Faculty Bibliography

The Justices of the Supreme Court increasingly claim to be originalists. Yet close examination reveals that the Court’s actual reliance on originalist analysis is highly selective. In large swathes of cases, the avowedly originalist Justices make little or no effort to justify their rulings by reference to original constitutional meanings. Nor do most of them show much disposition to grant certiorari in many cases that might enable them to overrule past, nonoriginalist decisions. This Article defines and documents the phenomenon of selective originalism. Having done so, the Article then explores the cultural and jurisprudential conditions in which selective originalism, which typically abets substantively conservative decisionmaking, has developed and now flourishes. The doctrine of stare decisis, the Article argues, plays an important role in enabling selective originalism. Because it seldom either requires or forbids precedent-based decisionmaking by the Supreme Court, it allows the Court to be originalist when it chooses but not to be originalist when it chooses. In light of this appraisal of the significance of stare decisis in the Supreme Court, the Article criticizes the practice of selective originalism for its inconsistency and disingenuousness. But the Article also explores the obvious question that criticisms frame: Why do the selectively originalist Justices not respond by articulating a more complex doctrine that would seek to justify their only-selective reliance on originalist premises? We would misunderstand selective originalism, the Article argues, if we derided its misleading pretensions and probed no further. The self-avowed originalist Justices almost certainly experience themselves as duty-bound to overturn nonoriginalist holdings in some cases, though not in all, even when the doctrine of stare decisis is too weak to dictate their conclusions as a strict matter of law. And the reasons why, I argue, contain lessons for originalists and nonoriginalists alike: A clear-eyed appraisal of the Justices' functions should inspire the conclusion that the Supreme Court, unlike other courts, is a predominantly lawmaking tribunal that must bear responsibility for the practical and moral desirability of changes that it effects in the fabric of constitutional law. In light of the Court's distinctive functions, conclusions about what the Justices ought to do, and indeed have obligations to do, are often best understood as embodying judgments about judicial role morality in addition to law.

This chapter probes the doctrine of stare decisis as it functions in constitutional cases in the Supreme Court of the US. It solves what some have viewed as two puzzles about constitutional stare decisis in the US. One involves how past decisions that the justices believe to be erroneous can displace the original meaning of a constitution that purports to be ‘the supreme law of the land’. The other mystery is how it can be that if erroneous precedents sometimes prevail over the US Constitution’s original meaning, they do not always do so. In response to the first puzzle, this chapter appeals to the Hartian concept of a ‘rule of recognition’, grounded in official practice and ‘acceptance’. In addressing the second puzzle, this chapter relies on Hart’s distinction between rules of recognition and ‘rules of change’. In the Supreme Court, the chapter argues, an important practical function of the doctrine of stare decisis is to empower the justices to act as constitutional law-makers choosing whether to effect or not to effect legal change. In addition to clarifying the role of constitutional stare decisis in the Supreme Court, this chapter seeks to advance understanding of possible variations in the functioning of stare decisis in different legal systems and of Hartian jurisprudential concepts, including those of rules of recognition and rules of change.

Despite the ringing dictum of Marbury v. Madison that “every right, when withheld, must have a remedy,” rights to remedies have always had a precarious constitutional status. For over one hundred years, the norm was that victims of ongoing constitutional violations had rights to injunctive relief. But the Constitution nowhere expressly prescribes that norm, and recent Supreme Court decisions, involving suits for injunctions and damages alike, have left the constitutional connection between rights and remedies more attenuated than ever before. This Article explores the conceptual and doctrinal connections between constitutional rights and entitlements to judicial remedies. Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson — which largely vindicated Texas’s strategy for insulating an antiabortion law from judicial challenge via suits for injunctions — furnishes the Article’s primary window into the current doctrinal landscape. But the Article’s perspective is broadly historical. It assumes throughout that we cannot understand the present law without understanding the background from which it developed and, in increasingly important respects, from which it now deviates. The Article’s central thesis combines empirical and normative aspects: Although the modern Supreme Court has wielded separation of powers arguments to truncate constitutional remedies, the Court’s premises are mistaken. The Constitution frequently, though not invariably, requires effective remedies for constitutional rights violations. When Congress fails to authorize such remedies, nothing in the Constitution’s history or tradition precludes a role for the Supreme Court in devising remedies that are necessary to enforce substantive rights. If we have entered an era in which a majority of the Justices believe otherwise, the situation is a deeply regrettable one in which the concept of a constitutional right will be cheapened.

