Law Commons^™

Judicial Opinions As Binding Law And As Explanations For Judgments, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

To what extent does the executive branch have autonomous powers of legal interpretation? The issue is often broadly framed in terms of two disparate understandings of the allocation of interpretative power: "judicial supremacy" and "departmentalism." In this paper, I shall speak of two different understandings of judicial opinions: the idea that judicial opinions (or at least the "holdings" of opinions) are legally binding on actors in the executive branch, and the idea that opinions are, from the perspective of executive actors, merely explanations for judicial judgments. I adopt this locution because it focuses more precisely on the core of the …

Legal Process And Judges In The Real World, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

It is gratifying, reading through a paper and noting here and there points that you might like to make, to find that by the end the author has anticipated them and made them well. This paper sneaks up on you. If at the outset it seems to be accepting that Justice Scalia has a jurisprudence of statutory interpretation that coheres and restrains, by the end it has shown the self-contradictions and decidedly political and institutional stakes in the textualist position the Justice appears to have been carving out for himself.

I am not going to address Professor Zeppos's account of …