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For over a generation, constitutional theory and academic jurisprudence have attempted to reconcile, on the one hand, the rule of law and the Constitution’s fundamentality with, on the other hand, the fact that legal and constitutional rules frequently do not produce determinate answers to concrete controversies. The approach of radical democrats who would abandon judicial review is unacceptable to all those who believe that some judicially enforceable limits on politics are needed to prevent majoritarian tyranny. At the same time, however, constitutional theories that attempt to justify judicial review have limited utility; at best they strike a compromise between the tyranny of the majority and the counter-majoritarian difficulty. Academic jurisprudence faces a parallel dilemma. Under close scrutiny, both positivism and its principal alternative—Dworkin’s “law as integrity”—turn out to adopt the same strategy for coping with legal indeterminacy: Each claims that the law’s areas of ambiguity are small; yet neither theory nor any of the leading approaches to constitutionalism proposes concrete measures to minimize the impact of legal indeterminacy.

Drawing inspiration from the Legal Process approach of Hart and Sacks, this Article proposes that instead of devising justifications for judicial review or explanations of the task of judges, theorists would do better to design institutions that reduce the domain of legal indeterminacy. Where Hart and Sacks proposed deference to politically accountable actors, however, this Article advocates deep collaboration with the other institutions of government. Departing from the Legal Process assumption that courts must defer to one of a fixed menu of institutions, this Article develops a model of “experimentalist” courts and agencies that are always in transition. This model is based in part on the explosive emergence of “problem-solving courts,” nominally judicial bodies that are more akin to decentralized administrative agencies than to conventional adjudicators. The model is also based on some hints in Supreme Court doctrine that suggest a role for appellate courts in using the opportunity of legal indeterminacy to create the preconditions for local deliberation about the content of legal norms.

Supreme Court doctrine grants special protection against laws that “chill” protected speech, most prominently via the overbreadth doctrine. The overbreadth doctrine permits persons whose own speech is unprotected to challenge laws that infringe the protected speech of third parties. The Court has not generally applied overbreadth and the other speech-protective doctrines to other constitutional rights even though other rights could also be subject to a chilling effect. The case law simply assumes that the chilling effect only acts on the exercise of speech, and that this justifies treating speech differently from other rights.

We tested these assumptions with respect to abortion rights. By comparing abortion rates with state laws over a two-decade-plus period, we found a statistically significant correlation between laws forbidding late-term abortions and the reduction of not only late-term but also “near-late-term” abortions, i.e., abortions in the roughly one month before the period in which abortions are forbidden. That effect persists even after controlling for potentially confounding variables, such as the number of abortion providers and pro-life public opinion. Moreover, the effect is not limited to the year of enactment or associated with failed policy initiatives, suggesting that the impact is due to the law itself rather than associated publicity. These findings are consistent with, and strongly suggestive of, a chilling effect on abortion providers and/or women seeking abortions. This result undermines the implicit assumption that the chilling effect is unique to laws regulating speech and vindicates the general proposition that laws can chill the exercise of constitutional rights beyond their literal coverage.