Rule of Law Commons^™

Securing The Rule Of Law Through Interpretive Pluralism: An Argument From Comparative Law, Richard Stith

Law Faculty Publications

Can law rule? For law to rule, it must be enforced. But when law is enforced, not it but its enforcers may rule. To bind those enforcers firmly to the law, they, too, would have to be subjected not only to law but also to a still stronger force—which itself may then be lawless. The very effort to secure the rule of law appears to lead instead to ever more powerful human rulers.

Put another way: If we abolish the police and the courts, in order to leave people truly “not under man but under God and the law,”1 we …

Legal Accountability In The Service-Based Welfare State: Lessons From Child Welfare Reform, Kathleen G. Noonan, Charles F. Sabel, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Current trends intensify the longstanding problem of how the rule-of-law should be institutionalized in the welfare state. Welfare programs are being re-designed to increase their capacities to adapt to rapidly changing conditions and to tailor their responses to diverse clienteles. These developments challenge the understanding of legal accountability developed in the Warren Court era. This Article reports on an emerging model of accountable administration that strives to reconcile programmatic flexibility with rule-of-law values. The model has been developed in the reform of state child protective services systems, but it has potentially broad application to public law. It also has novel …

When Should Original Meanings Matter?, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Constitutional theory lacks an account of when each of the familiar sources of authority-text, original meaning, precedent, and so on-should be given weight. The dominant tendency is to regard all sources as potentially applicable in every case. In contrast, this Article proposes that each source of authority is pertinent in some categories of cases but not in others, much as a physical tool is appropriate for some but not all kinds of household tasks. The Article then applies this approach to identify the categories of cases in which original meaning is, or is not, a valid factor in constitutional decisionmaking.

"Dragonslaying." Review Of Democracy Defended, By G. Mackie, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

Early in the Iliad, the Achaians convene an assembly. There are a lot of them and they're unruly, too. "[Tihe place of their assembly was shaken, and the earth groaned / as the people took their positions and there was tumult. Nine heralds / shouting set about putting them in order, to make them cease their / clamour and listen to the kings beloved of Zeus."' Clutching the scepter that has come to him ultimately from Zeus, the very symbol of his right to speak and be heard, Agamemnon bitterly proposes that the Achaians give up. Nine years of struggle …

‘Alert, Alive And Sensitive’: Baker, The Duty To Give Reasons, And The Ethos Of Justification In Canadian Public Law, Mary Liston

All Faculty Publications

This chapter argues that the remarkable phrase ‘alert, alive and sensitive’ – coined by Madame Justice L’Heureux-Dubé in the major Supreme Court of Canada decision, Baker v. Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) – signifies two important jurisprudential developments. First, the phrase ‘alert, alive and sensitive’ indicates a set of attributes connoting good judgment which can be used to evaluate the quality of judicial and administrative decisions. Second, the phrase comports with an emergent understanding of Canadian public law as an ‘ethos of justification’ in which citizens and non-citizens are democratically, and often constitutionally, entitled to participate in decisions made …

The Rule Of Law In China, Eric W. Orts

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Article explores contemporary meanings of the rule of law with a focus on its meaning in Chinese history and tradition, as well as Chinese legal institutions. Part II considers the concept of law in China, from early understandings in Confucianism and Legalism to more recent treatments in Chinese Communism. It also reviews efforts that the People's Republic of China has made in recent decades to strengthen its legal institutions. Part III begins with a discussion of the Western jurisprudential idea of the rule of law and suggests a distinction between two basic understandings: (1) rule by law as an …

America, Defender Of Democratic Legitimacy?, James C. Hathaway

Articles

American exceptionalism - a belief that the United States has a unique mission to lead the world, but ought logically to be exempt from the rules it promotes - is at the root of much of the American academy's effort to rationalize the US government's increasing rejection of multilateralism as the cornerstone of modern public international law. Even American scholars who disagree fundamentally on the problems with multilateralism (Kenneth Anderson arguing that it favours anti-democratic intervention by unelected NGOs, Michael Reisman asserting that it privileges elitist state-based lawmaking in the face of more democratic non-state 'lawmaking' processes) can agree on …

The Independent Counsel Statute: A Legal History, Benjamin Priester

Journal Publications

The independent counsel statute has been one of the most-if not the most-controversial federal laws of its time. A presence on the national stage for twenty years, it will expire on June 30, 1999, unless Congress affirmatively acts to save it. As the other articles in this issue of Law and Contemporary Problems attest, the statute's future seems bleak, perhaps even if substantial revisions are made. Numerous other sources also have heaped praise, criticism, and everything in between upon the statute. A law with so dark a beginning and so storied a political history may be doomed to extinction. Among …

Ex Post Facto Laws: Supreme Court New York County People V. Griffin (Decided December 5, 1996

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

"Originalist" Values And Constitutional Interpretation, Richard Kay

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

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 …

A Skeptical Look At Contemporary Republicanism, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

A growing number of scholars have been led by that impulse to an interest in 'the republican tradition," arguing that it offers resources for correcting the deformities they perceive in contemporary life and for which they hold liberalism responsible. Republicanism is a mansion with many rooms, and its modem interpreters emphasize varying possibilities within it, but common to all is the vision of a politics that recognizes and seeks to strengthen the social bonds within a political community. Within the limits set by that vision differences abound, just as differences exist among liberals concerning appropriate political foundations for individual freedom. …

Particularism And The Struggle For Coherence In The Common Law Literary Tradition, E. P. Krauss

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Competitiveness Of The U.S. Telecommunications Industry: A New York Case Study, Michael Botein, Alan Pearce

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Substantive Policies And Choice Of Law, Willis L. M. Reese

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Justice And The Bureaucratization Of Appellate Courts, Joseph Vining

Articles

The author notes the growing bureaucratization of appellate justice in the United States and, in particular, the drafting of opinions by law clerks rather than by judges. Taking the Supreme Court of the United States as an example, and comparing its internal procedure with that of large administrative agencies, he questions whether the method of analysis familiarly used by lawyers to arrive at an authoritative statement of law is applicable to legal texts bureaucratically produced. He suggests that legal method and its presuppositions are ultimately associated with the authority of law, and concludes that there may be critical losses not …

Constitutional Interpretation, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

"[We] must never forget," Chief Justice Marshall admonished us in a statement pregnant with more than one meaning, "that it is a constitution we are expounding."' Marshall meant that the Constitution should be read as a document "intended to endure for ages.to come, and, consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs."'2 But he meant also that the construction placed upon the document must have regard for its "great outlines" and "important objects."'3 Limits are implied by the very nature of the task. There is not the same freedom in construing the Constitution as in constructing a …

The Executive Department Of Government And The Rule Of Law, Frank E. Cooper

Michigan Law Review

For a long time, people have been talking about the executive department of government and the Rule of Law. Indeed, the suggestion of Aristotle that government should be by law, and not by men, represented a protest directed to the earlier Grecian systems of despotically controlled administrative law. It is my privilege this afternoon to carry forward the discussion of a problem that has been talked about for some two thousand years: how to apply the Rule of Law to the executive agencies of the government. They are commonly called "independent agencies" within the executive branch. I suggest that the …

Constitutional Law - Executive Powers - Use Of Troops To Enforce Federal Laws, Robert H. Elliott Jr., S.Ed., Richard I. Singer S.Ed.

Michigan Law Review

The recent use of federal troops in Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce the order of a federal district court requiring school integration has occasioned widespread controversy throughout the nation. It is the purpose of this comment to examine the constitutionality of such action and to consider its broader implications with respect to federal-state and congressional-executive relationships.