. However, recently discovered historical evidence suggests that the Ninth was understood to limit interpretations of federal power in order to maximize the autonomy of the states, and it calls into question Randy's reading of Sherman and Madison. As readers of your website probably know, I have presented this evidence in two articles to be published in the Texas Law Review. Randy has not dealt with this evidence beyond (I have been told) claiming that it supports his view of the Ninth. In fact, it not only changes our view of the original Ninth, it poses a serious difficulty for theories which broadly interpret the Fourteenth Amendment. Historical evidence suggests that natural rights were retained to the people under the Ninth Amendment. But "retaining" that right meant that the people of each state were free to delegate power over the "retained" subject to their own state government if they saw fit to do so (as many did, for example, in regard to the "natural rights" of speech and religion). The Ninth, in other words, protected state autonomy over these matters from federal interference. The issue of the Fourteenth Amendment becomes whether the Privileges or Immunities Clause (or any other provision in the Fourteenth) totally erases the original "state autonomy" meaning of the Ninth Amendment. Perhaps it does. But it also is possible that the Fourteenth erased only certain aspects of pre-existing state autonomy. It is possible, in other words, that the Fourteenth only partially amended the original meaning of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. What is lacking in the blogsphere debate is what Bruce Ackerman calls "synthesis"--the need to synthesize both the federalist Ninth and libertarian Fourteenth Amendments. Even if the Fourteenth Amendment was understood to "federalize" certain natural rights, this does not establish that the Fourteenth Amendment federalized all natural rights. Perhaps it did, and there is no need to "synthesize" both the original Ninth and the Fourteenth Amendment. However, significant historical evidence suggests that the original principles of federalism represented in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments survived Reconstruction. It is quite possible that sexual autonomy remained a matter "retained by the people" under the original Ninth Amendment and, thus, immune from federal interference. In sum, the historical evidence can be read to suggest that the Ninth Amendment stands as a barrier which Randy must overcome if his argument is to be persuasive as a matter of textual and historical meaning.
Lash's work on the Ninth Amendment, which is not yet in print, represents the kind of careful and thoughtful scholarship that does move the ball forward. I've read both of his articles, and I'm sure that they will provoke another round of scholarly debate and improve our ultimate understanding of the Ninth Amendment.


Saturday, May 08, 2004
 
Originalism & Liberty
    Introduction A minor blogospheric eruption has been triggered by a post or two by Stephen Bainbridge. Randy Barnett has two posts Should Conservatives Be Uninformed and Should Conservatives Be Confused. Clayton Cramer's foray into this debate is entitled What is Judicial Activism. In addition, One-Minute Pundit, Jon Rowe, Tim Sandefur, and Southern Appeal comment on Cramer.
    In this post, I will address one cluster of issues in what has become a wide ranging debate.
    Cramer versus Barnett Taking up the debate in the middle of things, let me make a comment or two about Barnett, Cramer, the Ninth Amendment, and the Lawrence decision. Cramer argues:
      Is it not a little strange that Professor Barnett's understanding of the Ninth Amendment--as a libertarian statement that the government must meet a very high standard to justify passing laws that interfere with what individuals do--does not seem to have been understood by anyone in the early Republic? Throughout this period, state governments had laws that made it a felony to engage in a variety of forms of conduct that Professor Barnett now insists are constitutionally protected. Whether these laws are good public policy or not is a legitimate question, but to argue that what was formerly felonious is now constitutionally protected is not a persuasive argument for Barnett's claims about "original intent" with respect to the Ninth Amendment.
    So Cramer is asserting that Barnett’s reading of the Ninth Amendment is contradicted by the historical practice preceding the adoption of the 14th amendment.
    Correcting a Mistake The blogosphere is not the legal academy. Nor are blogospheric arguments held to the standards of legal arguments before a judicial tribunal. Of necessity, things move quickly in the blogosphere. We write on the fly and make mistakes. But precisely for that reason, it is rather important that mistakes be corrected. Barnett didn't argue that the Ninth Amendment limits state (as opposed to federal) power. [In fact, he is on record as specifically disagreeing with this proposition.] So this first argument of Cramer's argument is simply off point.
    The Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment Barnett does argue that state power is limited in two distinct ways. First, he argues that there are internal limits on the "police powers" of the states. The nature of these limits is quite an interesting topic unto itself. On the one hand, they might be viewed as state constitutional limits on state legislative power. On the other hand, they might be viewed as natural rights, which are inherent limits on the authority of all governments. In either case, the idea of internal limits on state power is not the focus of the disagreement between Barnett, Bainbridge, and Cramer.
    Second, Barnett argues that state power is limited by the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment. [I will abbreviate this P or I Clause.] This argument was not made by Justice Kennedy in his opinion in Lawrence, but for an originalist, the P or I Clause of the 14th is a much more likely source of federal limits on substantive state legislative power than is the Due Process Clause. The clause reads as follows:
      No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.
    Cramer’s Historical Practice Argument With respect to the P or I Clause of the 14th, Cramer argues:
      However, insisting that what was a felony in every state when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 should now be understood to be actions protected by the Privileges [or] Immunities clause is nonsense. If the privileges or immunities clause was indeed understood by the Congress that passed, and the states that ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the right of people to have sex with whomever and however they wish, then why did every state have laws that specifically violated this right? Professor Barnett wants the Privileges [or] Immunities clause to mean something today that is exactly opposite to what its authors understood it to mean back then.
    The blogosphere is given to rhetorical exaggeration, and I assume that when Cramer wrote "nonsense," he meant "clearly wrong." Barnett's claim, whatever its merits, is not "nonsensical" in any meaningful sense of the concept of "nonsense." Certainly, we understand what Barnett means, and his claim can be understood in relationship to the historical evidence. In addition, Cramer’s argument that Barnett’s meaning is “exactly opposite to what its authors understood it to mean” is also a rhetorical exaggeration. There is no sense of “exact opposite” in which this claim could be correct. Cramer’s claim, if reconstructed so as to be plausible, would be something like: The original understanding of the P or I Clause was such that it was not perceived as relevant to Sodomy laws. Therefore, it is unlikely that any interpretation of the P or I Clause that would invalidate such laws is correct. Barnett’s claim is inconsistent with this argument (or even more accurately, in tension with it), but not its “exact opposite.”
    Moral Legislation in the Nineteenth Century and the Meaning of “Privileges or Immunities” The real substance of Cramer's remark goes to the relationship between "historical practice" and an originalist approach to constitutional interpretation. What should originalism say about cases in which the original meaning of a particular constitutional provision seems in conflict with the early historical practice?
    That question is not an easy one, especially for sophisticated contemporary originalists who are original-meaning originalists and not original-intention originalists. For the former, the question is, "What would the constitutional text have meant to audience to whom it was directed?" and not "What intentions motivated the promulgation of the constitutional text?" Original intentions originalism has been subjected to a withering critique and is no longer a serious position in constitutional theory. Original meaning originalism, on the other hand, is alive and well--one of the most vibrant movements in contemporary legal theory.
    Cramer's argument against Barnett relies on historical practice. Sodomy laws (and other morals legislation) were prevalent at the time of the adoption of the 14th amendment and were not challenged under the P or I clause at the time (so far as I know). This fact provides evidence that the phrase "privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States" did not encompass a "privilege or immunity" that encompassed or included consensual sexual conduct between adults. After all, if the P or I clause did encompass this right, why weren't legal challenges brought at the time?
    The fact that sodomy statutes were prevalent before and at the time the P or I Clause was adopted really doesn't settle anything, because the 14th Amendment cannot be sensibly understood as merely declaratory of historical practice. Although some of the proponents of the 14th viewed it as declaratory of existing law, they also understood the existing law to have prohibited slavery, despite the fact the historical practice was de facto legal recognition of slavery. The 14th was intended to change constitutional practice in a way that substantially affected the de facto power of the states. So the question is not whether there were sodomy laws before the 14th was adopted, but why sodomy laws persisted after the 14th came into effect. (For a decent introduction to these issues, try this position paper by the Cato Institute.)
    What Are Privileges or Immunities? And this issue is made difficult by the language of the clause. "Privileges or immunities"--what does that mean? The conjunction “or” indicates that we are really dealing with two ideas: (1) the privileges of citizens of the United States, and (2) the immunities of citizens of the United States. For our purposes, it seems likely that we put the “privileges” to the side. Whatever the privileges of citizens of the United States might be, it seems unlikely that the kind of conduct at issue—private sexual conduct—would have been categorized as a privilege. But we still are not very close to a definitive answer to the issues at hand: (1) what are the immunities of citizens of the United States?, and (2) what relevance does the prevalence of state sodomy laws in the period immediately after the adoption of the 14th have on the question whether one of the immunities is violated by a law prohibiting consensual sexual conduct between adults?
    The Slaughterhouse Cases as a Complicating Factor Both questions are further complicated by the Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 71 , 77-79 (1873). The Supreme Court’s decision of these cases is notorious, because it essentially wrote the P or I clause out of the Constitution. (For a short account of this, surf here.) Because of the Slaughterhouse Cases, the historical practice with respect to the 14th Amendment is a particularly problematic source of evidence about its original meaning. Because this clause was subject to judicial nullification shortly after its adoption, the early history of the clause tells us very little about its meaning with one exception.
      What’s the exception? In the Slaughterhouse Cases, the plaintiff’s theory was that a statute creating a monopoly abridged one of the immunities of the Citizens of the United States, e.g. the economic liberty to engage in a lawful business. Because the Supreme Court’s method for rejecting this theory was to adopt an interpretation that nullified the P or I Clause, the Slaughterhouse Cases provide some evidence that the Clause was understood at the time of its adoption to incorporate economic liberties as immunities of citizens of the United States.
    But this exception aside, it easy to see why judicial nullification makes the early historical practice a poor guide to the meaning of the clause. Because the clause was nullified before it “got off the ground,” courts and legislatures were not presented with concrete circumstances in which the meaning of the clause had real practical significance. The primary source of insight into the meaning of the clause could only come from commentators, writing critically about the Slaughterhouse Cases. Barnett, of course, relies on such commentators, but this source of insight into original meaning, while valuable, has the disadvantage that it illuminates the understanding of the few, rather than the many, and that given the culture of legal scholarship at the time, there is not a rich exchange, back and forth, that would have exposed the ambiguities and weaknesses in the views of particular commentators.
    Cramer’s Theory of the Privileges or Immunities Clause So it is impossible to read the meaning of the P or I Clause off of the early historical practice in any simple or easy fashion. In order to have a meaningful debate about the meaning of the clause, we need some theory as to what the original meaning of the clause was. Cramer has such a theory, contained in a single parenthetical phrase in his post:
      "Privileges or Immunities" (the first eight amendments of the Bill of Rights)
    Of course, Cramer undoubtedly has much to say about why he believes that the phrase “privileges or immunities of Citizens of the United States” means, the rights enumerated in the first eight amendments of the Bill of Rights and only those rights. This theory is not original with Cramer, and there is a history of scholarly debate about this claim. Before I speak to the evidence, however, I should like to note that this interpretation can hardly claim the status of a consensus view.
    Alternative Interpretations of the Privileges and Immunities Clause Indeed, the theory that Cramer briefly articulates is one of at least four major approaches to the P or I Clause:
    • The Civil-Rights-Act Interpretation. Several originalist scholars have argued that the meaning of the 14th Amendment is to be found in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and, in particular, in this list of rights included in the Act:
        [T]he inhabitants of every race and color . . . shall have the same right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property . . . .
      Some hold that the P or I Clause constitutionalizes and federalizes these rights; whereas other theorists maintain that the Clause merely requires that rights concerning these topics be granted to all citizens on equal terms.
    • The Bill-of-Rights Interpretation. A second theory of the P or I is that the Clause applies the Bill of Rights to the states. Again, there are different versions. One view is that all of the first Eight Amendments are “privileges or immunities.” Another version (refined incorporation) is that these rights are transformed as well as incorporated. Yet another view is that the rights are selectively incorporated. This is Cramer’s theory.
    • The Natural Rights Interpretation. Yet a third theory is that one of the functions of the clause is to constitutionalize the natural rights of citizens. This is Barnett’s theory.
    • The State Consensus Theory. A fourth view of the privileges or or immunities clause is that it protects rights recognized by a consensus of the states (not unanimous) over a reasonably long period of time. Judge Michael McConnell calls this the "traditionalist" reading, has defended it in "The Right to Die and the Jurisprudence of Tradition," 1997 Utah L Rev. 665 and "Originalism and the Desegregation Decisions," 81 Va L Rev 947, esp 990-1043.
    I'm not a P or I expert, and I may have missed a view that such be counted as major. There are variations within each of the four theories, and the theories can be mixed and matched in various ways. For example, it might be argued that the P or I Clause protects natural rights and that these include the rights protected by the Civil Rights Act and some (or all) of the Rights in the Bill of Rights as well. All three of these views have adherents in contemporary scholarly debate, and at least some textual and historical evidence supports each of these three views. My reading of the scholarly literature, is that the Civil Rights Act Interpretation and the Natural Rights Interpretation are currently the leading contenders. It seems to me that this debate is far from over, and that many of the meta-arguments that would resolve the evidentiary issues between the proponents of the three positions are still underdeveloped. At this point in my engagement with the literature, I would guess that the arguments are far from fully extended and that we are likely to see the emergence of new theories as well as hybrid views.
    If Cramer is aware of the scholarly debate, then I am sure he did not mean to represent that his theory of the P or I clause is uncontroversial. If he is not aware of the scholarly debate, then he should be given the opportunity to clarify or amend his views after he reads the relevant literature. Cramer’s interpretation of the 14th is close to that advocated by Akhil Amar. To give you a sense of the scholarly assessment of Amar’s thesis, let me quote a brief passage from Bret Boyce’s article, Originalism and the Fourteenth Amendment, 33 Wake Forest L. Rev. 909 (1998):
      Akhil Amar has urged that the Amendment incorporated all citizen rights in the Bill of Rights. However the historical record with respect to this question is even sparser than with respect to the general question of privileges and immunities. Moreover, Amar's approach, which is most confident on the incorporation issue, is methodologically and historically the most problematic. (p. 774)
    The Case for the Natural Rights Interpretation The blogosphere is a difficult place for careful historical debate. Rather than attempting to marshal all the evidence, let me just quote a passage from a recent article (not written by Barnett) that does some of this rather large job:
      The "principles" the 39th Congress thought the Privileges or Immunities Clause and the Civil Rights Act protected were the "natural rights which necessarily pertain[ed] to citizenship": liberty, security and property. [citing Representative Woodbridge] Granted, the Privileges or Immunities Clause does not mention "life, liberty or property." They were mentioned, however, in the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses. All three clauses worked in tandem. Members of Congress agreed that the privileges of citizens in the Privileges or Immunities Clause rested upon these three eternal rights of persons. As Representative Lawrence pointed out, these rights were so self-evident that "it has never been deemed necessary to enact" or articulate them in a written constitution. [citing Representative Lawrence] Representative Miller remarked that the natural rights of liberty, life and property were part of the "spirit of the Declaration of Independence . . . [and thus] no member of this House can seriously object" to Section One. (Trisha Olson, The Natural Law Foundation Of The Privileges Or Immunities Clause Of The Fourteenth Amendment 48 Ark. L. Rev. 347, 416-17 (1995))
    Given the intellectual framework of the proponents and drafters of the 14th amendment, a very good case can be made that statements favoring all three interpretations (Civil Rights Act, Bill of Rights, and Natural Rights) are consistent with the Natural-Rights view, which held that the Civil Rights Act and much of the Bill of Rights were declaratory of retained natural rights.
    My Bottom Line My point is not to claim that Barnett is right. That would require a careful analysis of the full historical record—something which Barnett and others have done. My point is much more modest. Some of Barnett’s blogospheric critics do not appear to have done that time-comnsuming and tedious work. Their posts do not provide evidence that they have even read the important secondary sources. They make sweeping statements and exaggerated charges on the basis of a very limited understanding of the issues they are discussing. This is simply irresponsible. Responsible blogging is not the same thing as responsible scholarship or legal advocacy, but we should not confuse standards that are appropriate to the medium with no standards at all. The debate over the meaning of the P or I clause is complex, serious, and highly dependent on the evidence. Hyperbolic blogospheric denunciations really serve no good purpose. Exaggerated rhetoric does not move the ball forward.
Update: Sandur notes in reply:
    even if it was universal historical practice for American governments to illegalize private, adult, consensual sexual activity, that does not prove that this power is just. People ignore inconsistencies all the time, especially when these inconsistencies only harm unpopular minorities, such as slaves in the 19th century, or homosexuals today.
This move is consistent with any version of originalism that takes generality of expression seriously.


