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Bob Higgs, the Man with a Smart Card

In Creativity, Economics, Law, Politics, Science on October 11, 2017 at 6:45 am

A different version of this article appeared here in the Library of Law and Liberty.

The U.S. healthcare industry is notoriously inefficient and troublesomely massive. It’s also wealthy and getting wealthier and more powerful as medical costs have exceeded, by some estimates, $10,000 per person.

What’s to be done?

Back in 2005, a group of healthcare experts asked, in a RAND Corporation study, whether electronic medical-record systems could transform healthcare by reducing costs and increasing efficiency. The answer, in short, was: it depends.

Although systematizing electronic medical records could save over $81 billion per year, these potential savings would be realized, the study concluded, only if healthcare in the United States integrated new technologies to allow for the flow of medical data between the patient and relevant parties such as doctors, hospitals, or insurers. Non-standardized record systems would result, by contrast, in inconsistent, inefficient, and incomplete data exchanges that could increase rather than decrease costs.

RAND Corporation revisited the issue in 2013, finding that healthcare expenditures had grown by $800 million since 2005 in part because systems of electronic medical records remained non-standardized. “We believe that the original promise of health IT can be met,” wrote Arthur L. Kellermann and Spencer S. Jones, the authors of the study, “if the systems are redesigned to address these flaws by creating more-standardized systems that are easier to use, are truly interoperable, and afford patients more access to and control over their health data.”

Healthcare in the United States is constitutionally fragmented: Not only does the industry consist of various entities, from doctors and hospitals and insurance providers to commercial suppliers of devices, goods, and services, but also the pricing of medical services is unreliable and unpredictable in part because the country is so large and the industry subject to different regulations from state to state.

Information integration could go a long way towards cutting medical costs and increasing medical savings. For example, it could reduce waste resulting from misdiagnoses, repetitive procedures, erroneous prescriptions, and duplicate testing and imaging.

What if there were a simple solution for this waste?

One entrepreneur believes he’s found the technology to revolutionize the way healthcare records are shared and maintained through Health Information Exchange (HIE).

Robert E. Higgs is the founder of ICUcare, a company that aims to improve technologies in the fields of telemedicine and electronic health records. He has invented a “smart” health card that can contain a patient’s complete medical history, which is stored in a cloud. His vision is that patients own their personalized smart cards, which they can voluntarily submit to healthcare providers and institutions for cheaper and more efficient services. Data on the card are easily stored and updated and exchanged only with the patient’s consent; thus, in the case of emergency, the patient’s medical records can be readily accessed and quickly reviewed.

There remains, sadly, a felt need to transition the healthcare industry from paper to electronic records. The smart card meets this need, but it does much more. It tracks your billing history, reconciles erroneous payment information, protects against fraud and identity-theft, and serves as a conveniently portable device.

One would expect such a card to have been in circulation by now, given the extensive government investment in HIEs. President George W. Bush, for example, issued an executive order in 2004 to create the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS) designed to advance technology and innovation pertaining to the exchange of healthcare information. This office created eHealth Exchange, a coalition of states, federal agencies, hospitals, medical groups, pharmacies, and other such entities that’s now run by the Sequoia Project.

But the federal government and the public-private partnerships it has fostered have been unable to produce a smart card that matches Higgs’s in capability and functionality. And even if they had, government retention of sensitive medical data would, among other things, raise privacy concerns that voluntary private transactions and coordination would alleviate.

Moreover, the many spinoff organizations emanating from the ONC and DHS have only crowded the field with swollen, inefficient government and quasi-government structures and programs. Rather than helping the situation, these putative “solutions” have slowed down innovators like Higgs, forcing them to deal with politicians and bureaucrats rather than patients and hospitals.

Having heard about Higgs’s curious smart card through a friend, I decided to reach out to him to find out more. I asked him, first, about privacy implications, namely whether the smart card could increase incidents of non-consensual data transfers and disclosures.

The smart card, he said, “never sends data to the care provider—it brings the care provider to the data.” He explained that data on the smart card are encrypted using the same standards as those used by the Department of Defense for common-access cards.

“We used Advanced Encryption Standard 265, or AES-256,” he said, “the highest standardized encryption specification that’s used worldwide by entities as diverse as corporations and the U.S. government. The key size of 256 bits means that the key, which turns encrypted data into unencrypted data, is a string of 256 ones or zeros.”

I admitted that I didn’t fully understand.

“Put it this way,” he said. “The research I’ve read indicates that each character has two possibilities—one or zero—for which there are 2,256 possible combinations. If 50% of the possibilities must be exhausted to determine the correct key, then you need to guess 2,255 of them [to hack the encryption].”

Pressed about how long it would take to test all possible keys to break the encryption, Higgs, parroting a claim I’ve heard used to describe bitcoin, said, “The universe itself has existed for 14 billion years. It would take something like 1.5770813e18 longer than our universe’s full age to exhaust just half of the key-space of our encryption.”

An attempt to verify Higgs’s figures turned up a plethora of studies and blog posts about encryption and decryption, bitcoin, hacking, and computer engineering (the calculation appearing on many blogs and tech sites is ~6.7e40, which equals 235,385,265,247,008,100, which is multiplied by 6.7 to yield the 1.5770813e18 number that Higgs supplied).

These calculations can be confusing, but the point Higgs wanted to drive home is that the smart card reverses the current power imbalance: today corporations and governments store medical records that patients often can’t access or don’t know about; the smart card, however, empowers patients to store their own records that they may voluntarily release to corporations and governments. The smart card, in other words, returns agency to the consumer whose data is at stake.

It would also, Higgs alleges, reduce rates of healthcare fraud. According to estimates by the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, the United States loses tens of billions of dollars every year due to healthcare fraud. Canada, Germany, and France have each instituted some form of a smart card to successfully cut back on fraud.

A company called Cerner has just landed a deal with the Department of Veterans Affairs (the VA) to implement an electronic health records system. The move away from the VA’s Vista system to Cerner’s electronic system suggests that at least some government officials are aware of the need to adopt interoperable and integrated measures of retaining and sharing medical records. The VA will implement the same electronic health record system used by the DOD.

So far as I can tell, however, Cerner has not created a smart card like Higgs’s. I reached out to Adam Lee, a senior communications partner at Cerner, to ask about smart cards and Cerner’s hopes and plans with the VA. Lee referred me to this press release about Cerner’s work with the VA but did not discuss smart cards.

