Faculty Bibliography

Judges on a multimember court might vote in two different ways. In the first, judges behave solipsistically, imagining themselves to be the sole judge on the court, in the style of Ronald Dworkin’s mythical Judge Hercules. On this model, judges base their votes solely on the information contained in the legal sources before them – statutes, regulations, precedents and the like – and the arguments of advocates. In the second model, judges vote interdependently; they take into account not only the legal sources and arguments, but also the information contained in the votes of other judges, based on the same sources and arguments. What does the law say about these two models? May judges take into account the votes of colleagues when deciding how to vote themselves? Should they do so? Are there even conditions under which judges must do so? To date, the law has no general theory about how to approach interdependent voting. Each setting is taken on its own terms, and judges muddle through. The problem is that some judges muddle in one direction, some in another, without any consistent approach, either across judges, or across settings. We argue for a presumption that judges not only may but should consider the votes of other judges as relevant evidence or information, unless special circumstances obtain that make the systemic costs of doing so clearly greater than the benefits. Our view is not absolutist; we do not say that judges should always and everywhere consider the votes of other judges. Under certain conditions, it may be better for decisionmakers not to attempt to consider all available information, and we will attempt to indicate what those conditions might be, in this domain. But we will argue that such conditions should not casually be assumed to exist. Interdependence should be the norm, and solipsism the exception, so that unless judges have good reason to do otherwise they should take into account the information contained in other judges’ votes. Our central case is an extended fugue on Chevron-related examples and variants, but we also consider qualified immunity, new rules in habeas corpus, mandamus, and the rule of lenity.

This paper was prepared for a conference about constraints on executive discretion. In addition to law and politics (to whatever extent they do or do not constrain the executive), there is also a distinct third bound on executive discretion: conventions, roughly understood as unwritten but obligatory rules of the political game. Debates over executive discretion should take account of distinctions between contingent politics and conventions; between intragovernmental conventions and extragovernmental conventions; and between conventions against doing things and conventions against saying things. The last distinction, in particular, illuminates the strong resistance, in contexts such as immigration, to executive policy statements that make explicit a pattern of enforcement discretion, one that would otherwise remain only implicit. Even holding legal authority constant, making that authority explicit through general policy statements may trigger the normatively-inflected political sanctions that are characteristic of conventions.

In the textbooks, procedural due process is a strictly judicial enterprise; although substantive entitlements are created by legislative and executive action, it is for courts to decide independently what process the Constitution requires. The notion that procedural due process might be committed primarily to the discretion of the agencies themselves is almost entirely absent from the academic literature. The facts on the ground are very different. Thanks to converging strands of caselaw -- partly involving due process, partly involving judicial deference to agency interpretation of procedural provisions in statutes, and partly involving the long shadow of Vermont Yankee v. NRDC -- agencies themselves are now the primary front-line expositors and appliers of the cost-benefit balancing test of Mathews v. Eldridge. The courts for their part often defer, explicitly or implicitly, to agencies’ due process decisions. I will defend this approach, and urge that it be made fully explicit. Rather than decide for themselves “what process is due,” courts should ask only whether the agency offered a rational justification for providing whatever process it did provide. Although the Mathews cost-benefit calculus would still supply the rule of decision, courts should merely review the application of that rule by agencies, and defer to reasonable agency decisions about the costs and benefits of procedural arrangements.

In the early twenty-first century, public law is being challenged by a fundamental assault on the legitimacy of the administrative state, under the banner of “the separation of powers.” The challengers frequently refer to the specter of Stuart despotism, and they valorize a (putatively) heroic opponent of Stuart despotism: the common-law judge, symbolized by Edward Coke. The New Coke is a shorthand for a cluster of impulses stemming from a belief in the illegitimacy of the modern administrative state. Despite its historical guise, the New Coke is a living-constitutionalist movement, a product of thoroughly contemporary values and fears -- perhaps prompted by continuing rejection, in some quarters, of the New Deal itself, and perhaps prompted by a reaction by some of the Justices to controversial initiatives from more recent presidents. In two important decisions in 2015, however, a supermajority of the Court refused to embrace the New Coke, and properly so. Instead the Court issued the long-awaited Vermont Yankee II, insisting that courts are not authorized to add procedures to those required by the APA, and reaffirmed the validity of Auer deference to agency interpretations of their own regulations. The Court’s approach promises to honor the multiple goals of administrative and constitutional law without embracing novel, ungrounded claims that betray basic commitments of the public legal order. For now, the center holds.

