Posts Tagged ‘common law’
Libertarianism and the Common Law
In Arts & Letters, Britain, Economics, History, Humanities, Law, Libertarianism, Philosophy on October 20, 2022 at 6:00 amSt. George Tucker’s Jeffersonian Constitution
In American History, Arts & Letters, Books, Civics, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Legal Education & Pedagogy, liberal arts, Nineteenth-Century America, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on October 30, 2019 at 6:45 am
This piece originally appeared here in Law & Liberty.
One could argue that there are two basic visions for America: the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian. The former is nationalist, calling for centralized power and an industrial, mercantilist society characterized by banking, commercialism, and a robust military. Its early leaders had monarchical tendencies. The latter vision involves a slower, more leisurely and agrarian society, political decentralization, popular sovereignty, and local republicanism. Think farmers over factories.
Both have claimed the mantle of liberty. Both have aristocratic elements, despite today’s celebration of America as democratic. On the Hamiltonian side we can include John Adams, John Marshall, Noah Webster, Henry Clay, Joseph Story, and Abraham Lincoln. In the Jeffersonian camp we can place George Mason and Patrick Henry (who, because they were born before Jefferson, could be considered his precursors), the mature (rather than the youthful) James Madison, John Taylor of Caroline, John C. Calhoun, Abel Upshur, and Robert Y. Hayne. The Jeffersonian Republicans won out in the early nineteenth century, but since the Civil War, the centralizing, bellicose paradigm has dominated American politics, foreign and monetary policy, and federal institutions.
St. George Tucker falls into the Jeffersonian category. View of the Constitution of the United States, published by Liberty Fund in 1999, features his disquisitions on various legal subjects, each thematically linked. Most come from essays appended to his edition of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.
Born in Bermuda, Tucker became a Virginian through and through, studying law at the College of William and Mary under George Wythe, whose post at the law school he would eventually hold. On Tucker’s résumé we might find his credentials as a poet, essayist, and judge. He was an influential expositor of the limited-government jurisprudence that located sovereignty in the people themselves, as opposed to the monarch or the legislature, which, he believed, was a surrogate for the general will in that it consisted of the people’s chosen representatives.
Tucker furnished Jeffersonians with the “compact theory” of the Constitution:
The constitution of the United States of America . . . is an original, written, federal, and social compact, freely, voluntarily, and solemnly entered into by the several states of North-America, and ratified by the people thereof, respectively; whereby the several states, and the people thereof, respectively, have bound themselves to each other, and to the federal government of the United States; and by which the federal government is bound to the several states, and to every citizen of the United States.
Under this model, each sovereign, independent state is contractually and consensually committed to confederacy, and the federal government possesses only limited and delegated powers—e.g., “to be the organ through which the united republics communicate with foreign nations.”
Employing the term “strict construction,” Tucker decried what today we’d call “activist” federal judges, insisting that “every attempt in any government to change the constitution (otherwise than in that mode which the constitution may prescribe) is in fact a subversion of the foundations of its own authority.” Strictly construing the language of the Constitution meant fidelity to the binding, basic framework of government, but it didn’t mean that the law was static. Among Tucker’s concerns, for instance, was how the states should incorporate, discard, or adapt the British common law that Blackstone had delineated.
Tucker understood the common law as embedded, situated, and contextual rather than as a fixed body of definite rules or as the magnificent perfection of right reason, a grandiose conception derived from the quixotic portrayals of Sir Edward Coke. “[I]n our inquiries how far the common law and statutes of England were adopted in the British colonies,” Tucker announced, “we must again abandon all hope of satisfaction from any general theory, and resort to their several charters, provincial establishments, legislative codes, and civil histories, for information.”
In other words, if you want to know what the common law is on this side of the pond, look to the operative language of governing texts before you invoke abstract theories. Doing so led Tucker to conclude that parts of English law were “either obsolete, or have been deemed inapplicable to our local circumstances and policy.” In this, he anticipated Justice Holmes’s claim that the law “is forever adopting new principles from life at one end” while retaining “old ones from history at the other, which have not yet been absorbed or sloughed off.”
What the several states borrowed from England was, for Tucker, a filtering mechanism that repurposed old rules for new contexts. Tucker used other verbs to describe how states, each in their own way, revised elements of the common law in their native jurisdictions: “modified,” “abridged,” “shaken off,” “rejected,” “repealed,” “expunged,” “altered,” “changed,” “suspended,” “omitted,” “stricken out,” “substituted,” “superseded,” “introduced.” The list could go on.
The English common law, accordingly, wasn’t an exemplification of natural law or abstract rationalism; it was rather the aggregation of workable solutions to actual problems presented in concrete cases involving real people. Sometimes, in its British iterations, it was oppressive, reinforcing the power of the king and his agents and functionaries. Thus it couldn’t fully obtain in the United States. “[E]very rule of the common law, and every statute of England,” Tucker wrote on this score, “founded on the nature of regal government, in derogation of the natural and unalienable rights of mankind, were absolutely abrogated, repealed, and annulled, by the establishment of such a form of government in the states.”
Having been clipped from its English roots, the common law in the United States had, in Tucker’s view, an organic opportunity to grow anew in the varying cultural environments of the sovereign states. In this respect, Tucker prefigured Justice Brandeis’s assertion in Erie Railroad Company v. Tompkins (1938) that “[t]here is no federal general common law.” Tucker would have agreed with Brandeis that, “[e]xcept in matters governed by the Federal Constitution or by acts of Congress, the law to be applied in any case is the law of the state.”
