The Volokh Conspiracy

Sirius Satellite Radio has posted the audio of my recentdiscussion of the Supreme Court with George State University Professor Eric Segall on Stand Up! With Pete Dominick. The audio is available here.

Much of the discussion focuses on general issues of constitutional theory and the extent to which the Supreme Court is or is not politicized, which I recently wrote about in this article. But towards the end, we also talked about the gay marriage cases currently before the Court, including my view that laws banning same-sex marriage are examples of unconstitutional sex discrimination.

With Rhode Island and Delaware recently becoming the tenth and eleventh states to permit same-sex marriage and Minnesota likely to soon become the twelfth, now is a good time to reconsider the impact of judicial decisions requiring state recognition of gay marriage. The trend towards gay marriage began in 2003, with a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision holding that the state constitution required recognition of same-sex marriage. At first, nearly all the states that recognized gay marriage did so as a result of judicial decisions rather than legislation. In this way, it seems clear that the cause of gay marriage benefited greatly from judicial action.

Nonetheless, scholars such as Gerald Rosenberg and Jeff Rosen argued that such litigation harmed the cause of gay rights more than it helped it, because it tended to generate a political backlash, a theory that gained some credence in 2008, when Proposition 8 reversed a pro-gay marriage California Supreme Court decision. In a series of posts written in 2008-2009, I argued that such skepticism was unjustified, and that pro-gay marriage judicial decisions were a major net benefit for the cause of gay rights, backlash notwithstanding.

I think recent events largely vindicate my side of this debate. Since early 2009, the number of states legalizing same-sex marriage has grown from four to a soon-to-be twelve, with most of the recent ones doing so through the legislative process. This undercuts claims that judicial action undercuts political action. Public opinion has rapidly moved in a pro-gay marriage direction, undercutting arguments that litigation would turn the public against the cause. And, of course, the Supreme Court might be on the brink of requiring recognition of gay marriage from some or all of the states that still deny it. That is highly unlikely to have happened absent litigation-driven progress at the state level. Even if the Supreme Court upholds California Proposition 8, it would likely do so only by a very narrow margin that could easily be reversed by future decisions – signalling that the issue is contested in a way that was clearly not the case just 10-15 years ago.

Obviously, some of this progress is the result of long-term trends in public and elite opinion that would have occurred even without litigation. But it is unlikely it would have happened anywhere near so quickly were it not for the example effect of the establishment of gay marriage in Massachusetts and other states where it happened through judicial action. These decisions made gay marriage seem much more thinkable and mainstream than before. They also helped galvanize the gay rights movement. Furthermore, they made the previously radical idea of civil unions seem moderate by comparison, which in turn helped lead to their adoption in ten states that still do not permit full-blown gay marriage. As in the case of the civil rights movement, feminism, the gun rights movement, and property rights activists, among others, judicial action and political action turned out to be mutually reinforcing rather than antagonistic.

The political backlash against the 2003 Massachusetts decision did lead to the enactment of anti-gay marriage constitutional amendments in some thirty states. But for reasons I noted in this 2009 post, that was only a minor setback for gay rights activists. All but one of these states (California) were unlikely to enact gay marriage in the near future anyway. In addition, most of their constitutions are relatively easy to amend, which means that it will not be hard to reverse these amendments when and if public opinion in the state changes.

None of this proves that pro-gay marriage decisions were legally correct. In my view, gay marriage bans violate the federal Constitution because they constitute sex discrimination, and also those state constitutions that contain Equal Rights Amendments. But the correctness of these decisions is separable from their impact. They could be practically effective but legally dubious, or vice versa. Overall, litigation has turned out be a highly effective strategy for gay marriage advocates, whatever you might think about the correctness of their legal arguments.

That does not mean, of course, that litigation is always an effective strategy for all social movements. In order for it to succeed, there has to be at least some amount of preexisting support for the cause among both elite and general public opinion. Efforts to secure recognition of same-sex marriage through legal action flopped in the 1970s, because that base level of support was still lacking. Even where litigation does work, it is usually effective only in tandem with political activism, rather than completely removed from it.

But the recent history of gay marriage does show that litigation can often help advance a cause significantly faster and more effectively than would be the case otherwise. It therefore helps undercut the arguments of revisionist scholars who claim that such action is almost always ineffective, except in cases where the political process is likely to reach the same results on its own.

