Volume 84, Number 1

The proper duration of legislation has become highly controversial as a result of the enactment of many temporary tax laws during the George W. Bush administration. The prevailing view is that inclusion of an expiration date or “sunset” feature in legislation permits the cost of the legislation to be misrepresented and allows its proponents to escape the discipline intended by the congressional budget process. Under this view, fiscal discipline is preserved through enactment of so-called permanent legislation.

This Article challenges that view and shows that, barring estimation error, the legislative process accounts completely for the costs of “temporary-effect” legislation but not permanent legislation. Consequently, enactment of temporary-effect rather than permanent legislation would promote more political accountability and may result in greater fiscal restraint. In addition, when temporary-effect legislation expires, the legislative process fully takes into account the cost of any extension. Extension of such legislation, therefore, competes with, and potentially displaces, adoption of other legislation. By contrast, the cost of continuing permanent programs largely disappears in the legislative process, and therefore continuation of such programs produces little or no crowding-out effect. This Article also addresses whether other features of the legislative process could overcome the problems associated with the budget accounting of permanent legislation and responds to criticisms of temporary-effect legislation.

Few pretrial motions in our civil justice system elicit as much controversy as those for the certification of class actions. This Article offers the first account of the challenges courts face today in light of an important series of federal appellate decisions that direct the district courts to resolve competing expert submissions on the class certification question during the pretrial stage, even when the dispute overlaps with the merits of the litigation.

Across broad swaths of class action litigation today, plaintiffs rely on aggregate proof—evidence, typically of an economic or statistical nature, that presupposes the cohesiveness of the aggregate unit for litigation and, from that perspective, seeks to reveal quantitatively a common wrong attributable to the defendant. Debates over the proper role of aggregate proof arise in what otherwise might seem disparate disputes over class certification across securities, antitrust, Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), and employment discrimination litigation. Too often, however, courts have taken at face value the evidentiary form that aggregate proof assumes in motions for class certification.

This Article urges a new conceptualization of the challenges in class certification facing courts today. The real question about aggregate proof in class certification is not one that speaks to the relationship between the court and the factfinder in the (usually hypothetical) event of a class-wide trial. Rather, the institutional relationship that really matters is the one between the court and the legislature as expositors of governing law. Properly understood, aggregate proof frequently offers not so much a contested view of the facts but, more fundamentally, a contested account of governing law—one eminently suited for judicial resolution and appellate correction de novo, without concern about possible intrusion into the role of the factfinder.

This Article exposes how renewed attention to the judicial duty to “say what the law is” can lend coherence to the law of class certification, offering the first extended assessment of such controversial recent litigation as the civil RICO class action against the tobacco industry in connection with its marketing of light cigarettes and the employment discrimination class action—the largest certified class in history— against Wal-Mart concerning the pay and promotion of its hourly female employees. The Article concludes by relating the analysis of class certification tolarger changes in the civil justice system that seek in various ways to address the reality of settlement, rather than trial, as the endgame of litigation.

Critical analysis of originalism should start by confronting a modest puzzle: Most commentators suppose that originalism is deeply controversial, while others complain that it means too many things to mean anything at all. Is one of these views false? If not, how can we square the term’s ambiguity with the sense that it captures a subject of genuine debate? Perhaps self-professed originalists champion a version of originalism that their critics don’t reject, while the critics challenge a version that proponents don’t maintain.

Contemporary originalists disagree about many things: which feature of the Constitution’s original character demands fidelity (framers’ intent, ratifiers’ understanding, or public meaning); why such fidelity is required; and whether this interpretive obligation binds judges alone or citizens, legislators, and executive officials too. But on one dimension of potential variability—the dimension of strength—originalists are mostly united: They believe that those who follow some aspect of a provision’s original character must give that original aspect priority over all other considerations (with a possible exception for continued adherence to non- originalist judicial precedents). That is, when the original meaning (or intent, etc.) is adequately discernible, the interpreter must follow it. This is the thesis that self- professed originalists maintain and that their critics (the non-originalists) deny.