In fact, summarizing competing contentions about the Sedition Act, Tucker subtly supported the position that “the United States as a federal government have no common law” and that “the common law of one state . . . is not the common law of another.” The common law, in Tucker’s paradigm, is bottom-up and home-grown; it’s not a formula that can be lifted from one jurisdiction and placed down anywhere else with similar results and effects.
By far the most complex essay here is “On the State of Slavery in Virginia,” which advocated the gradual extirpation of slavery. With admirable clarity, Tucker zeroed in on the hypocrisy of his generation:
Whilst we were offering up vows at the shrine of Liberty, and sacrificing hecatombs upon her altars; whilst we swore irreconcilable hostility to her enemies, and hurled defiance in their faces; whilst we adjured the God of Hosts to witness our resolution to live free, or die, and imprecated curses on their heads who refused to unite us in establishing the empire of freedom; we were imposing upon our fellow men, who differ in complexion from us, a slavery, ten thousand times more cruel than the utmost extremity of those grievances and oppressions, of which we complained.
Despite his disdain for the institution of slavery, Tucker expressed ideas that are racist by any measurable standard today—for instance, his notion that slavery proliferated in the South because the climate there was “more congenial to the African constitution.”
On the level of pure writing quality and style, Tucker had a knack for aphorism. “[T]he ignorance of the people,” he said, “is the footstool of despotism.” More examples: “Ignorance is invariably the parent of error.” “A tyranny that governs by the sword, has few friends but men of the sword.”
Reading Tucker reminds us that for most of our country’s formative history the principal jurisprudential debates were not about natural law versus positivism, or originalism versus living constitutionalism, but about state versus federal authority, local versus national jurisdiction, the proper scale and scope of government, checks and balances, and so forth. To the extent these subjects have diminished in importance, Hamilton has prevailed over Jefferson. Reading Tucker today can help us see the costs of that victory.
The Moral Imagination and the Common Law
In Arts & Letters, Conservatism, History, Humanities, Law, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Philosophy on June 12, 2019 at 6:45 am
I thought I knew a lot until I had kids. One hot Sunday summer afternoon in Alabama, when I was driving my family home from church, my son, Noah, then five, asked about the origin of roads. From a father’s perspective, this curiosity was a sweet, welcome alternative to questions about where babies come from. I explained with resolute immodesty how road construction operated, under what timelines and conditions, and using which tools and implements. I smiled, thinking the matter settled, and turned up the radio.
Then my son, in his little-boy manner and vocabulary, objected that his inquiry was, in effect, less about the technicalities of engineering or labor and more taxonomical or definitional in concern. Why wasn’t the trail near our home, trodden beneath innumerable feet, a road? Why weren’t the sidewalks in downtown Auburn roads? What made a road a road? How did construction workers know where to build roads? From whom did they take orders and derive their authority? Could he, Noah, build a road if he wanted to? How could anyone build a road from here to there if the property along the way belonged to someone else, even multiple owners?
I turned down the radio.
This perplexing interrogation led Noah—who, again, possessed merely the lexicon and sophistication of a child—to more grating appeals for clarity and qualification. What, he wondered, empowered governments to authorize the creation and maintenance of roads? Were there roads beyond government control? What was the difference between public and private? What was government? Where did it come from? Why did we have it?
The moment I caught myself trying to explain social contract theory to a five-year-old, I realized I had been not only humbled and humiliated but overmatched, not by Noah necessarily but by the impressive sum of human ignorance about everyday experience and activity.
Though not impulsively so, I’m reflectively Hayekian and thus managed to articulate to Noah my abiding belief in the limitations of human knowledge, the selectivity of human memory, and the fallibility of human intuition, and to emphasize the importance of subjecting our most cherished principles to continued testing so they may be corrected or refined as we mature in our understanding. Roads could not be the inevitable product of one man’s awesome imagination working in isolation; rather they were the concrete product of aggregated, uncountable ideas, applied variously depending on local circumstances. This fancy way of saying “I don’t know” seemed to satisfy Noah, who grew quiet about his objections and marvels and turned his attention elsewhere.
I, however, couldn’t quiet my restless urge for the kind of comforting certitude that ultimately cannot be achieved. It wasn’t roads but knowledge itself and its embodiment or expression in the law—in particular in our Anglo-American common-law tradition—that suddenly bothered and intrigued me. Noah’s inquisitiveness had reminded me of the opening lines to a learned book on the common law:
Legal history is a story which cannot be begun at the beginning. However remote the date at which we start, it will always be necessary to admit that much of the still remoter past that lies behind it will have to be considered as directly bearing upon the later history. […] [T]he further back we push our investigations, the scantier become our sources, and the more controversial and doubtful their interpretation.[1]
The common law is not just an historical and governmental system for resolving disputes through courts and case precedents, traceable to eleventh-century England and adopted by the United States and nearly half of the countries on earth, but also a mode of preserving and transmitting knowledge about the human condition that develops out of ascertainable facts rather than abstract speculation. It’s bottom-up, reflecting the embedded norms and values of the community as against executive command or legislative fiat.
To continue reading about the common law and the moral imagination, please download the remaining essay here at SSRN.
[1] Theodore F. T. Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law 3 (1956) (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010).
Love and the Law Professors
In Academia, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Conservatism, Jurisprudence, Law, Law School, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Legal Research & Writing, Liberalism, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Pedagogy, Scholarship, Teaching, Writing on March 29, 2017 at 6:45 am
This review originally appeared here in The University Bookman.