Under the Administrative Procedure Act, courts review and set aside agency action that is "arbitrary [and] capricious." In a common formulation of rationality review, courts must either take a "hard look" at the rationality of agency decisionmaking, or at least ensure that agencies themselves have taken a hard look. We will propose a much less demanding and intrusive interpretation of rationality review-a thin version. Under a robust range of conditions, rational agencies have good reason to decide in a manner that is inaccurate, nonrational, or arbitrary. Although this claim is seemingly paradoxical or internally inconsistent, it simply rests on an appreciation of the limits of reason, especially in administrative policymaking. Agency decisionmaking is nonideal decisionmaking; what would be rational under ideal conditions is rarely a relevant question for agencies. Rather, agencies make decisions under constraints of scarce time, information, and resources. Those constraints imply that agencies will frequently have excellent reasons to depart from idealized first-order conceptions of administrative rationality. Thin rationality review describes the law in action. Administrative law textbooks typically suggest that the State Farm decision in 1983 inaugurated an era of stringent judicial review of agency decisionmaking for rationality. That is flatly wrong at the level of the Supreme Court, where agencies have won no less than 92 percent of the sixty-four arbitrariness challenges decided on the merits since the 1982 Term. The Court's precedent embodies an approach to rationality review that is highly tolerant of the inescapable limits of agency rationality when making decisions under uncertainty. State Farm is not representative of the law; beloved of law professors, and frequently cited in rote fashion by judges, State Farm nonetheless lies well outside the mainstream of the Supreme Court's precedent. To encapsulate the Court's approach to rationality review, the best choice would be the powerfully deferential opinion in Baltimore Gas, decided in the same Term as State Farm. Plausibly, rather than living in the era of hard look review or the State Farm era, we live in the era of Baltimore Gas.

In recent years, several judges on the nation’s most important regulatory court -- the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit -- have given birth to libertarian administrative law, in the form of a series of judge-made doctrines that are designed to protect private ordering from national regulatory intrusion. These doctrines involve nondelegation principles, protection of commercial speech, procedures governing interpretive rules, arbitrariness review, standing, and reviewability. Libertarian administrative law can be seen as a second-best option for those who believe, as some of the relevant judges openly argue, that the New Deal and the modern regulatory state suffer from basic constitutional infirmities. Taken as a whole, libertarian administrative law parallels the kind of progressive administrative law that the same court created in the 1970s, and that the Supreme Court unanimously rejected in the Vermont Yankee case. It should meet a similar fate. Two cases to be decided next Term provide an opportunity for the Court to repudiate libertarian administrative law.

How should administrative law cope with genuine uncertainty, in which probabilities cannot be attached to outcomes? I argue that there is an important category of agency decisions under uncertainty in which it is rational to be arbitrary. Rational arbitrariness arises when no first-order reason can be given for the agency’s choice, yet the agency has valid second-order reasons to make a particular choice. When these conditions obtain, even coin flipping may be a perfectly rational strategy of decision making for agencies. Courts should defer to rationally arbitrary decisions. There is a proper role for courts in ensuring that agencies have adequately invested resources in information gathering, which may dispel uncertainty. Yet in some cases the value of further investments in information gathering will be genuinely uncertain. If so, courts should defer to agencies’ second-order choices about informational investments on the same grounds that justify deference to agencies’ first-order choices under uncertainty. If the [Board of Immigration Appeals] proposed to narrow the class of deportable aliens eligible to seek [legal] relief by flipping a coin—heads an alien may apply for relief, tails he may not—we would reverse the policy in an instant. That is because agency action must be based on non-arbitrary, “relevant factors.” (Judulang v. Holder, 132 S. Ct. 476, 485 [2011] [Kagan, J.]) The sense in which I am using the term [“uncertainty”] is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth-owners in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know. Nevertheless, the necessity for action and for decision compels us as practical men to do our best to overlook this awkward fact and to behave exactly as we should if we had behind us a good Benthamite calculation of a series of prospective advantages and disadvantages, each multiplied by its appropriate probability, waiting to be summed. (Keynes 1937, p. 214)