Talking to Higgs is like talking to a computer: more engineer than salesman, he’s strikingly intelligent but has difficulty getting through to politicians. He’s monotone and meticulous, frank and unexcitable. He’s fast with facts and figures and savvy with technology, but the average politician wants to know primarily whether the smart card appeals to constituents and only secondarily whether it’s operable and efficient.

Higgs grew emotional during our phone call, however, as he told me the story of his wife, who underwent a routine procedure that went wrong. He claimed that, during this standard operation, errors were made that could have been avoided had her doctors possessed his wife’s proper medical records. She’s been subjected to numerous tests throughout her illness, he said, only to have them redone when visiting a new facility or specialist because of an inability to simply retrieve her medical history. She remains in bad shape, living at home with hired assistance.

This unfortunate situation has motivated Higgs to seek answers to save others from similar mistakes in similar circumstances.

If Higgs’s smart card is so great, you might ask, why hasn’t it been adopted? Why haven’t I heard of it? Why doesn’t it circulate widely? Why aren’t hospitals jumping at the opportunity to use it?

The answer, according to Higgs, is simple: the healthcare industry doesn’t want you to know about his smart card because it doesn’t want to reduce costs. It’s full of people getting rich off inefficiency and artificially high prices. Lobbyists for the healthcare industry have taken advantage of the fear and apathy of politicians to ensure that technological progress is delayed or stymied.

Thus, Higgs describes his job in terms of David versus Goliath.

There are numerous ideas about how to trim healthcare spending; Higgs’s smart card is not the exclusive remedy or sole fix. But it’s an encouraging development. Healthcare spending makes up about 17.8% of the nation’s economy, according to an actuary report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. And it shows no signs of decreasing. This trend is unsustainable; something must be done—and undone.

We could use more men like Higgs and less government to push us in the right direction before it’s too late.

 

 

 

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Allen Mendenhall Interviews Anton Piatigorsky, Author of “Al-Tounsi”

In Arts & Letters, Books, Creative Writing, Criminal Law, Fiction, Humanities, Justice, Law, liberal arts, Literature, Novels, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Philosophy, Writing on October 4, 2017 at 6:45 am

AM: Thanks for discussing your debut novel with me, Anton.  It’s titled Al-Tounsi and involves U.S. Supreme Court justices who are laboring over a case about an Egyptian detainee held on a military base in the Philippines. How did you come up with this premise for a novel? 

AP:  I was interested in the intersection between contemporary legal and political issues and the personal lives of the justices. I was particularly impressed by the ways in which the writ of habeas corpus has been used (and suspended) throughout U.S. history.

The Great Writ is a heroic call to responsibility—a demand made by the judiciary for the executive to live up to its obligations to imprisoned individuals. While it has obvious political and social ramifications, it also has philosophical ones. It encourages moral and psychological reckoning: what are our responsibilities to others?

I was excited about writing a novel where two strains—the political and the personal—overlap and blend. I realized that if I fictionalized the important 2008 Guantanamo Bay case Boumediene vs. Bush—by changing key events, decisions and characters—I could use it as the basis for a novel about the Court that explores all my interests.

Anton Piatigorsky

AM: How did you decide to change directions and write about the law?  Did this case just jump out at you?  Your previous writings address a wide variety of subjects but not, that I can tell, law. 

AP:  I came to the law, strangely enough, through religion. I’ve long been interested in how religion functions, and especially in the ways that secular systems mimic religious ones. When I started reading about American law and the U.S. Supreme Court, I saw those institutions as a part of an Enlightenment era secular religion. From this perspective, law is a system of rituals, codes and writings that helps establish an identity for a community, a set of shared values and beliefs, and a way for people to function within the world. I found that fascinating. It inspired all sorts of questions.

What are the general beliefs about people and the world that lie beneath the American legal system? How are those beliefs enacted in cases, courts, and legal writings? How do they play out in the rituals of the Court?  How do the justices of the Supreme Court —who are, in some ways, high priests of the legal world — reconcile conflicts between their personal beliefs and the foundational beliefs of the legal system they guide?

The fictional stories I wanted to tell about justices’ lives grew out of these general questions. Those questions also led me into an investigation of the main case before them.

AM: One of the most fascinating parts of the book, to me, is the Afterword, which consists of the concurring opinion of the fictional Justice Rodney Sykes.

AP: I have always loved novels of ideas, when a character’s emotional journey overlaps with their complex thoughts and beliefs. Whenever that type of fiction really works — as it does with Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov — the character’s philosophy or worldview stands alone as a work of non-fiction. And so the novel becomes part fiction, part critical thought. It functions as a critique on ideas that circulate in the real world.

That’s what I hoped to achieve for Justice Rodney Sykes’s formal opinion in the novel’s Afterword. I wanted Rodney to reach a powerful critique of basic tenets of the American legal system. I wanted him to address what our responsibilities are (or aren’t) towards others in the legal system, and the problems with that system’s fundamental faith in individual actors. In his concurrence, Rodney takes an unorthodox and unlikely stance for a Supreme Court Justice, but that’s what makes it a work of fiction. A novel can be the perfect forum to discuss how a real person might come to a radical decision, and how that decision might revolutionize their thoughts and actions.

AM: Who are your favorite living writers?

AP:  I particularly admire J.M. Coetzee and Alice Munro. I think about their works often while I’m writing and editing my own.

Coetzee has written several fantastic “novels of ideas.” Both Diary of a Bad Year and Elizabeth Costello manage to incorporate far-reaching critiques into their larger stories about characters, and they do so while using imaginative formal techniques. I also love Coetzee’s cold and austere style in his less overtly intellectual books. They’re cleanly written, shockingly honest, and endlessly compelling.

Alice Munro—although it’s almost a cliché to praise her at this point—shows remarkable insight into her characters, gradually revealing their motivations, resentments and surprising decisions without ever erasing their fundamental mysteries as people. Her stories are complex formally, but in such a quiet way that I often don’t notice their structures until I’ve read them a few times. Her writing is a great model for how to show characters’ lives and decisions with efficiency and imagination while maintaining mystery.

AM: Do you intend to continue in the novel form in your own writing?

AP:  Absolutely. I would love to write more legal fiction, as well. I’ve spent years learning about the law, but know that I’ve barely scratched the surface. There are so many potentially interesting legal stories. I’m also at the early stages of a new novel, which is not explicitly about law, but does feel like an outgrowth of Al-Tounsi in certain ways.

AM: I worked for a state Supreme Court justice for over three years, and I agree: there are many interesting legal stories out there, and I’ve found that facts are often stranger than fiction.

