Law Commons^™

Courthouse Iconography And Chayesian Judical Practice, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis emphasize in Representing Justice that the traditional iconography of courthouses is incongruent with the current practices of the institutions that inhabit them. The key elements of traditional iconography – the blindfolded, scale-balancing Justitia and the courtroom configured for the trial – connote adjudication. Yet, the fraction of judicial work that involves deciding cases on the merits or conducting trials has decreased dramatically. Most judicial work today is basically managerial.

We could reduce this incongruity, on the one hand, by reviving the practical adjudicatory focus of the past or, on the other, by revising the iconography …

"Deference" Is Too Confusing – Let's Call Them "Chevron Space" And "Skidmore Weight", Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay suggests an underappreciated, appropriate, and conceptually coherent structure to the Chevron relationship of courts to agencies, grounded in the concept of "allocation." Because the term "deference" muddles rather than clarifies the structure's operation, this Essay avoids speaking of "Chevron deference" and "Skidmore deference." Rather, it argues, one could more profitably think in terms of "Chevron space" and "Skidmore weight." "Chevron space" denotes the area within which an administrative agency has been statutorily empowered to act in a manner that creates legal obligations or constraints – that is, its allocated authority. "Skidmore weight" …

Justice Stevens And The Obligations Of Judgment, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

How to sum up a corpus of opinions that spans dozens of legal fields and four decades on the bench? How to make the most sense of a jurisprudence that has always been resistant to classification, by a jurist widely believed to have "no discernible judicial philosophy"? These questions have stirred Justice Stevens' former clerks in recent months. Since his retirement, many of us have been trying to capture in some meaningful if partial way what we found vital and praiseworthy in his approach to the law. There may be something paradoxical about the attempt to encapsulate in a formula …

Lightened Scrutiny, Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

The current anxiety over judicial vacancies is not new. For decades, judges and scholars have debated the difficulties of having too few judges for too many cases in the federal courts. At risk, it is said, are cherished and important process values. Often left unsaid is a further possibility: that not only process, but also the outcomes of cases, might be at stake. This Article advances the conversation by illustrating how judicial overload might entail sacrifices of first-order importance.

I present here empirical evidence suggesting a causal link between judicial burdens and the outcomes of appeals. Starting in 2002, a …

What Happened In Iowa?, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Reply to Nicole Mansker & Neal Devins, Do Judicial Elections Facilitate Popular Constitutionalism; Can They?, 111 Colum. L. Rev. Sidebar 27 (2011).

November 2, 2010 is the latest milestone in the evolution of state judicial elections from sleepy, sterile affairs into meaningful political contests. Following an aggressive ouster campaign, voters in Iowa removed three supreme court justices, including the chief justice, who had joined an opinion finding a right to same-sex marriage under the state constitution. Supporters of the campaign rallied around the mantra, “It’s we the people, not we the courts.” Voter turnout surged to unprecedented levels; the national …

Left, Right, And Center: Strategic Information Acquisition And Diversity In Judicial Panels, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This paper develops and analyzes a hierarchical model of judicial review in multimember appellate courts. In our model, judicial panels acquire information endogenously, through the efforts of individual panelists, acting strategically. The resulting equilibria strongly resemble the empirical phenomena collectively known as "panel effects" – and in particular the observed regularity with which ideological diversity on a panel predicts greater moderation in voting behavior (even after controlling for the median voter's preferences). In our model, non-pivotal panel members with ideologies far from the median have the greatest incentive to acquire additional policy-relevant information where no one on a unified panel …

A Tale Of Two Paradigms: Judicial Review And Judicial Duty, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

What is the role of judges in holding government acts unconstitutional? The conventional paradigm is "judicial review." From this perspective, judges have a distinct power to review statutes and other government acts for their constitutionality. The historical evidence, however, reveals another paradigm, that of judicial duty. From this point of view, presented in my book Law and Judicial Duty, a judge has an office or duty, in all decisions, to exercise judgment in accord with the law of the land. On this understanding, there is no distinct power to review acts for their constitutionality, and what is called "judicial review" …

Judicial Elections As Popular Constitutionalism, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

One of the most important recent developments in American legal theory is the burgeoning interest in "popular constitutionalism." One of the most important features of the American legal system is the selection of state judges – judges who resolve thousands of state and federal constitutional questions each year – by popular election. Although a large literature addresses each of these subjects, scholarship has rarely bridged the two. Hardly anyone has evaluated judicial elections in light of popular constitutionalism, or vice versa.

