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Direct (Anti-)Democracy, Maxwell L. Stearns
Direct (Anti-)Democracy, Maxwell L. Stearns
Maxwell L. Stearns
Legal scholars, economists, and political scientists are divided on whether voter initiatives and legislative referendums tend to produce outcomes that are more (or less) majoritarian, efficient, or solicitous of minority concerns than traditional legislation. Scholars also embrace opposing views on which law-making mechanism better promotes citizen engagement, registers preference intensities, encourages compromise, and prevents outcomes masking cycling voter preferences. Despite these disagreements, commentators generally assume that the voting mechanism itself renders plebiscites more democratic than legislative lawmaking. This assumption is mistaken. Although it might seem unimaginable that a lawmaking process that directly engages voters possesses fundamentally antidemocratic features, this Article …
The Relational Contingency Of Rights, Alex Stein, Gideon Parchomovsky
The Relational Contingency Of Rights, Alex Stein, Gideon Parchomovsky
Alex Stein
In this Article, we demonstrate, contrary to conventional wisdom, that all rights are relationally contingent. Our main thesis is that rights afford their holders meaningful protection only against challengers who face higher litigation costs than the rightholder. Contrariwise, challengers who can litigate more cheaply than a rightholder can force the rightholder to forfeit the right and thereby render the right ineffective. Consequently, in the real world, rights avail only against certain challengers but not others. This result is robust and pervasive. Furthermore, it obtains irrespectively of how rights and other legal entitlements are defined by the legislator or construed by …