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Full-Text Articles in Law
Assessing The New Judicial Minimalism, Christopher J. Peters
Assessing The New Judicial Minimalism, Christopher J. Peters
All Faculty Scholarship
In this article, which has been published in slightly revised form at 100 Colum. L. Rev. 1454 (2000), I critique some recently prominent arguments for "judicial minimalism" in constitutional decisionmaking. Current minimalist arguments, I contend, are primarily "policentric," that is, focused on the role the judiciary can play in bolstering the accountability and deliberativeness of the political branches. Drawing in part on a previous article, I offer an alternative approach to minimalism that is "juricentric" - focused on the inherent democratic legitimacy of the adjudicative process and the unique competence of that process to produce decisions about individual rights. I …
Judicial Auditing, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley
Judicial Auditing, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley
Faculty Scholarship
This paper presents a simple framework for analyzing a hierarchical system of judicial auditing. We concentrate on (what we perceive to be) the two principal reasons that courts and/or legislatures tend to scrutinize the decisions of lower echelon actors: imprecision and ideological bias. In comparing these two reasons, we illustrate how each may yield systematically distinct auditing and reversal behaviors. While auditing for imprecision tends to bring about evenhanded review/reversal, auditing for political bias tends to be contingent on the first mover's chosen action. Examples of these tendencies can be found in a number of legal applications, including administrative law, …
Imagining Justice, Robin West
Imagining Justice, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
As we approach the new century and the new millennium, those of us who are legal professionals in liberal capitalist democracies need to drastically improve our practices of law if we are to bring those practices in line with our professed ideals. The commodification and marketing of legal services, for example, combined with a nearly blind commitment to overly combative advocacy, puts legal assistance beyond the means of large segments of the public, severely undercutting our commitment to equality before the law. A different and perhaps harder question, however, is whether the ideals against which we judge our practices are …