AP:  It must be fascinating to work on the diverse cases that roll through a court. I can only imagine how many potential stories you and other lawyers, judges and court workers can recall—ideas for a million novels and movies and plays.

I think legal stories are particularly exciting for fiction because they distill big questions into concrete human situations and personalities. The giant subjects of guilt and innocence, love and betrayal, responsibilities towards others as opposed to ourselves, community or self-reliance, greed, jealousy and ambition all play out in specific facts and events, in the concrete details of a case. It’s just like in a novel. And since the American legal system is, in my mind, an application of an entire Enlightenment, philosophic worldview, these test cases and stories also pose huge philosophical, ethical and moral questions. It’s no coincidence some of the best novels ever written involve detailed legal plots.

AM:  That reminds me of something Justice Holmes once said: “Law opens a way to philosophy as well as anything else.”  But it sounds as if you and I would go further and say it might open a way better than many other things do.

AP:  Law is like applied philosophy; It puts general ideas to the test in the real world. If a philosophy remains theoretical it never really touches what it means to live it, inside it. The answers theoretical philosophy provides are always tentative.

A huge inspiration for my novel was the work of the late French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. While Levinas’s writing is often arcane and difficult to get through, I find his thinking to be a powerful and searing indictment of basic Enlightenment principles. While I was writing Al-Tounsi, I used Levinas’s insights—directly—to help me construct Justice Sykes’s final concurrence. It was hugely inspiring to find a concrete way to use this philosophy I have long loved. All the questions and problems I was interested in exploring were present in this genuine legal situation, in the constitutional habeas corpus case, Boumediene vs. Bush, on which I based my fictional case of Al-Tounsi vs. Shaw.

So, yes, I completely agree with you and Justice Holmes!

AM:  So glad we had this opportunity to talk.  Let’s do it again.  

 

 

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Playing the Hand You’re Dealt: A Short Story

In Arts & Letters, Fiction, Humanities, Literature, Short Story, Writing on September 27, 2017 at 6:45 am

John S. Maguire is a Telecommunications and FM Broadcast consultant living in Oklahoma City. He obtained a degree in English from Texas Christian University and at 53 years old went back to graduate school and obtained a Master in Fine Arts from Oklahoma City University. 

A cheer from somewhere else in the room snapped Jake back to the world. He had been playing poker, and winning, for approximately five hours and was desperately in need of a short break. That wasn’t in his future because Jake knew, among many other things, that you don’t stop playing when you’re hot. He looked around the room and saw that every table in the poker room was full. He was playing 2-5 no limit and felt so at home. The comfortable chairs, the greenest green of the felt on the table, the dealer throwing cards around in what looked like a storm of cardboard but hitting the imaginary mark in front of each player.

Yes, he was home.

He never felt more comfortable than at a poker table. He looked down at his stack of chips and counted roughly $1,200 worth. Not bad, considering he started with only $175. He couldn’t believe he was only $600 away from his goal of $1,800, enough to pay his past due mortgage and keep the bank off his back.

Before he began this poker session he hadn’t played poker, hadn’t had a drink and was faithful to his wife going on six years. In his mind Jake was a drunk, a gambler and a womanizer, but in his opinion he had put that all behind him. He didn’t listen to the professionals who said that he would always have to fight his addictions because in his own mind he had a stronger will than others who would drift back to their drugs or obsessions of choice. But living the simple life of a husband, a father. Being straight didn’t suit him and his will was tested daily. So much so that he failed at most everything he did and instead of being a good father, a good husband, he was failing to be the provider that he thought he should be.

He got up every morning, went to whatever job he had at the time and gutted his way through it, but it had been a while since he had a job and the bill collectors were looming. It was more than he could take when the mortgage company called and threatened legal action against him if he didn’t bring his mortgage current. By his estimation, if he could get approximately $1,800 he would have enough to get the past due part of his mortgage paid and have a little left over. He had to do it somehow. He was the father, the provider, and he had failed thus far. He wanted to do the only thing he was ever really good at, poker. That is to say he was a very good poker player as long as he didn’t drink. Alcohol and poker never mix, but particularly with Jake. When he mixed the two he generally lost and lost big and then found some casino whore to sleep with to make himself feel better.

He wanted to play poker. He wanted to play badly but he had no stake, no money to get into a game at the nearby casino. Then it occurred to him. The family kept a jar where they all put change in to help a family they had adapted in Peru. He went to the jar, poured the coins out on the table and quickly counted them. He saw maybe $150. He scooped up the coins and put them back into the jar, grabbed it, jumped into his car and headed for the local service station where there was a coinstar machine that would count the coins and give him cash, less the two or three percent that the company took for providing the service. It turned out there was approximately $180 in the jar and Jake netted $175. Not as much as he would like to start a game with but enough to make a run at it. He took the cash from the attendant, got in his car and headed south towards the casino, calling the poker room on the way to reserve a seat at the 2-5 no limit game.

“I am sorry, sir, but only regular players can reserve seats on the phone. Can I get you player’s club card and I will see what I can do?”

The poker room attendant didn’t recognize him and, forgetting he had been away six years, Jake was pissed off.

“This is Jake. I played there so often I could call an hour ahead and get a seat,” Jake screamed. “How long have you worked there?”

“Only about two years, sir. I am sorry if I have upset you. I have to follow the regulations.”

Jake, realizing there was no way this guy could know him, said, “Okay, Okay, I understand. I will be there in about 30 minutes. Ask around and see if someone remembers me.”

Jake arrived exactly 29 minutes after the call. He walked into the casino and directly toward the poker room. When he walked in a large man greeted him with a hug.

“Jake, I can’t believe you are back,” the man said.

“Roberto, thank God someone recognizes me,” Jake said. “Can I get into a game?”

“Sure, I got you a seat. The guy you talked to on the phone is new but he asked me and I told him to reserve you a seat. I have a 2-5 no limit seat on table 15 waiting for you. You need chips.”

Jake handed him the $175 and caught Roberto looking at him funny. “Look, it is my first day back. Get me the chips, okay, Roberto?”

Jake headed to table 15 and Roberto yelled at the dealer.

“Jake’s got $175 behind.”

Jake sat in seat #5 and was immediately dealt a hand. His palms were sweating and his mind was drifting to what his family might think, but he didn’t see any other way.

