Public Law and Legal Theory Commons^™

Revitalizing Environmental Federalism, Daniel C. Esty

Michigan Law Review

Politicians from Speaker Newt Gingrich to President Bill Clinton, cheered on by academics such as Richard Revesz, are eagerly seeking to return authority over environmental regulation to the states. In the European Union, localist opponents of environmental decisionmaking in Brussels rally under the banner of "subsidiarity." And in debates over international trade liberalization, demands abound for the protection of "national sovereignty" in environmental regulation. All of these efforts presume that a decentralized approach to environmental policy will yield better results than more centralized programs. This presumption is misguided. While the character of some environmental concerns warrants a preference for local …

David Shapiro's Adversary Statement On Federalism, Patrick E. Higginbotham

Michigan Law Review

A Review of David L. Shapiro, Federalism: A Dialogue

The Concept Of Law Revisited, Leslie Green

Michigan Law Review

A Review of H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law Second Edition

Reading The Legal Process, Anthony J. Sebok

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in eh Making and Application of Law

Libertarianism With A Twist, Heidi Li Feldman

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Richard A. Epstein, Simple Rules for a Complex World

Overcoming Posner, Gerard V. Bradley

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Richard A. Posner, Overcoming Law

Misunderstanding Positivism, Anthony J. Sebok

Michigan Law Review

It is important that I point out the limited purposes of this article. I cannot, in the context of the argument I make, prove that positivism will not inevitably collapse into a conservative theory of law. Nor can I prove that positivism is not vulnerable to jurisprudential arguments unrelated to the attempt to link positivism with formalism, legal process, and originalism. I recognize that strong arguments have been made that modem positivism's attempts to divorce itself from classical positivism's command theory of law has opened up more problems than it has solved. I have certain views on whether that divorce …

Thirteen Easy Pieces, Frank I. Michelman

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment by Sanford Levinson

Pragmatism, Feminism, And The Problem Of Bad Coherence, Catharine Pierce Wells

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Reinterpreting Property by Margaret Jane Radin

Incommensurability And Valuation In Law, Cass R. Sunstein

Michigan Law Review

In this article I explore two claims and discuss their implications for law. The first claim is that human values are plural and diverse. By this I mean that we value things, events, and relationships in ways that are not reducible to some larger and more encompassing value. The second claim is that human goods are not commensurable. By this I mean that such goods are not assessed along a single metric. For reasons to be explored, the two claims, though related, are importantly different.

The Left Critique Of Normativity: A Comment, Mark V. Tushnet

Michigan Law Review

"In today's legal academy, the critique of normativity is associated with the left." The preceding sentence, which I have constructed to summarize the starting point of this essay, is both largely true and arguably incoherent. The incoherence occurs because describing a position as "the left" connotes values like egalitarianism, which are obviously normative. This essay examines the ways in which some writers associated with the left in the legal academy have tried to resolve the incoherence. The first Part shows that these writers can be identified with the left even in their critiques of normativity and also shows that they …

Moral Reality Revisited, Michael S. Moore

Michigan Law Review

Both the moral realist and the relational theses need clarification and motivation as much as they need defense. Because I have recently focused on the relational thesis, in this article I shall focus on the moral realist thesis. I shall ask three questions about the thesis. First, what does the thesis assert? This is a matter of clarifying what one means when one either asserts or denies that moral values are objective. Second, why should we care whether the moral realist thesis is true or false? I shall examine this question both in terms of the impact the truth or …

Justifiably Punishing The Justified, Heidi M. Hurd

Michigan Law Review

Contemporary moral philosophy, political theory, and jurisprudence have converged to create a quite baffling dilemma. This dilemma is generated by the apparent incompatibility of three principles, each of which grounds features of our system of law and government, and each of which carries substantial normative weight. The first I shall call the punishment principle - a moral principle, doctrinally entrenched in American criminal and civil law, which holds that individuals who are morally justified in their actions ought not to be blamed or punished for those actions. The second is the principle of the rule of law - a complex …

What Is A Postmodern Constitutionalism?, J. M. Balkin

Michigan Law Review

I begin with a puzzle. It must certainly strike one as odd that the subject of postmodern constitutional law arises at a time when the actual arbiters of the Constitution - the federal judiciary and in particular the Supreme Court of the United States - appear to be more conservative than they have been for many years, and indeed, are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Postmodernism is often associated with what is new, innovative, and on the cutting edge of cultural development. Yet if we were to define the elements of a postmodern constitutional culture, it would …

Some Lesson About The Law From Self-Referential Problems In Mathematics, John M. Rogers, Robert E. Molzon

Michigan Law Review

We first describe briefly mathematician Kurt Gödel's brilliant Incompleteness Theorem of 1931, and explore some of its general implications. We then attempt to draw a parallel between axiomatic systems of number theory (or of logic in general) and systems of law, and defend the analogy against anticipated objections. Finally, we reach two types of conclusions. First, failure to distinguish between language and metalanguage in mathematical self-referential problems leads to fallacies that are highly analogous to certain legal fallacies. Second, and perhaps more significantly, Gödel's theorem strongly suggests that it is impossible to create a legal system that is "complete" in …

Law, Politics, And The Claims Of Community, Stephen A. Gardbaum

Michigan Law Review

This article aims to provide this needed analysis and then to show how it illuminates many of the exchanges taking place within the legal academy. It argues that the first step toward understanding "the claims of community" - whether in law or moral and political theory - is to recognize that, as the phrase itself suggests, more than one claim is involved. Merely to observe that the various proponents of community have as yet failed to establish a common and coherent communitarian position, though certainly true, is to miss the more critical insight: they are not engaged in such an …