How should the administrative state be organized, from the epistemic point of view? There is a tension or tradeoff between local and global knowledge; this tradeoff implicitly structures a number of debates about the epistemic capacities of line agencies, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and the administrative state more generally. I will examine the tradeoff between local and global knowledge at two related levels. The first is the scope of the administrative state’s regulatory jurisdiction; this is the large-scale question of government versus markets that is central to the Hayekian program. The second level is the internal organization of the regulatory bureaucracy, within the area committed to the administrative state’s regulatory jurisdiction. Here the industrial organization literature has adapted Hayekian questions to new settings. On the first issue, Hayekian arguments for a constrained administrative state overlook the ability of non-market institutions to aggregate local and tacit knowledge. On the second issue, top-down epistemic coordination of agencies turns out to be indispensable; OIRA aggregates and coordinates dispersed information – information that is dispersed around the bureaucracy, rather than society -- and does so in a manner that cannot be replicated by decentralized horizontal coordination among agencies.

Review of Daniel R. Ernst's Tocqueville’s Nightmare: The Administrative State Emerges in America, 1900-1940.

Stock debates about transparency and secrecy usually assume that open voting and secret voting are mutually exclusive. But these positions present a false alternative; open and secret voting can be employed as complements in a larger decision-procedure. In what follows I will propose a hybrid or dual procedure of open-secret voting, and attempt to specify the conditions under which that procedure works well. I suggest that open-secret voting can best be justified as an institutional means of obtaining a second opinion from the voting group. A second opinion of this sort might produce informational benefits either for the members of the voting group itself, for outside parties, or for both. This is a companion paper to Adrian Vermeule, Second Opinions, available on SSRN.

I will argue that in the administrative state, in contrast to classical constitutional theory, the abuse of government power is not something to be strictly minimized, but rather optimized. An administrative regime will tolerate a predictable level of misrule, even abuse of power, as the inevitable byproduct of attaining other ends that are desirable overall. There are three principal grounds for this claim. First, the architects of the modern administrative state were not only worried about misrule by governmental officials. They were equally worried about “private” misrule -- misrule effected through the self-interested or self-serving behavior of economic actors wielding and abusing power under the rules of the 18th-century common law of property, tort, and contract. The administrative state thus trades off governmental and “private” misrule. Second, the rate of change in the policy environment, especially in the economy, is much greater than in the late 18th century -- so much greater that the administrative state has been forced, willy-nilly, to speed up the rate of policy adjustment. The main speeding-up mechanism has been ever-greater delegation to the executive branch, accepting the resulting risks of error and abuse. Third, the costs of enforcing legal rules against executive officials are necessarily positive and plausibly large, in part because any institutional monitors created to detect and punish abuses must themselves be monitored for abuse. The architects of the administrative state believed that a government that always forms undistorted judgments, and that never abuses its power, will do too little, do it too amateurishly, and do it too slowly. In that sense, the administrative state constantly gropes towards an institutional package solution that embodies an optimal level of abuse of power.

Review of Sanford Levinson's Review of An Argument Open to All: Reading The Federalist in the 21st Century.

This is a chapter for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the United States Constitution. I provide and compare three organizing frameworks for the administrative state. The first examines its constitutionality, the second its democratic credentials, the third its epistemic and technocratic capacities. After describing each, I examine their interaction, and suggest that the administrative state is the setting for an endlessly shifting series of alliances between and among constitutionalists, democrats and technocrats.

Administrative agencies frequently say “not now.” They defer decisions about rulemaking or adjudication, or decide not to decide, potentially jeopardiz- ing public health, national security, or other important goals. Such decisions are often made as a result of general Administration policy, may be highly controversial, and are at least potentially subject to legal challenge. When is it lawful for agencies to defer decisions? A substantial degree of agency autonomy is guaranteed by a recognition of resource constraints, which require agencies to set priorities, often with reference to their independent assessments of the relative importance of national policies. Agencies frequently defer decisions because they do not believe that certain policies warrant prompt attention. Unless a fair reading of congressional instructions suggests otherwise, agencies may defer decisions because of their own judgments about appropriate timing. At the same time, agencies may not defer decisions—or decide not to decide—if (1) Congress has imposed a statutory deadline, (2) their failure to act amounts to a circumvention of express or implied statutory requirements, or (3) that failure counts as an abdication of the agency’s basic responsibility to promote and enforce policies established by Congress. Difficult questions are raised by moratoria, formal or informal, on regulatory activity, especially if they are motivated by political considerations. Difficult questions also arise when agencies cannot feasibly meet statutory deadlines while fulfilling their obligation to engage in reasoned decisionmaking.