As improbable as it sounds, someone has written “a love letter to the teaching of law.” At least that’s what Stephen B. Presser sets out to do in Law Professors, which is less pedagogical than it is historical and biographical in approach. If not a love letter, it’s at minimum a labor of love about the genealogy of American legal education, for which Presser is admirably passionate.
Even more improbable is how a book about three centuries of law professors could be enjoyable. Yet it is. Every rising law student in the United States should read it as a primer; experienced legal educators should consult it to refresh their memory about the history and purpose of their profession.
Presser is the Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History Emeritus at Northwestern University’s Prizker School of Law and the legal-affairs editor of Chronicles. He’s a leading voice of what is sometime referred to as paleoconservatism, who maintains that our political dysfunction derives in part from the methods and jurisprudence of law professors. His book might be called a diagnosis of our social ailments, the cure being the repurposing of legal education.
Beneath his silhouettes—two involve fictional figures (Lewis Eliot and Charles Kingsfield) while the other twenty deal with actual flesh-and-blood teachers—lies a structural dualism that enables him to classify his subjects under mutually exclusive heads: those who believe in higher law and divine order, and those who believe that laws are merely commands of some human sovereign. The former recognize natural law, whereby rules and norms are antecedent to human promulgation, whereas the latter promote positivism, or the concept of law as socially constructed, i.e., ordered and instituted by human rulers.
These binaries, Presser says, explain the difference between “common lawyers and codifiers,” “advocates of Constitutional original understanding and a living Constitution,” and “economic analysts of law and Critical Legal Studies.” Here the dualism collapses into itself. The common-law method is at odds with originalism in that it is evolutionary, reflecting the changing mores and values of local populations in a bottom-up rather than a top-down process of deciphering governing norms. Constitutionalism, especially the originalism practiced by Justice Scalia, treats the social contract created by a small group of founding framers as fixed and unamendable except on its own terms. The law-and-economics movement as represented by Judge Posner and Judge Easterbrook is difficult to square with natural law because it’s predicated on cost-benefit analysis and utilitarianism. In short, it’s a stretch to group the common law, originalism, and the law-and-economics movements together, just as it’s strange to conflate legislative codification with critical legal studies. Distinctions between these schools and traditions are important, and with regard to certain law professors, the binaries Presser erects are permeable, not rigid or absolute.
Presser’s narrative is one of decline, spanning from the late eighteenth century to the present day. It begins with Sir William Blackstone, “the first of the great modern law professors.” Presser may overstate the degree to which Blackstone propounded a common-law paradigm that was frozen or static and characterized by biblical principles. The influence of Christianity and moral principles is unmistakable in Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law of England, especially in its introductory and more general sections, but the vast majority of the treatise—which was intended for an audience of young aspiring lawyers, not scholars or jurists—describes basic, mundane elements of the British legal system and organizes judicial principles and decisions topically for ease of reference. Presser is right that, more than anyone else, Blackstone influenced early American lawyers and their conception that the common law conformed to universal, uniform Christian values, but Jefferson’s more secular articulation of natural law as rooted in nature had its own adherents.
Other teachers included here are James Wilson (after whom Hadley Arkes has named a fine institute), Joseph Story (whose commitment to natural law is offset by his federalist and nationalist leanings), Christopher Columbus Langdell (whose “original and continuing impact on American legal education is unparalleled”), Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (whose career as a professor was short and undistinguished), John Henry Wigmore (whose “sometimes idol” was Holmes), Roscoe Pound (“a figure of extraordinary talent”), Karl Llewellyn (the “avatar” of the legal-realist movement), Felix Frankfurter (“no longer the God-like figure at Harvard”), Herbert Wechsler (“the anti-Holmes”), Ronald Dworkin (who reformulated the theories of John Rawls), Richard Posner (the subject of William Domnarski’s recent biography), Antonin Scalia (“best known for his bold conservative jurisprudence”), and several still-living contemporaries.
Presser is particularly hard on Holmes, relying on Albert Alschuler’s harsh and often careless assessments of the Magnificent Yankee. He charges Holmes with embracing the view that judges were essentially legislators and suggests that Holmes was “policy-oriented.” Although this portrayal is popular, it is not entirely accurate. In fact, Holmes’s jurisprudence was marked not by crude command theory (the Benthamite version of which he adamantly rejected) but by deference and restraint. Presser himself recalls Alschuler in claiming that Holmes “was prepared to approve of virtually anything any legislature did.”
So was Holmes a policy-oriented judge legislating from the bench, or did he defer to legislatures? Undoubtedly the latter. Only once during his twenty years on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court did he hold legislation to be unconstitutional. As a Supreme Court Justice, he almost programmatically deferred to state law. “[A] state legislature,” he said, “can do whatever it sees fit to do unless it is restrained by some express prohibition in the Constitution of the United States,” adding that courts “should be careful not to extend such prohibitions beyond their obvious meaning by reading into them conceptions of public policy that the particular Court may happen to entertain.” Rather than imposing his personal policy preferences, Holmes believed that a judge’s “first business is to see that the game is played according to the rules whether [he] like[s] them or not.” If Holmes’s conception of judicial restraint and the Fourteenth Amendment had carried the day, the holdings in Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges, among others, would not have occurred.
Presser admittedly doesn’t like Holmes, but he is polite about it. There’s a charming sense of collegiality in his assessments of his contemporaries as well. He boasts of his own traditionalism without hesitating to call Duncan Kennedy and Catharine MacKinnon “brilliant.” He disagrees with his opponents without denigrating their intelligence and expresses gratitude to faculty whose politics differ radically from his own. He describes a variety of disciplinary schools, including critical race theory, which don’t appeal to him. And he gives some unjustly neglected thinkers (e.g., Mary Ann Glendon) the attention they rightly deserve while some overrated thinkers (e.g., Cass Sunstein) receive the attention they relish.