Co-blogger David Bernstein and I criticized such revisionist arguments in this 2004 article, focusing on the history of civil rights litigation. We pointed out several ways in which litigation can help disadvantaged minorities even when the political majority remains hostile or indifferent. The gay marriage case seems consistent with our theory as well.

For a long time, the conventional wisdom among legal scholars has been that an originalist interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment would require courts to uphold laws that discriminate against women and laws banning interracial marriage. While these arguments were once advanced by defenders of sexism and Jim Crow laws, today they are usually used as justification for rejecting originalism itself rather than for rejecting court decisions such as Loving v. Virginia, which struck down anti-miscegenation laws. At the same time, most scholars have also argued that the original meaning of the Amendment permits states to adopt affirmative action programs.

Recent scholarship has called this conventional wisdom into serious question. In 2011, Northwestern law professor Steven Calabresi and Julia Rickert published an important article outlining an originalist case for striking down laws that discriminate on the basis of sex. More recently, both Calabresi (with Andrea Matthews) and David Upham have published originalist defenses of the result in Loving.

Just a few days ago, Michael Rappaport posted this paper questioning the conventional wisdom on originalism and affirmative action (which I myself questioned much less thoroughly here). It is not my view that the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment clearly requires courts to strike down all affirmative action programs. But the application of the original meaning to these programs is far from being as clear as the conventional wisdom suggests.

I don’t think the work of Calabresi and his coauthors, Rappaport, and Upham will definitively end the debate over originalism and discrimination. Critics of originalism will likely develop rebuttals to their arguments. But this new wave of scholarship does mount a strong challenge to the previously dominant conventional wisdom.

At today’s Proposition 8 oral argument, Justice Scalia asked Ted Olson, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, “when did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted?” The intuition behind Scalia’s question is that if a law would not have been unconstitutional on the day the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, it cannot be unconstitutional under that Amendment at all.

But the latter doesn’t necessarily follow from the former. Laws that are constitutional at Time X can easily be unconstitutional at Time Y if relevant factual circumstances have changed. This is true not only under “living Constitution” theories, but even under originalism.

I. Originalism and Changing Circumstances.

How could this be so? Whether a law violates original meaning of the Constitution depends not just on the words of the text, but on relevant factual circumstances. For example, the Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures. Whether a search is reasonable depends at least in part on the state of technology, the likelihood that the search will catch a criminal, and other factual circumstances. As technology changes and our knowledge increases, a search that could be considered reasonable at Time A might not be reasonable at Time B, even though the meaning of the Fourth Amendment has not changed at all.

The constitutionality of sex discrimination is a particularly telling example. Steven Calabresi and Julia Rickert have shown that the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment constrains discrimination against women if that discrimination lacked a compelling rationale beyond a desire to subordinate them as an inferior “caste.” But 19th century understandings of biology and social science led most people to believe that a wide range of laws discriminating against women were constitutional because they were rational responses to fundamental differences between the sexes. Today, much of the factual understanding of the 19th century has been discredited, with the result that many laws that perhaps could legitimately be upheld in the 1870s ago are now unconstitutional. I expounded on this point in greater detail here:

[In Bradwell v. State (1873)], three justices upheld the exclusion of women [from the legal profession] despite the general principle of occupational freedom under the Privileges and Immunities Clause, based on their factual understanding of women’s “characteristics, destiny, and mission.” If that factual understanding turns out to be wrong, they could no longer argue that the power to discriminate against women in this way would fall under “the police power of the State” and would be required to strike the law down.....

Thus, the legal rule [Justice] Bradley advocated would compel a different outcome in any similar case today. Originalism requires judges to apply the legal rules established by the framers. But it doesn’t require them to perpetuate factual errors in the evaluation of evidence used to determine how the rule applies to any given case. Assume that in 1873 a regulation were upheld based on scientific evidence derived from the popular 19th century theory of phrenology, which held that people’s abilities and character could be predicted based on the shape of their skulls. For example, a state could have enacted a law forbidding a person with the wrong type of skull to become a lawyer. Later research proves that phrenology is a bogus pseudoscience. A consistent originalist judge would overrule the 1873 decision if legislatures continued to enact statutes claiming a police power rationale for curtailing occupational freedom based on phrenological evidence. The same goes for statutes that restrict constitutional rights based on discredited nineteenth century factual assumptions about women. [emphasis added]