There is a substantial class of collective decision problems whose successful solution requires interdependence among decision makers at the agenda-setting stage and independence at the stage of choice. We define this class of problems and describe and apply a search-and-decision mechanism theoretically modeled in the context of honeybees and identified in earlier empirical work in biology. The honeybees’ mechanism has useful implications for mechanism design in human institutions, including courts, legislatures, executive appointments, research and development in firms, and basic research in the sciences. Our paper offers a fresh perspective on the idea of “biomimicry” in institutional design and raises the possibility of comparative institutional analysis across species.

What is the connection, if any, between the external perspective of the historian or political scientist and the internal perspective of lawyers and judges? That is the puzzle for constitutional law posed by Charles Beard’s classic, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). Beard challenges us either to reconcile our external and internal perspectives on constitutionalism, or else conceivably to declare them irreconcilable. I begin by showing that standard approaches to constitutional adjudication – originalism and Dworkinian moralism – are resolutely internal and thus have little use for the external standpoint of Beardian scholarship. I then describe a strategy of reconciliation offered by Justice Holmes, one that connects external and internal perspectives by means of a nonideal theory of constitutional judging under political constraints. The theory holds that the rational judge chooses the course of action that, at lowest possible cost, adjusts constitutional law and policy to match “the actual equilibrium of force in the community – that is, conformity to the wishes of the dominant power[].” In this framework, Beardian scholarship offers external analysis of the shape and force of the political constraints that the Holmesian judge should take into account when making constitutional law. External Beardian scholarship helps to delineate the feasible political options or possibilities for constitutional law, a critical datum from the internal but nonideal perspective of the Holmesian judge.

Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts (2007) advances a “trade-off thesis”: there exists a security–liberty frontier, such that policies below the frontier can be changed so as to improve both security and liberty, while if policy is already at some point on the frontier, neither security nor liberty can be increased without decreasing the other (the trade-off curve). Many commentators have launched critiques of the thesis, but none of them undermine it. Some redefine liberty as a component of security, or security as a component of liberty, while others make the point that not all policies are currently at the security–liberty frontier. These points are entirely consistent with the trade-off thesis; the critics err to the extent that they take these points as grounds for rejecting the thesis itself. No one has yet advanced an alternative framework that is both well-specified and analytically distinct from the trade-off thesis. Although the thesis is widely controverted, it should be common ground.

This essay attempts to recover a line of argument, developed by James Fitzjames Stephen and Justice Holmes, that describes majority rule as an irresistible force of nature. Majority rule has political and psychological force independent of its intrinsic merits. That force arises from a range of mechanisms, including the threat of majoritarian violence, the simplicity and focal-point character of majority rule, and political envy. Where the force of majority rule is sufficiently powerful, Stephen argues, majority rule is simply a political constraint, whatever its merits from an ideal point of view. Holmes then urges a least-cost principle: where majorities will inevitably get their way, law should at least ensure that they get their way efficiently - in a manner that minimizes total social cost. This principle has implications for the extension of the suffrage, legislative voting rules, delegation to bureaucracies, criminal law, free speech law, and the law and politics of emergency powers. The conclusion argues for an explanatory approach to social choice theory, as opposed to normative social choice, and for a second-best approach to normative social choice, in which the analyst assumes realistic political constraints.

In the Commonwealth nations, a constitutional “convention” denotes an unwritten but obligatory constitutional custom or norm. The question I will address is whether public law in the United States should be understood to permit, require or forbid federal courts to incorporate conventions into their decisions. My major claim is that public law should adopt an approach that has achieved consensus status in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth – what I will call the “modern Commonwealth view.” This approach holds that while courts may and should recognize conventions, they may not and should not enforce them. The main strength of the modern Commonwealth view is that it is not either of two other leading views, which I will call the “classical Diceyan view” and the “incorporationist view” respectively. I will argue that the two competing views are untenable and undesirable, and that the modern Commonwealth view triumphs faute de mieux – for lack of a better, or even any feasible, alternative. Moreover, I will claim that in important cases, especially recent cases, the U.S. Supreme Court has implicitly moved toward just this approach.