President Obama is held up as the quintessential modern law professor, the type of haughty pedagogue responsible for the demise of the rule of law and the widespread disregard for constitutional mandates and restrictions. Yet law professors as a class weren’t always bad; in fact, they once, according to Presser, contributed marvelously to the moral, spiritual, and religious life of America. Presser hopes for a return to that era. He wishes to restore a proper understanding of natural law and the common-law tradition. His conclusion takes a tendentious turn that reveals his abiding conservatism. Those who agree with him will finish reading this book on a high note. His political adversaries, however, may question whether they missed some latent political message in earlier chapters.
But isn’t that the nature of love letters—to mean more than they say and say more than they mean? Presser’s love letter to law teaching is enjoyable to read and draws attention to the far-reaching consequences of mundane classroom instruction. He’s a trustworthy voice in these loud and rowdy times.
Mens Rea and the Common Law
In Criminal Law, History, Justice, Law, Teaching on March 15, 2017 at 6:45 am
At common law, a victim had to prove four elements to demonstrate that a crime had occurred: mens rea (the mental element of a crime whereby intent or blameworthiness must be established), actus reus (the physical elements of a crime whereby the actions of a defendant must be established), causation, and damages or harm. This brief post concerns the first element, mens rea.
The concept of means rea involved three kinds of intent at common law: (1) general intent (the wish to do something prohibited by law), (2) specific intent (the wish to do something prohibited by law and to cause a particular result), and (3) transferred intent (which arises when the intention to harm one person results in harm to a different person).
The definition of intent traditionally included not just the results an actor wanted to occur when he contemplated taking some action, but also the results he knew would almost certainly occur from that action even if he did not truly wish to bring them about.
The landmark case of People v. Conley (1989) demonstrated that it was not always necessary, when establishing the elements of a crime, to show that an actor consciously desired the result of a particular harm as long as he knew that his conduct was virtually certain to cause general harm. A prosecutor may accordingly establish the element of intent by showing that a person consciously desired to occasion a particular harm or that he knew that his conduct was practically certain to cause harm.
Under the doctrine of transferred intent, a prosecutor may demonstrate that the defendant committed a crime if he intended to cause harm to one person but accidentally harmed a different person. This principle is also revealed in People v. Conley, in which an individual named William Conley attempted to strike Marty Carroll with a wine bottle but mistakenly struck Sean O’Connell instead. Because Conley attempted to commit a battery and did in fact strike someone as he intended, he was guilty of the crime of battery. The fact that his victim was not his intended victim was immaterial to his case.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Pragmatism, and the Jurisprudence of Agon
In America, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Law-and-Literature, Legal Research & Writing, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Philosophy, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Scholarship, The Supreme Court, Western Philosophy, Writing on December 7, 2016 at 6:45 am
My latest book, scheduled for release next week through Bucknell University Press, is about United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. The book continues my work at the intersection of law and the humanities and should interest scholars of literary theory, American literature, jurisprudence, and pragmatism.
I argue in the book that Holmes helps us see the law through an Emersonian lens by the way in which he wrote his judicial dissents. Holmes’s literary style mimics and enacts two characteristics of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thought: “superfluity” and the “poetics of transition,” concepts ascribed to Emerson and developed by literary critic Richard Poirier. Using this aesthetic style borrowed from Emerson and carried out by later pragmatists, Holmes not only made it more likely that his dissents would remain alive for future judges or justices (because how they were written was itself memorable, whatever the value of their content), but also shaped our understanding of dissents and, in this, our understanding of law. By opening constitutional precedent to potential change, Holmes’s dissents made room for future thought, moving our understanding of legal concepts in a more pragmatic direction and away from formalistic understandings of law. Included in this new understanding is the idea that the “canon” of judicial cases involves oppositional positions that must be sustained if the law is to serve pragmatic purposes. This process of precedent-making in a common-law system resembles the construction of the literary canon as it is conceived by Harold Bloom and Richard Posner.
The book is available for purchase here:
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How Unelected Bureaucrats Became ‘Liberty’s Nemesis’
In America, Book Reviews, Books, Jurisprudence, Law on August 17, 2016 at 6:45 am
This post originally appeared here in The Federalist.
Whether they realize it or not, Americans are subject to the soft despotism of administrative law. The common-law system of ordered liberty and evolutionary correction that the United States inherited from England is hardly recognizable in our current legal system. Bureaucratic administrative agencies that are unaccountable to voters now determine many of the rules and regulations that have palpable effects on the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.
In many important respects, we no longer live in a constitutional republic—we’re subject to the rule of an unaccountable administrative state. This the problem confronted in Liberty’s Nemesis: The Unchecked Expansion of the State, edited by Dean Reuter and John Yoo.
Although the U.S. Constitution does not expressly endow them with legislative prerogative, or even contemplate their current form and function, administrative agencies issue and enforce binding rules. They arrogate to themselves powers nowhere authorized by the Constitution or validated by historical Anglo-American experience. These agencies, moreover, govern quotidian activities once left to local communities and small businesses—everything from managing hospital beds to issuing permits to liquefied petroleum gas dealers. On both the state and federal level, administrative agencies have intruded upon local customs and practices and have imposed burdensome regulations on resistant groups, trades, neighborhoods, and civic associations.