This Article undertakes that thought experiment. Conceptualizing judicial elections as instruments of popular constitutionalism, the Article aims to show, …

Romancing The Court, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

Problem-solving courts, created at the end of the 20th century, make court-based solutions central to addressing significant societal problems, such as substance abuse and its impact on criminal activity and family functioning. Yet, lessons gleaned from over 100 years of family court history suggest that court-based solutions to intractable social problems have rarely been effective. This article asks three questions of the problem-solving court movement: What problem are we trying to solve? Is the court the best place to solve the problem? What are the consequences of giving authority to a court for solving the problem? Answering those questions through …

The Irony Of Judicial Elections, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Judicial elections in the United States have undergone a dramatic transformation. For more than a century, these state and local elections were relatively dignified, low-key affairs. Campaigning was minimal; incumbents almost always won; few people voted or cared. Over the past quarter century and especially the past decade, however, a rise in campaign spending, interest group involvement, and political speech has disturbed the traditional paradigm. In the "new era," as commentators have dubbed it, judicial races routinely feature intense competition, broad public participation, and high salience.

This Article takes the new era as an opportunity to advance our understanding of …

Making Judicial Recusal More Rigorous, James J. Sample, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

The right to an impartial arbiter is the bedrock of due process. Yet litigants in most state courts face judges subject to election and reelection – and therefore to majoritarian political pressures that would appear to undermine the judges' impartiality. This tension has existed for as long as judges have been elected (and, to some extent, for as long as they have been appointed, in which case campaigns often take a less public but equally politicized form).

In recent years, however, this tension has become more acute. Today, state courts around the country increasingly resemble – and are increasingly perceived …

The Best Defense: Why Elected Courts Should Lead Recusal Reform, Deborah Goldberg, James J. Sample, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, we have seen an escalation of attacks on the independence of the judiciary. Government officials and citizens who have been upset by the substance of judicial decisions are increasingly seeking to rein in the courts by limiting their jurisdiction over controversial matters, soliciting pre-election commitments from judicial candidates, and drafting ballot initiatives with sanctions for judges who make unpopular rulings. Many of these efforts betray ignorance at best, or defiance at worst, of traditional principles of separation of powers and constitutional protections against tyranny of the majority.

The attacks are fueled in part by the growing influence …

Courts As Catalysts: Re-Thinking The Judicial Role In New Governance, Joanne Scott, Susan P. Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers a step forward in developing a theory of judicial role within new governance, drawing on the emerging practice in both the United States and Europe as a basis for this reconceptualization. The traditional conception of the role of the judiciary – as norm elaborators and enforcers – is both descriptively and normatively incomplete, and thus needs to be rethought. There is a significant but limited role for courts as catalysts. In areas of normative uncertainty or complexity, courts prompt and create occasions for normatively motivated and accountable inquiry and remediation by actors involved in new governance processes. …

Originalism, Stare Decisis And The Promotion Of Judicial Restraint, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

If we consider constitutional law as a practice, it is clear that both originalism and precedent play an important role. Neither one is going to vanquish the other, at least not any time soon. We can engage in academic debate about originalism versus stare decisis, as if they were rival modes of interpretation that could operate to the exclusion of the other. But the question of practical importance is one of degree and emphasis: in cases where these two sources of authority arguably point in different directions, which one should have a greater claim to our allegiance?

Originalism – interpreting …

Disappearing Dilemmas: Judicial Construction Of Ethical Choice As Strategic Behavior In The Criminal Defense Context, Manuel Berrélez, Jamal Greene, Bryan Leach

Faculty Scholarship

Imagine the following scenario: A criminal defense attorney represents a man accused of kidnapping and murdering two children in a residential neighborhood. During the course of interviewing key witnesses, the defense attorney becomes convinced that her client was present at the scene of the murder. While her client denies having been present, his alibi changes entirely from one interview to the next. The two main witnesses that the client offers to Corroborate his most recent alibi recant, suggesting to the defense attorney that both they and the defendant were actually present at the scene of the crime. Third parties confirm …

Judicial Campaign Codes After Republican Party Of Minnesota V. White, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The vast majority of judicial offices in the United States are subject to election. The votes of the people select or retain at least some judges in thirty-nine states, and all judges are elected in twenty-one states. By one count, 87% of the state and local judges in the United States have to face the voters at some point if they want to win or remain in office. Judicial elections, however, differ from elections for legislative or executive offices in a number of significant ways. In nineteen states, most judges are initially appointed but must later go before the voters …

Law And Judicial Duty, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Two hundred years ago, in Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice Marshall delivered an opinion that has come to dominate modern discussions of constitutional law. Faced with a conflict between an act of Congress and the U.S. Constitution, he explained what today is known as "judicial review." Marshall described judicial review in terms of a particular type of "superior law" and a particular type of "judicial duty." Rather than speak generally about the hierarchy within law, he focused on "written constitutions."