In a typical pattern in the literature on public law, the diagnostic sections of a paper draw upon political science, economics or other disciplines to offer deeply pessimistic accounts of the motivations of relevant actors in the legal system. The prescriptive sections of the paper, however, then issue an optimistic proposal that the same actors should supply public-spirited solutions. Where the analyst makes inconsistent assumptions about the motivations of actors within the legal system, equivocating between external and internal perspectives, an inside/outside fallacy arises. We identify the fallacy, connect it to an economics literature on the "determinacy paradox," and elicit its implications for the theory of public law.

It is often said that the legal touchstone of agency independence is whether agency heads are removable at will or only for cause. Yet this condition is neither necessary nor sufficient for operational independence. Many important agencies whose heads lack for-cause tenure protection are conventionally treated as independent, while other agencies whose heads enjoy for-cause tenure protection are by all accounts thoroughly dependent upon organized interest groups, the White House, or legislators and legislative committees. This Article argues that the crucial role is played by what Commonwealth lawyers call "conventions." Agencies that lack for-cause tenure yet enjoy operative independence are protected by unwritten conventions that constrain political actors from attempting to remove their members or to direct their exercise of discretion. Such conventions reflect norms within relevant legal and political communities that impose sanctions for violations of agency independence or create beliefs or internalized moral strictures protecting independence. Conversely, where agencies enjoy statutory independence yet lack operative independence, the interaction among relevant political actors has failed to generate protective conventions. The lens of convention helps resolve several puzzles about the behavior of Presidents, legislators, judges, and others with respect to agency independence-including the Supreme Court's puzzling treatment of SEC independence in Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB. By acknowledging the conventional character of agency independence, U.S. courts can incorporate ideas from the courts of Commonwealth legal systems that harmonize conventions with written rules of law. This Article's principal suggestion is that U.S. courts should adopt the leading Commonwealth approach, according to which judges may indirectly "recognize" conventions and incorporate them into their interpretation of written law, but not directly enforce conventions as freestanding obligations.

In Noel Canning v. NLRB, 705 F.3d 490 (D.C. Cir. 2013), the D.C. Circuit held (inter alia) that the President’s constitutional power to make recess appointments does not include recesses during a session of the Senate (“intrasession recesses”), as opposed to recesses between sessions (“intersession recesses”). Many commentators have taken Canning to be principally a textualist and originalist decision. I argue, to the contrary, that Canning’s textualism and originalism are derivative strategies by which the court attempted to fashion a precautionary rule against presidential aggrandizement. As such Canning is best understood to exemplify a mode of constitutional adjudication that we might call precautionary constitutionalism. As a normative matter, Canning illustrates the major problem of precautionary constitutionalism: myopic focus on a target risk may cause the rulemaker to ignore or underestimate countervailing risks, resulting in unintended, counterproductive or perverse consequences.

The Athenian democracy developed striking institutions that, taken together and separately, have long engaged the attention of theorists in law, politics, and history. We will offer a unifying account of the major institutions of the Athenian constitutional order, attempting both to put them in their best light and to provide criteria for evaluating their successes and failures. Our account is that Athenian institutions are best understood as an illustration of precautionary constitutionalism: roughly, the idea that institutions should be designed to safeguard against political risks, limiting the downside and barring worst-case political scenarios, even at the price of limiting the upside potential of the constitutional order. We use this framework to illuminate some of the distinctive features of the Athenian democracy: selection of officials by lot, rotation of office, collegiality, ostracism, and the graphe paranomon (the procedure for overturning an unconstitutional decree). Under some circumstances, precautionary constitutionalism is a useful strategy of institutional design. Under other circumstances, however, precautionary constitutionalism can go wrong in characteristic ways – by perversely exacerbating the very risks it seeks to prevent, by jeopardizing other values and thereby imposing excessive costs, or simply by creating futile precautions that fail the test of incentive-compatibility. We evaluate the precautionary institutions of the Athenian democracy in this light, and suggest that some failed while others succeeded. While selection by lot, rotation, and collegiality proved to be enduring and incentive-compatible institutions, ostracism perversely exacerbated the risks of tyranny and political domination it was intended to prevent, and the graphe paronomon collapsed into futility.