Administrative agencies are creatures of legislation but directed by the executive branch, which has no constitutional authority to pass laws. Their powers derive from statutes that delegate the quasi-legislative authority to issue binding commands in specified contexts. Administrative agencies generally operate independently from Congress and the courts and possess discretionary rulemaking authority.
They conduct hearings and investigations and adjudicate disputes between parties. Some agencies are household names, such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency; some are less known, especially within state government. For instance, state personnel boards manage employment disputes involving state employers and employees, and smaller agencies regulate all sorts of activity—from cosmetology and barbering to translation services and historical preservation efforts.
The justifying theory underlying the creation and existence of administrative agencies is that they consist of qualified experts in a specialized field. Whereas the legislature is made up of elected generalists who come and go, an agency is peopled by nonpartisan specialists with unique training and experience who hold permanent positions. Administrative agencies should thus be more reliable and efficient than legislative or executive bodies in promulgating or enforcing rules and regulations. Moreover, they should be isolated from political processes and partisan pressure. Yet this institutional independence that is touted as a virtue has in practice resulted in widespread unaccountability.
It’s axiomatic that an agency may not be sued without the consent of the state. Such consent, when given, is typically limited in scope so that any potential substantive liability is narrowed. Administrative proceedings only approximate the processes and protocols recognized in courts of law. An administrative adjudicatory forum seldom replicates or reflects the procedural and functional characteristics of a courtroom. When an administrative tribunal enters a final order, the non-prevailing party may seek redress through judicial review, but the tribunal’s decision carries a presumption of correctness on appeal—both on findings of fact and matters of law—except in rare circumstances when a statute prescribes otherwise.
F. A. Hayek warned about administrative agencies—and what he dubbed the “public administration movement”—in The Constitution of Liberty.
He explained that the public administration movement had adopted slogans about government efficiency “to enlist the support of the business community for basically socialist ends.” “The members of this movement,” he cautioned, “directed their heaviest attack against the traditional safeguards of individual liberty, such as the rule of law, constitutional restraints, judicial review, and the conception of a ‘fundamental law.’” Hayek then traced the history of public administration to show that “the progressives have become the main advocates of the extension of the discretionary powers of the administrative agency.”
Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (2014) echoed Hayek’s criticism that, in Hayek’s words, “the widespread use of [administrative] delegation in modern times is not that the power of making general rules is delegated but that administrative authorities are, in effect, given power to wield coercion without rule, as no general rules can be formulated which will unambiguously guide the exercise of such power.”
Hamburger reframed Hayek’s criticisms in deontological terms by suggesting that administrative law is not, in fact, law—it is inherently lawless. Hayek and Hamburger both make the compelling case that administrative agencies routinely undermine the rule of law, or the principle that the general rules of society apply equally to all citizens as well as the sovereign.
In addition to Hamburger, several recent books have charted the slow growth of administrative law in the United States. Chief among them are Jerry L. Mashaw’s Creating the Administrative Constitution: The Lost One Hundred Years of Administrative Law (2012), Joanna L. Grisinger’s The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics Since the New Deal (2012), and Daniel R. Ernst’s Tocqueville’s Nightmare: The Administrative State Emerges in America (2014). These studies are indispensable and together form a comprehensive history of how ordinary citizens succumbed to the supervisory powers of administrative regulators.
Liberty’s Nemesis follows in the wake of these rigorous works, though it is perhaps more polemical. The book includes essays by highly visible and influential figures who range from legal practitioners to politicians, academics to activists, jurists to jurisprudents. The book’s primary focus is on administrative agencies, but certain essays—such as former congressman Bob Barr’s discussion of threats to the Second Amendment or John Eastman’s concerns about same, sex marriage—widen the topical scope.
Reuter and Yoo have collaborated before. In 2011 they published Confronting Terror: 9/11 and the Future of American National Security, an edition that featured disparate essays by prominent conservatives and libertarians, some of whom have also contributed to Liberty’s Nemesis.
Reuter, who serves as vice president for the Federalist Society, has supplied the introduction to the book. His contribution is a primer on American civics with an emphasis on the subtle tyranny of administrative law. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who’s perhaps best known for authoring legal memoranda regarding torture and the War on Terror during the George W. Bush administration, offers a brief conclusion to the book that calls for conservatives to “recalibrate their revolution” by turning their activist energies against administrative agencies rather than Congress.
In my view, the most intriguing essays in the book belong to Jonathan H. Adler, Gerard V. Bradley and Robert P. George (coauthors), and Patrick Morrisey and Elbert Lin (also coauthors). Some subjects, such as Ronald A. Cass’s appraisal of the so-called Chevron doctrine, under which courts defer to the decisions of administrative agencies, may seem predictable in a text that assails administrative regulation. However, they are no less insightful or important for their predictability.
Other subjects include immigration, financial regulation, and campus speech. An edition with such diverse chapters defies simple summary and ready classification. Doing it justice in this space is impossible. When the authors of such wide-ranging chapters include sitting senators like Orrin Hatch and former commissioners of federal agencies like Harold Furchtgott-Roth, Daniel Gallagher, F. Scott Kieff, Maureen Ohlhausen, Troy Paredes, and Joshua Wright, the reviewer’s task becomes daunting if not impossible.
So permit me a few brief remarks about just three chapters and accept my general endorsement of the book as reason enough to buy it and read it in its entirety. I’ll start with Adler, who details, among other things, the manner in which the Obama administration exceeded the scope of its authority by delaying the implementation of the employer mandate found in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. The first time his administration announced this delay was in a blog post.