 
Legal Theory Bookworm This week, the Legal Theory Bookworm recommends Why Societies Need Dissent by Cass Sunstein. Here is a description:
    University of Chicago law professor Sunstein draws on an impressive knowledge of economics, law and psychology, as well as a great deal of common sense, to make an elegant and compelling case that dissent is critical to a successful society. So convincing and lucid is his argument that this work is likely to influence the current debate on the role of dissenting from official or conventional thinking when society faces external threats. Sunstein does not elevate dissent based on abstract ideology, but rather on the most pragmatic of grounds-good choices are unlikely to be made by a society that stifles dissent. In an engaging analysis, Sunstein examines studies of three related phenomena-the human desire to conform to group norms, group decision-making processes and the tendency for groups to polarize-that lead to the suppression of dissent. This suppression in turn results in the loss of accurate information and competing arguments, which are the basis for rational and effective decision making. Making his arguments all the more powerful, and more acceptable across the political spectrum, is Sunstein's choice to avoid taking political or moral positions on the many charged social issues-such as affirmative action and conformism among judges and in other branches of government-he employs as examples of how decision making is aided when dissent is encouraged. Sunstein also offers wise suggestions on how to create systems that not only tolerate but encourage dissent. This is a noteworthy achievement and an invaluable contribution to the literature on the enduring question of dissent's role in a democratic society.
Highly recommended!


 
Download of the Week This week, the Download of the Week is a paper co-authored by Francesco Parisi and Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith: The Law and Economics of Irrational Behavior: An Introduction on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Behavioral economists accept many of the premises of traditional economic thought; that situational outcomes are the result of individual decisions, taking place in a particular economic environment. But behavioral economists go a step further, arguing that the human action is shaped not only by relevant economic constraints, but is highly affected by people’s endogenous preferences, knowledge, skills, endowments and a variety of psychological and physical constraints. Incentives matter and incentives drive human behavior, but incentives are often more than simple monetary gain. The rise of behavioral economics and the findings of experimental economics however, have led to a clash between the theory of rational-choice and those who believe that this idea does not properly account for the montage of human emotions, biology and attitudes. However, it may be possible to end the intellectual tug of war between rational choice theorists and behavioralists without turning it into a zero-sum game. In this Introduction we consider the contributions of twenty-eight authors have joined together to present such a possibility. Covering a wide range of fields from neuroscience, to economics, to law and sociology, these distinguished academics have presented an array of valuable contributions that, aware in their own application that rational choice theory can no longer be bought in a wholesale fashion, aims at revisiting its basic premises in such a way as to ensure a more rigorous analytical model. These authors then proceed to offer a practical application of this modified theory to a variety of economic and legal problems that have bedeviled traditional economic thought.
Download it while its hot!