Regularly invoked by the Supreme Court in diverse contexts, the maxim nemo iudex in sua causa - no man should be judge in his own case - is widely thought to capture a bedrock principle of natural justice and constitutionalism. I will argue that the nemo iudex principle is a misleading half-truth. Sometimes rulemakers in public law do and should design institutions to respect the value of impartiality that underlies the nemo iudex principle. In other cases, they do not and should not. In many settings, public law makes officials or institutions the judges of their own prerogatives, power, or legal authority. Officials or institutions may determine their own membership, award their own compensation, rule on the limits of their own jurisdiction, or adjudicate and punish violations of rules they themselves have created. I will attempt to identify the general conditions under which rule designers sensibly depart from, override, or qualify the nemo iudex principle. In some cases, there is no impartial official or institution in the picture, so that wherever decisionmaking authority is lodged, someone or other will have to be the judge in his own case. In other cases, even where it would be feasible to respect the principle, the costs of doing so will exceed the benefits. In general, this will be so when and because impartiality trades off against one or several competing considerations: the benefits of expertise, the value of institutional autonomy and independence, or the motivation and activity level of officials and institutions. The upshot is that it is never sufficient to argue that a proposed institution, or a proposed interpretation of ambiguous constitutional rules or practices, would violate the nemo iudex principle. One must go on to ask whether the conflict is avoidable or unavoidable, and, if it is avoidable, whether it would be good or bad overall to avoid it.

In many constitutional regimes, constitutional powers atrophy over time. Examples of atrophied powers include the royal veto in the UK, the power of the Canadian federal government to ‘disallow’ provincial laws, the power of the US Congress to expand the number of Supreme Court justices (‘court-packing’), the ‘notwithstanding clause’ that authorizes the Canadian Parliament to override judicial decisions, and congressional impeachment of executive officers. This article offers mid-level hypotheses about the atrophy phenomenon. A power that is not exercised tends, over time, to become unexercisable. When a power goes unexercised over some sufficiently long period, its use comes to seem illegitimate to boundedly informed publics. Such publics use a political precedent heuristic, according to which an attempt to revive the power at a later time amounts to an illegitimate attempt to change the rules of the political game. Accordingly, constitutional actors who wish to prevent the atrophy of particular constitutional powers would do well to engage in pointless exercises of power—a form of deliberate precedent-setting in which the power is exercised merely to preserve its existence for the future. The main illustration involves legislative power to overturn or override constitutional or quasi-constitutional decisions of the judiciary, with special reference to judicial review under the Human Rights Act in the UK.

This article examines precautionary strategies of constitutional design and interpretation. In many contexts, constitutional actors and theorists justify rules of constitutional law as precautionary measures against various political risks, including the abuse of power by incumbent officials, dictatorship, majoritarian oppression, and biased adjudication. After providing an analytic taxonomy of such arguments, I examine criticisms of constitutional precautions offered by early proponents of national power such as Hamilton, Marshall and Story, and by New Dealers such as Frankfurter and Jackson. These critics argued that precautionary constitutionalism might be futile, might jeopardize other values, and might even prove perversely self-defeating, if and because the precautions create or exacerbate the very risks they were intended to prevent. Accordingly, these critics argued for a “mature position” that requires constitutional rulemakers to consider all relevant risks of action and of inaction. I identify a strictly negative but nonetheless valuable function of that approach: by laundering out one-sided arguments and placing all relevant risks before constitutional rulemakers, the mature position improves the process of constitutional design and interpretation.

