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Full-Text Articles in Law
Advisory Opinions And The Problem Of Legal Authority, Christian Burset
Advisory Opinions And The Problem Of Legal Authority, Christian Burset
Journal Articles
The prohibition against advisory opinions is fundamental to our understanding of federal judicial power, but we have misunderstood its origins. Discussions of the doctrine begin not with a constitutional text or even a court case, but a letter in which the Jay Court rejected President Washington’s request for legal advice. Courts and scholars have offered a variety of explanations for the Jay Court’s behavior. But they all depict the earliest Justices as responding to uniquely American concerns about advisory opinions. This Article offers a different explanation. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, it shows that judges throughout the anglophone world—not …
On The Place Of Judge-Made Law In A Government Of Laws, Matthew J. Steilen
On The Place Of Judge-Made Law In A Government Of Laws, Matthew J. Steilen
Journal Articles
This essay explores a constitutional account of the elevation of the judiciary in American states following the Revolution. The core of the account is a connection between two fundamental concepts in Anglo-American constitutional thinking, discretion and a government of laws. In the periods examined here, arbitrary discretion tended to be associated with alien power and heteronomy, while bounded discretion was associated with self-rule. The formal, solemn, forensic, and public character of proceedings in courts of law suggested to some that judge-made law (a product of judicial discretion under these proceedings) did not express simply the will of the judge or …