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Constitutional law in social choice perspective

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Abstract

Constitutional scholars do not typically employ spatial reasoning in their work. And yet, constitutional jurisprudence and much work in judicial politics implicitly rest on assumptions best cast in spatial terms. These include assuming that positions in constitutional disputes, and the views of Supreme Court justices, generally lie along a common liberal-to-conservative ideological dimension. Although the single dimension assumption is often appropriate, it suffers inherent limitations. First, Supreme Court decision-making rules, both within and across cases, expose problems of dimensionality. Second, important substantive doctrines likewise reveal dimensionality. Third, and finally, throughout the Supreme Court’s history, positions deemed liberal (or conservative) in one period have emerged as conservative (or liberal) in a later period, suggesting that dimensionality is a persistent feature in our jurisprudential history. Social choice proves uniquely suited to explaining these important aspects of constitutional law. After briefly introducing the discipline of constitutional law and its relationship to social choice, this article offers three illustrations of how social choice analysis deepens our understanding of important substantive areas. The analysis exposes dimensionality within Supreme Court decision-making rules, within separation-of-powers doctrine, and over historical shifts in the liberal and conservative valence of once-prominent jurisprudential positions. Failing to appreciate dimensionality, which lies at the core of social choice theory, when studying the Supreme Court and constitutional law risks a truly one-dimensional understanding of a richer and multidimensional institution and body of doctrine.

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Notes

  1. I am setting aside those rules deemed Condorcet consistent; see Tideman (2006). Those rules tend to divide over two sub-rules, one that meets the Condorcet criterion, and one that chooses a default outcome in the event of a cycle. For a related discussion, see Stearns (2002, pp. 46–49).

  2. Justice O’Connor expressed a similar insight in relying on the Commerce Clause and the Tenth Amendment to strike down a federal statute coercing state legislatures to either enact a self-sufficiency provision for low level radioactive waste or to take title of offending waste; see New York v. United States (1992, pp. 176–177): “This line of reasoning, however, only underscores the critical alternative that a State lacks: A State may not decline to administer the federal program.” Like Congress but unlike appellate courts, state legislatures have the power of inertia.

  3. Only 4 of the Constitution’s 27 amendments overturn Supreme Court decisions. See US Constitution (amend. XI), limiting suits against the states and overturning Chisholm v. Georgia (1793); US Constitution (amend. XIV), granting citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the US and overturning Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857); US Constitution (amend. XVI), allowing the income tax and overturning Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. (1895); US Constitution (amend. XXVI), lowering the voting age to 18 and overturning Oregon v. Mitchell (1970).

  4. Although rare, prominent illustrations include Brown v. the Board of Education (1954), overruling Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), and West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937), overruling Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923), thus ending the era of Lochner v. New York (1905).

  5. This ruling was later extended to include the power to strike down state laws that violate the Constitution. See, e.g., Cohens v. Virginia, 19 US 264 (1821).

  6. Not entirely: Kenneth Arrow (1963) followed the discovery of a mathematical error in Kenneth Arrow (1951), but the efforts to disprove Arrow’s later proof were unavailing. For a discussion of the error and Arrow’s revision, see Stearns (2002, pp. 344–345 n. 91). In this article, with a minor exception involving range, I employ the definitions set out in William Vickrey, as presented by Dennis Mueller (Vickrey 1960, 1997, pp. 29, 107, 139, 142; Mueller 2003). For an explanation, including a comparison to Arrow’s original and revised proofs, see Stearns (2002, pp. 344–45 n. 91, 346–47 n. 104, 347–48 n. 112).

  7. Glassman et al. (2011, p. i) state that the average tenure of a Senator in the last three Congresses has been just over 13 years, and the average tenure of a member of the House of Representatives has been approximately 10 years.

  8. Portions of the analysis that follows are based on Stearns (2002, pp. 97–157).

  9. For a discussion and critique of proposals to change the Supreme Court’s voting rules from outcome to issue voting, see Stearns and Zywicki (2009, pp. 447–451). Such proposals would have spillover effects not only in the narrow category of cases for which they are targeted—category 3—but also, as a result of preference endogeneity, in categories, including 1 and 2, which do not presently pose aggregation difficulties.

  10. A notable illustration of the exception: Bush v. Gore (2000). For a general discussion, see Abramowicz and Stearns (2001), discussing how alternative voting protocols might have affected the voting path despite the majority opinion.

  11. These approaches include simply voting on a per-issue basis, at least when the issues divide “vertically” but not “horizontally” (Post and Salop 1996); voting on whether to decide via issue or outcome (Kornhauser and Sager 1993); or applying issue voting to questions of law and outcome voting to questions of fact (Nash 2003). Judge John Rogers and I have opposed these proposed voting protocols, albeit on different grounds (Rogers 1996, pp. 449–460; Stearns 1996).

  12. For a discussion of other cases that thwart the dimensionality assumption of the narrowest grounds rule, see Stearns (2002, pp. 97–156), collecting and analyzing cases.

  13. Portions of the discussion that follow are based on Stearns (1995a, b, 2002, 2008a, b, 2013).

  14. This discussion focuses on constitutional, rather than statutory, standing. Although traditionally the Court generally afforded Congress substantial latitude to broaden standing by statute, in the 1992 decision, Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, the Court for the first time held that claimants relying on a broad citizen-standing provision in a federal environmental statute had to demonstrate linkage between a claimed personal injury and the alleged legal violation similar to common-law notions of injury. For a discussion of the competing separation of powers premises of Lujan and Allen v. Wright, see Stearns (2013).

  15. The discussion in this paragraph borrows from the analysis in Stearns (1994).

  16. This hypothetical was adapted from New York v. United States (1992).

  17. Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942). This decision precedes the Warren Court but establishes the framework for many of the equal protection-based individual rights vindicated in that era.

  18. Sunstein (1988, p. 1437) writes: “Such doctrines were used enthusiastically by judges associated with the progressive movement, and the New Deal, most prominently Justices Brandeis and Frankfurter, who reflected the prevailing belief that traditional conceptions of the rule of law were incompatible with administrative regulation;” see also Stearns (2008a, pp. 888–891), describing New Deal standing.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Todd Zywicki for helpful comments, and Sue McCarty for excellent library support.

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Correspondence to Maxwell L. Stearns.

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Prepared for the Public Choice Society Annual Meeting Plenary Session, New Orleans, LA, 7–10 March 2013.

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Stearns, M.L. Constitutional law in social choice perspective. Public Choice 163, 167–186 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-014-0216-9

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