Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Law
Stare Decisis And Constitutional Text, Jonathan F. Mitchell
Stare Decisis And Constitutional Text, Jonathan F. Mitchell
Michigan Law Review
Almost everyone acknowledges that stare decisis should play a significant role when the Supreme Court of the United States resolves constitutional cases. Yet the academic and judicial rationales for this practice tend to rely on naked consequentialist considerations, and make only passing efforts to square the Court's stare decisis doctrines with the language of the Constitution. This Article offers a qualified defense of constitutional stare decisis that rests exclusively on constitutional text. It aims to broaden the overlapping consensus of interpretive theories that can support a role for constitutional stare decisis, but to do this it must narrow the circumstances …
Reply: The Institutional Dimension Of Statutory And Constitutional Interpretation, Richard A. Posner
Reply: The Institutional Dimension Of Statutory And Constitutional Interpretation, Richard A. Posner
Michigan Law Review
Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue in Interpretation and lnstitutions that judicial interpretation of statutes and constitutions should take account both of the institutional framework within which interpretation takes place and of the consequences of different styles of interpretation; they further argue that this point has been neglected by previous scholars. The first half of the thesis is correct but obvious; the second half, which the authors state in terms emphatic to the point of being immodest, is incorrect. Moreover, the authors offer no feasible suggestions for how the relation between interpretation and the institutional framework might be studied better …
Horrible Holmes, Mathias Reimann
Horrible Holmes, Mathias Reimann
Michigan Law Review
Holmes has kept scholars busy for most of a century, and the resulting volume of literature about him is staggering. In that last twenty years along, we have been blessed with four biographies, four symposia, three new collections of his works, two volumes of essays, and various monographs, not to mention a multitude of free-standing law review articles. Since life is short, everyone who adds to the deluge, including Albert Alschuler with his new book, bears a heavy responsibility to make the expenditure of trees, library space, and reading time worthwhile. Does Law Without Values fulfill that responsibility? Despite the …
Law Without Mind, Steven D. Smith
Law Without Mind, Steven D. Smith
Michigan Law Review
A large part of the work done by lawyers and judges involves the interpretation of enacted law - primarily, statutes and the Constitution. Not surprisingly, legal scholars offer a good deal of advice, usually unsolicited, about how the task of interpretation should be performed. At present, such scholarly advice commonly recommends variations on an approach that may be called "present-oriented interpretation." This approach discourages judges from equating a law with its historical meaning or "original understanding." Instead, it urges them to construe statutes and constitutional provisions in a way that will render the law "the best it can be" in …