Faculty Bibliography

In the past two years, the Supreme Court has invalidated two major executive-branch initiatives—the termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy and the addition of a citizenship question to the census—as arbitrary and capricious. Many have cast Chief Justice Roberts’s decisive votes and opinions in these cases as efforts to protect the Court’s public standing by skirting political controversy. Taken on their own terms, however, the opinions seem less about keeping the Court out of the political thicket and more about pushing the Trump Administration into it. And that use of arbitrariness review as a judicial backstop for political accountability is an important jurisprudential development in its own right. For decades, the Court has understood arbitrariness review mainly as a check against bureaucratic blunders, lawlessness, and political interference with agency expertise. But in the DACA and census cases, a narrow majority refashioned this form of review as a tool for forcing an administration to pay the appropriate political price for its discretionary choices. Through close and context-laden readings of these back-to-back opinions, I aim to surface the “accountability-forcing” form of arbitrariness review that they employ and to draw out its significance. Between the two cases, the Roberts-led majority identified three kinds of agency explanations that should be rejected or disfavored on political-accountability grounds: post hoc explanations, buck-passing explanations, and pretextual explanations. Standing alone, these new rules (and new justifications for old ones) have wide-ranging consequences. But if the shift toward an accountability-centric vision of arbitrariness review continues, it could also lead to renovations of several other administrative-law doctrines—including narrowing the carve-outs from judicial review, undermining the remedy of “remand without vacatur,” and empowering courts to discount agencies’ fallback justifications for their choices. After laying out the accountability-forcing turn in the Court’s recent cases and sketching its possible ramifications, I consider several grounds for doubt about its propriety and efficacy. Some of these objections, I conclude, have real force. Still, none debunks the core insight that I take to underlie Roberts’s approach: The reasoned explanation requirement can sometimes be deployed so as to promote not only rational administration, but democracy as well.

What principle underlies the Supreme Court’s “colorblind” or “anticlassification” approach to race and equal protection? According to the Court and many commentators, the answer lies in a kind of individualism—a conviction that people should be treated as individuals, not as instances of racial types. Yet the Court has said almost nothing about what it means to treat someone “as an individual.” This Article excavates the philosophical foundations of that idea. And in so doing, it offers a framework for understanding, and then evaluating, the Court’s assertions that the government fails to treat people as individuals when it classifies them by race. Rightly understood, the Article argues, treating people as individuals means showing respect for their individuality—a central facet of their moral standing as persons. To evaluate the claimed linkage between individualism and colorblindness, then, one first has to consider what respect for a person’s individuality involves. Drawing on the philosophical literatures on respect and autonomy, the Article offers an answer to that question: Treating someone as an individual requires taking due account of the information conveyed by her self-defining choices. But that answer entails that respect for a person’s individuality does not inherently require, or even favor, disregard of information carried by her race. The Article thus offers an internal critique of the Supreme Court’s avowedly “individualistic” approach to race and equal protection; it shows that the central moral argument for colorblindness rests on too shallow an account of what individualism itself demands. Building on that conclusion, the Article then turns to suggestions that racial distinctions—whatever their intrinsic moral status—are nonetheless stamped with social meanings that render them disrespectful of a person’s individuality. Even if such a symbolic norm might justify limiting integrative race-based state action, the Article contends, the recognition that no more basic moral wrong is at work should transform how the colorblindness project is carried out. Most fundamentally, that recognition should prompt the Court to enforce colorblindness, if it does, with regret rather than indignation. And most concretely, it should lead the Court to decide cases and write opinions in ways that avoid further entrenching respect conventions that operate as obstacles to valuable means of racial repair. In sum, with the Court poised to double-down on colorblindness in the years ahead, this Article surfaces the internal challenges that an intellectually serious form of the doctrine would need to address and charts the course that a more reflective colorblindness doctrine might take.

Everyone agrees that discrimination can be a grave moral wrong. Yet this consensus masks fundamental disagreements about what makes something an act of discrimination, as well as precisely why (and hence when) such acts are wrong. In Discrimination and Disrespect, Benjamin Eidelson develops illuminating philosophical answers to these two questions. Discrimination is intrinsically wrong, Eidelson argues, when it manifests disrespect for the personhood of those it disfavours. He offers an original account of what such disrespect amounts to, explaining how attention to two different facets of moral personhood -- equality and autonomy -- ought to guide our judgments about wrongful discrimination. At the same time, however, Eidelson contends that many forms of discrimination are morally impeachable only on account of their contingent effects. The book concludes with a discussion of the moral arguments against racial profiling -- a practice that exemplifies how controversial forms of discrimination can be morally wrong without being intrinsically so.