II. Implications for Same-Sex Marriage.

As I have previously argued, laws banning same-sex marriage discriminate on the basis of gender, much like 19th century laws banning women from various occupations. For many decades, the state of our knowledge was such that it seemed inconceivable that same-sex couples could raise children, form committed long-term relationships, play a stabilizing role in society, and otherwise carry out the various functions associated with opposite-sex marriages. Today, however, we know that these assumptions are false or at least greatly overstated. Just as we now know that women can be effective lawyers and that phrenology is bogus.

We may not be able to pinpoint the exact date when knowledge advanced to the point that courts were justified in striking down laws excluding women from various occupations. I would tentatively say it happened soon after various states first allowed women to enter many professions in the late 19th century, and experience quickly showed that no great disaster occurred as a result. Still, a good case can be made for a different date. But all a court needs to know is that the relevant date occurred sometime before the day when it has to make a decision in the case before it. And what is true of other forms of sex discrimination is also true of laws banning same-sex marriage.

Finally, I recognize that originalism is far from the only theory of constitutional interpretation. I myself do not believe that it should be the only factor courts take into account. In this post, I focus on originalism because I think it obvious that most “living Constitution” theories readily allow for situations where a law that is initially constitutional becomes unconstitutional over time.

UPDATE: The above analysis could potentially be reformulated as saying that laws banning same-sex marriage were unconstitutional as soon as the the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted in 1868, but people just didn’t have enough knowledge to figure it out until much later. But, for purposes of judicial review, the key issue is when real-world courts had enough evidence to justify striking down a law like Proposition 8. And that time could easily be later than the point at which a court with perfect information would have been justified in doing so.

In a recent column, Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein argues that Republican senators who have filibustered some of Barack Obama’s judicial nominees are more to blame than Democrats who previously filibustered GOP nominees because the Democrats only tried to block nominees who were “out of the mainstream,” while the GOP targeted any nominees whom they “strongly disagree” with on constitutional issues. Sunstein does recognize that “Senate Democrats deserve a fair share of the blame for this dismal situation” because “their use of the out-of-the-mainstream test sometimes veered disturbingly close to the disagreement test.” But he claims that the GOP has gone further than the Democrats did.

Sunstein’s critique is overdrawn. If the Republicans really tried to filibuster any Obama nominees with whom they have strong disagreements, they would have filibustered virtually all of them, not just a few. In reality, they have targeted nominees who they thought were even more liberal than the average nominees put up by a Democratic administration and/or had a “paper trail” that made them unusually vulnerable to attack. Democrats pursued a similar strategy during recent Republican administrations.

Most of the nominees that Democrats aggressively opposed during the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II administrations were well within the mainstream of modern conservative constitutional thought. That was certainly true of high-profile cases such as Miguel Estrada and Peter Keisler. Similarly, most of the Democratic nominees targeted by Republicans under Clinton or Obama were well within the mainstream of modern liberal constitutional theory.

The underlying reality here is that there is a deep chasm between mainstream conservative views on constitutional interpretation and mainstream liberal ones. The standard-issue conservative Republican jurist believes that the Constitution provides extensive protection for gun rights and property rights, that the courts should enforce significant federalism-based constraints on Congress’ powers, that all or most affirmative action programs violate the Fourteenth Amendment, that Roe v. Wade should be overruled, and that there is no general right to privacy in the Constitution. The standard-issue liberal Democratic jurist thinks that all of the above is wrong. Each side believes that the other side is not only wrong about some particular issues, but has a fundamentally defective approach to constitutional interpretation and the role of judicial review. Much of what the conservative mainstream believes about constitutional law is completely anathema to the liberal mainstream, and vice versa.

Yet both sets of views are clearly within the “mainstream” of their respective parties. And both also enjoy substantial public support. I won’t run through all the relevant survey data here. But both liberal and conservative positions on most of the above constitutional issues have considerable appeal (usually at least 30-40 percent of the publidc). Neither is confined to a small clique of “extremists.”

Given the deep divide between the conservative mainstream and the liberal one, it is no surprise that the two sides have gradually escalated their efforts to impede the other’s judicial nominees over the last thirty years. If you think that the other party’s nominees are not just suboptimal but threats to fundamental constitutional principles, you are likely to seize on any possible tools that could be used to block them.