This Article demonstrates that constitutional provisions rarely if ever have uniquely correct “original public meanings” that are sufficiently determinate to resolve disputed constitutional cases. As public meaning originalism (“PMO”) ascends toward a position of dominance within the Supreme Court, both practitioners and critics should recognize the limited capacity of historical and linguistic facts to settle modern issues. To understand successful constitutional communication, this Article argues, requires a distinction between “minimal” original public meanings, which either are entailed by language and logic or are otherwise noncontroversial, and the richer and more determinate meanings that originalists often purport to discover. When the Constitution says that each state shall have “two Senators,” “two” means two. By contrast, when members of the Founding generation disagreed about the meaning of a constitutional provision—as they frequently did—the idea of a uniquely correct and determinate more-than-minimal meaning that existed as a matter of linguistic and historical fact is chimerical. Judges can of course reach determinate conclusions, but seldom can those dispute-resolving conclusions be ones of simple historical fact. Insofar as practitioners of PMO—including Justices of the Supreme Court—purport to discover more-than-minimal original public meanings that provide determinate resolutions to contested cases, skepticism is in order. The problem with claims about more-than-minimal original public meanings is conceptual, not epistemological. Although public meaning originalists speak of “evidence” establishing the historical validity of disputed claims about original public meanings, they have no adequate account of what, exactly, the evidence is supposed to be evidence of. Beyond historical facts about who said and believed different things at particular times, there is no further, diversity-transcending fact of an original public meaning that extends beyond minimal and noncontroversial meanings. After identifying the conceptual limitations of public meaning originalism, this Article examines the resulting challenges for both theorists of PMO and for originalist and nonoriginalist Justices alike. It also draws lessons concerning the nature of and necessary conditions for successful constitutional communication across generations.

This Article advances a novel theory of the political question doctrine by locating its foundations in a conundrum about ultra vires action, exemplified by the ancient question: Who will guard the guardians? The political question doctrine marks some questions as ultra vires the judicial power, or beyond the jurisdiction of courts to resolve. Correspondingly, designation of a question as political typically identifies it as lying within the jurisdiction of a nonjudicial institution to settle. Even after denominating a question as political, however, courts retain a responsibility to check actions by other institutions that overreach those institutions’ authority and thus are themselves ultra vires. The need for the judiciary to press to the outer limits of its jurisdiction to rein in ultra vires action by other institutions renders political question rulings less categorical, and also less distinct from merits decisions, than both judges and commentators have often imagined. The inescapable role of the courts in identifying ultra vires action by other branches also highlights the possibility of ultra vires action by the courts themselves. The paired risks of ultra vires action by the courts and ultra vires action by other branches if the courts could not assert jurisdiction to restrain them—both made vivid by the political question doctrine—define what this Article calls the ultra vires conundrum. The ultra vires conundrum, in turn, gives rise to what we might think of as ultimate political questions: What happens if courts err in their determination of the outer bounds of their own power? If the courts act ultra vires, do their decisions bind conscientious officials of other branches? And if not, who gets to decide when judicial action is ultra vires? Besides formulating the ultra vires conundrum and answering the questions that define its core, this Article solves a number of more traditional, interrelated puzzles about the political question doctrine that appear in a new light once the ultra vires conundrum lies exposed. It also traces previously unexplored connections between political questions and the ideal of the rule of law.

This Article responds to comments on my book Law and Legitimacy in the Supreme Court by Professors Gillian Metzger, Scott Soames, Lawrence Solum, and Keith Whittington. It defends the main theses that my book develops and engages further questions that Professors Metzger, Soames, Solum, and Whittington either raise or provoke.