 
SSRN Top Recent Downloads The Social Science Research Network compiles lists of top ten downloads by subject matter. (Click on the category name for the full list of the top ten papers by number of downloads in the past 60 days.) Here are categories and selected papers of interest to legal theorists:


 
Nachbar on Copyright Purity I highly recommend Thomas Nachbar's JUDICIAL REVIEW AND THE QUEST TO KEEP COPYRIGHT PURE, which you can download from Westlaw and which is now available in print (2 J. Telecomm. & High Tech. L. 33 (2004). Here is a taste:
    Challenges to copyright legislation based on the Progress Phrase are cases about ambiguity - not just ambiguity in the text itself, but ambiguity over what purpose the text serves in the constitutional order. Those arguing for the use of the Progress Phrase to restrict Congress's power can point to a body of case law suggesting that the Court will aggressively review federal laws for compliance with the Constitution's restrictions on congressional authority, but those who have argued for restrictive judicial review of the copyright power have ignored the basis for the Supreme Court's restrictive approach to interpreting congressional power. When one considers the rationales behind the various justifications for judicial review - including the Rehnquist Court's rediscovery of constitutional limits on Article I powers - it becomes clear that arguments for reading the Copyright Clause restrictively ignore the foundational premises of constitutional judicial review. Rather, calls for reading the Copyright Clause restrictively are merely attempts to employ the rhetoric of constitutional limitation to engage the Court in making socially optimal copyright policy. That the Court should not do so is plain not only as a matter of republican values, but also as a matter of relative competence to make copyright policy. Far from safeguarding constitutional values, challenges based on the Progress Phrase will place modern copyright law at the mercy of a group ill qualified to make modern copyright policy: the Framers.
I must be missing something, because that last argument seemed rather casual. The Framers may be ill-suited to make copyright policy, but from that premise, it does not necessarily follow that reliance on the original meaning of the Constitution is "[f]ar from safeguarding constitutional values." Indeed, one might think that when there is a tension between the original meaning of the constitution and "modern copyright policy," that going for the constitution would prima facie be the natural way to to safeguard constitutional values.
Quibbles aside, this is very fine! Download it while its hot!


Friday, May 07, 2004
 
Parisi & Smith on Irrational Behavior Francesco Parisi and Vernon Smith (George Mason University School of Law and George Mason University - Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science (ICES)) have posted The Law and Economics of Irrational Behavior: An Introduction on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Behavioral economists accept many of the premises of traditional economic thought; that situational outcomes are the result of individual decisions, taking place in a particular economic environment. But behavioral economists go a step further, arguing that the human action is shaped not only by relevant economic constraints, but is highly affected by people’s endogenous preferences, knowledge, skills, endowments and a variety of psychological and physical constraints. Incentives matter and incentives drive human behavior, but incentives are often more than simple monetary gain. The rise of behavioral economics and the findings of experimental economics however, have led to a clash between the theory of rational-choice and those who believe that this idea does not properly account for the montage of human emotions, biology and attitudes. However, it may be possible to end the intellectual tug of war between rational choice theorists and behavioralists without turning it into a zero-sum game. In this Introduction we consider the contributions of twenty-eight authors have joined together to present such a possibility. Covering a wide range of fields from neuroscience, to economics, to law and sociology, these distinguished academics have presented an array of valuable contributions that, aware in their own application that rational choice theory can no longer be bought in a wholesale fashion, aims at revisiting its basic premises in such a way as to ensure a more rigorous analytical model. These authors then proceed to offer a practical application of this modified theory to a variety of economic and legal problems that have bedeviled traditional economic thought.
Highly recommended!


 
Chen on Biodiversity Jim Chen's WEBS OF LIFE: BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION AS ASPECIES OF INFORMATION POLICY, 89 Iowa L. Rev. 495 (2004) is now available in print and on Westlaw. Here is a taste:
    Code is code, whether expressed in binary digits or in the ATCG alphabet of molecular biology. Having long "conceive[d] of genetic information and electronic information as information," we now "have the technical capability to make good on this conception." Gerald Edelman won the 1972 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering how antibodies enable the immune system to identify and remember patterns and thereby to attack invaders without harming itself. Seemingly simple organisms, real or virtual, have solved mazes and performed other complex pathfinding tasks. Computer scientists have experimented with DNA itself as a parallel processor. Professional taxonomy--the time-honored task of classifying all living things--stands on the verge of an electronically driven revolution that harnesses the storage and search capacities of the Internet. Bioinformatics represents merely one tendril of the scientific rhizome that has grown from the double helix. At any level--evolutionary, ecological, organismal, physiological, cellular, or molecular--biology is displaying the "emergent behavior" of "complex adaptive systems." Just as the novel term lex informatica describes the deployment of technological constraints on electronic information as a source of policy, the neologism lex genetica expresses the same idea with respect to bioengineered constraints on genetic information. In short, "information is information, whether the medium is a double helix or an optical disk." Our understanding of virtual and natural commons has obliterated the boundary between electronic and biological code. This much can be known from even a quick glance at two recent best sellers. Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World shares far more than a similar title with Edward O. Wilson's The Future of Life. Lessig's technological world and Wilson's natural world treat human prosperity as a precarious, provisional, and easily unraveled contingency. "[A]ll life is an experiment," said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in his most celebrated defense of free speech. "Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge." Wilson's environmentalist credo similarly cautions, "One planet, one experiment."


 
Nachbar on IP & the Constitution Thomas B. Nachbar's INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND CONSTITUTIONAL NORMS, 104 Colum. L. Rev. 272 (2004) is now available in print and on Westlaw. Here is a taste:
    This Article examines a question of general interpretive significance about the relationship between enumerated powers within the particular context of intellectual property. Specifically, the Article asks whether Congress can avoid the restrictions on its intellectual property power (such as the "limited Times" requirement or the prohibition against protecting facts and, consequently, electronic databases) by resorting instead to other Article I powers, most notably the commerce power. Because the federal government is one of enumerated powers, it is impossible as a matter of text or structure to determine whether limits on one Article I power apply to the others. Instead, one must identify the values underlying the different Section 8 restrictions and whether they are worthy of general application--whether they represent constitutional norms. Once one closely examines the history of intellectual property and American trade regulation, it becomes clear that no such generally applicable norm is at work in the limits on Congress's intellectual property power. Beliefs about the importance of preventing Congress from granting monopolies were neither widely held at the time of the framing nor were they a feature of the Constitution as adopted. In the end, "exclusive rights" are merely another form of regulation that Congress may, and frequently does, use to confer economic rents on favored special interests. The Constitution, it will come as no surprise, offers very little protection against rent-seeking.


 
Weatherson on Zombies Brian Weatherson has posted Morality in Fiction and Consciousness in Imagination. Here is a taste:
    Zombies, by definition, are physical duplicates of actual people with no qualia. Zombie Paul is just like actual Paul, but even if I threw the pie in his face, he wouldn't feel a thing. (Quick moral question: would it be OK to throw the pie in Zombie Paul's face? He isn't conscious, so he might not have moral standing.) It's agreed on many sides, and I'm going to accept it here, that if zombies are possible, physicalism is false. And Dave Chalmers says he has an argument that they are possible. Here it is:
      Zombies are ideally positively conceivable Whatever is ideally positively conceivable is possible. So, zombies are possible.


 
Korobkin on ERISA & Self-Insured Health Plans Russell B. Korobkin (University of California, Los Angeles - School of Law) has posted The Battle Over Self-Insured Health Plans, or One Good Loophole Deserves Another on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    One of the most perplexing consequences of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act's (ERISA) preemption provisions is the differential regulatory treatment afforded to employer-sponsored health care benefits provided directly to employees by the employer's "self-insured" plan and to benefits provided by a third party that sells an insurance policy to the employer. Under ERISA's savings clause, states may regulate insurance contracts, thus allowing regulators to guarantee "insured" employees a menu of state-mandated health-insurance benefits. But under ERISA's deemer clause, self-insured plans are immune to such requirements. Since ERISA's passage three decades ago, there has been an explosion in the number of employers choosing to self-insure their health benefits plans and then purchase "stop-loss" insurance for the plan in order to avoid both state mandates and insurance risk. Critics cry foul at the use of this regulation-avoidance tactic. This Article defends employers' exploitation of the "deemer clause loophole" on the grounds that it is consistent with ERISA's clear language, structure, and delicate balance of underlying goals. But it argues that ERISA contains a complementary "savings clause loophole" that state regulators can exploit by regulating stop-loss insurance companies, thus using a self-help remedy to close the deemer clause loophole substantially. One good loophole deserves another.


