Law Commons^™

Bad News For Everybody: Lawson And Kopel On Health Care Reform And Originalism, Andrew M. Koppelman

Faculty Working Papers

Gary Lawson & David Kopel's Bad News for Professor Koppelman: The Incidental Unconstitutionality of the Individual Mandate argues, on the basis of recent research, that the Necessary and Proper Clause incorporates norms from eighteenth-century agency law, administrative law, and corporate law, and that the mandate (and perhaps much else in the U.S. Code, though they are coy about this) violates those norms. The Necessary and Proper Clause, as they understand it, tightly limits the scope of implied powers. These claims are obscure even on their own terms. It is mysterious how we are to know whether the power to impose …