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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Through The Looking Glass Of Eminent Domain: Exploring The "Arbitrary And Capricious" Test And Substantive Rationality Review Of Governmental Decisions, Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Through The Looking Glass Of Eminent Domain: Exploring The "Arbitrary And Capricious" Test And Substantive Rationality Review Of Governmental Decisions, Zygmunt J.B. Plater
Zygmunt J.B. Plater
The day-to-day realities of different systems of government can be discerned in the way they handle, in theory and practice, clashes between the individual and the collective will. The structure of contemporary American democracy is no exception. It is comprised of a variegated assortment of judicial formulae for balancing the interests of the individual and the state, most of these formulae tracing back with differing degrees of directness to textual bases in the first nine amendments to the federal Constitution or their state constitutional equivalents. One of these basic structural balancings, encountered early on by every student of American law …
Collective Choice, Justin Schwartz
Collective Choice, Justin Schwartz
Justin Schwartz
This short nontechnical article reviews the Arrow Impossibility Theorem and its implications for rational democratic decisionmaking. In the 1950s, economist Kenneth J. Arrow proved that no method for producing a unique social choice involving at least three choices and three actors could satisfy four seemingly obvious constraints that are practically constitutive of democratic decisionmaking. Any such method must violate such a constraint and risks leading to disturbingly irrational results such and Condorcet cycling. I explain the theorem in plain, nonmathematical language, and discuss the history, range, and prospects of avoiding what seems like a fundamental theoretical challenge to the possibility …