Law Commons^™

Active Avoidance: The Modern Supreme Court And Legal Change, Neal Kumar Katyal, Thomas P. Schmidt

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court in the last few years has resolved some of the most divisive and consequential cases before it by employing the same maneuver: construing statutes to avoid constitutional difficulty. Although the Court generally justifies the avoidance canon as a form of judicial restraint, these recent decisions have used the canon to camouflage acts of judicial aggression in both the statutory and constitutional spheres. In particular, the Court has adopted dubious readings of federal statutes that would have been unthinkable in the canon’s absence. We call this move the “rewriting power.” The canon has also been used to articulate …

Justice Harlan's Conservatism And Altenative Possibilities, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Bruce Ackerman and Charles Fried's rich essays address the subject of Justice Harlan as a conservative. One who comes to this topic has in mind questions like: Was Justice Harlan a conservative? If so, what kind of a conservative was he? How did his judicial actions exemplify a conservative approach? Most importantly, is his conservatism an appealing model for modern judicial practice?

Professors Ackerman and Fried's slices on this topic reflect their own casts of mind and philosophies of judging. Fried looks at a broad range of Justice Harlan's opinions and sets them against particular conservative qualities that Fried commends. …