Zolinerek/Shutterstock.comEnabling Congress to Control the Administrative State
View of Washington, DC from Washington Monument. Shutterstock.comAgainst Skidmore Deference
Eliminating Chevron and Auer Deference
The Dangers of an Engaged Judiciary
The puzzle is why judges review the constitutionality of (some) laws deferentially. Last week I considered one of the most often provided reasons for deference, that the judges are “unelected,” and so, in a republican political system, should be careful when striking down the enactments of popularly elected legislators. Yet in the American constitutional system, national-level courts are fully republican institutions. They are immunized from direct electoral supervision to make them and the system more republican, not less republican. They are selected by the people’s representatives, and serve only during “good behavior.” This makes courts republican institutions according to the “rigid definition” that James Madison provides in Federalist No. 39. So, too, at the state level, many judges are elected directly, or at least undergo retention elections. It’s hard to maintain at either the state or national level that the judiciary is a non-republican branch of government.
Why Judicial Deference?
Judges do not treat all constitutional rights the same.
Gorsuch Gets Judicial Deference Right
As the confirmation battle over 10th Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch—Donald Trump’s nominee to fill the late Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court seat—takes shape on cable news shows and across newspaper opinion pages, phrases like “judicial restraint” and “judicial activism” dominate much of the discussion.
While anyone you ask will agree that restraint is good and activism bad, and that judges should be careful not to usurp lawmaking authority from the people’s duly elected representatives, it’s often difficult to figure out exactly what people mean when they give their opinion on this subject. All too often, calls for judicial restraint or deference are not about dispassionately applying the law and leaving the policy decisions to Congress; they are calls for blind rubber-stamping of governmental action.
Constitutionalism by Word Association: A Reply to Evan Bernick
The doors of the Supreme CourtAt The Huffington Post, Evan Bernick has offered a thoughtful reply to my suggestion that judicial deference to Congress differs categorically from judicial deference to the administrative state, arguing instead that the real problem is deference simply: “Judicial deference of any kind sees judges elevating will over the reasoned judgment that judges who draw their power from Article III must exercise.”
This usefully identifies the core of the issue. If federal judges actually possessed all the power Bernick says Article III assigns them, there would be less constitutional basis for constraining their authority. If they do not, the issue is whether they can commandeer it.
More Evidence for the Judicial Duty of Clarity
In a previous post, I discussed my new paper, The Duty of Clarity. There I show that the original meaning of the Constitution requires a clear violation of its terms before invalidating legislation. But the Constitution also demands that judges use the ample interpretive methods available to clarify the precise meaning of our fundamental law. Both the obligations of clarity and clarification flow from the judicial duty, a duty that is an aspect of the judicial power granted under Article III of the Constitution.
My paper helps resolve the long standing debate about whether judges should defer to the legislature. Judges are empowered to use legal methods to clarify a constitutional provision, and if they can be made clear by these methods, the provision offers a basis to invalidate legislation. But if judges cannot disambiguate or eliminate vagueness, they have no authority to replace the legislature’s judgment with their own.
Since finishing a draft of the paper, I have come across one more powerful piece of evidence for this proposition. It is widely agreed among early Supreme Court justices that this duty of clarity exists and was binding on them. Nevertheless, I had not previously found any instance in which a justice claimed that the duty was the proximate cause of a refusal to hold legislation unconstitutional.
The case in which the duty of clarity appeared to be decisive was United States v. Ravara.
Fighting Federalism: Damon Root’s Overruled (Part One)
Supreme Court pundits generally have the Court’s members pegged along a simple political spectrum, with “liberal” denoting one side and “conservative” the other (with Justice Anthony Kennedy endlessly dancing from one side to the other). The assumption is that constitutional interpretation falls along a simple liberal-conservative continuum. Damon Root’s new book, Overruled: The Long War for Control of the Supreme Court, suggests that this binary view is too simplistic. A third approach, libertarianism, presents a theory of limited government power that is indebted to, and yet distinguishable from, post-New Deal liberalism and traditional social conservativism. Like most constitutional conservatives, libertarians call…
