Public Law from the Bottom Up

Public Law from the Bottom Up

PUBLIC LAW FROM THE BOTTOM UP WILLIAM N. ESKRIDGE, JR.* I. INTRODUCTION: LAW FROM THE BOTTOM UP ......... 142 A. Law Comes from the "Bottom Up," Not from the "Top Down" . ........................ 150 B. Positive Law is Not Neutral and Involves Strug- gle Among Competing Visions ................ 151 C. Official Choice of Law Does Not Necessarily Settle Matters ......................... 152 II. DOCTRINAL ILLUSTRATIONS OF LAW FROM THE BOTTOM U P .................................. 153 A. Statutory Interpretation (Job Discrimination)....... 153 B. Constitutional Law (Gender Discrimination) ...... 156 C. Tort Law (Cigarettes dnd the Anti-Smoking Cam- paign) ............................. 160 III. LAW AND POLITICAL CONSENSUS ............... 163 A. Statutory Interpretation (Griggs) .............. 170 B. Administrative Law (Chevron)............... 173 C. ConstitutionalLaw (Abortion)............... 177 IV. CONCLUDING NORMATIVE QUALMS .............. 179 * Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Visiting Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. B.A., Davidson College; M.A., Harvard University; J.D., Yale Univer- sity. This article is adapted from the West Virginia University College of Law, Edward G. Donley Memorial Lectures I delivered in March 1994. I am grateful to the Faculty of the College of Law for extending me this invitation and to Dean Teree Foster for hosting my stay and giving me excellent comments on the Lectures. This article has greatly benefit- ted from her comments and the questions posed by faculty and students at the Lectures. As a native West Virginian, I am honored by the chance to have developed the ideas in this article at my home state. William N. Eskridge, Jr. & Philip P. Frickey, The Supreme Court, 1993 Term - Foreword: Law as Equilibrium, 108 Harv. L. Rev. 27 (1994), explores related themes in connection with this year's Supreme Court cases. HeinOnline -- 97 W. Va. L. Rev. 141 1994-1995 WEST VIRGINIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 97:141 I. INTRODUCTION: LAW FROM THE BoTToM UP American public law has traditionally been understood as an insider's game. Within this understanding, law is following the rules laid down, particularly those laid down by the United States Supreme Court. Rig- orous legal analysis treats Supreme Court opinions as self-contained exercises to be understood or criticized from the inside - from the point of view of the Supreme Court Justices who write them. Thus, a turn-of-the-century formalist would try to situate a decision in the larger geometric unity of law, or might fault a decision for being in- consistent with precedent. Although the realists of the 1920s rejected this sort of analysis and more aggressively criticized the Court, they too read the cases through the eyes of the Court - albeit a Court fol- lowing a political or personal agenda. The legal process school of the 1950s was realist in understanding law as policy and formalist in eval- uating the Court through criteria such as reasoned elaboration, defer- ence, and coherence with neutral or authoritative principles. But like the formalists and the realists before them, legal process thinkers were insiders, viewing law from the perspective of the New Deal Presidency and Court. These three generations of differently disposed legal thinkers - the formalists, the realists, the legal process thinkers - shared a similar vision: law is something handed down to the populace by high officials following professional norms, and the citizenry is obligated to follow the rules simply because they are the rules handed down by the duly established mechanisms for handing down rules.' Let me be explicit about the assumptions of traditional law: 0 It is handed down by officials at the "top" to citizens below. We can call this the top-down assumption.2 1. See, e.g., Henry M. Hart, Jr. & Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Prob- lems in the Making and Application of Law 4-5 (William N. Eskridge, Jr. & Philip P. Frickey eds., 1994) (1958)); H. L. A. HART, THE CONCEPT OF LAW (1961). 2. As used in this article, the top-down, bottom-up terminology was first used in JACK KNiGHT, INSTtJTIONs AND SOCIAL CONFLICT (1992). The terminology is used in similar ways in Mar J. Matsuda, Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Repa- rations, 22 C.R.