Debates about statutory interpretation typically proceed on the assumption that statutes have linguistic meanings that we can identify in the same way that we identify the meaning of utterances in ordinary conversation. But that premise is false. We identify the meaning of conversational utterances largely based on inferences about what the speaker intended to communicate. With legislatures, as now is widely recognized, there is no unitary speaker with the sort of communicative intentions that speakers in ordinary conversation possess. One might expect this recognition to trigger abandonment of the model of conversational interpretation as a framework for interpreting statutes. Instead, interpreters invent legislative intentions—purportedly “objective” ones for textualists—or purposes. With those inventions in place, judges and theorists then carry on talking about what statutes mean, or would mean to a reasonable person, as if there were a linguistic fact of the matter even in intelligibly disputed cases. But this is a deep and systematic error. Mainstream thinking about statutory interpretation needs a major reorientation. Contrary to widespread impressions, debates about statutory interpretation are not about what statutes mean as a matter of linguistic fact, but about which grounds for the attribution of an invented meaning would best promote judicial and governmental legitimacy. Having recognized that the model of conversational interpretation cannot ground claims about statutes’ meanings in disputed cases, we also need to rethink the role of legislatures and courts in a political democracy. There are limits to what legislatures can reasonably be expected to accomplish. Courts need to play the role of helpmates to the legislature, not just faithful agents. In the interpretation of statutes, linguistic intuitions should matter, but primarily for normative reasons, involving justice and fairness in the coercive application of law, and not because they reveal the legislature’s linguistically clear dictates.

This supplement brings the principal text current with recent developments in the law.

What does it mean to have a constitutional right in an era in which most rights must yield to 'compelling governmental interests'? After recounting the little-known history of the invention of the compelling-interest formula during the 1960s, The Nature of Constitutional Rights examines what must be true about constitutional rights for them to be identified and enforced via 'strict scrutiny' and other, similar, judge-crafted tests. The book's answers not only enrich philosophical understanding of the concept of a 'right', but also produce important practical payoffs. Its insights should affect how courts decide cases and how citizens should think about the judicial role. Contributing to the conversation between originalists and legal realists, Richard H. Fallon, Jr explains what constitutional rights are, what courts must do to identify them, and why the protections that they afford are more limited than most people think.

The Supreme Court displays increasing hostility to constitutional tort claims. Although the Justices sometimes cast their stance as deferential to Congress, recent cases exhibit aggressive judicial lawmaking with respect to official immunity. Among the causes of turbulence in constitutional tort doctrine and the surrounding literature is a failure—not only among the Justices, but also among leading scholarly critics—to see interconnected problems in a sufficiently broad frame. This Article refocuses analysis along four interconnected dimensions. First, it examines relevant constitutional history, centrally including that of the maxim “for every right, a remedy.” That maxim has exerted significant generative force, but it has also been widely misunderstood. Second, the Article reviews and critiques recent Supreme Court decisions involving constitutional tort claims, many of which reflect fallacious assumptions. Third, the Article addresses the question, What role would damages and injunctive remedies for constitutional violations play in a justly and prudently designed legal system unfettered by historical accidents and path dependence? Commentators almost invariably assume that any gap between constitutional rights and individually effective, make-whole remedies is inherently regrettable. This Article refutes that premise. Although an ideal regime would substitute entity liability for officer liability and afford broad opportunities for victims of constitutional violations to vindicate their rights, it would not always authorize recovery of money damages. Finally, the Article considers reforms that the Supreme Court could effectuate in the absence of action by Congress. Among other proposals, it calls for expansion of municipal liability in suits under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and for reinvigoration of Bivens actions, but it defends the main outlines of qualified immunity doctrine against a spate of recent critics.