Once we recognize that the issue here is not a conflict between “extremists” and “the mainstream,” but one between two mainstream views that are very far apart, there are three reasonable responses to the situations. One is co-blogger Jonathan Adler’s view that both sides should abjure the use of the filibuster and other delaying tactics, and perhaps also stop opposing technically qualified nominees on the basis of their judicial philosophy. Another (closer to my view) is that both sides are equally entitled to consider nominees’ views and to use any blocking tactics permitted by the rules of the Senate. The Senate can, of course, change its rules. But until they do so, it is not wrong for either side to exploit them for the purpose of opposing judicial nominees who they believe are likely to make badly misguided decisions should they get on the bench.

Finally, partisans on each side can argue that their side is justified in using aggressive tactics and the other is not because the former is right about the constitutional issues in dispute, while the latter is wrong. Just as just wars have a different moral status from unjust ones, so the use of the filibuster against nominees who are badly wrong about key constitutional issues is more legitimate than its use against those who are right.

But there is a big difference between distinguishing between nominees with right and wrong views and distinguishing between those who are inside and outside of the mainstream. A mainstream view of the Constitution can be badly wrong. Indeed, if mainstream liberals are right about constitutional interpretation, that implies that the mainstream conservative view is badly wrong, and vice versa. Similarly, an extremist view can be correct. Between, say, 1890 and 1930, the view that the Constitution bans racial segregation in public education was clearly an “extreme” one. Ditto for the view that the Constitution imposes tight constraints on sex discrimination by state governments (considered extreme for much of American history), and quite a few other cases.

There are serious arguments for each of these three approaches. But none of them can rest on the assumption that either the Democrats or the Republicans are targeting only “out of the mainstream” nominees.

Ultimately, we should spend less time talking about whether nominees’ views are “out of the mainstream” and more time focusing on whether they are correct. For the most part, presidents of both parties are likely to nominate judges who are within the mainstream of their side of the political spectrum, and that mainstream is also likely to enjoy considerable public support (even if not always a majority). But when one side’s mainstream is deeply at odds with the other’s, that suggests that one or both are also badly misguided.

UPDATE: I have changed the title to better reflect the argument of the post.

Mike Ramsey has a nice post over at the Originalism Blog.

Generally, the entire Constitution is seen as having equal weight; there are not tiers of authority (unlike in the constitution’s of many other nations, which make certain provisions suspendable). Thus I have always been puzzled by the dominant view, well-articulated by Prof. Pildes, which manages to account for Missouri v. Holland and Reid v. Covert by saying that treaties can expand legislative powers but not infringe the Bill of Rights.

I do not see a strong basis to exempt just the Bill of Rights from the the general rule of treaties, whatever that rule may be, for several reasons. Mostly, I see no way to neatly sever the Bill of Rights from the rest of the Constitution.

1) There is no other area, to my knowledge, where one can override enumerated powers but not the Bill of Rights. If anything, the latter are at least waivable by individuals, while the former are not.

2) The 10th Amendment, reflecting the principle of Federalism, is of course part of the Bill of Rights. So the position must be “the Bill of Rights, except the last bit,” which seems even more selective.

3) Could a treaty override Bill of Rights protections against action by the states? If not, this means treaties can override everything except Amends. I-VII, (maybe XI, see below), and XIV, D.P. Clause. That sounds even more selective.

4) Individual rights protections are contained elsewhere besides the Amends. I-VIII. Take the jury trial provision of Art. III: can treaties override that? (It is not a hypothetical question, as this would be the effect of signing the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.) What about the President’s pardon power? We can imagine the creation of mixed courts for treaty crimes, with convicts made unpardonable.

5) Now lets turn back to amendments: why stop at the first eight? What about a treaty changing voting rights? Abrogating state sovereign immunity? (See Carlos Vasquez’s 2000 article arguing against abrogation.)