He declared that the U.S. Constitution is "a superior, paramount law" and that if "the constitution is superior to any …

Public Funds And The Regulation Of Judicial Campaigns, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Recent discussions of judicial election campaigns have been marked by two themes: (i) the growing costs of such campaigns, with concerns over the roles of large contributions and independent spending, the burden of fundraising for candidates, and the implications of campaign finance practices for judicial decision-making; and (ii) the changing nature of campaigning, as elections that were once “low-key affairs, conducted with civility and dignity,” have become increasingly politicized, marked by heated charges and sharp criticisms of the records and decisions of sitting judges. The two developments are surely intertwined, with the more bitter and hard-fought campaigns funded by rapidly …

Judicial Auditing, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents a simple framework for analyzing a hierarchical system of judicial auditing. We concentrate on (what we perceive to be) the two principal reasons that courts and/or legislatures tend to scrutinize the decisions of lower echelon actors: imprecision and ideological bias. In comparing these two reasons, we illustrate how each may yield systematically distinct auditing and reversal behaviors. While auditing for imprecision tends to bring about evenhanded review/reversal, auditing for political bias tends to be contingent on the first mover's chosen action. Examples of these tendencies can be found in a number of legal applications, including administrative law, …

Variations On Some Themes Of A Disporting Gazelle And His Friend: Statutory Interpretation As Seen By Jerome Frank And Felix Frankfurter, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In 1947, this Review published two lectures on statutory interpretation by Jerome Frank and Felix Frankfurter. Both jurists were concerned with a basic question: How constrained are judges when they interpret legislation? The answers each gives, while similar in some respects, differ strikingly. In arguing that interpretation necessarily involves a creative element, Frank analogizes the role of a judge in interpreting legislation to that of a performer in interpreting a musical composition. Although he argues that judicial creativity is constrained, Frank views statutory interpretation as "a kind of legislation." For Frankfurter, by contrast, in construing a statute, a judge is …

Thinking To Be Paid Versus Being Paid To Think, Merritt B. Fox

Faculty Scholarship

In the first chapter of The Economic Structure of Corporate Law, Frank Easterbrook and Daniel Fischel make an arresting statement:

... [P]eople who are backing their beliefs with cash are correct; they have every reason to avoid mistakes, while critics (be they academics or regulators) are rewarded for novel rather than accurate beliefs. Market professionals who estimate these things wrongly suffer directly; academics and regulators who estimate wrongly do not pay a similar penalty. Persons who wager with their own money may be wrong, but they are less likely to be wrong than are academics and regulators, who are wagering …

Chief Justice Rehnquist, Pluralist Theory, And The Interpretation Of Statutes, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist is often viewed as the ultimate "political" judge. According to Mark Tushnet, for example, "[o]ne could account for perhaps ninety percent of Chief Justice Rehnquist' s bottom-line results by looking, not at anything in the United States Reports, but rather at the platforms of the Republican Party." Nowhere is this attitude more prevalent than with respect to issues of statutory interpretation. When I informed colleagues I was working on an article about Chief Justice Rehnquist's theory of statutory interpretation, the almost universal response was: "What theory?"

Contrary to the common view that Chief Justice Rehnquist …

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 …

The Judicial Prerogative, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

In John Locke's account of separation of powers, the executive is not limited to enforcing the rules laid down by the legislature. The chief magistrate also exercises the prerogative, a power "to act according to discretion for the public good, without the prescription of the law and sometimes even against it. "Locke explained that such a discretionary power is required because "it is impossible to foresee and so by laws to provide for all accidents and necessities that may concern the public, or make such laws as will do no harm, if they are executed with an inflexible rigor on …

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 …

The Perceived Authority Of Law In Judging Constitutional Cases, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this conference is a dialogue between scholars and judges about judging. Because judges have many opportunities to read what scholars think, and scholars don't very often have this kind of chance to hear judges reflect on their own experiences and perspectives, I expect the main benefit to go to us scholars. However, for many questions of jurisprudential interest, figuring out what relevance different judicial experiences might have is complicated, and extensive discussion may be necessary to learn what really matters.

I shall focus on a question that has lain at. the center of jurisprudential discussion in the …

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. …

The Mandatory/Enabling Balance In Corporate Law: An Essay On The Judicial Role, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

A half-filled glass of water can be described as either half full or half empty. The structure of American corporate law – partly enabling, partly mandatory in character – can be viewed in much the same way. Some commentators see American corporate law as primarily composed of mandatory rules that the shareholders themselves cannot waive or modify, In their view, this mandatory component compensates both for the absence of true bargaining among the parties and for the inevitable divergence of interests between the principals (the shareholders) and their agents (the managers and directors). Conversely, other commentators, to whom this Article …

Comment On Professor Van Alstyne's Paper, Henry P. Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

My major difficulty with Professor Van Alstyne's paper is its incomplete character. In the end, he makes only two points: first, judges are authorized to apply "this Constitution," not to do justice; and second, judges should not lie about what they are doing. The danger is that after a while the first point sounds somewhat empty, while the actual content of the second point seems entirely parasitic on the first.

Two Modes Of Legal Thought, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

We should begin with a confession of ignorance. We have no jurisprudence of legal scholarship. Scholars expatiate at length on the work of other actors in the legal culture – legislators, judges, prosecutors, and even practicing lawyers. Yet we reflect little about what we are doing when we write about the law. We have a journal about the craft of teaching, but none about the craft of scholarship.

In view of our ignorance, we should pay particular heed to our point of departure. I start with the observation that legal scholarship expresses itself in a variety of verbal forms. Descriptive …