On December 15-16, 2011, Harvard Law School convened a conference on “Political Risk and Public Law.” A special issue of the Journal of Legal Analysis will be devoted to publishing papers on this topic by Jon Elster, Edward Glaeser, Eric Posner, Fred Schauer, Mark Tushnet, and myself. The overall aim is to introduce a new set of questions about public law and a new analytical framework for thinking about those questions. The premise of the enterprise is that constitutions and other instruments of public law may fruitfully be viewed as devices for regulating political risks. Large literatures in law, economics, political science and policy studies examine first-order risks that arise from technology, the market, or nature. By contrast, constitutions and foundational statutes, such as the Administrative Procedure Act, may be understood as devices for regulating second-order risks. These are risks that arise from the design of institutions, the allocation of legal and political power among given institutions, and the selection of officials to staff those institutions. This perspective employs the framework of risk analysis elaborated by many disciplines across the social and policy sciences. The framework promises new insights for public law. Constitutional actors have often spoken the prose of risk regulation without knowing it, offering arguments about constitutional and institutional design that implicitly posit second-order risks and offer institutional prescriptions for managing those risks. By bringing the analytic structure of those arguments to the surface, political risk analysis promises to allow a more intelligent description and evaluation of the major problems of public law.

This paper identifies two distinctive features of ancient constitutional design that have largely disappeared from the modern world: constitution-making by single individuals and constitution-making by foreigners. We consider the virtues and vices of these features, and argue that under plausible conditions single founders and outsider founders offer advantages over constitution-making by representative bodies of citizens, even in the modern world. We also discuss the implications of adding single founders and outsider founders to the constitutional toolkit by describing how constitutional legitimacy would work, and how constitutional interpretation would be conducted, under constitutions that display either or both of the distinctive features of ancient constitutional design.

Philosophers and others have criticized reparations, particularly compensatory cash reparations, on a range of conceptual grounds. I shall attempt to defend reparations programs against these criticisms. The defense is that compensatory reparations programs aspire to do "rough justice" - no less, but no more. Rough justice is the intuition that sometimes it is permissible, even mandatory, to enact a scheme of compensatory reparations that is indefensible according to any first-best principle of justice. Rough justice seems attractive only when compared to no justice at all. The status quo of inaction is also a proposal for a scheme of compensation (set at zero dollars). The status quo thus fares even worse, according to the same criteria that condemn the relevant reparations proposals.

Standing institutions have a continuous existence: examples include the United Nations, the British Parliament, the US presidency, the standing committees of the US Congress, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Intermittent institutions have a discontinuous existence: examples include the Roman dictatorship, the Estates-General of France, constitutional conventions, citizens' assemblies, the Electoral College, grand and petit juries, special prosecutors, various types of temporary courts and military tribunals, ad hoc congressional committees, and ad hoc panels such as the 9/11 Commission and base-closing commissions. Within the class of intermittent institutions, one may distinguish periodic from episodic institutions. The former come into being on a schedule set down in advance, while the latter come into being at unpredictable intervals. The Electoral College is a periodic institution, while the Roman dictatorship is an episodic one. This article attempts to identify the benefits and costs of intermittent institutions, both as a class and in their periodic and episodic varieties. The largest goals are to state some general conditions under which intermittent institutions prove superior or inferior to standing institutions, and to illuminate the temporal dimension of institutional design.

In many settings, decisionmakers seek second opinions, and are wise to do so. Sometimes decisionmakers do not seek second opinions when they should have, or seek them when they should not have. In yet other settings, legal rules require decisionmakers to seek second opinions before taking action. There is a burgeoning literature on second opinions in professional contexts, as when patients or clients seek advice from doctors or lawyers. My aim, by contrast, is to analyze second opinions as a technique for the design of lawmaking institutions. I will try to show that many institutional structures, rules and practices have been justified as mechanisms for requiring or permitting decisionmakers to obtain second opinions; examples include judicial review of statutes or of agency action, bicameralism, the separation of powers, and the law of legislative procedure. I attempt to identify the main costs and benefits of second opinions, to identify the conditions under which second-opinion arguments prove more or less successful, and to consider how the lawmaking system might employ second-opinion mechanisms to greater effect. Part I provides an analytic taxonomy of second-opinion mechanisms and introduces some conceptual distinctions. Part II analyzes the main benefits and costs of second-opinion mechanisms, and then ties the benefits and costs together with some comparative statics, attempting to identify general conditions under which second-opinion mechanisms are desirable or undesirable. Part III applies the analysis to legislative structure and procedure, and to judicial stare decisis. I claim, among other things, that the Supreme Court should adopt a norm that two successive decisions, not merely one, are necessary to create binding law.