Non-originalists have challenged this thesis on varied wholesale grounds, which include: that the target of the originalist search is undiscoverable or nonexistent; that originalism is self-refuting because the framers intended that the Constitution not be interpreted in an originalist vein; and that originalism yields bad outcomes. This Article proceeds differently. Instead of mounting a global objection—one purporting to hold true regardless of the particular arguments on which proponents of originalism rely—I endeavor to catalogue and critically assess the varied arguments proffered in originalism’s defense.

Those arguments are of two broad types—hard and soft. Originalism is “hard” when grounded on reasons that purport to render it (in some sense) inescapably true; it is “soft” when predicated on contingent and contestable weighings of its costs and benefits relative to other interpretive approaches. That is, hard arguments seek to show that originalism reflects some sort of conceptual truth or follows logi- cally from premises the interlocutor already can be expected to accept; soft arguments aim to persuade others to revise their judgments of value or their empirical or predictive assessments. The most common hard arguments contend that originalism is entailed either by intentionalism or by binding constitutionalism. Soft arguments claim that originalist interpretation best serves diverse values like democracy and the rule of law. I seek to show that the hard arguments for originalism are false and that the soft arguments are implausible.

The upshot is not that constitutional interpretation should disregard framers’ intentions, ratifiers’ understandings, or original public meanings. Of course we should care about these things. But originalism is a demanding thesis. We can take the original character of the Constitution seriously without treating it as dispositive. That original intents and meanings matter is not enough to render originalism true.

A new approach to national interpretations of international law suggests that, to be successful, national courts must engage in flexible, culturally conscious translations of international norms. Transitional justice projects, however, pose a challenge to this approach. This Note proposes that when criminal prosecutions function as truth-seeking processes, the ability of domestic groups to influence how national courts interpret international law is heightened. In these instances, nonstate actors understandably attempt to capitalize on courts’ awareness of the critical role legal judgments play in engendering national reconciliation in order to secure favorable legal outcomes. Accordingly, courts have the challenge of adjudicating egregious human rights violations while also complying with the strict limitations of international criminal law. This Note suggests that the exigencies of transitional justice may lead national courts to issue interpretations that deviate from the existing body of international law. It examines this thesis through the lens of recent criminal prosecutions in Argentina for massive human rights violations during the Dirty War, in which a federal court greatly expanded the legal definition of genocide, contradicting long-standing international jurisprudence.

In 2005, Congress passed the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA), which gave federal courts jurisdiction over class actions with both minimal diversity and an amount in controversy exceeding $5 million. In the wake of CAFA, federal courts have struggled to formulate appropriate standards of proof when the defendant removes a class action to federal court and the plaintiff seeks to remand the case to state court. This Note argues that if a defendant looks to remove such a class action, it should have to demonstrate that the amount in controversy is met by a preponderance of the evidence—regardless of whether the plaintiff’s complaint requests a specific amount of damages. In addition, if a plaintiff wants to utilize either of CAFA’s “federalism exceptions” to federal jurisdiction, it should have the benefit of a rebuttable presumption that a class member’s state of residence is her state of citizenship. This two-part approach comes closest to effectuating the “balanced diversity” that Congress intended in CAFA.

In recent decades, states have exhibited remarkable leadership in environmental policy. This leadership is threatened by federal ceiling preemption, which prevents states from adopting regulations that exceed federal standards. While environmental law scholars have argued that the rise in federal ceiling preemption will undermine environmental policy, these critics have failed to take the arguments in favor of preemption seriously. Specifically, they have not addressed the risk that states may adopt tough environmental regulations because they can externalize costs to other states, or that a single, large, pro-regulatory state like California could effectively dictate excessively stringent national standards. This Note presents a more principled case against federal ceiling preemption in environmental law and contends that the cost-externalization argument’s practical application is limited. It illustrates this primarily through an extended case study of California’s regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles. The Note argues that state regulations that provide manufacturers with sufficient flexibility to meet standards without disrupting economies of scale can largely avoid externalizing costs to out- of-state consumers. It further contends that states may have to consider the interests of out-of-state producers when issuing regulations because, among other reasons, compliance costs will be partly internalized by in-state consumers and shareholders. The Note concludes that the merits of the cost-externalization argument must be carefully weighed against the benefits of decentralized policymaking in order to yield optimal environmental policy.