Now, Jake had been playing for five hours and couldn’t believe his stack was so large. He had confidence in his ability but deep down he wasn’t sure he could pull this off. He was so close but he couldn’t stop. Not until he had the $1,800.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a cocktail waitress, called her over and ordered a scotch. He was hot, playing well, what would it hurt. The scotch was delivered just as Jake won a hand and his stack was growing rapidly. He threw the cocktail waitress enough chips to cover the drink and tip and told her to check with him often. The size of the tip made sure that she would.

Jake continued to win and continued to order drinks. Soon his stack was more than $1,800 and he thought about quitting then, but he was hot. This is easy, he thought. Why did I ever quit?

He was delivered his fourth scotch as a new hand was dealt. He looked at his two cards and took a log pull of his scotch. He had an ace and king, both spades. Big slick is the name for that hand and is one of the best starting hands a player could be dealt.

The bet was checked around to Jake and he bet $25 or 5 times the big blind. All but two of the players folded and then the community cards were dealt. The first three community cards were ten of spades, queen of spades, and eight of diamonds. Jake now had a flush draw and an inside straight draw. With another spade he would make a flush and with any ten he would have a straight.

Jake bet $100. One payer folded and one called. That was weird. That bet should have chased everyone out. Jake thought for a moment and then it hit him. The other player had two spades as well. If so Jake would win the hand big if another spade fell because he, Jake, had the top two spades. The next community card, known as the turn, was the eight of spades. There it was. Jake made his flush and hopefully the other player did as well.

Jake bet $300 and was immediately called by the other player. This told Jake that he was right and the other player had a flush. The next card, known as the river, fell and it was the two of diamonds. That card couldn’t have helped anyone. Jake announced that he was all in. He knew he had his guy. Soon he would have the money to pay the mortgage. As Jake suspected, the other player called the “all in” bet and Jake threw his cards on the table face up with a large smile on his face and looked at the other player. Wait, why was he smiling Jake thought. The other player threw his cards in the air and Jake knew he was beat before they hit the table. When they landed all the players saw two eights, giving the other player 4 of a kind and crushing Jake’s flush hand. Jake had lost it all. Not just the money to pay the mortgage, but the money that was to go to the adopted family in Peru.

Jake was speechless. He looked up and noticed the acoustical tile in the ceiling for the first time. They were dirty and showed the few leaks in the roof. He looked down and saw the player raking all of his chips into his own stack and laughing. Laughing! How could he laugh? Did he know how important that money was to Jake. He pushed his chair out from the table got up and started to walk out of the room. He had nothing left to do but leave.

“Jake, where are you going?” asked Roberto.

Jake’s head turned slowly, or so it seemed. He looked at Roberto and Jake guessed that he looked pretty bad as Roberto ducked his head and didn’t say anything else.

Jake made his way out of the poker room and to the exit of the casino. For a moment he forgot where his car was parked. He raised the remote locking device and clicked it and heard the honk of his car, saw the lights flick and made his way towards his car.

“Fucking idiot,” he whispered to himself.

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Session Twelve: Richard Bulliet on the History of the World

In Arts & Letters, Christianity, Eastern Civilizaton, Historicism, History, Humanities, Islamic Law, Pedagogy, Western Civilization on September 20, 2017 at 6:45 am

Here, in the twelfth lecture of his course, The History of the World, Richard Bulliet discusses the Rise of Islam (600-1200 C.E.):

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How to Fight the ABA’s Anticompetitive and Discriminatory Practices

In American History, Economics, History, Law, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Scholarship on September 13, 2017 at 6:45 am

This piece was originally published here by the James G. Martin Center for Higher Education.

Recently I urged top law schools to stand up to the excesses and abuses occasioned by the ministrations of the American Bar Association (ABA). These schools could band together and follow the lead of the journalism schools at Northwestern and Berkeley, which dropped their accreditor, the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, earlier this year because accreditation standards were outmoded and not worth the cost of compliance.

But states can also fight the ABA and are arguably in a better position to do so.

The ABA is a nonprofit organization incorporated in Illinois that operates like a trade union for lawyers. Founded in 1878 by a small group of prominent East Coast lawyers, it has accredited law schools under the authority of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) since 1952.

Why, exactly, would states want to push back against the ABA? There are two reasons, the first involving economics and the second involving racial diversity in the legal profession. In other words, both the Right and the Left have a standing interest in diminishing the ABA’s power.

The Economic Reason

The ABA remains the sole accreditor for legal education in the United States. Its onerous and in many cases outmoded regulations drive up the price of law school, forcing schools to reallocate resources away from students and education and towards regulatory compliance.

The high costs of legal education resulting from ABA regulations are passed off to ordinary consumers over time.

As one example, ABA Standard 701 states, “A law school shall have facilities, equipment, technology, and technology support that enable it to operate in compliance with [ABA] Standards and carry out its program of legal education.” To address this standard, law schools have furnished computer labs with fancy equipment to give the appearance of technological sophistication. But the labs and equipment often go unused.

The legal profession is notoriously behind the times on the technology front, and it takes advantage of anticompetitive restrictions regarding the unauthorized practice of law to push out innovative companies like LegalZoom that offer creative and inexpensive services. If the ABA were serious about technological innovation in law schools, it wouldn’t burden online and distance education the way it does in Standard 306. It bears noting, as well, that the ABA’s official interpretation of Standard 306 includes the “Internet,” “video cassettes,” “DVDs,” and “CD-ROMs” as examples of “technology.” Not exactly inspiring or pioneering. No wonder some analysts predict that computers and artificial intelligence will replace lawyers.

The high costs of legal education resulting from ABA regulations are passed off to ordinary consumers over time. They also prevent people with low to modest incomes from attending law school. According to Law School Transparency, the cost of legal education at private schools has risen from an average annual tuition of $7,526 in 1985 to $41,985 in 2013. The average cost of legal education for in-state students at public schools rose from $2,006 in 1985 to $23,879 in 2013 (for non-residents, tuition increased from $4,724 in 1985 to $36,859 in 2013).

These figures suggest that disadvantaged students do not have the financial means to delay or suspend a career to pay for legal education, or to take out student loans with an interest rate that exceeds that of the housing market. Thus, the ABA not only inadvertently drives up legal costs for all consumers, but also prevents many consumers of certain income levels from entering the legal industry to reform it from the inside.

The Diversity Reason

The ABA has an ugly history of targeting ethnic minorities who aspired to become attorneys. For most of the 20th century, it openly discriminated against African Americans, officially excluding them from membership for 66 years.