In The American Commonwealth (1888), James Bryce identified a political regime-type that he called “government by public opinion,” and argued that the United States had developed it to a greater degree than any other constitutional democracy then extant. Bryce’s analysis entails that familiar propositions about the relationship between public opinion and the constitutional order – many stemming from Publius – must be questioned, and perhaps heavily qualified or discarded. Bryce argues that the basic Madisonian strategy for channeling and containing majoritarian opinions and passions, by means of checks and balances and an extended republic, has perverse results; it strengthens rather than containing the force of public opinion. The power of mass opinion in America thus results, in part, from the very safeguards the framers put into place against it. Once in place, government by public opinion sets both a lower bound and an upper bound on the performance of the American democracy, ensuring that it performs tolerably well but also preventing it from performing better still. In Bryce’s paradoxical assessment, “the American democracy is not better just because it is so good.”

Standard questions in the theory of administrative law involve the allocation of power among legislatures, courts, the President, and various types of agencies. These questions are often heavily informed by normative commitments to particular allocations of governmental authority among the three branches of the national government. These discussions, however, are incomplete because agencies are typically treated as unitary entities. In this Article, we examine a different question: how does administrative law allocate power within agencies? Although scholars have sometimes cracked open the black box of agencies to peer inside, their insights are localized and confined to particular contexts. We will generalize the idea, attempting to show that administrative law allocates power both horizontally and vertically within agencies and offering some hypotheses about the nature of the resulting effects. Horizontally, administrative law directly or indirectly determines the relative influence within agencies of various types of professionals—lawyers, scientists, civil servants, politicians, and others. Vertically, administrative law directly or indirectly determines the relative influence within agencies of appointed agency heads, midlevel bureaucrats, and line personnel. This perspective illuminates several of the most puzzling judicially developed principles and doctrines of administrative law, including the doctrines surrounding Chenery, Chevron, Mead, and Accardi, as well as agency structures and procedures established by statute or executive order. The internal allocation perspective offered here both improves upon and critiques existing justifications for these developments and in that sense points the way toward a superior understanding of administrative law.

This is a response to Bruce Ackerman’s Tanner Lectures, “The Decline and Fall of the American Republic,” delivered at Princeton University on April 7-9, 2010. I suggest a framework for clarifying and evaluating Ackerman’s claims: constitutions and other instruments of public law can be understood as devices for regulating political risks. Many of the standard tools of risk regulation analysis can be used, with appropriate modifications, to analyze political risks and to evaluate the institutions that attempt to manage those risks. Given this framework, I suggest that Ackerman’s central claims and concerns are inconsistent or ill-defined.

This is The Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies’ second issue. It consists of a published version of two book symposia held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The first symposium was dedicated to a discussion of Adrian Vermeule’s “Law and the Limits of Reason” (Oxford University Press, 2009). It includes critical comments by Prof. Alon Harel, Dr. Rivka Weill and Dr. Ori Aronson, to which Prof. Vermeule then responds.

Uncovering the reasons for this ambivalence, this book looks at the difficulties of constitutional democracy, and reexamines fundamental questions: What is constitutional democracy? When does it succeed or fail?

The maxim “divide and conquer” (divide et impera) is frequently invoked in legal theory and the social sciences. We suggest that the maxim is a placeholder for a complex of ideas related by a family resemblance, but differing in their details, mechanisms and implications. We provide an analytic taxonomy of divide and conquer mechanisms in the settings of a Stag Hunt Game and an indefinitely-repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma. These two games both illustrate a tension between the social desirability of cooperation and the private incentives for safety and short-run gains. Next, we describe the role of third parties who are not themselves players of these games but who will be harmed if the players cooperate. In particular, we explore a variety of divide-and-conquer strategies – including the sabotage of communication channels, the payment of bribes, and the imposition of penalties – that effectively prevent cooperation among the players of these games. A number of applications are considered, including labor law, constitutional design and the separation of powers, imperialism and race relations, international law, litigation and settlement, and antitrust law. Conditions under which divide and conquer strategies reduce or enhance social welfare, and techniques that policy makers can use to combat divide and conquer tactics, are also discussed.