Constitutional Law Article

Trimming

Vol. 122 No. 4 In law and politics, some people are trimmers. They attend carefully to competing positions and attempt to steer between the poles. Trimming might be defended as a heuristic for what is right, as a means of reducing political conflict over especially controversial questions, or as a method of ensuring that people who hold competing positions are not humiliated, excluded, or hurt. There are two kinds of trimmers: compromisers, who follow a kind of “trimming heuristic” and thus conclude that the middle course is best; and preservers, who attempt to preserve what is most essential to competing reasonable positions, which they are willing to scrutinize and evaluate. It is true that in some cases, trimming leads to bad results in both politics and law, including bad interpretations of the Constitution. It is also true that trimmers face difficult questions about how to ascertain the relevant extremes and that trimmers can be manipulated by those who are in a position to characterize or to shift those extremes. Nonetheless, trimming is an honorable approach to some difficult questions in both law and politics, and in some domains, it is more attractive than the alternatives. In constitutional law, there are illuminating conflicts among those who believe in trimming, minimalism, rights fundamentalism, and democratic primacy.
Administrative Law Article

Our Schmittian Administrative Law

Vol. 122 No. 4 Our administrative law contains, built right into its structure, a series of legal “black holes” and “grey holes” – domains in which statutes, judicial decisions and institutional practice either explicitly or implicitly exempt the executive from legal constraints. Legal black holes and grey holes are best understood by drawing upon the thought of Carl Schmitt, in particular his account of the relationship between legality and emergencies. In this sense, American administrative law is Schmittian. Moreover, it is inevitably so. Extending legality to eliminate these black and grey holes is impracticable; any aspiration to eliminate the Schmittian elements of our administrative law is utopian.
Contract Law Recent Case

Lewis v. Lewis

Colorado Supreme Court Holds Defendants Liable for Full Profits from the Sale of a Home by Applying Unjust Enrichment Theory to an Informal Agreement Between Close Relatives.

Vol. 122 No. 3
Contract Law Article

Treaties as Law of the Land: The Supremacy Clause and the Judicial Enforcement of Treaties

Vol. 122 No. 2 Courts in recent years have perceived threshold obstacles to the enforcement of treaties deriving from their nature as contracts between nations that generally depend for their efficacy on the interest and honor of the parties, rather than on domestic adjudication. This approach to treaty enforcement is in tension with the Constitution’s declaration that treaties are part of the law of the land and its instruction to judges to give them effect. The Founders understood that treaties depended on interest and honor on the international plane, but they made treaties enforceable in our courts anyway in order to avoid the international friction that could be expected to result from treaty violations and to capture the benefits of a reputation for treaty compliance. The Supremacy Clause gives treaties a domestic judicial sanction that they would otherwise lack. It makes treaties enforceable in the courts in the same circumstances as the other two categories of norms specified in the clause – federal statutes and the Constitution itself.