Similar announcements followed from the Internal Revenue Service (which was under fire for the politicization of its activities) and the Treasury Department. Obamacare itself was silent as to any executive authority to waive the requirements of the employer mandate, which, as its name suggests, mandated the implementation of its terms. Ignoring that mandate, President Obama and his executive officers enjoy the unique distinction of being the first violators of the law they championed and swore to uphold. In light of the foregoing, Adler concludes that President Obama implemented Obamacare through “unlawful administrative action” carefully calculated to avoid Democratic losses in the 2014 midterm elections.
Bradley and George, for their part, argue the Obama administration has “remapped” religion and society by erasing (or at least by seeking to erase) religious exercise and expression from the public sphere while subjecting private religious exercise and expression to novel and intrusive regulation. Bradley and George argue the Obama administration is erasing religious exercise and expression from the public sphere. For example, the Obama administration promulgated rules that compel religious employers to subsidize not just contraception but abortifacients for their female employees. The exception to this requirement was crafted such that no religious institution could qualify to opt out. The Obama administration promulgated another rule that may effectively eliminate government contracts with religious-based humanitarian organizations that provide care and counseling for crisis pregnancies. Executive Order 13672, which became effective in April of last year, adds sexual orientation and general identity to the non-discrimination categories or classes under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The list could go on—and does go on in Bradley and George’s sustained critique.
Finally, Morrisey, and Lin present a firsthand perspective on the overreach of environmental regulations that have crippled the economy in West Virginia and Appalachia more generally. They target the Environmental Protection Agency, which used Section 112 of the Clean Air Act as a pretext for regulating power plants in West Virginia.
Morrisey is the current Republican attorney general of West Virginia, having defeated the five-term Democratic incumbent Darrell McGraw in 2012. Morrisey’s political rise in West Virginia, which coincided with the Republican takeover of that state’s government, has generated national attention in addition to speculation about his future in higher office.
The fresh-faced Lin, a graduate of Yale Law School, is the Solicitor General of West Virginia, making him the chief appellate lawyer for the state. His experience includes a stint in private practice in Washington DC as well as clerkships with Justice Clarence Thomas, Judge William (“Bill”) Pryor, and Judge Robert E. Keeton. Morrisey and Lin, who actually practice what they preach, give the following warning that sums up the message of the book: “The worst that can be done with respect to an overreaching federal agency is to simply accept it and allow it, through sheer inertia, to remake this country according to the preferences of a handful of unelected bureaucrats.”
Although the composition and character of the U.S. Supreme Court is undoubtedly the most important issue in the 2016 election because of the president’s power to appoint a successor to Justice Scalia—and possibly other justices nearing retirement—voters must also bear in mind the rapid and steady expansion of the administrative managerial state under President Obama. Conservatives now populate state legislatures in vast numbers; state attorneys general collaboratively have begun pushing back against federal agencies; state supreme courts have welcomed traditionalist jurisprudents who revere their state constitutions and the federalist system envisioned by the American Founders.
It will take a new kind of president to roll back the administrative state altogether. State resistance alone is no longer enough. Without any pressure from the executive branch, Congress will remain content to pass off touchy political decisions to administrative agencies, which, unlike politicians, cannot be voted out of power. Congress, in turn, can blame the agencies for any negative political consequences of those choices.
We may never recover the framework of ordered liberty that the Founding generation celebrated and enjoyed. But for the sake of our future, and to secure the hope of freedom for our sons and daughters, our grandchildren and their children, we must expose and undo the regulatory regime of administrative agencies. It’s our duty to do so.
Those concerned must applaud Reuter and Yoo for their efforts at publicizing the complex problems occasioned by administrative agencies. But there’s still much work left to do. Practical solutions will not come quickly or easily. Yet they’ll be necessary if we’re ever going to reverse course and remain a nation of promise and prosperity.
The Felony-Murder Rule: Background and Justification
In American History, Britain, Criminal Law, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Justice, Law, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Philosophy on October 8, 2014 at 8:45 am
The rule at common law as incorporated into the legal system of the early United States was that a person is guilty of murder (and not some lesser offense of killing) if he killed another person during the commission or attempted commission of any felony. This rule is known as the “felony-murder rule.” It was abolished in England in the mid-20th century and never existed in such continental nations as France or Germany. The rule became common, however, in various jurisdictions throughout the United States, although it never escaped criticism.
Felony murder is bifurcated into first-degree and second-degree murder: the former arises when the killing of another results from the commission of an enumerated felony; the latter arises when the killing of another results from the commission of an unspecified felony. The felony-murder rule negates any investigation into the objective intent of the offender; it obtains regardless of whether the offender killed his victim intentionally, recklessly, accidentally, or unforeseeably. Although it dispenses with the element of malice that is requisite to a finding of murder, the felony-murder rule retains by implication the concept of malice insofar as the intent to commit a felony is, under the rule, constitutive of malice for murder. The rule, in essence, conflates the intent to commit one wrong with the intent to commit another wrong, namely, the termination of another’s life. The intent to do a felonious wrong is, on this understanding, sufficiently serious to bypass any consideration of the nature of the exact wrong that was contemplated.
The most common justification for the felony-murder rule is that it deters dangerous felonious behavior and decreases the chance that an innocent bystander will suffer bodily harm from a high-risk felony. The possibility of a more severe conviction and sentence, according to this theory, reduces the number of negligent and accidental killings that might have taken place during the commission of a felony. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., supported the felony-murder rule, believing as he did that a felonious offender who kills another person during the commission of any felony ought to be punished as a murderer, even if the killing was not foreseeable based on the circumstances of the felony. Critics of the deterrence justification for the felony-murder rule have argued that no rule can deter an unintended act.