In 1912, the ABA ousted three African Americans from membership and issued a resolution proclaiming, “it has never been contemplated that members of the colored race should become members of this association.” Recent decades have seen the ABA attempt to make up for its racist past by instituting committees and programs aimed at racial diversity and championing what are widely considered to be leftist social causes.

These efforts, however, seem insincere—just another PR tactic—because the very purpose of the ABA’s accrediting arm (the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar) is to exclude people from legal education. To this day, the exclusionary policies and practices of the ABA disproportionately impact African Americans and other racial minorities. In other words, the ABA still does precisely what it was designed to do: keep African Americans, other minorities, and poor people out of the practice of law.

Law schools that are not ABA-accredited often offer inexpensive, part-time evening or night programs that enable students to work during their studies. Students who cannot afford to take off years of work to pursue legal education can complete these programs in four to five years. This affordable option provides needed access to legal education for low-income students who wish to become lawyers.

The ABA was formed, in part, to segregate the legal profession from ethnic minorities. It can’t be used now to the fix problems it caused and exacerbated.

Under present conditions, however, a graduate from one of these unaccredited schools can sit for a bar exam only in the state in which the school is located—and only if the state allows that. Unaccredited law schools also carry a stigma.

For these reasons, among others, ethnic minorities and disadvantaged students who are able learners with competitive test scores and academic records typically forego affordability and choose to attend ABA-accredited schools with a higher sticker price. These students thus take out massive loans and dig themselves deeper into a financial hole from which it’s difficult to emerge, even with good jobs coming out of law school.

Critics of unaccredited law schools point to high attrition rates and low success on bar exams to rationalize increased restrictions and stricter standards. But if the ABA no longer accredited law schools, capable students would begin to populate what are now unaccredited law schools, if for no other reason than affordability. Expensive law schools that are currently ABA-accredited would be forced to find cost-cutting measures to remain competitive in the market and attract new students.

The prevailing justification for ABA accrediting authority is that such superintendence is necessary to protect consumers. But protect consumers from what? From a more diverse legal community? From black people? From poor people? That is the message the ABA is sending.

The ABA would never defend itself in these terms, nor purposefully discriminate with the goal of ensuring that the profession remain predominately white. Yet it can’t deny the realities that flow from its very purpose for existing. The ABA was formed, in part, to segregate the legal profession from ethnic minorities. It can’t be used now to the fix problems it caused and exacerbated. It simply lacks the institutional incentives and infrastructure to realize the objectives of diversity or inclusion.

Revising Standard 316

To make matters worse, the ABA is considering revising its Standard 316 to require law schools to maintain a 75 percent bar passage rate among its graduates in at least three of the last five years. Law schools failing to meet this standard face potential consequences for non-compliance, including loss of accreditation. The ABA House of Delegates rejected this measure in February, but the ABA has issued a questionnaire to law schools pending the possible reconsideration of this revised standard in 2018.

The ABA Council for Racial and Ethnic Diversity opposes the revised standard, which was proposed to address concerns that greedy law schools, faced with declining enrollments, were admitting unqualified students to generate tuition revenue. Although this criticism has merit, the revised standard is the wrong remedy. It will disproportionately impact schools in states like California, where bar passage rates historically have been low. Moreover, it could limit educational options for minorities who aspire to practice law by punishing schools with high minority enrollment.

You might be asking, “Why is the author advocating reform that would lower standards? Don’t we want better attorneys? And don’t we have enough attorneys already?” If the bar exam measured the ability to practice law, it might be a reliable indicator of a person’s legal skills. But it has little to do with actual practice; therefore, passing or failing it doesn’t measure one’s legal skills. It also delays what has already been delayed during three years of law school: the practical experience necessary to make a good lawyer.

If there were no law schools, no bar exams, and no barriers to entry, we could still figure out how to weed out the good lawyers from the bad. In fact, we might even see exciting new advances in the field of online reputation markets that could rank and assess lawyers, giving a feedback mechanism to consumers.

If there were no law schools, no bar exams, and no barriers to entry, we could still figure out how to weed out the good lawyers from the bad.

And sure, there are a lot of attorneys. But having a lot of attorneys is not necessarily a bad thing. If we were to roll back all the anticompetitive practices perpetuated by the ABA, state bar associations, and their lobbyists, which work together to solidify lawyers’ monopoly on the practice of law, the costs of legal services could be drastically reduced. An overabundance of lawyers would simply mean that hiring lawyers would be cheap. It’s unlikely, at any rate, that we’d ever see an overabundance of lawyers in such a competitive market because intelligent people would choose to enter a different profession where salaries are higher.

The ABA discusses the bar exam in several standards: Standard 315 (the official interpretation), Standard 316, Standard 504, and Standard 505. The unintended consequence of this emphasis is to unreasonably encumber students and schools with red-tape administrative measures that have no proven effect on the quality of legal services.

Conclusion

The economic function of the ABA is, as I’ve said, to serve as a barrier to entry. Milton Friedman once declared that “[t]he overthrow of the medieval guild system was an indispensable early step in the rise of freedom in the Western World,” adding that it was also “a sign of the triumph of liberal ideals.” Recently, though, there’s been what he called a “regression,” and the ABA is a case in point.

Combating the ABA isn’t easy. This organization is equipped with powerful lobbyists and enjoys longstanding relationships with influential politicians. Still the states, through their supreme courts and bar associations, remain in control over the admission of candidates into the legal profession in their jurisdiction.

State bar associations are typically corporations to which state legislatures have granted monopoly powers over the legal profession, subject to the oversight of state supreme courts. They are not affiliates or adjuncts of the ABA. If several state supreme courts and state bar associations allowed all graduates of non-ABA accredited law schools to sit for the state bar exam in their state, they could curtail the ABA’s authority and diminish the ABA’s credibility. To this end, they could also enter into reciprocity agreements with other states to allow graduates of non-ABA accredited schools in those states to sit for the bar exam.

State supreme court justices—or justices sitting on the highest court in their state—are elected in a majority of states. And of course judicial appointments are always political to some degree. Thus, these justices are likely attentive to the demands of an informed public. Citizens should press their state supreme courts about the ABA, especially during campaign season when seats are up for grabs. Moreover, citizens should urge their legislators to interrogate state bar associations about the ABA. After all, state legislators can undo legislation empowering state bar associations.

Citizens should press their state supreme courts about the ABA, especially during campaign season when seats are up for grabs.