We live in a time of anxiety about the rule of law. In railing against individual judges and their decisions, angry protesters—including elected officials and the President—presume a knowledge of what the Constitution requires, judicial pronouncements to the contrary notwithstanding. Recent bluster raises a question about what would occur if the President ordered government officials to defy a judicial ruling. The idea that the Supreme Court has ultimate authority in matters of constitutional interpretation—which often rides under the heading of “judicial supremacy”—has acquired strong currency. In the history of American political ideas, it has substantially eclipsed “departmentalist” theories, which hold that each branch of government should interpret the Constitution for itself, and an allied notion of “popular constitutionalism.” In the view of many, the rule of law requires judicial supremacy. This Article probes the concepts of judicial supremacy, departmentalism, popular constitutionalism, and the rule of law, all of which possess relatively timeless importance. In doing so, it sheds light on issues of immediate practical urgency. The truth, terrifyingly enough under current circumstances, is that our system is not, never has been, and probably never could be one of pure judicial supremacy. In principle, moreover, a regime in which judicial review operates within “politically constructed bounds”—and judicial rulings on constitutional issues are at risk of occasional defiance—is entirely compatible with rule-of-law ideals. In our current political context, there is abundant ground for anxiety about the future of rule-of-law constitutionalism. But judicial supremacy is not the answer to any significant legal, constitutional, or political problem. An adequate response will require repair of the ethical commitments—among elected officials and the public, as well as the Judicial Branch—that the rule of law requires.

"Why do self-proclaimed constitutional “originalists” so regularly reach decisions with a politically conservative valence? Do “living constitutionalists” claim a license to reach whatever results they prefer, without regard to the Constitution’s language and history? In confronting these questions, Richard H. Fallon reframes and ultimately transcends familiar debates about constitutional law, constitutional theory, and judicial legitimacy. Drawing from ideas in legal scholarship, philosophy, and political science, Fallon presents a theory of judicial legitimacy based on an ideal of good faith in constitutional argumentation. Good faith demands that the Justices base their decisions only on legal arguments that they genuinely believe to be valid and are prepared to apply to similar future cases. Originalists are correct about this much. But good faith does not forbid the Justices to refine and adjust their interpretive theories in response to the novel challenges that new cases present. Fallon argues that theories of constitutional interpretation should be works in progress, not rigid formulas laid down in advance of the unforeseeable challenges that life and experience generate. Law and Legitimacy in the Supreme Court offers theories of constitutional law and judicial legitimacy that accept many tenets of legal realism but reject its corrosive cynicism. Fallon’s account both illuminates current practice and prescribes urgently needed responses to a legitimacy crisis in which the Supreme Court is increasingly enmeshed." -- publisher

Nearly all of us who participate in constitutional argument in subjective good faith share a second-order methodology of constitutional decision-making—that is, an approach to working out both our first-order theories of constitutional interpretation and our judgments about appropriate results in particular cases. That shared method involves a search for reflective equilibrium between our prior or intuitive methodological assumptions (which sometimes may be vague or indeterminate) and our intuitive judgments concerning the appropriate results in particular cases. If our ex ante methodological theories are underdeterminate, reflection on new cases’ facts will lead us to specify our premises more fully. Moreover, in instances of initial conflict between judgments of desirable case-specific outcomes and previously adopted methodological commitments, the Reflective Equilibrium Hypothesis advanced in this Essay holds that adjustment can occur on either end. If we argue about constitutional issues in good faith, normally we will adapt our judgments concerning correct results to methodological premises that we have previously endorsed. But sometimes reflection on new cases will provoke an elaboration, qualification, or rethinking of methodological commitments. After advancing the Reflective Equilibrium Hypothesis as an explanatory theory of the main currents of constitutional argumentation, this Essay offers a brief normative defense.

An annually-revised paperback designed for a single-semester course on constitutional law, this book is roughly half the length of many hardcover casebooks.

This Essay seeks to reframe a longstanding debate by propounding a novel theory of judicial candor. Previous commentators on judicial candor have failed to draw a crucial distinction between obligations of candor, breaches of which constitute highly culpable failures, and ideals of candor that even the best judges fail to satisfy fully. This Essay argues for a theory of judicial candor that defines both minimal obligations and aspirational ideals and that explains the linkages between the two. This Essay’s potentially larger contribution lies in its provision of a template for thinking about judicial candor. Different people begin with different understandings or intuitive conceptions. To arbitrate among rival perspectives, this Essay posits that discussion needs to begin with familiar patterns of linguistic usage, but insists that analysis cannot stop there. Against the background of linguistic and theoretical disagreement, intellectual progress requires examination of why we have reason to care about judicial candor in the various senses in which that term can be used. At the last stage, the selection of a conception of judicial candor must turn on normative considerations. Consistent with that credo, this Essay not only explains, but also justifies, its conclusions about what judicial candor minimally requires and about the further ideals that it embodies, even if fallible and time-pressed human judges understandably fall short of ideal candor in many cases.

