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The Executive Power Of Constitutional Interpretation, Gary S. Lawson, Christopher D. Moore
The Executive Power Of Constitutional Interpretation, Gary S. Lawson, Christopher D. Moore
Faculty Scholarship
It is emphatically the province and duty of the President to say what the law is, including the law embodied in the Federal Constitution. In the mid-1980s, a claim of this sort would have been received by the legal intelligentsia with some combination of bemusement and outrage. One would have heard, loudly and often, that it is the special province of the federal courts to declare the meaning of the Constitution, -Lnd that any attempt to question the judiciary's supreme interpretative role, especially in favor of an interpretative role for the President, was an attack on the rule of law …
Legal Indeterminacy: Its Cause And Cure, Gary S. Lawson
Legal Indeterminacy: Its Cause And Cure, Gary S. Lawson
Faculty Scholarship
Legal indeterminacy--the extent to which any particular legal theory cannot provide knowable answers to concrete problemsis one of the principal themes of modern jurisprudence. Indeterminacy plays an important role in debates concerning interpretation, the nature of legal obligation, and the character and possibilities of the rule of law.' Indeterminacy looms particularly large in debates concerning originalism as a method of constitutional interpretation. Some scholars insist that originalism resolves too few problems to be of much use,2 while others argue that originalism's indeterminacy is often overstated.'