6) Another challenge for the theory is whether treaties can just the doctrine of enumerated powers, or all structural constitutional limits, including separation of powers. Many of the questions about the scope of the Treaty Power were previewed during the debate in the early 19th century over the constitutionality of joining international courts for the trial of the slave trade, about which I have written at length in The Constitutionality of International Courts: The Forgotten Precedent of Slave Trade Tribunals. In those debates, Quincy Adams and others argued successfully that treaties could not vest judicial power in a court independent of the “Supreme” court. Note that this also means that the treaty could not expand Congress’s power to create “inferior” tribunals by authorizing parallel or co-equal tribunals. This is a limitation on Congress’s Art. I powers.

7) I understand the notion that when we deal with the outside world, our internal arrangements do not matter. But the question of legislative power is not about dealing with the outside world, but enforcing that deal domestically. If the idea is that the fulfillment of our external promises cannot be hostage to our particular federal arrangements, why should it be hostage to our particular domestic rights?

8) The “not the Bill of Rights” view may be based on the notion that individual rights are special. But limited government and federalism is designed in part as a protection for individual rights.

The University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law is hosting a very promising symposium on Friday, January 25. My colleague and co-blogger Randy Barnett will be on the first panel. I will be giving the keynote address. And the second half of the symposium is largely dedicated to (eviscerating) my work!

I want to thank Eugene and Nick for graciously inviting me to guest blog here.

One of the longstanding conundrums in American constitutional history, theory, and doctrine is how the treaty power relates to Congress’ Art. I enumerated powers.  This question is also pending before the Supreme Court in Bond v. United States, in which the cert. petition challenges the constitutional power of Congress to enforce the international Chemical Weapons Convention, a treaty the United States entered into in 1993.  The Court has already re-listed Bond an exceptional six times for the Court’s consideration at conference – a strong signal that at least some Justices consider these issues extremely serious ones.

The most momentous argument the Bond petition raises follows the novel solution to “the treaty problem” developed in a provocative article by Nick Rosenkranz, Executing the Treaty Power.  Distilled to a sentence, Nick’s argument (which he will explain more fully in his own posts) is that a treaty cannot change the balance of federal-state power established in Art. I, which enumerates Congress’ specific powers.  More specifically, if Congress legislates to enforce a treaty, Congress is limited to the powers it otherwise has in Art. I; the treaty itself does not permit Congress to enact legislation it would otherwise be constitutionally forbidden to enact.  In a few posts, I’ll suggest why I think Nick’s analysis is ultimately unconvincing.

The treaty-power issue is part of the larger set of questions about how the outward looking aspects of the Constitution — its structure of powers for international relations, foreign affairs, war, and the like — relate to the Constitution’s inward looking structure of powers over purely domestic matters.  In starting to think about these issues, it’s essential to understand  that ensuring that the United States would be able to credibly make and faithfully honor international agreements was one of the central purposes driving the creation of the Constitution.  This aim was not just one of many desirable goals the Constitution was designed to help achieve; it was one of the central animating causes that led to the calling of the Constitutional Convention, the abandonment of the Articles of Confederation, and the overall design and structure of the Constitution.  See here for a full history.

Today, it is easy to forget how fundamental it was to the Constitution’s design that the U.S. be able to make and honor treaties.  The most important treaty in U.S. history is still the Treaty of Peace with Great Britain in 1782, which ended the Revolutionary War.  The inability of the U.S. to honor its obligations under the Treaty, and the resulting national-security threat to the U.S. from British retaliation for the inability of the U.S. to honor its Treaty commitments, was one of the major events behind the Constitution’s creation.

The Treaty recognized the independence of the U.S. and our claim to expansive boundaries.  On the British side, an essential demand was that the U.S. override  state war-time confiscation laws that had eliminated or reduced pre-War debt obligations of American debtors to British creditors.  In the Treaty, the U.S. agreed to do so to ensure these debts would be honored in full; as part of the pact, the British also agreed to withdraw from their forts in the northwest of the U.S.  But all that Congress could do, under the Articles of Confederation, was to ask the states to honor these international commitments the U.S. had made, and Virginia (whose citizens owed the largest portion of these debts) refused to do so.  In retaliation, the British refused to withdraw from their forts and held the security of the U.S. hostage.

Notice that the Treaty regulated property or contract claims — debts — that are ordinarily regulated under state law.  In addition, this problem of states undermining the capacity of the U.S. to honor its treaty obligations and be a credible nation in world affairs, with consequences to both the security and economic prosperity of the country, was a general problem under the Articles (for a fuller history on the Treaty of Peace, see the magisterial article on the history of the treaty power:  David Golove, Treaty-Making and the Nation).

