Vanderbilt Law Review Volume 74 Issue 3 April 2021 Article 5 4-2021 Advisory Opinions and the Problem of Legal Authority Christian R. Burset Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vlr Part of the Judges Commons, and the Jurisprudence Commons Recommended Citation Christian R. Burset, Advisory Opinions and the Problem of Legal Authority, 74 Vanderbilt Law Review 621 (2021) Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vlr/vol74/iss3/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Vanderbilt Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Vanderbilt Law Review by an authorized editor of Scholarship@Vanderbilt Law. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Advisory Opinions and the Problem of Legal Authority Christian R. Burset* The prohibition against advisory opinions is fundamental to our understanding of federal judicial power, but we have misunderstood its origins. Discussions of the doctrine begin not with a constitutional text or even a court case, but a letter in which the Jay Court rejected President Washington’s request for legal advice. Courts and scholars have offered a variety of explanations for the Jay Court’s behavior. But they all depict the earliest Justices as responding to uniquely American concerns about advisory opinions. This Article offers a different explanation. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, it shows that judges throughout the anglophone world—not only in the United States but also in England and British India— became opposed to advisory opinions in the second half of the eighteenth century. The death of advisory opinions was a global phenomenon, rooted in a period of anxiety about common-law authority.