Judges Commons^™

Democracy, Not Deference: An Egalitarian Theory Of Judicial Review, Ronald C. Den Otter

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Marbury And Judicial Deference: The Shadow Of Whittington V. Polk And The Maryland Judiciary Battle, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

On the 200th anniversary of Whittington and approaching the 200th anniversary of Marbury, this article revisits these two decisions and challenges legal scholars' assumptions that they were such strong precedents for judicial review.⁵ When one takes into account the broader contexts, both decisions were in fact judicial capitulations to aggressive legislatures and executives. The Maryland General Court asserted its judicial supremacy only in dicta, and the court failed to enforce judicial supremacy when it was legally justified. This article picks apart the court's reasoning step by step, using Whittington to illuminate Marbury and Marbury to illuminate Whittington. …

Taking Its Toll: Partisan Judging And Judicial Review, Jeff Broadwater

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

A Goldilocks Account Of Judicial Review?, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

According to Professor Christopher Eisgruber, judicial review of the sort embedded in United States constitutional practice is a practical mechanism for implementing the Constitution's commitment to self-government. "The justices ... make a distinctive contribution to representative democracy" because they are "better positioned [than elected officials] to represent the people's convictions about what is right." Judges can articulate "a conception of justice with which Americans in general [can] plausibly identify themselves. "

I will focus here on two themes in Professor Eisgruber's argument. The first theme can be found in many works of constitutional theory - the construction of a strong …

Are Judges Motivated To Create "Good" Securities Fraud Doctrine?, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

‘How Do Judges Maximize? (The Same Way Everybody Else Does – Boundedly): Rules of Thumb in Securities Fraud Opinions’, by Stephen M. Bainbridge and G. Mitu Gulati, confronts the reader with a theory about judicial behavior in the face of complex, "unexciting" cases such as those involving securities fraud. The story is simple: few judges find any opportunity for personal satisfaction or enhanced reputation here, so they simply try to minimize cognitive effort, off-loading much of the work that has to be done to their clerks. The evidence that Bainbridge and Gulati offer is the creation of some ten or …

The Judiciary In The United States: A Search For Fairness, Independence And Competence, Stephen J. Shapiro

All Faculty Scholarship

Alexander Hamilton referred to the judiciary as “the least dangerous branch” because it could neither make nor enforce the law without help from the other two branches of government. In the years since then, however, courts and judges in the United States have assumed a much more prominent role in society. American judges preside over criminal trials and sentence those convicted, decide all kinds of civil disputes, both large and small, and make important decisions involving families, such as child custody. They have also become the primary guarantors of the civil and constitutional rights of American citizens.

The case of …

Terry Firma: Background Democracy And Constitutional Foundations, Frank I. Michelman

Michigan Law Review

Ages ago, I had the excellent luck to fall into a collaboration with Terrance Sandalow to produce a casebook now long forgotten. There could have been no more bracing or beneficial learning experience for a fledgling legal scholar (meaning me). What brought us together indeed was luck from my standpoint, but it was enterprise, too - the brokerage of an alert West Publishing Company editor picking up on a casual remark of mine as he made one of his regular sweeps through Harvard Law School. A novice law professor, I mentioned to him how much I admired a new essay …

Piercing The Veil: William J. Brennan's Account Of Regents Of The University Of California V. Bakke, Lee Epstein, Jack Knight

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Assessing The New Judicial Minimalism, Christopher J. Peters

All Faculty Scholarship

In this article, which has been published in slightly revised form at 100 Colum. L. Rev. 1454 (2000), I critique some recently prominent arguments for "judicial minimalism" in constitutional decisionmaking. Current minimalist arguments, I contend, are primarily "policentric," that is, focused on the role the judiciary can play in bolstering the accountability and deliberativeness of the political branches. Drawing in part on a previous article, I offer an alternative approach to minimalism that is "juricentric" - focused on the inherent democratic legitimacy of the adjudicative process and the unique competence of that process to produce decisions about individual rights. I …

Choosing Justices: A Political Appointments Process And The Wages Of Judicial Supremacy, John C. Yoo

Michigan Law Review

William H. Rehnquist is not going to be Chief Justice forever - much to the chagrin of Republicans, no doubt. In the last century, Supreme Court Justices have retired, on average, at the age of seventy-one after approximately fourteen years on the bench. By the end of the term of the President we elect this November, Chief Justice Rehnquist will have served on the Supreme Court for thirty-two years and reached the age of eighty. The law of averages suggests that Chief Justice Rehnquist is likely to retire in the next presidential term. In addition to replacing Chief Justice Rehnquist, …

Losing Faith: America Without Judicial Review?, Erwin Chemerinsky

Michigan Law Review

In the last decade, it has become increasingly trendy to question whether the Supreme Court and constitutional judicial review really can make a difference. Gerald Rosenberg, for example, in The Hollow Hope, expressly questions whether judicial review achieves effective social change. Similarly, Michael Klarman explores whether the Supreme Court's desegregation decisions were effective, except insofar as they produced a right-wing backlash that induced action to desegregate. In Taking the Constitution Away from the Courts, Mark Tushnet approvingly invokes these arguments (pp. 137, 145), but he goes much further. Professor Tushnet contends that, on balance, constitutional judicial review is harmful. He …

Regulatory Takings And "Judicial Supremacy", J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The thesis of this Article is that the Court of Federal Claims and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit have become exposed to this classic critique of constitutional decision-making through the recent expansions of the regulatory takings doctrine. Though the chief agent for this expansion has been the Supreme Court, these lower courts have made their own prominent contributions to broadening regulatory takings, and they are far more vulnerable to political reprisals. Like the Due Process Clause in the gilded age, the Takings Clause today can easily be and has been seen as an avenue for inappropriate judicial …