Of course, the Obama administration contemplated another alternative that would likely appeal to both President Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos: the DOE could strip the ABA of its accreditation authority altogether, in effect getting the federal government out of legal education. (Obama was motivated by animus against for-profit colleges, as reflected in his Education Department’s gainful employment rule, whereas Trump’s interest would be in scaling back federal meddling.) This solution would leave matters of accreditation and bar eligibility to the respective states. Stripping the ABA of accrediting powers, however, raises other concerns, given that, at present, a law school’s eligibility to receive federal funds is tied to accreditation.

In this period of political rancor, reining in the ABA should appeal to both the Left and the Right, the former on grounds of racial diversity and fundamental fairness and the latter on grounds of decentralization and economic freedom. Despite the vitriolic and malicious rhetoric emanating from our politicians and media pundits, I believe most Americans want to get along and facilitate constructive dialogue about pressing issues. Why not refocus our attention on matters about which there is critical consensus? Why not work together, as a start, to curtail or revoke the ABA’s ability to accredit law schools?

This move could reduce the costs of legal education and, hence, of legal services. It could go a long way towards restoring confidence in the legal profession and freeing up law schools to work more closely with state supreme courts and state bar associations to meet the needs of local markets, adapt to new industry technologies, and satisfy the changing demands of consumers.

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Session Eleven: Richard Bulliet on the History of the World

In Eastern Civilizaton, Historicism, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Pedagogy, Western Civilization on September 6, 2017 at 6:45 am

Here, in the eleventh lecture of his course, The History of the World, Richard Bulliet discusses the Age of Empires: Rome and Han China (History of the World to 1500 CE):

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Making Legal Education Great Again

In America, Civics, Conservatism, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Law School, Legal Education & Pedagogy, liberal arts, Liberalism, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Scholarship, Teaching, The Academy, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on August 30, 2017 at 6:45 am

This piece originally appeared here and was published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

Legal education has become a surprisingly regular topic of news media for several years now. Most of this commentary has focused on enrollment and matriculation problems, bar passage rates, accreditation standards, student debt, and the job market for recent graduates. These are pressing issues that raise vexing questions for law school administrators, and they warrant the attention they’ve received.

Little attention, however, has been paid to curriculum, except as it pertains to those issues. And not just curriculum, but subject matter within the curriculum.

There are certain subjects—let’s call them “the permanent things”—that always have and will interest scholars of the law because of their profound influence on legal norms and institutions: history, philosophy, literature, and theology. Whether they belong in law schools or some other department, whether they prepare students to become practice-ready or not, these topics will remain relevant to subsequent generations of jurists and legal scholars. There will be a place for them somewhere within the world of legal learning and letters.

Law school faculty and research centers have expanded over recent decades to include studies of these humanistic fields. As long as these fields populate law school, there’s a felt need for rigorous liberal education in them.

Ordered liberty in the United States has historically rested on a commitment to religious faith and pluralism, fidelity to the rule of law, and traditional liberties grounded in the conviction that all humans are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. These values characterize the American experiment. Our society is built on them, and its continued vitality depends upon maintaining and promoting our commitment to them.

Yet these values are ridiculed and attacked in universities across the country. When they’re taught, they’re often treated as products of a morally inferior era and thus as unworthy of our continued respect. And because these values aren’t seriously or rigorously taught, students lack working knowledge about them and are therefore unprepared for the kind of civic engagement that young people desire and demand.

A decline in civic education has caused misunderstanding and underappreciation of our foundational norms, laws, and liberties. Religious liberty is mischaracterized as license to harm and on that basis is marginalized. Economic freedom is mischaracterized as oppression and is regulated away. Well-positioned reformers with good but misguided intentions seek to fundamentally transform the American experiment from the ground up. They work to limit foundational freedoms and increase regulatory power.

Without well-educated lawyers and civil servants equipped to resist these reformers, the transformation of America will result in the destruction of the freedoms enabled by our founding generation. We cannot allow this to happen. The Blackstone & Burke Center for Law & Liberty at Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, for which I serve as executive director, therefore seeks to educate the legal community in such areas as natural law, natural rights, religious liberty, economic freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of association and assembly, and other liberties that find expression not just in the American but in the larger Western jurisprudential tradition.

I define “legal community” broadly to include law students, law professors, public policy institutes, political theorists, judges, and businesses in addition to practicing lawyers. Because my center is housed in a law school, it’s well positioned to instruct future lawyers while bringing together faculty from different disciplines who are steeped in liberal education.

Numerous organizations promote these values in the political arena, but few attempt to reconnect foundational values with the law. The Blackstone & Burke Center aims to fill this gap by bringing together scholars and students committed to American constitutional government and the common law foundations of our cherished liberties. Our target audience will include law students, judges, and civics groups.

For law students, we offer the Sir Edward Coke Fellowship. We’ve accepted our inaugural class of fellows, who, beginning this fall, will study formative texts in Western jurisprudence in monthly seminars that supplement their core coursework. Next semester, we’ll read and discuss works by Aristotle, Grotius, Hayek, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Robert P. George. The center will be a key networking opportunity for fellows seeking careers at foundations, think tanks, universities, and public policy organizations.

Fellows will also help to organize a judicial college for state jurists. Thanks to the Acton Institute, Atlas Network, and the Association for the Study of Free Institutions, the Blackstone & Burke Center possesses the grant money needed to host its first judicial college in October. Professor Eric Claeys of Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University will direct this event, the readings for which include selections from not only cases (old and recent) but also Aquinas, Locke, Blackstone, and Thomas Jefferson. The readings for judges are extensive, and the seminar sessions are meant to be intensive to ensure that judges get as much out of the experience as possible.

The center will also provide basic civics education to local communities. For several years, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute issued reports on the poor state of civic literacy in the United States. The National Association of Scholars recently issued a detailed report on the inadequacies and politicization of the “New Civics.” The current issue of Academic Questions, moreover, describes the sorry state of civics knowledge in the United States and the tendentious methods and institutions that teach political activism rather than deep learning.

Against these alarming trends, my center organized and hosted a reception featuring a U.S. Library of Congress interactive Magna Carta exhibit, which was displayed in the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court for three weeks and now remains in the possession of the Alabama Supreme Court Law Library. The reception included prominent judges, business and university leaders, lawyers, and the general public.

For example, Chief Justice Lyn Stuart of the Alabama Supreme Court and Judge William “Bill” Pryor of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals delivered remarks about Magna Carta during the reception, and young people conversed casually with judges about the legal system, federalism, and the challenges and opportunities facing the legal profession in the 21st century. This fall, the center is cosponsoring an event with the Foundation for Economic Education on the campus of Auburn University to explore the relationship between law and markets, and I hope to see as many high-school students as college students in attendance.