Another justification for the felony-murder rule is that it affirms the sanctity and dignity of human life. This justification answers in the affirmative the question whether a felony resulting in death is more serious than a felony not resulting in death. Because a felony resulting in death is, in fact, more serious, according to this logic, a felony murderer owes a greater debt to society and must accordingly suffer a more extreme punishment. Critics of this view argue that the culpability for the two separate harms—the felony and the killing—must remain separate and be analyzed independently of each other. These critics suggest that the felony-murder rule runs up against constitutional principles regarding proportional punishment (i.e., whether the punishment “fits” the crime) and that there is no justice or fairness in punishing a felon for a harm (death) that was unintended.
Burglary at Common Law
In American History, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law on December 12, 2013 at 8:45 am
At common law, burglary was defined as the “breaking and entering into the dwelling of another, at night, with the intent to commit a felony therein.” Nearly all jurisdictions in the United States today punish as burglary conduct that does not meet one or more of the elements of that definition; those elements, however, continue to be recognized, in some jurisdictions and under particular circumstances.
At common law, a person could become a “burglar” (i.e., one guilty of burglary) if he had but an intent to commit a different crime (i.e., not just breaking into the dwelling) and yet, having broken into the dwelling, had not committed that intended crime. The intent to break into the dwelling was not relevant to an evaluation of the elements of the crime of burglary; what was relevant was the reason (i.e., the person’s intent) for doing something criminal within the dwelling. Even before a person entered the house unlawfully, he could have been, according to the elements of the crime, guilty of attempted burglary. Burglary is inchoate to a theft or to other crimes that the person committing the burglary also intends to commit inside the dwelling. In other words, the classification of “burglary” obtains if a person breaks into a house but does not actually commit the felony he intends to commit inside the house.
To be convicted of burglary at common law, one had to actually break into the house; the burglar had to create an opening through which to pass. It was not enough that the owner of the home left open a door or a window through which the burglar crawled. If person X saw the door to person Y’s home left wide open, or if person Y invited person X into the home, and person X then entered through the door intending to steal silverware, then person X could not be guilty of burglary. And if the door were closed, but it was daytime, and person X busted through the door, he could not be guilty of burglary because it was not nighttime. It was once apparently believed that the greatest danger to homeowners was during the night, and although statistics may suggest that is still the case, there is no longer a “nighttime” element to burglary.
In most states within the United States, if not all of them, the “breaking” element of burglary has been done away with; instead, if a person’s presence on the property of another is unlawful, and the person satisfies the other elements of burglary, with the exceptions mentioned above, then that person may be guilty of burglary. Most states still retain the “entry” element of burglary, and this element is satisfied if any part of the body enters the structure, if only for a moment.
No states in the United States retain the “dwelling” requirement. At common law, a “dwelling” was, more or less, a house; a place of business didn’t qualify. Therefore, someone could break into your office, steal your equipment, and not be guilty of burglary. Most states in the United States no longer require an “intent to commit a felony”; rather, the word “felony” has been dropped and replaced with “crime.” Therefore, a person could be guilty of burglary for breaking into a home with the intent to commit any crime, even a misdemeanor. This is not true in all jurisdictions, however, as some states still provide that, to be guilty of burglary, a person breaking into the home must do so with the intent to commit either a felony or some other theft crime.
A Tale of the Rise of Law (Part Two of Two)
In Arts & Letters, Britain, Fiction, Historicism, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Justice, Law, Law-and-Literature, Liberalism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Politics, Western Civilization, Writing on March 13, 2012 at 1:00 am
This essay originally appeared here at Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature (Issue 2.1, 2012)
As the sovereign, or king, was never fixed in Geoffrey’s lifetime, even if the idea of sovereignty was, The History treats law as transcending any particular human sovereign. Geoffrey creates a need for law by portraying it as sovereign, anchored in a classical past and cloaked in religious terms. Austin works as a functional lens through which to view The History’s suggestion that law is necessary to provide shape to the nation-state. Geoffrey’s text signals what Mooers calls the “outgrowth” of twelfth-century legal principles that enabled coercive, nationalist projects and agendas before people could speak of concepts like nation-states. Put another way, Geoffrey was an originator of and a participator in twelfth-century jurisprudence not necessarily a transcriber of an ancient corpus juris.5 This claim is not to reduce Geoffrey’s text to the grade of propaganda but rather to adduce jurisprudence from The History to support a claim that Geoffrey champions legal theory instead of simply documenting it. Because the term “uniform and rational justice” does not admit ready definition, I defer to Mooers’s clarifying focus on the comprehensive systemization of law manufactured by royal writs and other like instruments (341). Uniform and rational justice had to do with the proliferation of court systems whereby centralized authorities could begin to impose and enforce sets of common, consistent rules. The twelfth century was, after all, the age laying the institutional structures of the Anglo common law.6 The common law was the distillation of custom (a claim made by its iconic protagonists such as Bracton, Fortescue, and St. German) and thus was of time immemorial, beyond the memory of man. But the solidification of the common law as a mass system enforceable by a centralized body – the precursor to the modern state – began in the twelfth century. Roman law may have influenced these common, consistent rules and inspired Henry I, Matilda, Henry II, Geoffrey and their contemporaries, but tracing the concept of uniform and rational justice back to pre-Britain is not my aim, for that would entail looking beyond Britain in a way that Geoffrey refuses (or fails) to do. Medieval and early modern common law derived its authority from religion, and medieval jurists claimed unequivocally that common law was derived from God.7
Geoffrey’s first sustained treatment of law and the sovereign and their relationship to uniform and rational justice appears at the end of Brutus’ section. Here, Geoffrey submits that when Brutus built his capital on the River Thames, Brutus not only presented the city “to the citizens by right of inheritance,” but also gave those citizens “a code of laws by which they might live peacefully together” (74). Coming as they do after Brutus’ many battles and conquests, these laws suggest peace and order befitting a civilization prophesied by a goddess: Diana. No sooner is this putative history of a nation professed in terms of law than it is consumed in mythology and institutional legend. That Brutus, the eminent Trojan, would establish this city (“Troia Nova” or “New Troy”) suggests that the British legal system had the proper pedigree, according to Geoffrey and his contemporaries.
