Law Commons^™

Introduction, Joseph R. Grodin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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 …

Summaries Of Justice Raymond L. Sullivan's Majority Opinions On The Supreme Court Of California, Marsha N. Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Rediscovering Conservatism: Burkean Political Theory & Constitutional Interpretation, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

Recent decisions of the Rehnquist Court--particularly the Court's 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey--have caused many to question widely-held assumptions about the meaning of judicial conservatism. In this article, Ernest Young argues that the views of the modern judicial "conservatives" such as Judge Robert Bork and Justice Antonin Scalia are antithetical to classical conservative political theory, as exemplified by the writings and speeches of the eighteenth-century British philosopher/politician Edmund Burke. In particular, Mr. Young argues that strict adherence to the original understanding of the Constitution, judicial deference to democratic majorities, and formulation of legal directives as bright-line rules are …