Legal education is strikingly different today than it was when Thomas Jefferson apprenticed under George Wythe, or when Abraham Lincoln read law before receiving from a county circuit court certification of his good moral character, then a prerequisite to practicing law.

Nevertheless, legal education looks much the same as it did in the late nineteenth century, when Christopher Columbus Langdell, dean of Harvard Law School, instituted a curriculum, pedagogy, and case method that came to characterize “the law school experience.” If there’s been a paradigm shift, it’s been toward more practical aspects of legal education such as clinical programming. Yet many lawyers remain ignorant of the history and philosophical conventions that shaped their profession over centuries.

The Blackstone & Burke Center for Law & Liberty is a modest corrective in that it doesn’t seek to remake legal education or demolish longstanding practices and procedures in one fell swoop. Rather, it does what it can with the resources and tools available to strive to renew an America where freedom, opportunity, and civil society flourish. In the long run, I think, these reasonable efforts will have powerful effects and far-reaching benefits, both within the legal academy and beyond.

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On Judicial Concurring and Dissenting Opinions

In Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law on August 23, 2017 at 6:45 am

This post is adapted from a law review article that may be downloaded here (citations available in the original).  

A unanimous judicial opinion admits little doubt about its authority.  Yet a dissent, especially when it is joined by another justice, deprives a majority opinion of its full import, calling into question the soundness and quality of the reasoning that prevailed in the case.  Future judges may, after all, reclaim from obscurity the rationale of a dissent, thereby abrogating the majority opinion against which the dissent was situated.  Concurrences and dissents notify future readers of alternative grounds of argument.  Concurrences may complicate the interpretation of the leading or majority opinion, but the fact that they signal the need for closer scrutiny and inspection is, in my view, advantageous.

Each case in a common-law system represents a ratified principle or principles nested within a chain of other cases.  Patterns of precedent gain increasing authority the longer and more widely they are followed.  Dissents add to the population of principles within the total system of rules that govern society, but they chart a path away from the settled course if they attract adherents and gradually disturb consensus about what the operative rule should be.

A decision in a single case may seem inconsequential because it is plugged into a vast network of cases.  Yet each case is important in the aggregate because it contributes to the wide distribution of choices by purposeful actors (voters who elect legislators, legislators who enact statutes, lawyers who contextualize statutes and produce lines of argument, judges who interpret statutes and formalize lines of argument, and litigants who initiate cases that either adopt or challenge prevailing rules).  Each case thus contributes to the filtering processes by which sketchy correspondences develop between past and present holdings.  Principles become clearer as associative links between cases grow more noticeable and as like cases combine into a cumulative force that demands attention.  Each case is necessary as a practical test for some principle to win judicial recognition.  A judge considers the law of the case synchronically, as if the operative rule were fixed, because he or she is bound by statute or precedent or some other source of positive law at that moment.  But concurrences and dissents, when they challenge the operative rule, force future judges to consider the law diachronically, as if it were subject to change and perhaps derived from some other source of law (e.g., when a judge dissents even though a statute or constitutional provision leads seemingly inexorably to the conclusion reached by the majority).

There are millions of published cases from both federal and state courts across the United States; the relation between principles and rationale in each of these cases cannot possibly be based on factual resemblances alone.  Only slight factual affinities, for instance, may lead judges to label an activity “theft” or “murder” in one case but not in another.  Cases do not consist merely of facts that require naming and classification according to a fixed legal lexicon.  The facts of a case may square with a legal principle that can be named, but the precise application of the principle remains unknown until a judge articulates it in an opinion.  The judge differentiates between principles in light of facts that are specific to each case.  The principles represent, in this sense, theoretical concepts abstracted from facts in specific cases.  When several cases hitch up to announce similar principles derived from comparable facts, the principles accrue authority.  Textual patterns signal how judges will rule in like cases; they thus ensure the predictability of rules.

The heritability of principles through cases enables judges to construct genealogies for principles to reveal a common ancestry.  An opinion represents one operative resolution among a heterogeneous mass of decisions.  An opinion in isolation derives its clarity and meaning by linking its rationale to associated concepts in prior cases.  Only by linking itself to like antecedents can an opinion establish its authority as the apparent sum of a limited number of legal options.  Case precedent is thus a social and discursive institution, embedding principles within a system or network of citation and imitation.  Each opinion unites certain principles with facts until eventually several opinions merge to form a cumulative family of similar cases.  Each opinion thereby serves as a resource for future judges who need to find and assemble principles that will situate the facts of a case within a settled pattern of decision-making.

Dissents are corrective mechanisms that guide future judges and justices away from problematic precedents.  They also facilitate and instantiate the values of free expression, as well as competition among ideas, that the First Amendment enshrines.  Justice William Brennan suggested that dissents involve “the critical recognition that vigorous debate improves the final product by forcing the prevailing side to deal with the hardest questions urged by the losing side.”  He echoed Justice Holmes by invoking “the conviction that the best way to find the truth is to go looking for it in the marketplace of ideas,” and to this end he referred to opinions figuratively as “the product of a judicial town meeting.”  Melvin Urofsky argues that dissents facilitate a “constitutional dialogue,” a phrase that “includes not just debates justices on the high court have with one another in specific cases or over particular jurisprudential ideas but also discussions between and among jurists, members of Congress, the executive branch, administrative agencies, state and lower federal courts, the legal academy, and last, but certainly not least, the public.”

The constructiveness of concurrences and dissents is evident from those which later courts have vindicated.  Examples include Justice Brandeis’s concurrence in Whitney v. California (1927) and his dissent in Olmstead v. U.S. (1928),  Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissents in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Justice Wiley Rutledge’s dissent in In re Yamashita (1946), and Justice Hugo Black’s dissent in Betts v. Brady (1942).  Recently the Supreme Court of Alabama released Ex parte Christopher (2013), a case that overruled a quarter-century-old precedent established in Ex parte Bayliss (1989).  Chief Justice Roy Moore, who authored the majority opinion in Christopher, had urged the overruling of Bayliss in a special writing he authored in Ex parte Tabor (2002).  Reanimating his Tabor writing in Christopher, the Chief Justice and a majority of the Court demonstrated the mode in which non-binding dissents may express reasoning that courts later adopt, in effect turning dead-letter into living authority.