 
Conference Announcement: WIPO Comes to the Silicon Valley
    The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology are joining forces to bring to the fore issues relating to intellectual property and its growing importance in today's technology and knowledge driven economies. The conference entitled "WIPO Comes to Silicon Valley - High Tech IP Issues in a Global Marketplace" will take place on May 17 and 18, 2004 on Stanford University campus. The program will address timely issues relating to intellectual property including the international patent and trademark systems administered by WIPO, WIPO's alternative dispute resolution services, and WIPO's work relating to patent law harmonization. Domain names, software and biotechnology patents, protection of genetic resources, digital copyright and the link between public health and intellectual property are among the session topics. The event will bring together major players from Silicon Valley's high technology industries and venture capital community, patent and trademark practitioners, academics, and members of the public. For more information, and registration, please visit http://lst.stanford.edu/wipo. Featured speakers include: Mr. Guido Appenzeller Co-founder CTO and Chief IP strategist Voltage Security United States of America Prof. John H. Barton George E. Osborne Professor of Law Emeritus Stanford Law School United States of America Mr. Keith Beresford European Patent Attorney Chartered Patent Attorney Intellectual Property Litigator Beresford & Co United Kingdom Ms. Lynne Beresford Deputy Commissioner for Trademark Examination Policy United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Ms. Carol Bidwell Supervisor Office of PCT Legal Administration United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Mr. Robert P. Blackburn Vice President and Chief Patent Counsel Chiron Corp. Distinguished Scholar Berkeley Center for Law & Technology UC Berkeley School of Law United States of America Mr. Mario Cervantes Project Manager Academic Patenting and Licensing in OECD countries Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) France Mr. Timothy Crean Chief IP Counsel SAP United States of America Mr. Alan Datri Senior Counsellor Sector of Trademarks, Industrial Designs and Geographical Indications World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Switzerland Mr. M. Scott Donahey Special Counsel Tomlinson Zisko L.L.P. United States of America Mr. Roger Elliott Member Intellectual Property Working Group (Keeping science open: the effects of intellectual property policy on the conduct of science) The Royal Society United Kingdom Prof. Paul Goldstein Stella W. and Ira S. Lillick Professor of Law Stanford Law School United States of America Prof. Joseph A. Grundfest W. A. Franke Professor of Law and Business Stanford Law School United States of America Mr. Francis Gurry Deputy Director General World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Switzerland Mr. John Hornickel Intellectual Property Counsel PolyOne Corporation United States of America Mr. Pitch Johnson Founding Partner Asset Management Company United States of America Mr. Sean Johnston Vice President Intellectual Property and Assistant Secretary Genentech United States of America Mr. Richard Kjeldgaard Senior Counsellor Traditional Knowledge Division World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Switzerland Mr. Barry J. Kramer Partner Fenwick&West LLP Palo Alto United States of America Ms. Katharine Ku Director Stanford University Office of Technology Licensing United States of America Ms. Michelle Lee Senior Patent Counsel Google United States of America Prof. Mark A Lemley Professor Stanford Law School United States of America Prof. Lawrence Lessig Professor of Law and John A. Wilson Distinguished Faculty Scholar Stanford Law School United States of America Mr. David Lim Deputy Director NUS Venture Support National University of Singapore Mr. Stephen Merrill Executive Director Science, Technology and Economic Policy The National Academies United States of America Ms. Kate H. Murashige Partner Morrison & Foerster, L.L.P. United States of America Mr. Douglas K. Norman General Patent Counsel Eli Lilly United States of America Prof. Margaret Jane Radin Wm. Benjamin Scott and Luna M. Scott Professor of Law Stanford Law School United States of America Mr. David Reed Senior Patent Advisor Global Patent Services The Procter & Gamble Company United States of America Mr. Mike Rodenbaugh Senior Corporate Counsel Yahoo! Inc. United States of America Mr. Tony Tangena Senior Vice President and Patent Portfolio Director Philips Intellectual Property Standards Netherlands Ms. Ruby Ann Zefo Managing Counsel Trademarks & Brands Intel Corporation United States of America


 
Conference Announcement: Judgments Judged and Wrongs Remembered
    Judgments Judged and Wrongs Remembered: Examining the Japanese American Civil Liberties Cases of World War II on their Sixtieth Anniversary November 5 and 6, 2004 The Japanese American National Museum Los Angeles, California a conference jointly sponsored by by the University of North Carolina School of Law, the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, and the Japanese American National Museum On December 18, 1944, the United States Supreme Court decided the landmark cases of Korematsu v. United States and Ex parte Endo, the first of which approved of the forced eviction of 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes, and the second of which struck down their continued incarceration after the government had recognized their loyalty. Over the months leading up to December 18, 1944, judges and juries in the lower federal courts across the western United States heard hundreds of criminal prosecutions of young Japanese American men who sought to turn their conscription into the military from behind barbed wire into legal test cases of the lawfulness of their confinement. On the occasion of their sixtieth anniversary of these cases, this conference will provide a rich and varied opportunity to reflect on their meaning, their legacy and their continued relevance to the world of today. It may well be the last major gathering at which at least some of the participants in the cases (especially litigants and law clerks) are still living and able to share their recollections. The emphasis of the conference will be on the legal cases themselves, rather than on the larger incarceration story that is their backdrop. For this reason, the conference will be of special interest to lawyers, judges, and others with interest or expertise in the law and legal history. The conference will begin on Friday afternoon, November 5, 2004, in the George and Sakaye Aratani Cental Hall of the Japanese American National Museum, at about 2:00 p.m. That afternoon's panel will provide a historical grounding for the conference by presenting as panelists a number of surviving participants in the legal cases. These will include litigants, law clerks to judges who decided the cases, and attorneys from the team that secured coram nobis writs in the 1980s for the men who had been wrongfully convicted during the war. A reception will follow. That evening, after a break for dinner, there will be performances in the George and Sakaye Aratani Central Hall of a dance piece by Gordon Hirabayashi's son Jay and a play by Minoru Yasui's daughter Holly. Both pieces are artistic interpretations of the artists fathers' legal battles against curfew, eviction, and incarceration. The conference will resume on Saturday morning, November 6, 2004, with a continental breakfast and the first of the two academic panels. Scholars including Greg Robinson (U. of Quebec), Patrick Gudridge (U. of Miami School of Law), Eric Muller (University of North Carolina School of Law), and John Q. Barrett (St. John's University School of Law), will examine the historical setting of the various Japanese American civil liberties cases. A keynote address will be delivered before lunch by the Honorable A. Wallace Tashima, a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Judge Tashima, the highest-ranking Japanese American judicial officer in the nation, spent several of his childhood years at the Poston Relocation Center and has recently published pointed and moving comments about these World War II cases in the pages of the Michigan Law Review. A box lunch will be provided for conference attendees, for them to consume at their leisure during the noon hour. After lunch, the panels will resume. A second panel of academics will address the legacy of the World War II civil liberties cases for the post-9/11 world. These scholars will include Roger Daniels (U. of Cincinnati, emeritus), Jerry Kang (UCLA Law School), Eric Yamamoto (U. of Hawaii Law School), Frank Wu (Howard U. Law School), Margaret Chon (Seattle U. Law School), Donna Arzt (Syracuse U. Law School), Neil Gotanda (Southwestern U. Law School), and Natsu Taylor Saito (Georgia State U. School of Law). The final panel of the day promises to be moving. Children of men who fought the incarceration in court will speak about the personal legacy of the decisions their fathers made sixty years ago. Panelists will be Karen Korematsu (daughter of Supreme Court litigant Fred Korematsu), Jay Hirabayashi (son of Supreme Court litigant Gordon Hirabayashi), Holly Yasui (daughter of Supreme Court litigant Minoru Yasui), Kenji Taguma (son of a draft resister from the Granada Relocation Center), and Carol Hoshizaki (daughter of a draft resister from the Heart Mountain Relocation Center). The conference will end late in the afternoon on Saturday, November 6, 2004.


Thursday, May 06, 2004
 
Rappaport on Vieth v. Jubelirer Mike Rappaport has a post on Vieth v. Jubelirer on The Right Coast. Here is a taste:
    Recently, the Supreme Court decided Vieth v. Jubelirer, a lawsuit challenging political gerrymandering – the situation when the legislature draws district lines in order to benefit one political party. The Court split. Four members (Scalia, Rehnquist, Thomas, and O'Connor) held that the question was nonjusticiable – that the Constitution did not provide a judicial remedy for such gerrymanders. Justice Kennedy provided the fifth vote for denying relief, but on the alternative ground that such gerrymanders were problematic and might be justiciable if someone could just find a judicially manageable standard to govern them. But since no one had done so yet, no relief could be afforded. Finally, the four liberal dissenters argued that a judicially manageable standard was available, but then proposed three different approaches, ironically showing the difficulty of discovering a constitutional standard.


 
Oman on Legal Scholarship and the Charge of Dilettantism Check out this post by Nate Oman at Tutissima Cassis. Here's a taste:
    Law stands at the intersection of politics, philosophy, history, economics, and any number of other disciplines. The problem is that when you are trying to understand, evaluate, and craft the law you cannot really escape any of these fields. The problem is that law is a set of concepts and ethical propositions amenable to philosophic analysis, a set on concerete incentives amenable to economic analysis, a social institution with a complex and important history, and so on. It is impossible to escape this multidimensional chacter of law, and those who have made serious attempts to reduce law to a single approach (think Posner and economics or Dworkin and moral philosophy) have consistently been hoisted in the end on their own petards. There have been two responses to this problem of pluralism. One has been professionalism. We dismiss the theoretical inquiries as essentially irrelevant and focus on the real business of lawyers and their problems and not worry overly much about the nature, meaning, and ultimate defensibility of what we are doing. The other response has been individual specialization and institutional ecclecticism. In concrete terms, this means that the law schools hire lots of Ph.D.s, but don't worry overly much about what discipline they have their training in.


 
Friday Calendar
    At Oxford's faculty of law, Andrew Kull (Boston University) presents the Astor Lecture Restatement of Restitution.
    At Harvard's Philosophy Department, Robert Stalnaker (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) presnets Our Knowledge of the Internal World (I): Knowing Where We Are, and What It Is Like, the First Whitehead Lecture.
    Today through May 8, at the Université de Montréal Deliberation, Desires, and Emotions: A Debate among Medieval and Contemporary Philosophers.
    At Oxford, João Bettencourt da Câmara (Technical University of Lisbon) & Grahame Lock (Oxford) present Adventures of Machiavelli's Prince in comparison with his other major political writings, 1532 - 1900.