Numerous provisions reveal the extent to which the Constitution was designed to remedy this defect.  Although treaties were made difficult to enter into, requiring 2/3 support in the Senate for ratification, the Constitution sought to ensure that the U.S. would have the capacity to honor valid treaties.  Thus, the Constitution expressly makes treaties part of the “supreme law of the land;” the Art. III federal judicial power expressly extends to cases arising under treaties, to ensure their effective enforcement; the states are expressly denied power to enter into treaties; and the states are also denied power to enter into international compacts without congressional consent.

In addition, the Constitutional Convention explicitly debated but rejected the proposal to  limit the subject matter of treaties into which the U.S. could enter, because of the view that the U.S. needed to have the power to decide over time the subject on which it would be desirable to enter into treaties to promote the  interests of the U.S.  Moreover, the Founding Era is overflowing with statements and positions that express the necessity and importance of the Constitution enabling the U.S. to honor its treaty commitments.   As just one brief glimpse, here is what Federalist Papers #22 (by Hamilton) has to say:

 The treaties of the United States, under the present Constitution [of the Confederation], are liable to the infractions of thirteen different legislatures, and as many different courts of final jurisdiction, acting under the authority of those legislatures. The faith, the reputation, the peace of the whole Union, are thus continually at the mercy of the prejudices, the passions, and the interests of every member of which it is composed. Is it possible that foreign nations can either respect or confide in such a government? Is it possible that the people of America will longer consent to trust their honor, their happiness, their safety, on so precarious a foundation.

This brief account of the historical problems and context against which the Constitution was crafted is necessary to set the stage for considering Nick’s approach to the “treaty problem.”

Yet pushing back against all this history and original understanding is the kind of intuition or anxiety that fuel’s Nick’s argument and related ones that have arisen throughout U.S. history:  if no limit on the treaty power and related national powers exists, can’t the national government subvert the federal/state balance of power that the Constitution also works so hard to establish?  To make this concrete, let’s assume Congress does not have the legislative power to abolish the death penalty in the states.  If the U.S. then enters into a treaty on this subject, can Congress now legislate to abolish the death penalty?  Or, to take the issue in Bond itself, if Congress would not otherwise have the power to regulate an individual’s possession and use of toxic chemicals, can Congress gain this power as a means of implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention?

The issue takes on even more heightened stakes with the rise of human rights treaties the U.S. has signed in the post-WWII era.  If Congress would not otherwise have the power to legislate in these areas, can it do so as a means of implementing these treaties?   These questions illustrate the tension or puzzle or conundrum about the treaty power.

This post has gone on long enough in providing the historical perspective needed to assess Nick’s argument.  In subsequent posts, I will offer my reasons for not being persuaded by Nick’s approach to the treaty power.  I will then suggest some alternative approaches.

I will be talking about The Subjects of the Constitution and The Objects of the Constitution on Monday, January 14th. The first talk is for the Boalt Hall (Berkeley) Chapter of the Federalist Society, 12:45-2:00pm. The second is for the San Francisco Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society, at Sheppard Mullin, 4 Embarcadero Center, 17th Floor, 6:15-7:30pm.

“Everyone loves money. That is why they call it MONEY.” – David Mamet.

The trillion-dollar coin is a proposal to avoid the debt ceiling through a loophole in a federal statute that authorizes the U.S. Mint to coin platinum in any denomination. Platinum is reserved for commemorative issues, and the obscure statutory provision was certainly not intended by Congress to authorize the effective borrowing of a trillion dollars, but as a statutory matter, the trillion dollar coin may work.

I have not examined the matter too closely, but at least one constitutional question pops up here.

Congress is authorized to “coin money.” The proposed trillion-dollar coin is certainly a coin – but is it money? Money is created for circulation. As Justice Story put it in his Commentary on the constitution, the power to coin money is designed to “preserve a proper circulation of good coin of a known value.” Vol. 2, § 1118. That is why it is put into the convenient form of coins or bills. Specie never intended for circulation, one might argue, is simply not money.

The link between circulation and coinage has been noted by courts, though obviously nothing has been decided, at least as far as my brief inquiry revealed. Veazie Bank v. Fenno, 75 U.S. 533 (1869) (“It cannot be doubted that under the constitution the power to provide a circulation of coin is given to congress.”)