Debates about constitutional federalism—by which I roughly mean the division of powers and responsibilities between the national and state governments—abound. Participants typically cast such debates as constitutional in character. Nearly invariably, however, policy concerns exert a dominating influence, either on the surface or just beneath it. More often than not, proponents offer federalism-based arguments on behalf of conclusions that they value for policy-based reasons. Reciprocally, champions of particular theories of constitutional federalism typically argue that their visions would yield better outcome —as measured along some dimension—than would any other understanding of the Constitution’s structure. In an effort to chart some dimensions of the relationship between federalism-based arguments and more overtly normative or policy based arguments, I pursue three lines of inquiry in this Essay.

In this Essay, written in tribute to Dan Meltzer, I shall attempt to explicate his views regarding statutory interpretation in general, thematic terms. In doing so, I shall register my agreement with virtually all of Dan’s conclusions and frequently echo his practically minded arguments in support of them. But I shall also advance arguments—with which I cannot be entirely sure he would have agreed—that seek to show that his position reflected theoretical insights about how language works, not only in law, but also more generally in life. By seeking simultaneously to defend Dan’s views and to build on them, this Essay may sometimes blur the line between explication and original argumentation. Its methodology is, accordingly, risky, but I do not believe it is misplaced. As I hope will become clear, my blending of descriptive and interpretive claims with normative argumentation in some ways parallels the approach that Dan thought courts should take in acting as Congress’s junior partners.

Debates about legal interpretation frequently bypass or give short shrift to the more basic concept of legal "meaning." Seeking to rectify that deficiency, this Article explores the meaning of "meaning." Examination of familiar terms of legal argument reveals an astonishing number of possible senses of that term - and, correspondingly, an equally large number of possible referents for ultimate claims concerning what legal provisions mean. These referents include a statutory or constitutional provision's semantic or literal meaning, its contextual meaning as framed by the shared presuppositions of speakers and listeners, its "real" conceptual meaning, and its intended, reasonable, and previously interpreted meanings. Proponents of interpretive theories such as textualism and originalism sometimes suggest that legal meaning depends on prelegal, linguistic facts that make one of these kinds or senses of meaning uniquely correct. But that suggestion reflects a misunderstanding about how language works. Framing the challenge for legal interpretation as that of choosing the normatively best referent for claims of legal meaning from among otherwise eligible candidates, this Article shows that textualism and originalism, in particular, lack the resources to make the unique, consistent, categorical selections and exclusions that some versions of those theories purport to achieve. Like a variety of other interpretive theories, they lapse into reliance on case-by-case normative judgments. When understood against the background of a careful delineation of the choices that legal interpretation requires, the aspirations of textualism and originalism help to frame a fundamental question: Given the function of interpretive theories to guide or determine choices among otherwise plausible senses of legal meaning, should such theories do so on a categorical or a case-by-case basis? This Article advocates the latter approach. A due appreciation of the interpretive challenge - which frequently requires a choice among the literal, con-textually framed and limited, real conceptual, intended, reasonable, and interpreted meanings of statutory and constitutional provisions - reveals the stark hubris of proposals that commit in advance to categorical selections or even categorical exclusions.

The application of the doctrine of standing has become less and less predictable since the Supreme Court’s adoption of a tripartite test for standing in the 1970s. Professor Fallon analyzes the Court’s decisions in standing cases in order to discern patterns in the Court’s application of this test. Fallon concludes that the Supreme Court and legal scholars should embrace the fragmentation of the doctrine of standing and look to discernable patterns in the cases to find general rules of application for different contexts.

