Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

Deliberative Constitutionalism In The National Security Setting, Mary B. Derosa, Milton C. Regan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Deliberative democracy theory maintains that authentic deliberation about matters of public concern is an essential condition for the legitimacy of political decisions. Such deliberation has two features. The first is deliberative rigor. This is deliberation guided by public-regarding reasons in a process in which persons are genuinely open to the force of the better argument. The second is transparency. This requires that requires that officials publicly explain the reasons for their decisions in terms that citizens can endorse as acceptable grounds for acting in the name of the political community.

Such requirements would seem to be especially important in the …

The "Gag Rule" Revisited: Physicians As Abortion Gatekeepers, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

To the surprise of many and the dismay of some, the U.S. Supreme Court took it upon itself last term to proclaim a national compromise on the question of abortion. The Court's announced truce, an elaboration on Justice O'Connor's "undue burden" idea, is pragmatic in design but unlikely to prove stable in practice. The three justices who spoke for the Court disparaged Roe with reluctant praise, then upheld its outer shell on the ground that social expectations and the need to sustain the appearance of the rule of law made it impolitic to do otherwise. This awkward doctrinal invention seems …