Law Commons^™

Rules, Tricks And Emancipation, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

Rules and tricks are generally seen as different things. Rules produce order and control; tricks produce chaos. Rules help us predict how things will work out. Tricks are deceptive and transgressive, built to surprise us and confound our expectations in ways that can be entertaining or devastating. But rules can be tricky. General prohibitions and prescriptions generate surprising results in particular contexts. In some situations, a rule produces results that seem far from what the rule makers expected and antagonistic to the interests the rule is understood to promote. This contradictory aspect of rules is usually framed as a downside …

In The Shadow Of The Legislature: The Common Law In The Age Of The New Public Law, Daniel A. Farber, Philip P. Frickey

Daniel A Farber

In this essay, we explore how modem common law judges should view their role vis-a-vis the legislature. We suggest that the perspective of the "New Public Law," as we conceptualize it, is surprisingly helpful in considering this problem.

In Part I, we briefly summarize two important aspects of the New Public Law: republicanism and public choice. We then address an obvious objection to our project - that our topic relates to private law, and is therefore outside the purview of the New Public Law. Part II turns to important questions about the relationship between statutes and the common law: When …

Before Interpretation, Anya Bernstein

Journal Articles

What a statutory interpretation opinion interprets may seem given. It is not: this article shows how judges select what text to interpret. That text may seem to carry with it one of a limited range of contexts. It does not: this article shows how judges draw on a variety of factors to situate the texts they interpret in unique, case-specific contexts. Selecting and situating form the infrastructure of interpretation. Their creativity and choice provide the basis on which assertions of determinate meaning are made. That process reveals how contestation and indeterminacy permeate legal interpretation even as judicial opinions seek to …

The Scrivener’S Error, Ryan D. Doerfler

Northwestern University Law Review

It is widely accepted that courts may correct legislative drafting mistakes, i.e., so-called scrivener’s errors, if and only if such mistakes are “absolutely clear.” The rationale is that if a court were to recognize a less clear error, it might be “rewriting” the statute rather than correcting a technical mistake.

This Article argues that the standard is much too strict. The current rationale ignores that courts can “rewrite,” i.e., misinterpret, a statute both by recognizing an error and by failing to do so. Accordingly, because the current doctrine is designed to protect against one type of mistake (false positives) but …

Reading Statutes In The Common Law Tradition, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

There is wide agreement in American law and scholarship about the role the common law tradition plays in statutory interpretation. Jurists and scholars of various stripes concur that the common law points away from formalist interpretive approaches like textualism and toward a more creative, independent role for courts. They simply differ over whether the common law tradition is worth preserving. Dynamic and strongly purposive interpreters claim the Anglo-American common law heritage in support of their approach to statutory interpretation, while arguing that formalism is an unjustified break from that tradition. Formalists reply that the common law mindset and methods are …

Reading Statutes In The Common Law Tradition, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

Journal Articles

There is wide agreement in American law and scholarship about the role the common law tradition plays in statutory interpretation. Jurists and scholars of various stripes concur that the common law points away from formalist interpretive approaches like textualism and toward a more creative, independent role for courts. They simply differ over whether the common law tradition is worth preserving. Dynamic and strongly purposive interpreters claim the Anglo-American common law heritage in support of their approach to statutory interpretation, while arguing that formalism is an unjustified break from that tradition. Formalists reply that the common law mindset and methods are …

Antitrust And The Judicial Virtues, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Although commentators frequently debate how judges should decide antitrust cases substantively, little attention has been paid to theories of judicial virtue in antitrust decision making. This essay considers four pairings of virtues: (1) striving for substantive purity versus conceding to institutional realism; (2) incrementalism versus generalism; (3) presenting a unified face versus candidly conceding differences among judges on an appellate panel; and (4) adhering strictly to stare decisis versus freely updating precedents to reflect evolving economic learning or conditions. While recognizing the complexities that sometimes pull judges in the opposite direction, this Article gives the nod to institutional realism, incrementalism, …

The Common Law And Statutes, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Controversies about statutory interpretation and the proper roles for judges in interpretation are particularly noticeable in the Supreme Court but have penetrated downward throughout the judicial system. What I mean to explore here are some implications of our common law heritage and the presuppositions of a common law system for these controversies, that seem rarely noticed in the ongoing debates. I mean by this not only common law judging, but also what we might call common law legislating – that is, the practice of creating statutes to achieve marginal changes in existing law in response to perceived deficiencies, rather than …

In The Shadow Of The Legislature: The Common Law In The Age Of The New Public Law, Daniel A. Farber, Philip P. Frickey

Michigan Law Review

In this essay, we explore how modem common law judges should view their role vis-a-vis the legislature. We suggest that the perspective of the "New Public Law," as we conceptualize it, is surprisingly helpful in considering this problem.

In Part I, we briefly summarize two important aspects of the New Public Law: republicanism and public choice. We then address an obvious objection to our project - that our topic relates to private law, and is therefore outside the purview of the New Public Law. Part II turns to important questions about the relationship between statutes and the common law: When …

Common Sense About The Age Of Statutes, Steve Macisaac

Michigan Law Review

A Review of A Common Law for the Age of Statutes by Guido Calabresi

The Emergence Of A General Reformation Doctrine For Wills, Lawrence W. Waggoner, John H. Langbein

Articles

In this article, which both summarizes and updates an extensively footnoted article published last year ("Reformation of Wills on the Ground of Mistake: Change of Direction in American Law?" 130 University of Pennsylvania Law Rmiew 521 (1982)), we report on this new case law and discuss the analytic framework that we think it suggests and requires.

Reformation Of Wills On The Ground Of Mistake: Change Of Direction In American Law?, John H. Langbein, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

Although it has been "axiomatic" that our courts do not entertain suits to reform wills on the ground of mistake, appellate courts in California, New Jersey, and New York have decided cases within the last five years that may presage the abandonment of the ancient "no-reformation" rule. The new cases do not purport to make this fundamental doctrinal change, although the California Court of Appeal in Estate of Taff and the New Jersey Supreme Court in Engle v. Siegel did expressly disclaim a related rule, sometimes called the "plain meaning" rule. That rule, which hereafter we will call the "no-extrinsic-evidence …