Judicial Auditing, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents a simple framework for analyzing a hierarchical system of judicial auditing. We concentrate on (what we perceive to be) the two principal reasons that courts and/or legislatures tend to scrutinize the decisions of lower echelon actors: imprecision and ideological bias. In comparing these two reasons, we illustrate how each may yield systematically distinct auditing and reversal behaviors. While auditing for imprecision tends to bring about evenhanded review/reversal, auditing for political bias tends to be contingent on the first mover's chosen action. Examples of these tendencies can be found in a number of legal applications, including administrative law, …

Finding The Constitution: An Economic Analysis Of Tradition's Role In Constitutional Interpretation, Adam C. Pritchard, Todd J. Zywicki

Articles

In this Article, Professor Pritchard and Professor Zywicki examine the role of tradition in constitutional interpretation, a topic that has received significant attention in recent years. After outlining the current debate over the use of tradition, the authors discuss the efficiency purposes of constitutionalism--precommitment and the reduction of agency costs--and demonstrate how the use of tradition in constitutional interpretation can serve these purposes. Rejecting both Justice Scalia's majoritarian model, which focuses on legislative sources of tradition, and Justice Souter's common-law model, which focuses on Supreme Court precedent as a source of tradition, the authors propose an alternative model--the "finding model"-- …

The Constitutional Limits Of Judicial Review: A Structural Interpretive Approach, Jack Wade Nowlin

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Judicial Review Of Initiatives And Referendums In Which Majorities Vote On Minorities’ Citizenship, Sylvia R. Lazos

Scholarly Works

In this Article, Professor Lazos examines initiatives and referendums in which a majority is in a position to vote on the content of a minority's democratic civic standing. Case law fails to set forth a single test for judicial review; consequently, doctrinal and theoretical coherence in this area is nonexistent. Professor Lazos proposes a test that takes into account social dynamics and focuses on the impact of these measures. First, she examines outcomes over the last three decades of approximately eighty such initiatives and referendums, from the anti-integration movement of the sixties to today's ideological and cultural versions, such as …

Judicial Restraint In The Administrative State: Beyond The Countermajoritarian Difficulty, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Arguments for judicial restraint point to some kind of judicial deficit (such as a democratic or an epistemic deficit) as grounds for limiting judicial review. ("Judicial review" is used in this Article to mean, essentially, the judicial invalidation of statutes, rules, orders and actions in virtue of the Bill of Rights, or similar unwritten criteria.). The most influential argument for judicial restraint has been the Countermajoritarian Difficulty. This is a legislature-centered argument: one that points to features of *legislatures*, as grounds for courts to refrain from invalidating *statutes*. This Article seeks to recast scholarly debate about judicial restraint, and to …

A Text Is Just A Text, Paul F. Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

An American Perspective On Environmental Impact Assessment In Australia, Mark Squillace

Publications

No abstract provided.

Judicial Review Of Discretionary Immigration Decisionmaking, Michael G. Heyman

San Diego Law Review

The Immigration and Nationality Act vests enormous discretion in the Attorney General and subordinates, such discretion exercised frequently at all levels of the immigration system. Despite this, though, judicial review of these decisions has followed a very uneven, troubled course. This Article explores the reasons for this, focusing first on the Administrative Procedure Act and the elusive meaning of discretion itself. The author demonstrates the "disintegration" of administrative law and what he sees as the failure of its general precepts to accommodate immigration issues. The Article traces the development of faulty doctrine through case law, resulting in a stunted judicial …

John Marshall And The Moral Basis For Judicial Review, David F. Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

During the last two decades, many observers have been disappointed in some of the appointments to the federal bench and in the judicial philosophies some judges have brought with them. But if we turn to the source of our constitutional order, we would find in the example of John Marshall the moral basis for the judicial craft.

The Case Of The Prisoners And The Origins Of Judicial Review, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For over one hundred years, scholars have closely studied the handful of cases in which state courts, in the years before the Federal Constitutional Convention, confronted the question whether they had the power to declare laws invalid. Interest in these early cases began in the late nineteenth century as one aspect of the larger debate about the legitimacy of judicial review, a debate triggered by the increasing frequency with which the Supreme Court and state courts were invalidating economic and social legislation. The lawyers, political scientists, and historians who initially unearthed the case law from the 1770s and 1780s used …

Terminator 2, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

Name-Calling And The Clear Error Rule, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

Disagreement And Interpretation, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

Three Mistakes About Interpretation, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

Progressive Free Speech And The Uneasy Case For Campus Hate Codes, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Presumption Of Reviewability: A Study In Canonical Construction And Its Consequences, Daniel B. Rodriguez

Vanderbilt Law Review

The much-maligned canons of statutory construction stubbornly have survived, largely on the strength of the assertion that whatever the aim of the statute's interpretation, an interpretive canon will improve the chances that the statute's aim will be realized. Canonical construction serves two different functions. Some of the canons ostensibly are designed as short-cuts to the discovery of the legislature's "true" intent. Professor Geoffrey Miller has explained how the canons may reflect the judicial articulations of conversational conventions that help courts understand otherwise vexing statutory language.' Canons may also serve as surrogates for other, better evidence of legislators' intent. In this …

Due Process, Judicial Review, And The Rights Of The Individual, Edward D. Re

Cleveland State Law Review

As a federal judge I fully appreciate the role of the judiciary in reviewing the actions of administrative agencies. Hence, I am pleased to discuss the concepts of due process, judicial review, and the rights of the individual. Since it cannot be questioned that public officers and administrative agencies vitally affect the lives and interests of all persons, it is important to know the legal controls and remedies that are available to assure that public officials act lawfully. This, of course, implies that all administrators and officers of government must act within the bounds of their delegated authority and comply …

The First Amendment, Burt Neuborne

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.