As much as - if not more than - any other lower federal court judge of his generation, J. Skelly Wright left large footsteps on the sands of time. As a district judge for the Eastern District of Louisiana from 1949 to 1962, he took a courageous leading role in desegregating the New Orleans schools. Braving social ostracism, death threats, and a cross-burning on his lawn, he brought about "not only the integration of the public schools in New Orleans but also the integration of universities, buses, parks, sporting events and voting lists, historic moves that reverberated elsewhere in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, the era of the civil rights campaigns." As a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1962 to 1988, Judge Wright wrote path-breaking opinions in a number of areas of the law. Many of his decisions attracted widespread academic commentary, most of it favorable but some critical. Welcoming the debates, Judge Wright published an accompanying stream of much-discussed articles in the nation's foremost law reviews. When Wright died in 1988, tributes described him as among "the outstanding jurists of the nation's history.

The Seventh Edition of this classic casebook brings it thoroughly up to date (as of December 31, 2014) and includes numerous revisions to enhance its teachability. The book’s depth of coverage and intellectual rigor remain unrivaled. In addition, each chapter has been carefully revised with an eye to making the material more accessible to students. A number of new introductory and explanatory notes help to frame the key issues raised by the materials. Moreover, the editors’ judicious revision and trimming of older material will permit assignments of manageable length, without sacrificing the scholarly comprehensiveness that has always been the Hart & Wechsler hallmark.

Part I presents the thesis that the Supreme Court frequently undertakes a multiplicity of history-based inquiries and weighs a variety of historically grounded considerations. Part I also argues (as some originalists recognize, but stringently exclusive originalists do not) that the original meaning of constitutional language was frequently vague or indeterminate. Accordingly, the Constitution’s application to current issues would often require a mix of historical and normative analysis even if original history were the only kind of history that mattered. Part II offers a preliminary exploration of why so many kinds of historical inquiry bear on constitutional and sometimes on statutory cases. Part III advances a jurisprudential argument in favor of a multi-factored approach to constitutional decisionmaking. Arguing that the foundations of law, including American constitutional practice, necessarily reside in social facts involving what is accepted as binding law, Part III establishes the radical, revisionary character of calls for exclusive originalism. Part IV defends what—adapting vocabulary from Professor David Strauss—I call a common law approach to determining the relative importance of varied kinds of historical phenomena in reaching conclusions of constitutional law. It analyzes a mixture of “easy” and “hard” federal courts cases to illustrate that almost no one, outside the context of a methodological debate about how to resolve understandably disputable cases, actually is an exclusive originalist, but that widespread convergence of judgment about the proper decision of constitutional cases typically occurs anyway. Part IV explains calls for exclusive originalism as the product of a largely misplaced anxiety about untrammeled judicial subjectivity. Part V provides a brief conclusion.

The organization of the new compact book will be similar to the much larger Choper - Fallon - Kamisar - Shiffrin casebook (one which will continue to be revised and published) and the big book (which contains many Notes & Questions) will be ...

Justice Holmes famously observed that “[g]reat cases . . . make bad law.” The problem may be especially acute in the domain of national security, where presidents frequently interpret their own powers without judicial review and where executive precedents play a large role in subsequent interpretive debates. On the one hand, some of the historical assertions of presidential authority that stretch constitutional and statutory language the furthest seem hard to condemn in light of the practical stakes. On the other hand, to credit the authority of executive precedent risks leaving the president dangerously unbound. To address the conundrum posed by executive precedent, this Article proposes a two-tiered theory for the interpretation of presidential powers. Framed as an analogy to a position in moral philosophy known as “threshold deontology,” two-tiered interpretive theory treats rules that restrict executive power as normally inviolable, not subject to a case-by-case balancing analysis. Analogously to threshold deontology, however, two-tiered theory also recognizes that when the costs of adherence to ordinary principles grow exorbitantly high, extraordinary interpretive principles should govern instead and should result in the upholding of broad presidential power. For reasons that the Article explains, resort to extraordinary reliance on second-tier justifications for assertions of sweeping executive authority involves a legal analogue to “dirty-handed” moral conduct and should be labeled accordingly. And executive precedents set in extraordinary, second-tier cases should not apply to more ordinary ones. Through its conjunction of elements, two-tiered interpretive theory furnishes analytical and rhetorical safeguards against executive overreaching, but also allows accommodations for truly extraordinary cases.