 

Entry Level Hiring (Update #33, Last Updated on August 20, 2004) This is the final version of my report on entry level hiring. My thanks to everyone who has contributed.
Here is are some interesting numbers:
    JD Institution Yale leads with 20, Harvard has 18 and Stanford (10) is close behind. Chicago has 6. Berkeley has 5. Columbia, Michigan, Penn, Georgetown, and Virginia have 4 each. Howard and Texas are next with 3 each.
      Arizona-1 Australian National University-1 Boston College-1 Boston University-1 Columbia-4 Cornell-1 Chicago-6 Fordham-1 George Mason-1 George Washington-1 Georgetown-4 Georgia-1 Harvard-17 Hebrew-2 Howard-3 Kansas-2 Michigan-3 National Law School of India-1 North Carolina-1 Northwestern-1 NYU-1 Penn-4 Stanford-10 U of Arizona-1 UC Berkeley-5 UC Davis-1 UCLA-1 Tel Aviv-2 Texas-3 Toronto-1 Tulane-2 Vanderbilt-1 Virginia-4 William & Mary-1 Wisconsin-1 Yale-20
    PhD Discipline Philosophy leads with five placements, with Political Science (including Government, Political Theory, etc.) just behind with 4 placements. There must be more economics PhDs in the pool, but perhaps the economists realize that it is rational to be a free rider, gleaning the information submitted by others, but not submitting information yourself.
      Economics-1 English-1 History-2 Jurisprudence & Social Policy (Berkeley Program)-1 Middle Eastern Studies-1 Philosophy-6 Political Science-4 Psychology-2
And here are the hires by school in alphabetical order:
    American
      Amanda Frost (JD Harvard)
    Arizona State
      Yariv Brauner (JD Hebrew University & JSD NYU)
      Adam Chodorow (JD Virginia & LLM NYU)
      Linda Demaine (JD Arizona & PhD Psychology Arizona State)
      Aaron Fellmeth (JD Yale)
      Sandeep Gopalan (JD National Law School of India & DPhil Law Oxford)
      Orde Kittrie (JD Michigan)
    Boston College
      Mary-Rose Papandrea (J.D. Chicago)
    California Western
      Michael Yu (JD Columbia & LLM NYU)
    Chapman
      John Hall (JD Stanford & DPhil History Oxford)
      Donald Kochan (JD Cornell)
      Francine Lipman (JD UC Davis & LLM NYU)
    Chicago-Kent
      Daniel Hamilton (JD George Washington & Phd History Harvard)
      Michael Scodro (JD Yale Law)
      Carolyn Shapiro (JD Chicago JD)
    Columbia
      Alex Raskolnikov (JD Yale)
    Cornell
      Robert Hockett (JD Kansas & MA Oxford; JSD Yale)
      Bernadette Meyler (JD Stanford & PhD English UC Irvine)
    DePaul
      David Franklin (JD Chicago)
    Duke
      Jedediah Purdy (J.D. Yale)
      Neil Siegel (JD & PhD Berkeley)
    Emory
      Kimberly Jenkins (JD Harvard)
      Michael Kang (JD Chicago & PhD Government Harvard)
      Julie Seaman (JD Harvard)
    Florida International University
      Jose M. Gabilondo (JD Berkeley)
      Heather Lauren Hughes (JD Harvard)
      Andre L. Smith (JD Howard & LLM Georgetown)
      Carlton Mark Waterhouse (JD Howard & PhD Social Ethics Emory)
    Florida State
      Amitai Aviram (JD Tel Aviv & JSD Chicago)
      Curtis Bridgeman (JD & PhD Philosophy Vanderbilt)
      Jonathan Klick (JD & PhD Economics George Mason)
    Fordham
      Robin Lenhardt (JD Harvard)
    George Mason
      Michelle Boardman (JD Chicago)
    George Washington
      Steve Charnowitz (J.D. Yale)
      Amanda Tyler (J.D. Harvard)
    Georgetown
      John Mikhail (JD Stanford & PhD Philosophy Cornell)
      Ethan Yale (JD Tulane & LLM NYU)
    Hofstra
      Hofstra: Michael Siebecker (JD Columbia & PhD Political Theory (expected) Columbia)
    Indiana, Bloomington
      Kevin Collins (JD Stanford)
    Loyola Marymount University
      Robin Kar (JD Yale & PhD Philosophy Michigan)
      Lauren Willis (JD Stanford)
    Loyola University (Chicago)
      Sacha M. Coupet (J.D., University of Pennsylvania; Ph.D., University of Michigan)
      Stephanie M. Stern ( JD Yale)
    Marquette
      Jason J. Czarnezki (J.D. Chicago)
      Scott A. Moss (J.D. Harvard)
    Michigan State
      Adam Candeub (J.D. Penn)
      Noga Morag-Levine (LL.B. Hebrew; Ph.D. Jurisprudence and Social Policy, UC Berkeley)
    Minnesota
      Kristin Hickman (JD Northwestern)
      David Stras (JD & MBA Kansas)
    New York University
      Cristina Rodriguez (JD Yale)
    Northwestern
      Tonja Jacobi (JD Australian National University & PhD Political Science (Expected) Stanford)
      Jide Nzelibe (JD Yale)
    Notre Dame
      No entry level hire this year.
    Ohio State
      Garry Jenkins (JD Harvard)
    Rutgers, Camden
      Greg Lastowka (JD Virginia)
      John Oberdiek (JD & PhD Philosophy Penn)
    Seton Hall
      Gaia Bernstein (JD Boston University & JSD (expected) NYU)
      Frank Pasquale (JD Yale & MPhil Oxford Politics)
    Southwestern
      Paul Horwitz (LL.B. Toronto & LL.M. Columbia)
    St. Louis University
      Fred Bloom (JD Stanford)
      Nicole Porter (JD Michigan)
    Southern Methodist
      Jenia Iontcheva (JD Yale).
    Stanford
      Alison Morantz (JD Yale & PhD Economcis Harvard)
    Suffolk
      Christopher Gibson (JD Berkeley)
    Syracuse
      Aviva Abramovsky (JD Penn)
      Terry Turnipseed (JD & LLM Georgetown)
    Temple
      Craig Green
      David Hoffman (JD Harvard)
      Duncan Hollis (JD Boston College)
    Texas Wesleyan
      Neal Newman (JD Howard)
      Aric Short (JD Texas)
    University of California at Berkeley
      Anne Joseph (JD Yale, Ph.D Harvard in Political Economics and Government)
    University of California at Davis
      Michelle Alexander (JD Stanford)
      Jennifer Chacon (JD Yale)
      Carlton Larson (JD Yale)
      Donna Shestowsky (JD Stanford & PhD Psychology Stanford)
    University of California at Los Angeles
      Russell Robinson (JD Harvard)
      Noah Zatz (JD Yale)
    University of Chicago
      Adam Samaha (JD Harvard)
    University of Cincinnati
      Adam Steinman (JD Yale)
    University of Colorado
      Nestor Davidson (JD Columbia)
      Clare Huntington (JD Columbia)
    University of Connecticut
      Alexandra Lahav (JD Harvard)
    University of Georgia
      Kevin Jon Heller (JD Stanford)
      Erica Hashimoto (J.D. Georgetown)
    University of Kansas
      Elizabeth Weeks (JD Georgia)
    University of Kentucky
      Mark Kightlinger (JD & Ph.D., Philosophy, Yale)
    University of Nevada Las Vegas
      Tuan Samahon (JD Georgetown)
    University of Miami
      Mario L. Barnes (JD Berkeley)
    Univeristy of Michigan
      Alicia Davis Evans (JD Yale & MBA Harvard)
    University of Nebraska
      Richard Moberly (JD Harvard)
    University of North Carolina
      Richard Myers (North Carolina)
    University of Oklahoma
      Mary Sue Backus (JD William and Mary)
    University of San Diego
      Adam Kolber (JD Stanford)
      David Law (JD Harvard & PhD Political Science Stanford)
      Lisa Ramsey (JD UCLA)
    University of South Carolina
      Josie Brown (JD Harvard)
      Josh Eagle (JD Georgetown)
      Joel Samuels (JD Michigan)
    University of Tennessee
      Jeffrey Hirsch (JD NYU)
    University of Texas
      Oren Bracha (JD Tel Aviv & SJD Harvard)
    University of Washington
      Kristin Stilt (JD Texas & PhD Middle Eastern Studies Harvard)
    Villanova
      Tiffany Graham (JD Virginia)
    Wake Forest
      No entry level hire this year.
    Washington & Lee
      Montre Underwood (JD Tulane)
      Melissa Waters (JD Yale)
    Western New England
      William Childs (JD Texas)
    Widener, Harriburg
      Ben Barros (JD Fordham)
      Michael Dimino (J.D. Harvard)
    William & Mary
      Eric Chason (JD Virginia)
      Nancy Combs (JD Berkeley)
      Erin Ryan (JD Harvard)
    William Mitchell
      Alexandra Klass (JD University of Wisconsin)
      John Radsan (JD Harvard)
This is the final version of the list!
And JD students are also hired in other disciplines. For example, Wharton Legal Studies reports that they have hired Kevin Werbach (JD Harvard).
Note: This list is for entry-level hires only. I have arbitrarily grouped first degrees in law as JDs, even though many non-US law schools award the LLB as the first law degree. Several readers have asked that I collect data on subject-matter areas, but my judgment is that this data is both too soft to be reliable and too difficult to collect. My thanks to everyone who has contributed information!


