Death and Paperwork Reduction

How does government value people\u27s time? Often the valuation is implicit, even mysterious. But in patches of the federal administrative state, paperwork burdens are quantified in hours and often monetized. When agencies do monetize, they look to how the labor market values the time of the people faced with paperwork. The result is that some people\u27s time is valued over ten times more than other people\u27s time. In contrast, when agencies monetize the value of statistical life for cost-benefit analysis, they look to how people faced with a risk of death subjectively value its reduction. In practice, agencies assign the same value to every statistical life saved by a given policy. This Article establishes these patterns of agency behavior and suggests that there is no satisfying justification for them. Welfarist and egalitarian principles, along with the logic of statistical life valuation, lean against the use of market wages to monetize a person\u27s time doing government paperwork. The impact of this practice might be limited, given the modest ambition of today\u27s paperwork reduction efforts. But time-related burdens—and benefits—are key consequences of government decisions in countless contexts. If we want to scale up a thoughtful process for valuing people\u27s time in the future, we will need new foundations

Separation Rhetoric and Its Relevance. Book Review Of: Separation of Church and State. by Philip Hamburger

Book review: Separation of Church and State. By Philip Hamburger. Harvard University Press. 2002. Pp. 514. Reviewed by: Adam M. Samah

Separation Rhetoric and Its Relevance. Book Review Of: Separation of Church and State. by Philip Hamburger

Book review: Separation of Church and State. By Philip Hamburger. Harvard University Press. 2002. Pp. 514. Reviewed by: Adam M. Samah

If the Text is Clear—Lexical Ordering in Statutory Interpretation

Most courts now endorse lexical ordering for statutory cases. That is, a limited set of top-tier sources, if adequately clear, are supposed to establish statutory meaning. Lower-tier sources are held in reserve for close calls. Examples include legislative history and deference to agency positions, which often are demoted into tiebreaking roles. In fact, some such hierarchy of sources is approved by working majorities at the U.S. Supreme Court and more than forty state supreme courts. Although popular today, lexically ordered interpretation has risen and fallen before. Indeed, we should pause to reconsider whether these instructions are justified and whether judges can follow them. This Article explores the core trade-offs and implementation challenges of lexical ordering. On trade-offs, the Article spotlights decision quality, decision costs, and, less intuitively, decisiveness. Compared to aggregating all source inferences, lexical ordering threatens decision quality by sometimes throwing out useful information, but it can reduce decision costs and probably will increase the chance of a decisive judgment. Compared to flatly excluding lower-tier sources, lexical ordering probably yields higher quality decisions and decisiveness, but also higher decision costs. Whether the overall compromise seems tolerable depends on a series of debatable judgment calls. Moreover, the actual trade-offs depend on whether judges lexically order sources in their decisionmaking, not only in their opinion writing. To date, we lack evidence either way. The Article goes on to report results from a new vignette experiment conducted with approximately one hundred appellate judges. These judges showed curiously mixed success at lexical ordering. In a trade name case, we find little evidence that judges were improperly influenced by legislative history. In an election law case, by contrast, we find evidence that judges were improperly influenced by an agency’s position. There is much more to learn about the patterns of judicial behavior in this field. For now, we should expect mixed judicial success at achieving the mixed advantages and disadvantages of lexical ordering. The hard trade-offs cannot be casually assumed or ignored. With that unsettling lesson, more courts might abandon lexical ordering’s complex and sometimes fragile architecture—or at least maintain respect for judges who are committed to less orthodox, more extreme, and simpler methods for deciding statutory cases

Originalism\u27s Expiration Date

The Constitution of the United States declares itself supreme law, but even the amended document is ancient. By 2008, the predicted age of a randomly selected word in this text reached 178 years. The judiciary, for its part, might not interpret the text until decades after ratification. For Article V amendments, the average lag between ratification and Supreme Court interpretation has been about 40 years. The question is how these features of our supreme law might influence the choice of interpretive method and, ultimately, constitutional decision-making. In particular, some scholars indicate that originalism may be a strong force in adjudication when constitutional text is still fresh, but should then fade with time. This Article is a reassessment of time \u27s influence on constitutional adjudication. It begins by investigating the character and suggesting the causes of time lags in the interpretation of supreme law. It also identifies the Supreme Court\u27s initial encounters with Article V amendments and charts some interpretive trends over time. The Article then turns to the normative arguments for an expiring originalism. First, it resists the claim that strong judicial originalism is always desirable in the wake of ratification. Second, it pushes back in the other direction and explores justifications for a timeless originalism. An example is the possibility that judicial originalism generates ex ante incentives for Article V effort. Although unacceptable to some on principle, for others this justification will be persuasive given certain empirical assumptions. Finally, an unorthodox analogy is explored. Within a limited domain, a version of originalism can function as a culturally acceptable substitute for randomization. It turns out that a corner of supreme law is likely best determined at random, even if judges will never actually roll dice