-C.L. L. REV. 323 (1987); Richard A. Posner, Legal Reasoning from the HeinOnline -- 97 W. Va. L. Rev. 142 1994-1995 1994] PUBLIC LAW FROM THE BOTTOM UP o Law can be criticized only from the inside. Grounds for criticism must be objective and potentially universal: Is the decision consistent with other decisions? Does it rest upon erroneous factual premises? Did it ignore the views of experts charged with solving such problems? This is the neutrality assumption of public law. o Our obligation to follow this law, its legitimacy, derives from criteria internal to law. Was the decision rendered by officials charged with making such decisions, and was it de- livered according to the regular procedures for making such decisions? This is the positivism assumption. This understanding of law makes less sense to the Baby Boom generation that came of age in the 1960s.' For most of us, "law" meant not just Brown v. Board of Education,4 the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared state-required school segregation inconsis- tent with the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, but also the private resistance to the de jure apartheid that Brown overthrew. The story of Brown illustrates the decline and fall of the top-down model of public law. Equally, it suggests the appeal of a model in which public law comes from the "bottom up," representing a political strug- gle among different "nomic" communities. The legal process generation, the most eminent legal thinkers of the 1950s, immediately praised Brown as a good decision and claimed it as one consistent with their strongly top-down vision of law. Justice Felix Frankfurter, a former law professor, blessed the decision with his acquiescence, and his acolytes (usually former law clerks) immediately spread the word that Frankfurter's strategizing within the Court had Top Down and from the Bottom Up: The Question of Unenumerated Constitutional Rights, 59 U. CHi. L. REv. 433 (1992). 3. Boomer critiques include ROBERT GORDON, LEGAL THOUGHT AND PRACTICE IN THE AGE OF AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, 1870-1920, in PROFESSIONS AND PROFESSIONAL IDEOL- OGIES IN AMERICA (G. Geison ed. 1983); Thomas Grey, Langdell is Orthodoxy, 45 U. PFrr L. REv. 1 (1983); Gary Peller, The Metaphysics of American Law, 73 CAL. L. REV. 1151 (1985). See also William N. Eskridge, Jr. & Gary Peller, The New Public Law Movement: Moderation as a Postmodern Cultural Form, 89 MICH. L. REv. 707 (1990). 4. 347 U.S. 483 (1954). HeinOnline -- 97 W. Va. L. Rev. 143 1994-1995 WEST VIRGJNLA LAWREVIEW [Vol. 97:141 enabled the decision to be unanimous.5 Henry Hart and Albert Sacks, who were then drafting their classic materials on The Legal Process,' lavishly praised Brown as reflecting a great and enduring "principle" of racial equality.7 Alexander Bickel adapted his memorandum on the history of the Equal Protection Clause, which he had written when he was law clerk for Frankfurter, into a dense and detailed article con- cluding that Brown was defensible from an historical point of view.' Paul Freund, Archibald Cox, and other scholars too numerous to men- tion hopped on the Brown Bandwagon.9 Notwithstanding this enthusiasm, some legal process thinkers un- derstood that Brown challenged their way of thinking. The most nota- ble skeptic was Herbert Wechsler, a professor at Columbia whose 1959 essay praised Brown as a decision he liked, but who wondered whether it was actually "law."' After all, Chief Justice Warren's opinion im- plicitly overruled several Supreme Court precedents and made no effort to defend the overrulings as supported by a textual interpretation of the Constitution or by the original discussions surrounding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. Given this default, the only defense of the decision, according to Wechsler, would be for the decision to rest upon some "neutral principle," through an opinion "resting with respect to 5. For a recent example of this from a former Frankfurter clerk particularly close to the Justice, see Philip Elman, The Solicitor General's Office, Justice Frankfurter, and Civil Rights Litigation, 1946-1960: An Oral History, 100 HARV. L. REV. 817 (1987). More bal- anced accounts include Mark Tushnet & Katya Lezin, What Really Happened in Brown v. Board of Education, 91 COLUM. L. REV. 1867 (1991); Dennis Hutchinson, Unanimity and Desegregation:Decisionmaking in the Supreme Court, 1954-1958, 68 GEO. L.J. 1 (1979). 6. Hart & Sacks, supra note 1. 7. See Albert M. Sacks, The Supreme Court, 1953 Term - Foreword, 68 HARV. L. REV. 96 (1954); Letter from Henry M. Hart, Jr., to Harry Wellington, Dec. 9, 1959, FRANKFURTER PAPERs, Harvard Law School Library, Box 187, Folder 20. 8. Alexander M. Bickel, The Original Understanding and the Segregation Decision, 69 HARV. L. REv. 1 (1955). 9. Paul Freund, Storm over the American Supreme Court, 21 MOD. L. REv. 345 (1958); Archibald Cox, The Supreme Court, 1965 Term - Foreward: Constitutional Adjudi- cation and the Promotion of Human Rights, 80 HARV. L. REV. 91 (1966). 10. Herbert Wechsler, Toward Neutral Principles of Constitutional Law, 73 HARV. L. REV. 1 (1959). Although Wechsler was virtually the only respectable law professor who was willing to question the "lawlikeness" of Brown, it is my judgment that his doubts were widely but silently shared among law professors. HeinOnline -- 97 W. Va. L. Rev. 144 1994-1995 1994] PUBLIC LAW FROM THE BOTTOM UP every step that is involved in reaching judgment on analysis and rea- sons quite transcending the immediate result that is achieved."" Under this criterion, Brown is questionable, Wechsler observed, in some much quoted analysis: [Brown] must have rested on the view that racial segregation is, in princi- ple, a denial of equality to the minority against whom it is directed ...

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