Wednesday, May 05, 2004
 
Law School Members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Announced The new Law Fellows of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Announced are:
    Philip Bobbitt (University of Texas, Austin) George Fletcher (Columbia University) Michael Graetz (Yale University) Joel Handler (University of California, Los Angeles) Daniel Meltzer (Harvard University) Thomas Merrill (Columbia University) Diane Wood (U.S. Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit)


 
New Law and Philosophy Institute at Rutgers The website for the new Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy is now up. Check it out.


 
Wednesday Calendar
    At Princeton, Tyler Cowen presents the DeCamp Bioethics Seminar.


 
Marina on U.S. Torture in Historical Perspective William Marina has a piece entitled Torture and Civilian Deaths in Three Counterinsurgencies. Here is a taste:
    It was revealed this past week that, on top of the indiscriminate bombardment of civilians in Iraqi urban areas, both U.S. and British soldiers have become involved in the torture of Iraqi prisoners as well. Ironically, the torture of prisoners by the U.S. military has been carried out in the very same Abu Ghraib Prison used by Saddam Hussein and his murderous regime. This is not the first time that torture has been a central feature of U.S intervention. The war in Iraq shares parallels with both the Vietnam War a generation ago and the Spanish-American War a century earlier—massive civilian deaths and torture are characteristics of all three imperial interventions.


 
Book Announcement
    Wittgenstein on the Arbitrariness of Grammar Michael N. Forster To read a sample chapter, please visit: http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7747.html What is the nature of a conceptual scheme? Are there alternative conceptual schemes? If so, are some more justifiable or correct than others? The later Wittgenstein already addresses these fundamental philosophical questions under the general rubric of "grammar" and the question of its "arbitrariness"--and does so with great subtlety. This book explores Wittgenstein's views on these questions. To read the entire book description, go to: http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7747.html


Tuesday, May 04, 2004
 
Tuesday Calendar
    At Oxford's Jurisprudence Discussion Group, Vesselin Paskalev presents Joint Commitment and Individual Freedom.


 
Keller on Virtue Ethics Simon Keller has posted Virtue Ethics is Self-Effacing. Here is a taste:
    Michael Stocker famously argues that consequentialist and deontological moral theories are "schizophrenic" or self-effacing, meaning that they recommend a kind of disharmony between reasons and motives. His argument is often taken to give a reason why we should abandon consequentialism and deontology in favor of virtue ethics. I argue that it isn't, because virtue ethics is self-effacing in just the same way as are its traditional rivals. I present some cases in support of my claim, and consider (and reject) a virtue ethical response that arises from the work of Bernard Williams and Rosalind Hursthouse.


 
Thompson on the Martin Act Nicholas Thompson's essay The Sword of Spitzer is now available over at Legal Affairs. Here is a taste:
    A little-known law called the Martin Act gives New York's attorney general extraordinary power, yet for 75 years this Excalibur has been left to rust in its scabbard. Now, Eliot Spitzer is wielding it against the biggest players on Wall Street. Should such a powerful weapon be left in anyone's hands?


 
Yoo on Broadband Neutrality Christopher S. Yoo (Vanderbilt University - School of Law) has posted Would Mandating Broadband Network Neutrality Help or Hurt Competition? A Comment on the End-to-End Debate (Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law, Vol. 3, 2004). Here is the abstract:
    A chorus of commentators has drawn inspiration from the end-to-end argument first advanced by Saltzer, Reed, and Clark and called upon policy makers to mandate that last mile broadband providers adhere to certain principles of network neutrality. In this symposium contribution, Professor Christopher Yoo offers an economic critique of these proposals, concluding first that they are based on a fundamental misreading of Saltzer, Reed, and Clark, who actually reject attempts to turn the end-to-end argument into a categorical mandate. In addition, prohibiting the use of proprietary protocols can harm consumers by skewing the Internet towards certain types of applications. Finally, network neutrality raises the even more significant danger of forestalling the emergence of new broadband technologies by reinforcing the existing supply-side and demand-side economies of scale and by stifling incentives to invest in alternative network platforms. Although such considerations would be problematic under any circumstances, they carry particular weight with respect to industries such as broadband, which are undergoing rapid technological change.


 
Radin on Standardized Contracts & DRM Margaret Jane Radin (Stanford Law School) has postedRegulation by Contract, Regulation by Machine (Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, Vol. 160, pp. 1-15, 2004). Here is the abstract:
    Two potentially widespread phenomena, mass standardized contracts and digital rights management systems, could have dramatic impact on how the law of property and contract regulates the distribution of intellectual property. This paper argues these phenomena motivate a more careful consideration of (1) their effect on the knowledge-generation incentives that underlie intellectual property, (2) which aspects of the present property and contract regimes are default, waivable rules and which are inalienable entitlements, and (3) whether legislative approval of regulation by machine is best interpreted as a revision of the law of intellectual property or as an attempt to undermine it.


 
Reese on DRM & Anticircumvention R. Anthony Reese (University of Texas at Austin - School of Law) has posted Will Merging Access Controls and Rights Controls Undermine the Structure of Anticircumvention Law? (Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 619, No. 18, 2003) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    This article looks at the legal regime designed to protect copyright owners' technological control measures against circumvention efforts. The article considers how Chapter 12 of current copyright law, enacted as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, treats different controls - access controls and rights controls - differently, offering more protection for access controls. Congress afforded rights controls less protection, the article argues, in order to allow users to make noninfringing uses of copyrighted works even when copyright owners have applied technological protection measures. The disparate levels of protection might offer copyright owners an incentive to prefer access controls over rights controls. More significantly, it may lead copyright owners to adopted "merged" control measures which function as both access and rights controls. If courts treat such merged controls as entitled to the legal protections granted to both access controls and rights controls, they may hinder users from engaging in permitted circumvention of rights controls for noninfringing purposes without facing liability for prohibited circumvention of an access control. Because this would undermine Congress's goal of preserving noninfringing uses of technologically protected works, the article concludes by considering two legislative approaches to preserving noninfringing use in the face of merged controls.


 
Kerr on Cybercrime Orin S. Kerr (George Washington University Law School) Cybercrime's Scope: Interpreting 'Access' and 'Authorization' in Computer Misuse Statutes (NYU Law Review, Vol. 78, No. 5, pp. 1596-1668, November 2003) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    In the last twenty-five years, the federal government and all fifty states have enacted new criminal laws that prohibit unauthorized access to computers. These new laws attempt to draw a line between criminality and free conduct in cyberspace. No one knows what it means to access a computer, however, nor when access becomes unauthorized. The few courts that have construed these terms have offered divergent interpretations, and no scholars have yet addressed the problem. Recent decisions interpreting the federal statute in civil cases suggest that any breach of contract with a computer owner renders use of that computer an unauthorized access. If applied to criminal cases, this approach would broadly criminalize contract law on the Internet, potentially making millions of Americans criminals for the way they write e-mail and surf the Web. This Article presents a comprehensive inquiry into the meaning of unauthorized access statutes. It begins by explaining why legislatures enacted unauthorized access statutes, and why early beliefs that such statutes solved the problem of computer misuse have proved remarkably naïve. Next, the Article explains how the courts have construed these statutes in an overly broad way that threatens to criminalize a surprising range of innocuous conduct involving computers. In the final section, the Article offers a normative proposal for interpreting access and authorization. This section argues that courts should reject a contract theory of authorization, and should narrow the scope of unauthorized access statutes to circumvention of code-based restrictions on computer privileges. The section justifies this proposal on several grounds. First, the proposal will best mediate the line between securing privacy and protecting the liberty of Internet users. Second, the proposal mirrors criminal law's traditional treatment of crimes that contain a consent element. Third, the proposed approach is consistent with the basic theories of punishment. Fourth, the proposed interpretation avoids possible constitutional difficulties that may arise under the broader constructions that courts recently have favored.


 
Ellen, Schill, Schwartz, and Voicu on Housing Assistance and Cities Ingrid Gould Ellen , Michael H. Schill , Amy Ellen Schwartz and Ioan Voicu (New York University - Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service , New York University School of Law , New York University - Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and New York University - School of Law) have posted The Role of Cities in Providing Housing Assistance on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    In recent years, the federal government has increasingly relied upon states and cities to create and administer social policy. This paper examines available theory and evidence regarding the appropriate role of different levels of government, focusing in particular on the role of cities. Exploring the case of New York City, the paper also offers new empirical evidence on the extent to which investments in affordable housing can help to eliminate externalities and rebuild inner city communities. We conclude that although cities should play a major role in administering housing programs, they should only fund them under a limited set of circumstances. Redistribution of income, a major objective of most housing subsidy programs, should generally be paid for by the federal government, not cities. In contrast, cities should consider funding housing production programs when they are part of a comprehensive strategy either to remove negative externalities or to generate positive spillovers. Our empirical analysis of New York City's investment in new housing suggests that housing programs can generate significant external benefits to their neighborhoods. Thus, our results point to a potentially important role for cities, based upon the spillover effects of housing construction and rehabilitation in distressed neighborhoods.