Are Commercial Speech Cases Ideological? An Empirical Inquiry

The empirical study of judicial behavior continues to grow and mature. The live challenges include specification, such as constructing useful conceptions and measures of ideology, mapping particular domains in which identifiable forces influence decisions, and quantifying the magnitudes of those influences. To make progress on these challenges, we roll out new and expanded datasets that build on the work of Cass Sunstein, Lee Epstein, Gregory Sisk, and others, and we report on the character of constitutional litigation today. Our datasets cover U.S. Court of Appeals decisions in five domains: (1) commercial speech, (2) gun rights, (3) abortion rights, (4) establishment clause claims, and (5) anti-affirmative action claims. The bulk of the data reaches into 2016. Part of the data collection was automated, but all judge votes were coded by at least one law professor. Our vote coding allows judges to support claims in part or in full. We then deploy three proxies for judge ideology, including a new variable designed by Adam Bonica and Maya Sen that relies on judges’ pre-appointment campaign contributions. In our regression models, we introduce both standard and novel independent variables, such as three measures of procedural and substantive law. Commercial speech cases are the focus of this Article. We find no evidence of ideological influence within the full set of those cases, in the sense of judge votes tracking ordinary policy disagreements. The results make commercial speech cases look like gun rights cases—and unlike abortion rights, establishment clause, and affirmative action cases, which are consistently ideologically charged in our models. The differing magnitudes of ideological influence across case sets are presented numerically and visually. However, when commercial speech cases are limited to post-2000 decisions, to cases involving disclosure requirements, or to cases involving “right-wing advertising,” some results do change. Our variable for “big business” claimants is statistically significant in the post-2000 cases but not in the full sample of cases. Also, subtle ideological rifts seem to emerge in the disclosure and rightwing advertising cases, with some judges apparently migrating toward or away from supporting commercial speech claims in part or in full. Some of our findings are preliminary and warrant further research. Regardless, our data and analysis should cast more light on contemporary constitutional litigation as it now stands, after the close of the Obama administration and at the beginning of the Trump presidency

Anti-Modalities

Constitutional argument runs on the rails of “modalities.” These are the accepted categories of reasoning used to make claims about the content of supreme law. Some of the modalities, such as ethical and prudential arguments, seem strikingly open ended at first sight. Their contours come into clearer view, however, when we attend to the kinds of claims that are not made by constitutional interpreters – the analytical and rhetorical moves that are familiar in debates over public policy and political morality but are considered out of bounds in debates over constitutional meaning. In this Article, we seek to identify the “anti-modalities” of constitutional law and to investigate their implications. The anti-modalities both stabilize and undermine the modalities. On the one hand, they work in tandem to ensure that constitutional interpretation remains a distinctive legal enterprise. The two argument bundles are in this sense mutually reinforcing, even co-constitutive. On the other hand, by ruling out various important categories of reasoning – from general moral theory to emotional judgment to many cost-benefit calculations – the anti-modalities put continuous pressure on the modalities to accommodate such reasoning in adulterated forms, or else insist on a long distance between the inputs into supreme law and the concerns that most people care about. We call this distance constitutional law’s “resonance gap.” Such a gap arises in all areas of law, but it is especially pronounced in the constitutional realm. Although the anti-modalities play a critical role in preserving the law/politics distinction, they have deleterious consequences for each side of that line. The best response, this Article suggests, is not necessarily to narrow the resonance gap but rather to narrow the domain of constitutional law. If constitutional argument must exclude (or purport to exclude) vital modes of reasoning, we might worry less about refining its grammar and more about restricting its reach

Anti-Modalities

Constitutional argument runs on the rails of “modalities.” These are the accepted categories of reasoning used to make claims about the content of supreme law. Some of the modalities, such as ethical and prudential arguments, seem strikingly open ended at first sight. Their contours come into clearer view, however, when we attend to the kinds of claims that are not made by constitutional interpreters—the analytical and rhetorical moves that are familiar in debates over public policy and political morality but are considered out of bounds in debates over constitutional meaning. In this Article, we seek to identify the “anti-modalities” of constitutional law and to investigate their implications. The anti-modalities both stabilize and undermine the modalities. On the one hand, they work in tandem to ensure that constitutional interpretation remains a distinctive legal enterprise. The two argument bundles are in this sense mutually reinforcing, even co-constitutive. On the other hand, by ruling out various important categories of reasoning—from general moral theory to emotional judgment to many cost-benefit calculations—the anti-modalities put continuous pressure on the modalities to accommodate such reasoning in adulterated forms, or else insist on a long distance between the inputs into supreme law and the concerns that most people care about. We call this distance constitutional law’s “resonance gap.” Such a gap arises in all areas of law, but it is especially pronounced in the constitutional realm. Although the anti-modalities play a critical role in preserving the law/politics distinction, they have deleterious consequences for each side of that line. The best response, this Article suggests, is not necessarily to narrow the resonance gap but rather to narrow the domain of constitutional law. If constitutional argument must exclude (or purport to exclude) vital modes of reasoning, we might worry less about refining its grammar and more about restricting its reach