Let us turn to the dictionaries. “Money” is “metal coined for public use,” according to the 1788 edition of William Perry’s The royal standard English dictionary. This may lead to a debate about what a “public use” is, reminscent of the “general welfare” question in the Spending power. I would guess it means “use by the public,” a view supported by “Metal coined for the purposes of commerce,” according to the 1789 edition of Sheridan’s Complete dictionary of the English language.

There are of course many potential rejoinders (aside from the possibility that the money/circulation property is specious.) The transfer to Treasury could be deemed circulation, but this I think weak. More seriously, one would point out that all non-circulating commemorative coins would thus be unconstitutional. OK – but has any court said that they are constitutional? Apparently the making of such coins did not begin until 1892, so as an originalist matter, their long-standing existence does not prove much. Presumably no one ever had reason to make issue over their issue. And not all commemoratives are non-circulating.

In any case, I doubt this proposal will gain currency with President. He has previously dismissed the constitutional legitimacy of formalistic gimmicks and “procedural tricks,” like the Senate declaring itself in session to avoid recess appointments. Back them, the White House counsel said that since the Senate was “functionally” in recess, that is what counts. Presumably here they will see that this is “functionally” a money supply policy not authorized by Congress in evasion of a debt ceiling that was.

UPDATE: I have amended this a bit shortly after posting it.

Rob Natelson explains in this essay, which points of some of Seidman’s major historical errors about the Founding Era and constitutional history.

Georgetown’s Louis Michael Seidman, author of On Constitutional Disobedience has an NYT op-ed (noted in the comments to Orin’s open thread) calling for ignoring the Constitution — or at least those parts that he does not like.

As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions. . . .

Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago. . . .

If even this change is impossible, perhaps the dream of a country ruled by “We the people” is impossibly utopian. If so, we have to give up on the claim that we are a self-governing people who can settle our disagreements through mature and tolerant debate. But before abandoning our heritage of self-government, we ought to try extricating ourselves from constitutional bondage so that we can give real freedom a chance.

As commenters in the open thread have already noted, the Constitution itself provides for its own revision to cure deficiencies: Article V. This amendment process has allowed for dramatic changes to the document, from the Bill of Rights and the Civil War Amendments to women’s suffrage and changes to election procedures.

Seidman cites what he characterizes as a proud history of “constitutional disobedience” to suggest that ignoring the document would be all to the good, suggesting that the country would be better off if political disputes about everything from budgetary policy to military conflict were merely debated on the policy merits. Yet Seidman conspicuously ignores the various policy measures throughout our nation’s history that would have remained the law of the land were it not for the Constitution, including numerous restrictions on the freedom of speech and the detention policies struck down by the Court in Boumediene.

Seidman suggests that liberal constitutional values such as the freedom of speech and religion, equal protection, and due process “are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution” and that “we should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.” But our political history shows quite clearly that the political process is more than willing to trample such principles, often with substantial popular support even with a constitutional obligation to respect. Yet the whole point of a constitution is to prevent such abuses and constrain popular majorities.

Seidman writes that if we followed his advice: “The Supreme Court could stop pretending that its decisions protecting same-sex intimacy or limiting affirmative action were rooted in constitutional text.” So supreme court opinions would be nothing more than policy briefs and appeals to moral principle? It seems to me that is a recipe for undermining the legitimacy of judicial review and ultimately relegating all such questions to the political process — and producing quite a few results I doubt Seidman would much like (e.g. greater limits on expression, lesser protection of criminal defendants, and more expansive national security authority). There are reasonable arguments for constraining (or even eliminating) judicial review — I don’t agree with them, but I think they are reasonable — but I don’t take that to be Seidman’s argument. To the contrary, he seems to want to keep judicial review, but just for those constitutional provisions he likes, but that’s hardly the basis for a principled argument for “constitutional disobedience,” as such.

Of course the constitution doesn’t settle all questions, and wouldn’t even if everyone accepted the same approach to constitutional interpretation. Our understanding of the Constitution changes over time, even if the document itself does not (other than when we amend it). Seidman is correct that a constitutional order such as ours depends upon “entrenched institutions and habits of thought and . . . the sense that we are one nation and must work out our differences.” But that does not mean that the Constitution itself serves no role, or that lessening constitutional constraints on government action is desirable or beneficial. The Constitution is not perfect — far from it. But Seidman’s op-ed does not convince me we’d be better off to disregard it.