Authored during the reign of Henry II in the late 1180s, roughly half a century after the publication of The History, Ranulf de Glanvill’s landmark legal treatise, The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England Commonly Called Glanvill, is important as it suggests that The History reflects ideas common to the period, showing the workaday application of various strands of jurisprudence. Moreover, like The History, The Treatise anchors law in history and tradition, asserting that the “laws and customs of the realm had their origin in reason and have long prevailed,” and as if to neutralize anxieties about the fact that many of these laws remained unwritten, Glanvill adds that if “merely for lack of writing, they were not deemed to be laws, then surely writing would seem to supply to written laws a force of greater authority than either the justice of him who decrees them or the reason of him who establishes them” (2). The epigram preceding the prologue of Glanvill, apparently affixed to the text after Glanvill’s death, adds to this invocation of history and celebrates Glanvill himself as “the most learned of that time in the law and ancient customs of the realm” (1). Foregrounding custom and tradition seems like a strategy for both Geoffrey and Glanvill as well as other contemporary writers who sought to anticipate objections to law or to mobilize support for legal mechanisms currently in flux (because the monarchy is in flux).
The History is thus a model for government and for those subject to government. It mythologizes what law can be – derivations of divine prophesy couched in terms of Roman mythology and not Christian truth – and so inspires readers to ensure that law realizes its full potential. From Geoffrey’s attention to Brutus, for instance, readers are supposed to learn that law corresponds with peace and that the king initiates and sanctions law. It is Brutus, after all, who drives away the giants from the caves of Britain into the mountains and who commands the populace to “divide the land among themselves,” “cultivate the fields,” and “build houses” (72). Geoffrey uses Brutus to establish the image of an authoritative king and, more specifically, a glorified body as a site of sanctified authority.8
Glanvill underscores the centrality of peace to law and even suggests that law, which vests in the king, endeavours primarily toward peace and harmony. Glanvill opens by rendering law as the sovereign’s decorative yet lethal façade: “Not only must royal power be furnished with arms against rebels and nations which rise up against the king and the realm, but it is also fitting that it should be adorned with laws for the governance of subject and peaceful peoples” (1). Like Geoffrey, Glanvill does not put a name on the sovereign; he merely extols law and its utility to the king. These lines suggest that peace cannot exist without war and that law obtains in the jurisdiction not to make peace or war but to assist the king in the functioning of his office. Uniform and rational justice does not arise for its own sake but for the service of the sovereign so that he “may so successfully perform his office that, crushing the pride of the unbridled and ungovernable with the right hand of strength and tempering justice for the humble and meek with the rod of equity, he may both be always victorious in wars with his enemies and also show himself continually impartial in dealing with his subjects” (1). For Glanvill and for Geoffrey, law is mostly about utility to the king in that it sanctions sovereign violence and centralizes power such that one individual, the sovereign, can issue commands to his subjects, demand the submission of his subjects to his authority by visiting punishment upon those who violate his commands and, therefore, ensure the habitual obedience of multiple subjects across a vast territory.
The lack of a centralized authority or definite sovereign is the reason that Britain falls into disarray when, after Brutus’ death, Brutus’ sons Locrinus, Kamber, and Albanactus divide the kingdom of Britain into thirds (Geoffrey 75). As a result of this partition, the brothers are unable to maintain the military presence necessary to preserve the polis and its laws, and therefore the island suffers from foreign invasion and bloodshed. Likewise, Maddan’s sons quarrel over the crown upon Maddan’s death, and as a result, law becomes something oppressive as one son, Mempricius, given to sodomy and other “vices,” murders the other son, Malin, and “by force and by treachery” does away with “anyone who he feared might succeed him in the kingship” (78). Unlike Brutus, Mempricius exercised “so great a tyranny over the people that he encompassed the death of almost all the more distinguished men” (78). Geoffrey redeems law by giving Mempricius the fate of being devoured by wolves, presumably due to his despotism (78). The suggestion here is that although laws are, as Austin claims, the commands of a sovereign, a sovereign like Mempricius will forfeit sovereignty if his commands take on forms that the polis cannot or will not habitually obey. God or Nature will destroy him for that failing, since the devouring by wolves seems to have some kind of divine justice. Such bodily mutilation signifies destruction of law itself; as Goodrich points out, law and the body are interactive in religious terms:
[The annunciation] is logos, the word as incarnation of divine presence, the spirit made flesh. For the law, the spirit made flesh takes the form of a text, vellum or skin in which is inscribed the form of the institution, of society and its subjects as the unified members and membrane of a body, the corpus iuris civilis or civilised body, the corpus mysticum or body politic, Leviathan or law. (248-49) Read the rest of this entry »
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