Counterintuitively, a dissent may itself represent the plurality opinion.  In Ex parte Harper (2015), for example, Chief Justice Moore authored an opinion that drew only one concurrence as to the rationale.  Three other justices concurred in the result of the opinion but rejected the opinion’s rationale.  One justice recused from the case.  Justice Lyn Stuart authored a dissent that two other justices joined.  Thus, the dissent, with a block of three justices, had more support as to the rationale than did Chief Justice Moore’s rationale with which only one justice agreed.  Technically, then, the dissent carried more precedential weight than the opinion that disposed of the case.

The ideal of freedom of speech and expression is an inadvertent byproduct of the practice of dissenting, the primary function of which is to ascertain the proper legal argument, rationale, rule, or standard of review for a particular case.  A competition among values and ideas emerges inductively from the free play of clashing judicial opinions.  A variety or diversity of ideas embedded in case precedent enables a constructive flexibility in the rules that govern human activity.  By multiplying the options available to future judges, dissents ensure that courts have wider latitude to reach the right result in complex cases.  Dissents preserve in the textual record arguments that may in the long run seem more plausible, seemly, and correct.  They make it possible for future jurists to say, “This other argument is better and should be dispositive in the case before me.”

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Session Ten: Richard Bulliet on the History of the World

In Eastern Civilizaton, Historicism, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Pedagogy, Western Civilization on August 16, 2017 at 6:45 am

Here, in the tenth lecture of his course, The History of the World, Richard Bulliet discusses the Age of the Empires of Rome and Han China.

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A Brief History of Opinion-Writing Practices from Hale and Blackstone to the 20th Century

In American History, Britain, History, Law, Nineteenth-Century America, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. on August 9, 2017 at 6:45 am

This post is adapted from a law review article that may be downloaded here (citations available in the original).  

Sir Matthew Hale and Sir William Blackstone explained that judicial opinions in England traditionally were a source of unwritten law, or lex non scripta, derived from custom and read from the bench but not transcribed in official reports or indexed in a formal corpus.  Judicial opinions began as an oral medium, not a written record.  They were considered evidence of what the law was, but not the law itself.

From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, opinions were often written down, in French, and compiled in Year Books.  Lawyers began citing opinions—some written, some unwritten—in their arguments before the courts, although there was no systematized mode of citation.  As early as the fifteenth century, lawyers produced abridgements, or digests, to review the state of the law across England.  These sketchy compilations summarized and classified opinions and could be referenced in the courtroom as authority for particular propositions.  During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a comprehensive scheme of methodical and widespread adherence to written precedent emerged gradually by slow degrees.  However, not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did judges and litigants treat opinions as authoritative and binding in a manner that resembled the modern sense of precedent.  The publication of Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England over the course of nearly two decades during the early seventeenth century provided direction for both jurists and attorneys who wished to substantiate their arguments with concrete holdings.  Still there were no certified court reporters or verbatim transcriptions; the enterprise of publishing reports or digests was often personal and selective, insofar as reporters often chose to record only cases they liked and to disregard cases they disliked.

From approximately 1600 to 1800, the British House of Lords enjoyed supreme appellate jurisdiction over cases in common-law and equity courts.  During that time, the House of Lords did not publish reports of its decisions, seriatim or otherwise.  Most cases were ultimately determined by intermediate appellate courts, including the Exchequer Chamber, the Court of Common Pleas, and the King’s Bench, which regularly issued seriatim opinions that were transcribed by reporters.  Prior to American independence from Great Britain, appeals from colonial courts went before the Privy Council in England.  The Privy Council reached decisions by majority vote but issued those decisions as unified pronouncements, regardless of dissenting views.  Because all decisions of the Privy Council were subject to the King’s review, and the King, the site and symbol of the law or body politic, could not articulate simultaneous, contradictory positions, the appearance of unanimity within the Privy Council was paramount.

In its early years, after the adoption of the Judiciary Act of 1789, the United States Supreme Court (“the Court”), following the practice of English common-law courts—specifically the King’s Bench—typically rendered decisions in the form of per curiam and seriatim opinions.  The near obligatory practice of rendering written opinions was an American innovation and a departure from the English custom of residual orality.  The fact that the United States Constitution was written perhaps necessitated the textual documentation of judicial opinions in books, digests, and reports.

During the tenure of Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth (1796–1800), the third Chief Justice of the Court, seriatim opinions became less common and were abandoned during the tenure of Chief Justice John Marshall (1801–1835), who orchestrated consolidated opinions among the justices, much to the chagrin of Thomas Jefferson.  Justices who concurred with the prevailing rationale no longer authored a separate opinion to express their agreement.  Justice William Johnson, a Jeffersonian Republican, was the notable exception, authoring nearly half of the dissents that were produced by members of the Court during his tenure on the bench.  Chief Justice Marshall, for his part, authored most of the Court’s majority opinions, which were issued with the phrase “opinion of the Court” to lend the impression that the justices spoke with one voice.  Collegiality and consensus-building must have been a high priority because, after work hours, the justices resided and dined together in a small boardinghouse on Capitol Hill, away from their families, where court conflicts could have incited personal quarrels.  Abandoning the seriatim mode and dissenting opinions also quickened the publication process; over a quarter of the cases decided by opinion between 1815 and 1835 were published in no more than five days.

The period late in Chief Justice Marshall’s tenure to approximately 1905 involved the rise of dissenting justices.  Chief Justice Marshall himself began to author dissents as the Court increasingly decided cases through majority rather than unanimous opinions.  Dissents proliferated during the mid-nineteenth century and into the twentieth century.  Justice John McLean and Justice Benjamin Curtis authored memorable dissents in Dred Scott v. Sandford.  Forty-eight years later, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s three-paragraph dissent in Lochner v. New York became one of the most influential legal writings in American history.  Blackstone’s conviction that opinions were evidence of law but not actually law continued to some extent throughout the nineteenth century, yet it had been diminishing since the mid-eighteenth century.  The notion of “caselaw,” or the idea that judicial opinions constituted law, did not gain currency until the twentieth century.  Today it is mostly accepted without question or qualification.

The twentieth century ushered in the era of the “Great Dissenter,” a label that has been conferred on Justice Holmes and Justice John Marshall Harlan.  By the 1940s, most cases involved separate opinions.  Dissents and separate writings are now common.  A jurist’s reasoning and argument typically enjoy precedential effect, but historically, under the English tradition of the common law, the judgment of the opinion was authoritative, and later courts could disregard the analysis from which that judgment followed.  The results of an opinion, in other words, took priority over its reasoning.