National Review has posted an on-line symposium in honor of Judge Robert Bork, the great legal scholar and jurist who passed away today. Here is an excerpt from my contribution:

Judge Robert Bork was an outstanding legal scholar and jurist. It is often forgotten that he first became prominent thanks to his path-breaking work on antitrust law and economics in the 1960s and ’70s. In this area, he made major advances that have become conventional wisdom for scholars across the political spectrum....

Bork’s theories on constitutional law are far more controversial. Nonetheless, he undeniably made a major contribution to the defense of originalism. He played a key role in bringing it from the margins of legal thought to the center....

In his later years, Bork ran into two contradictions that bedevil conservative legal and political thought more generally. The first is the tension between originalism and judicial deference to the democratic process. In many cases, enforcing the original meaning of the Constitution requires imposing tight constraints on legislative and executive power.... Second, Bork advocated extensive government regulation and “censorship” (his word) of the culture, without considering the possibility that this form of government intervention is often prone to the same pitfalls that he had earlier identified in government economic regulation.

The controversy over his 1987 Supreme Court nomination and the continuing ideological divide over judicial review make it difficult to objectively assess Judge Bork’s legacy. In the long run, however, I think he will be remembered for his important contributions to legal thought — even by those who, like myself, disagreed with many of his conclusions.

I previously wrote about Judge Bork’s legal and political thought (mostly focusing on the differences between us) here and here, and in this 2008 article for a symposium on Bork’s work. Readers of those pieces will see that I have many reservations about Bork’s ideas. Nonetheless, he was a giant of late 20th century legal thought, and will be remembered as such. The fact that we are still debating his work decades after his most influential books and articles were published is in itself a major testament to his significance.

I only briefly met Judge Bork. For that reason, I have focused these reflections on his legal and political thought rather than my very limited personal impressions of the man. But I would like to take this opportunity to extend condolences to Judge Bork’s family, friends, and professional colleagues, some of whom may perhaps be readers of this blog.

UPDATE: The symposium also includes a good contribution by co-blogger Jonathan Adler.

My review of Michael Greve’s important new book, The Upside-Down Constitution is about to be published in Constitutional Commentary, and is now available on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Michael Greve’s The Upside-Down Constitution is one of the most important works on constitutional federalism in years. It is the best exposition to date of the idea that the American Constitution establishes a federal system primarily devoted to promoting competition between state governments. It is also probably the most comprehensive critique of the traditional view that federalism is really about promoting the interests of state governments. As Greve recognizes, state governments rarely want to compete, often preferring to establish cartels among themselves.

Greve praises the original Constitution for creating an effective system of interstate competition and the nineteenth and early twentieth century Supreme Court for enforcing it. But he warns that the system has broken down over the last eighty years, replacing competition with cartels and what he considers to be dysfunctional empowerment of state governments. He argues that American federalism has now reached a crisis point from which we must either restore some of its earlier, more competitive, structure, or face a decline similar to those that have beset several other federal systems

In Part I, I describe Greve’s argument, focusing especially on the ways in which it enhances our understanding of the history of constitutional federalism. Part II addresses a potential internal contradiction in Greve’s position. While he emphasizes the need for the judiciary to enforce a competitive regime and recognizes that the federal government often has incentives to promote cartelization, he endorses a broad interpretation of congressional authority under the Commerce Clause and the Spending Clause which effectively gives Congress a blank check to suppress competition in ways he deplores.

Part III briefly considers a second tension in Greve’s analysis. Greve pins his hopes on originalism as the best possible way to restore a competitive federalist Constitution. While he argues that the original Constitution establishes a competitive structure, he also recognizes that the Founders paid little attention to interstate mobility and competition. These two positions are not completely irreconcilable. But they are more difficult to square than Greve sometimes allows.

NOTE: The editors of Constitutional Commentary invited me to review this book before Michael Greve accepted a position at George Mason University School of Law, where I also teach. When Greve accepted GMU’s offer, I informed the editors of this possible conflict of interest. We agreed that I could proceed with the review, so long as we included a note addressing the issue.