"The Eternal Triangles Of The Law": Toward A Theory Of Priorities In Conflicts Involving Remote Parties, Menachem Mautner

Michigan Law Review

Anglo-American priority law is premised on a doctrinal-derivational approach under which "triangle conflicts" are supposed to be resolved on the basis of the legal rights that the intermediate, wrongdoing party could have transferred from the first-in-time competing party to the second-in-time competing party. In Part I, I outline the major propositions of this approach. I argue that in focusing on the intermediate party, the doctrinal-derivational approach fails to address the primary consideration relevant to resolving triangle conflicts, namely the conduct of the two remote claimants involved in the conflict. In Part II, I focus on the two remote parties involved …

The Substance Of Equality, Jeremy Waldron

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Speaking of Equality: An Analysis of the Rhetorical Force of "Equality" in Moral and Legal Discourse by Peter Westen

Judge Richard Posner's Jurisprudence, Robert S. Summers

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Problems of Jurisprudence by Richard A. Posner

Gender Justice Without Foundations, Marion Smiley

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Feminism/Postmodernism edited by Linda J. Nicholson and Justice and the Politics of Difference by Iris Marion Young

Inessentially Speaking (Is There Politics After Postmodernism?), Allan C. Hutchinson

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Making All the Difference by Martha Minow

From Blackstone To Bentham: Common Law Versus Legislation In Eighteenth-Century Britain, James Oldham

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth Century Britain by David Lieberman

The New Public Law Movement: Moderation As A Postmodern Cultural Form, William N. Eskridge Jr., Gary Peller

Michigan Law Review

The past twenty years have witnessed an explosion of public law scholarship, as legal scholars reconceptualized themes of administrative law, legislation, and constitutional law; created almost from scratch whole new areas of public law scholarship, including discrimination, environmental, and consumer protection theory; and enlivened discourse with concepts drawn from microeconomics, public choice theory, civic republicanism, practical philosophy, and hermeneutics. This intellectually intense activity has suggested the possibility that public law discourse has entered a "critical stage" and stimulated the Michigan Law Review to hold a conference in October 1990 on whether there is something that might be called "New Public …

The Unintended Cultural Consequences Of Public Policy: A Comment On The Symposium, Richard H. Pildes

Michigan Law Review

In this essay, I want to try to build on it in order to suggest forms a genuinely New Public Law scholarship might take. My aim is to embrace much of what New Public Law thought has urged: the marginality of common law doctrine or judicial decisionmaking; the need to attend to profound disaffections with the modem regulatory state; an acceptance of the complex, dynamic relationship of public policy and private understandings; a recognition that public values are constituted not only at the grandest levels of policy formation, but also in the myriad microscopic day-to-day experiences of policy. In my …

Review Essay: Sunstein, Statutes, And The Common Law--Reconciling Markets, The Communal Impulse, And The Mammoth State, Peter L. Strauss

Michigan Law Review

The following pages principally address Professor Sunstein's basic argument for building on, rather than defending against, legislative judgments, and so virtually ignore the details of his proposals for statutory interpretation. Part I outlines Sunstein's case for some regulation - the necessary failures of market ordering and the consequent need for a mixed economy in which government regulation intervenes in important ways. Part II addresses Sunstein's decision to tie his analysis to the public law innovations of the New Deal, and suggests ways in which the analysis might be strengthened by attention to earlier struggles and changes - changes in common …

The Concept Of Law And The New Public Law Scholarship, Edward L. Rubin

Michigan Law Review

This article is an attempt to identify the nature of an emerging field of legal scholarship known as "New Public Law." "New," of course, is a dangerous term. Our society's image of itself as forward looking and its tendency to market itself to itself through claims of novelty has spawned a range of phrases from the New Deal to the New Criticism to various new, improved laundry detergents. One does not hear very many positive comments about the "old" these days. The argument that old ways of doing things are better has become an emblem of mistaken thought, and the …

Structure, Relationship, Ideology, Or, How Would We Know A "New Public Law" If We Saw It?, Peter M. Shane

Michigan Law Review

Academic writings and judicial opinions are the research materials most accessible to legal academics. It is thus unsurprising that, when asked to discuss "New Public Law," professors of administrative law, constitutional law, and legislation focus chiefly on emerging scholarship and judicial output. This tendency illustrates the general and quite understandable phenomenon that people, including law professors, do most whatever they can do most readily.

Nevertheless, however elegantly and provocatively we analyze each other's work and the labor of judges, discerning whether a new public law exists ought to involve a broader inquiry. In this essay I explore the complexity of …

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 …

Beyond Candor, Scott Altman

Michigan Law Review

In Part I, I consider whether judges might hold inaccurate beliefs that make them more candid and constrained. I suggest that even if theories of neutral decisionmaking are incomplete and inaccurate, a legal system in which judges hold these beliefs about their own behavior could have advantages. If many judges believe that they can, should, and do decide almost all cases by following the law, they might behave differently than they would if they held more accurate beliefs. They might behave so as to facilitate repression and denial, because their self-esteem depends on maintaining the belief that they decide as …

The Role Of The Democratic And Republican Parties As Organizers Of Shadow Interest Groups, Jonathan R. Macey

Michigan Law Review

This article advances a new theory to explain the relationship between political parties and interest groups. Among the as yet unanswered questions that I resolve are: (1) why many politicians -both Republicans and Democrats - develop a reputation for "party loyalty" despite the parties' inability to employ any meaningful sanctions against politicians who deviate from the party line; (2) why candidates for public office run in contested primaries when running as an independent generally would be a less costly mechanism for getting on the ballot; (3) why the two major U.S. political parties continue to attract resources from contributors and …