 
Davey on WTO Dispute Resolution William J. Davey (University of Illinois College of Law) has posted Reforming WTO Dispute Settlement on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    The dispute settlement system of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was one of the most important achievements of the Uruguay Round. Since the birth of the WTO over nine years ago on January 1, 1995, the dispute settlement system, as established by the Dispute Settlement Understanding, or DSU - has played a particularly important role in the world trading system. While the system has been praised by many, some of the specific cases that the system has dealt with have been quite controversial. One consequence has been that there has been considerable interest in modifying a number of the DSU's procedural rules, and WTO Members have spent much time discussing DSU reforms for most of the last six years. This paper outlines the history of DSU reform, examines the amendments that were proposed by the Chairman of the reform process in May 2003, and discusses a number of major reform proposals that he did not put forward. It concludes that the Chairman's proposals were relatively modest, dealing with such issues as sequencing of implementation procedures, remands and third party rights. Among the significant proposals that were not included in the Chairman's text, but which are discussed in the paper are proposals for the shortening of time frames, the European Community's permanent panel body proposal, various proposals on transparency and amicus briefs, the Chile/US proposals on party control, the Mexican proposals on remedies and various proposals relating to special and differential treatment for developing countries.


 
Setear on Whaling Legalization John K. Setear (University of Virginia School of Law) has posted Can Legalization Last? Whaling and the Durability of National (Executive) Discretion (Virginia Journal of International Law, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Legal academics and international-relations scholars have recently undertaken a great deal of interdisciplinary work on the interaction of international law and world politics. One framework for such analysis, developed at length in the Summer 2000 issue of International Organization, emphasizes three characteristics of legalization: (1) degree of formal legal obligation, (2) precision of rules, and (3) amount of authority delegated to a neutral, non-state decision-maker. International whaling reflects a high-high-low configuration of these three variables, respectively. Most analyses of legalization ignore this configuration of variables despite its pervasiveness. An examination of the whaling regime shows that the high-high-low configuration of variables has been highly stable, despite dramatic changes in a wide variety of other variables in the whaling regime (such as membership, breadth of regulation, and the stringency of regulation) and pressure in the US (involving both litigation and legislative action) to move towards a higher-delegation regime. The pervasiveness and stability of the high-high-low configuration in the face of these changes and pressures argues for much closer attention to this form of legalization by scholars. Given the amount of power that this form of legalization grants to the national executive, the stability of the high-high-low configuration for an international legal regime also implies that executive branches will retain a near-monopoly on policy-making in regimes that initially display this configuration.


 
Kieff & Paredes on the Periphery of IP F. Scott Kieff and Troy A. Paredes (Washington University School of Law and Washington University, St. Louis - School of Law) have posted The Basics Matter: At the Periphery of Intellectual Property on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Controversies often arise at the interfaces where intellectual property ("IP") law meets other topics in law and economics, such as property law, contract law, and antitrust law. Participants in the debates over how to mediate these interfaces often view each interface as a special case deserving unique treatment under the law. The doctrines of copyright and patent misuse are cases in point: they graft select antitrust principles onto copyright or patent law, even though there is an entirely distinct body of law - antitrust law - designed to deal with the putative concerns about competition that allegedly give rise to misuse. In this essay, we argue that a better approach for mediating disputes at the periphery of IP law focuses on what we term the "basics" - or core principles and features - of each area of law, and rarely requires specialized frameworks. For example, according to our "basics matter" approach, there is no need to create special doctrines or approaches to address issues relating to matters such as price discrimination or restrictive licensing arrangements involving IP. Rather, analyzing the legality of such arrangements simply requires one to look to the basics of substantive IP law, antitrust law, and what some people call the "general law" - property law, contract law, and the like. Applying the basics of each area of the law gives us a workable - and more predictable - framework of analysis than creating one - with more specialized approaches, such as the doctrines of copyright or patent misuse, using the basics results in easier to apply rules for resolving disputes that transacting parties can better understand and rely on in advance. By reducing legal uncertainty, the "basics matter" approach facilitates the ex ante coordination necessary to promote innovation through the commercialization of the inventions, symbols, and creative works that are protected by patents, copyrights, and trademarks - the entire goal of IP law and an important goal of antitrust law.


 
Book Announcement: The Dark Side of Virtue
    The Dark Sides of Virtue Reassessing International Humanitarianism David Kennedy To read a sample chapter, please visit: http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7711.html In this provocative and timely book, David Kennedy explores what can go awry when we put our humanitarian yearnings into action on a global scale--and what we can do in response. Rooted in Kennedy's own experience in numerous humanitarian efforts, the book examines campaigns for human rights, refugee protection, economic development, and for humanitarian limits to the conduct of war. It takes us from the jails of Uruguay to the corridors of the United Nations, from the founding of a non-governmental organization dedicated to the liberation of East Timor to work aboard an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. To read the entire book description, go to: http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7711.html


Monday, May 03, 2004
 
Kraut on Plato I am a huge fan of Richard Kraut. He has a wonderful new essay on Plato in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.


 
Entry Level Hiring The most recent update of the entry-level hiring report is here. I would like to close this out this week, so if you have information that you have been meaning to send in, please drop me a line at lsolum@sandiego.edu. And thank you to everyone who has contributed information!


 
Weened Update On Saturday, the top SSRN downloads were summarized, and the Download of the Week was Grutter's First Amendment by Paul Horwitz. Also on Saturday, the Legal Theory Bookworm recommended Getting Even: Forgiveness and Its Limits by Jeffrie G. Murphy. On Sunday, the Legal Theory Lexicon was on Hohfeld's theory of rights and the Legal Theory Calendar previewed the week's talks, workshops, and conferences.


 
Monday Calendar
    At the University of San Diego's colloquium series, Rick Pildes (NYU) presents Emergency Contexts Without Emergency Powers: The United States' Constitutional Approach to Rights During Wartime.
    At George Mason's Program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Andrew Yates (Department of Economics, University of Richmond) presents Citizen Participation in Pollution Permit Markets.
    At the Princeton University Seminar in Law and Public Affairs, Anita L. Allen (University of Pennsylvania Law School & LAPA Fellow, Princeton University) is speaking.
    At Oxford's Moral Philosophy Seminar, Michael Rosen is speaking.


 
Walker Asks Whether Executive Compensation Is Tax Advantages David I. Walker (Boston University School of Law) has posted Is Equity Compensation Tax Advantaged? on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    Employees who receive stock options and other forms of equity compensation generally are able to defer paying tax on this compensation for years, sometimes decades. In a rising market this deferral results in a tax benefit at the employee level. This article asks whether the employee-level tax benefit in a rising market results in a global tax advantage for companies that rely heavily on equity compensation and their employees. There are two primary issues. First, on initial inspection one might conclude that the employee-level benefit in a rising market is offset by a disadvantage in a stagnant or declining market. But this is not the case. This article demonstrates that the apparently symmetric disadvantage of equity compensation in a declining market is undermined by capital loss limitations, the likelihood of employee-favorable ex post adjustments to equity compensation contracts, and the general upward drift in stock prices. Thus, equity compensation and deferral do provide a tax benefit at the employee level on an expected value basis. The second question is who bears the burden of the employee-level tax benefit? This article demonstrates that the key to determining the overall winners and losers lies in tracking the actual corporate investment of the cash that is saved when employees are compensated with equity. The evidence suggests that this investment results in significant corporate tax revenues for the fisc that offset the employee-level tax savings. In aggregate, taxpayers do not appear to be subsidizing corporate equity compensation programs and these programs are not producing a global tax advantage. However, this does not mean that equity compensation tax reform should be off the table. The aggregate global tax advantage (and taxpayer subsidy) could increase if companies become more adept at hedging stock and option grants. In addition, the employee-level tax benefit associated with equity compensation is concentrated in the hands of senior executives, which 1) results in vertical inequity between the taxation of these executives and rank and file employees who tend to be cash compensated and 2) could undermine the formation of broad-based qualified savings plans. Thus, a modest reform to the taxation of equity compensation, such as the imposition of a special employee-level tax on equity gains, may be justified.


 
Bradley & Flaherty on Executive Powers Curtis A. Bradley and Martin S. Flaherty (University of Virginia School of Law and Fordham University - School of Law) have posted Executive Power Essentialism and Foreign Affairs (Michigan Law Review, Vol. 102, Forthcoming 2004) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    The so-called "Vesting Clause" of Article II of the Constitution, which provides that "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America," stands in apparent contrast with the Article I Vesting Clause, which provides that "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States. . . ." This textual difference, usually bolstered with historical materials, has long undergirded the claim that the Article II Vesting Clause implicitly grants the President an array of residual powers, especially foreign affairs powers, that are not specified in the remainder of Article II. This argument, which we call the "Vesting Clause Thesis," was famously advanced by Alexander Hamilton in his first Pacificus essay defending President Washington's 1793 Neutrality Proclamation. In recent years, the Vesting Clause Thesis has gained newfound popularity. White House officials were apparently prepared to deploy the argument in support of the Bush Administration's authority to use military force against Iraq had Congress not expressly granted such authority. Professors Saikrishna Prakash and Michael Ramsey recently defended the Vesting Clause Thesis at length in an important article in the Yale Law Journal. Professor John Yoo has invoked the Thesis in a number of recent articles as support for a variety of alleged presidential foreign affairs powers. The Thesis also has received recent support from Professor Phillip Trimble, and its historical account of executive foreign affairs authority is similar to the account developed in a thoughtful recent book by Professor H. Jefferson Powell. This Article critiques the Vesting Clause Thesis on both textual and historical grounds. As for text, the difference in wording between the Article I and Article II Vesting Clauses can be explained on a number of other plausible grounds and need not be read as distinguishing between a limited grant of legislative powers and a plenary grant of executive power. As for history, the narrative that is offered by proponents of the Vesting Clause Thesis has two central features. First, it is a story of continuity, whereby European political theory is carried forward, relatively unblemished, into American constitutional design and practice. Second, the narrative relies on what could be called "executive power essentialism" - the proposition that the Founders had in mind, and intended the Constitution to reflect, a conception of what is "naturally" or "essentially" within executive power. We argue that this historical narrative is wrong on both counts. Among other things, the narrative fails to take account of complexity within eighteenth century political theory, the experience of state constitutionalism before 1787, and the self-conscious rejection by the Founders of the British model of government. The narrative also understates the degree to which the constitutional Founders were functionalists, willing to deviate from pure political theory and essentialist categories in order to design an effective government.


