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Absolute Majority Rules
(Cambridge University Press, 2007)
This article considers absolute majority rules, which require the affirmative vote of a majority of all those eligible to vote in the institution. I compare absolute majority rules to simple majority rules under which only ...
Optimal Abuse of Power
(Northwestern University Law School, 2014)
I will argue that in the administrative state, in contrast to classical constitutional theory, the abuse of government power is not something to be strictly minimized, but rather optimized. An administrative regime will ...
Conventions in Court
(2013)
In the Commonwealth nations, a constitutional “convention” denotes an unwritten but obligatory constitutional custom or norm. The question I will address is whether public law in the United States should be understood to ...
Power to the People
(2011)
The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making
(Cambridge University Press, 2012)
Delegating to Enemies
(Columbia Law Review Association, Inc., 2012)
An axiom of institutional design is known as the ally principle: All else equal, voters, legislators, or other principals will rationally delegate more authority to agents who share their preferences (“allies”). The ally ...
Improving Deference: Chevron as a Voting Rule
(Yale Law School, 2007)
Common-Law Constitutionalism and the Limits of Reason
(Columbia Law Review Association, Inc., 2007)
In recent years, the central claim of common-law constitutionalism has been that precedent and tradition embody some form of latent wisdom. Judges will generally do best by deferring to the wisdom embodied in precedent and ...
Should We Have Lay Justices?
(Stanford Law School, 2007)
By "lay justices" I mean justices of the Supreme Court of the United States who are not accredited lawyers. Currently the number of lay justices is zero, although there is no constitutional or statutory rule that requires ...
Chevron as a Voting Rule
(Yale Law School, 2007)
In Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., the Supreme Court created a new framework for judicial deference to agency interpretations of law: courts should defer to an agency interpretation unless ...