In this short Article, I shall express some grounds for respectful skepticism, both about whether Rosenkranz has proven his claims and about whether courts should decide cases on the basis of his arguments, even if judges thought him more likely right than not about the significance that well-informed Americans of the Founding generation would have attached to the “subjects” and “objects” of the Constitution. But, I also hope to train attention on the general methodological challenge—partly for other law professors working in the field and especially for judges and Justices—that work such as Rosenkranz’s poses: How should we appraise, and what significance should we attach to, ingenious, provocatively novel theses that would make constitutional outcomes depend wholly on seemingly plausible, but not clearly proven linguistic and historical claims?

When Professor Martin Redish condemned abstention doctrines as violating norms of "institutional legitimacy," he provoked an informative debate, but one that has largely subsided. This Essay revisits the once-heated debate about abstention's legitimacy, clarifies its terms, and identifies its stakes. The legitimacy question is not whether abstention decisions are legally correct, but whether applicable statutes and the Constitution render such decisions ultra vires. Most often, the answer to that question is no. Recent versions of both textualist and purposivist theories of statutory interpretation recognize that statutory meaning always depends on "context." And when relevant statutes are read in a sufficiently capacious semantic context (as textualists would insist) or policy context (as purposivists would demand), abstention emerges as justified in some cases. Indeed, if abstention were illegitimate, then a number of other federal courts doctrines-many of which are difficult to justify by reference either to the language of pertinent statutes or to Congress's most pressing purposes in enacting them-would be illegitimate also.

This article examines the increasingly common phenomenon of “scholars’ briefs” in which collections of law professors appear as amici curiae in litigation before a court. Arguing that many professors compromise their integrity by joining such briefs too promiscuously, the article proposes standards that professors should insist upon before signing amicus briefs that they do not write. The article's methodology involves comparisons among various roles that law professors sometimes play and the distinctive moral and ethical standards appropriate to each. Besides a thorough discussion of scholars’ briefs, the article includes broader analysis of law professors’ role-based ethical obligations.

An essay is presented on whether the theory of originalism of constitutional language is a rationalization for conservatism or a principled theory of interpretation. Several arguments on how constitutional language should be interpreted are that it should reflect the Framers' intent, how it is understood by the ratifiers, and the original public meaning of the constitutional language. The essayist explains that when practical consequences and political valences are not taken into consideration in the generality of cases, rationalization occurs.

The Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have frequently insisted that “facial challenges” to the validity of statutes are and ought to be rare. Based partly on an empirical survey of all cases decided by the Court during six selected Terms, this Article reveals that assumption to be empirically false and normatively mistaken. Error on this point reflects broader confusions and misunderstandings. For example, it is not true that only a few especially stringent constitutional tests frame facial challenges. Even the rational basis test sometimes yields the conclusion that statutes are invalid in toto. The conventional wisdom also errs in positing that the Supreme Court can cure a statute’s facial defects merely by invoking a general “presumption of severability” under which, in a future case, any of a statute’s invalid applications can be separated from valid ones. Besides revising the conventional wisdom about facial challenges, this Article locates the root of misunderstanding in the rhetoric of a relatively small number of much-cited cases. It also begins the reconstructive task of explaining when facial challenges do and do not succeed. That explanation has three parts. First, there is a crucial linkage between rulings of facial invalidity and the breadth of the reasons that the Supreme Court gives in upholding constitutional challenges. Second, the Court is often inattentive to severability issues, and its practice must be understood accordingly. Although this Article advances important rationalizing generalizations, it explains why the Court’s approach to severability cannot be captured in rigid rules. Third, many Supreme Court decisions rejecting facial challenges are best understood as finding facial challenges to be unripe, rather than categorically unavailable.