 
Clerkship Announcement
    Judge Christine O.C. Miller, U.S Court of Federal Claim, Washington, DC, is now accepting applications for a one year clerkship starting August 2005. The Court of Federal Claim, located on Lafayette Square adjacent to the White House, hears non-tort civil claims against the U.S. federal government. A typical docket is 75% contract claims, 15% Fifth Amendment takings claim, and the remainder patent and tax claims. Judge Miller produces published decisions in most matters, offering clerks the opportunity to draft the first version of rulings and hone their analytical and drafting skills. Law review and top 10% class ranking are required. Moot court and other experiences are also considered. To apply, please send cover letter, resume, transcript and writing sample to: Hon. Christine O.C. Miller Attn: Clerkship Application U.S. Court of Federal Claims 717 Madison Pl., NW, # 716 Washington, DC 20005


 
Rickless on the Guantanamo Cases Sam Rickless (UCSD Philosophy & USD Institute for Law and Philosphy) has an op/ed in Newsday on the Guantanamo Bay Cases. Here is a taste:
    'The practice of arbitrary imprisonment ha[s] been in all ages [one of]the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny," wrote Alexander Hamilton more than 200 years ago. His words are as true now as they were then. More than anything else, more than war, more than pain, more than death, the nation's founders feared the machinations of unbridled executive power, even in the service of the general welfare. At no time since the establishment of judicial review has it been more important than it is now for the Supreme Court to rein in the executive and restore the balance of powers the founders envisaged.


Sunday, May 02, 2004
 
Legal Theory Calendar
    Monday, May 3
      At the University of San Diego's colloquium series, Rick Pildes (NYU) presents Emergency Contexts Without Emergency Powers: The United States' Constitutional Approach to Rights During Wartime.
      At George Mason's Program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Andrew Yates (Department of Economics, University of Richmond) presents Citizen Participation in Pollution Permit Markets.
      At the Princeton University Seminar in Law and Public Affairs, Anita L. Allen (University of Pennsylvania Law School & LAPA Fellow, Princeton University) is speaking.
      At Oxford's Moral Philosophy Seminar, Michael Rosen is speaking.
    Tuesday, May 4
      At Oxford's Jurisprudence Discussion Group, Vesselin Paskalev presents Joint Commitment and Individual Freedom.
    Wednesday, May 5
      At Princeton, Tyler Cowen presents the DeCamp Bioethics Seminar.
    Thursday, May 6
      At Oxford's faculty of law, Andrew Kull (Boston University) presents the Astor Lecture Restatement of Restitution.
      At Harvard's Philosophy Department, Robert Stalnaker (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) presnets Our Knowledge of the Internal World (I): Knowing Where We Are, and What It Is Like, the First Whitehead Lecture.
      Today through May 8, at the Université de Montréal Deliberation, Desires, and Emotions: A Debate among Medieval and Contemporary Philosophers.
      At Oxford, João Bettencourt da Câmara (Technical University of Lisbon) & Grahame Lock (Oxford)pre sent Adventures of Machiavelli's Prince in comparison with his other major political writings, 1532 - 1900.
    Friday, May 6
      At Harvard's Philosophy Department, Robert Stalnaker (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) presnets Our Knowledge of the Internal World (II): Knowing What I Am Thinking, the Second Whitehead Lecture.
    Saturday, May 7
      The University of San Diego is hosting the Third Annual Administrative Law Discussion Forum.


 
Legal Theory Lexicon: Hohfeld
    Introduction You need to know Hohfeld. Why? Because W.N. Hohfeld’s typology of rights from his book Fundamental Legal Conceptions is, well, fundamental. And useful!
    Law students encounter the idea of right (moral or legal) early and often. But “rights talk” is frequently “loose talk.” Hohfeld is famous for exposing the ambiguity in the concept of a right and resolving that ambiguity with a typology of rights that distinguishes between claims, liberties, authorities, and immunities. This post is a quick and dirty introduction to Hohfeld for law students (especially first year law students) with an interest in legal theory.
    Types of Rights and Correlative Duties Lawyers tend to mush all legal rights together into a single category. The right to privacy, the right to freedom of speech, property rights, and civil rights—these diverse legal phenomena are frequently treated as if the “right” involved in these diverse cases was a single unambiguous type. Hohfeld’s first contribution was to distinguish different types of rights. Claim rights, for example, create corresponding obligations. Thus, my right to exclusive use of my land entails a corresponding duty of noninterference. You have a duty not to enter upon my land. But my property right also entails my liberty to use my land in a wide variety of ways—to build a house, plant a garden, and so forth. Correlated to that liberty is a correlative absence of inconsistent claim rights. You have no right to prevent me from building a house or planting a garden. Some legal rights involve powers over others. Thus, an employer has a right to control and direct the employee’s actions at work, and parents have authority over their children. Finally, there are immunities from authority. Thus, when children reach the age of majority or are legally emancipated they acquire immunities that disable the authority rights of their parents.
    Implicit in our discussion so far is Hohfeld’s second big idea, which is that each kind of right (claim, liberty, authority, and immunity) has a correlative legal consequence for others. Claim rights have correlative duties. Liberty rights correlate with an absence of claims. Authority rights correlate with liabilities. Immunities correlate with the absence of authority.
    Four Types of Rights The following list enumerates Hohfeld’s basic schema, identifying each kind of right and the correlative legal consequence. P is the party with the right. Q represents the person or group of persons on whom the right has a legal effect. X represents the object of the right.
      Claim Rights
        Rights relation:
          P has a claim against Q to X.
        Correlative relation:
          Q has a duty to P to X.
      Liberty Rights
        Rights relation:
          P has a liberty against Q to X.
        Correlative relation:
          Q has no claim against P to not-X
      Authority Rights:
        Rights relation:
          P has authority over Q to X
        Correlative relation:
          Q has a liability to P to X.
      Immunity Rights
        Rights relation:
          P has an immunity against Q to X.
        Correlative relation:
          Q has a disability (no authority) against P to not-X.
    Moral and Legal Rights Hohfeld was interested in legal rights, but we can extend his scheme to moral rights. Thus, if I have a moral claim right to performance of a promise, you have a corresponding moral duty to perform. Of course, many legal rights are identical to (or substantially the same as) similar moral rights. Contracts, for example, create both moral and legal obligations. Some moral rights, however, may not be reflected in the law. For example, I may have a moral obligation not to discriminate on the basis of race when letting a room in my home, but at the same time have a legal liberty right to engage in such discrimination.
    Conclusion That’s Hohfeld in a very short nutshell!
    If you are still in exams, good luck on the remainder of your tests. If you exams have ended, my best wishes for the summer. The Legal Theory Lexicon will continue throughout the summer.


Saturday, May 01, 2004
 
Download of the Week This week, the Download of the Week is Grutter's First Amendment by Paul Horwitz (visiting University of San Diego). Here is a taste:
    No shortage of ink will be spilled on the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action decisions. And little imagination is needed to predict how much of that commentary will run – as praise for the Court’s cautious, Solomonic, sound balancing of the conflicting concerns of formal equality and racial justice in light of the continuing consequences of slavery, or as condemnation of an unprincipled, unsound departure from fundamental principles of equal justice under law. In any event, the subject of the symposia, colloquia, special issues, and other countless discussions devoted to these cases will be clear: Grutter and Gratz belong to the Fourteenth Amendment caselaw, sub-genus affirmative action. I propose to leave that debate to one side as much as possible. Notwithstanding the expertise and the good intentions of many of those constitutional scholars who will enter the lists on one side or another of the affirmative action debate, I suspect that a good deal of discussion of Grutter and Gratz will simply rehearse positions long since fixed on this divisive issue. Perhaps it is in the nature of the subject. As a matter of policy and morality, affirmative action is too controversial to lend itself to a principled resolution that can easily command popular consensus. As a matter of constitutional law, the capacious terms of the Constitution, the meandering course of the Court’s opinions, and the opaque nature of the Court’s discussions will invariably lead the legal debate back to the intractable moral and political questions. Discussion about affirmative action may simply be one more illustration of a basic principle of legal discourse: the political heat of an issue is inversely proportional to the light that legal debate can shed on it.


 
Legal Theory Bookworm This week, the Legal Theory Bookworm recommends Getting Even: Forgiveness and Its Limits by Jeffrie G. Murphy. Here is a synposis:
    We have all been victims of wrongdoing. Forgiving that wrongdoing is one of the staples of current pop psychology dogma; it is seen as a universal prescription for moral and mental health in the self-help and recovery section of bookstores. At the same time, personal vindictiveness as a rule is seen as irrational and immoral. In many ways, our thinking on these issues is deeply inconsistent; we value forgiveness yet at the same time now use victim-impact statements to argue for harsher penalties for criminals. Do we have a right to hate others for what they have done to us? Jeffrie Murphy is a skeptic when it comes to our views on both emotions. In this short book, he proposes that vindictive emotions (anger, resentment, and the desire for revenge) actually deserve a more legitimate place in our emotional, social, and legal lives than we currently recognize, while forgiveness deserves to be more selectively granted.
And here is a review in the First Things. I've been a fan of Murphy's for many years! This is the book on forgiveness.


 
SSRN Top Recent Downloads The Social Science Research Network compiles lists of top ten downloads by subject matter. Here are some of the categories of interest to legal theorists: