Volume 98, Number 5

Today’s Supreme Court is committed to originalism—the idea that the Constitution’s meaning is fixed at ratification. But it often rests decisions on the post-ratification practices of other actors—Presidents, Congresses, or states. Call this method “living traditionalism”: “traditionalist” because it looks to political traditions, and “living” because the traditions postdate ratification. The method is ubiquitous but undertheorized, in part because its distinctness from “liquidation”—a variant of traditionalism that is indeed consistent with originalism, but that rarely drives any cases—has not been understood.

This Article offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Court’s living traditionalism, which includes scores of cases spanning every subject and Justices of every stripe. Next, the Article identifies a fundamental but previously unrecognized tension in the method itself: If the Court gives living-traditionalist cases full weight as precedent, it defeats the reasons for using the method at all. Put another way, it is incoherent to treat political practices as a ratchet: capable of moving law in one direction (e.g., against a right in 2022) but not the other (in favor of the right later on). Yet the Court is at risk of doing that, making constitutional law turn on accidents of history: whatever practices happened to exist when the Court first addressed an issue. Finally, the Article proposes solutions to this predicament. Where the Court does not simply retreat from living traditionalism, it should write living-traditionalist rulings so that they expire when practices change, or else modify stare decisis to make these cases easier to overturn. These solutions would have to be paired with a resolve on the part of political actors to manifest any rejection of practice-based holdings in ways that courts could heed when the issue next arose in litigation. I review several “hard” and “soft” law means of doing so that the case law itself invests with constitutional significance. By these means, politics could shape sundry individual-rights and separation-of-powers doctrines. Absent such reforms, the Court’s application of living traditionalism will prove increasingly at odds with the democratic and other rationales for using the method at all.

The Supreme Court’s new religious liberty jurisprudence has dramatically expanded the circumstances in which religious objectors can claim exemption from general legislative enactments. Thus far, most of the claimants who’ve taken advantage of these doctrinal innovations have been conservative Christians seeking to avoid liberal policy initiatives (on matters like COVID-19 restrictions, vaccines, or LGBTQ inclusion). This emerging jurisprudence, as well as the rhetoric from legal and political elites regarding religious liberty, has generally acceded to the conflation of religiosity with conservatism. Liberal Jews challenge this conflation, as they offer an example of a religious community whose spiritual commitments tend to align with progressive rather than conservative politics.

Nominally, the new religious liberty doctrine should also provide protections to more liberal Jewish denominations that may seek relief from conservative statutory enactments, such as restrictive abortion laws following Dobbs. Assuming that this outcome is undesirable for conservative legal elites, the question for them becomes how to justify locking liberal Jews out while ensuring conservative Christians remain protected. To this end, jurists may find tempting a modern version of Christian supersessionism—the claimed entitlement of Christians to authoritatively declare who and what truly counts as Jewish. An ascendent form of antisemitism, increasingly mainstream in conservative political circles, insists that authentic Judaism is only that which is compatible with conservative Christian commitments, and so seeks to delegitimize liberal Jews (which is to say, most Jews) as not counting as actual Jews. Where this delegitimization is successful, seemingly blatant exclusion, marginalization, or hatred of (most) Jews can be removed from the ambit of religious liberty or antisemitism, since the targets are not recognized as religious Jews in the first place, and so cannot claim access to the expansive protections given to religious practitioners.

Using a series of surveys and experiments, we find that ordinary people think that courts will give them exactly what they bargained for after breach of contract; in other words, specific performance is the expected contractual remedy. This expectation is widespread even for the diverse array of deals where the legal remedy is traditionally limited to money damages. But for a significant fraction of people, the focus on
equity seems to be a naïve belief that is open to updating. In the studies reported here, individuals were less likely to anticipate specific performance when they were briefly introduced to the possibility that courts sometimes award damages in contract disputes.

We argue that the default expectation of equitable relief is a widespread but malleable intuition—and that even a fragile legal intuition has practical consequences, individually and systemically. In a follow-up experiment, we show that subjects are more interested in the prospect of efficient breach when they know
that money damages are a possible remedy. This finding suggests that the mismatch between what people assume the law will do (specific performance) and what it actually does (money damages) sometimes encourages performance. We consider the potential for exploitation of this tendency. Finally, we offer some suggestions about how scholars of law and psychology should elicit folk beliefs about legal rules and remedies.

Bankruptcies now dominate mass-tort litigation. Defendants file for bankruptcy because the class action and multi-district litigation devices have failed to deliver parties meaningful finality, and new legal tools—nondebtor releases, complex claims-processing schemes, and the Texas Two-Step—have made bankruptcy a more attractive forum for resolving mass-tort liabilities. Troublingly, litigants, courts, and scholars struggle to consistently evaluate a reorganization plan’s legitimacy. This Note takes a novel approach, arguing federal preclusion law and due process principles of exit, voice, and loyalty provide the best framework for evaluating a mass-tort bankruptcy. Bankruptcy resolutions are generally “otherwise consistent” with due process because they substitute claimants’ exit rights for voice rights. Whether a reorganization plan violates due process depends not on the formal legal tools mass-tort debtors deploy but on whether those tools infringe upon claimants’ voice rights or undermine aggregate litigation’s core goals of finality and equitable redress. This Note concludes that bankruptcy remains a valuable forum for resolving complex mass-tort crises and identifies several cases that can guide future stakeholders.

The role of stare decisis in constitutional law is a ubiquitous one. It shows up almost everywhere, leaving controversy and chaos in its wake. Yet despite the prominence of stare decisis, its jurisprudence remains perpetually unsettled. The Supreme Court identifies several factors that affect the strength of prior precedent. However, these factors are not consistently defined or even wholly agreed upon. How can something as crucial as the law of stare decisis have such scattered precedents? Something more, something deeper, is going on here. A hint of this deeper issue comes out in contentious cases like Payne v. Tennessee, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, where the Justices speak to or acknowledge democratic disagreement and its effect on the Supreme Court’s legitimacy. But to understand these cases as the Court simply confronting its own legitimacy, while partly correct, is much too narrow. A closer inspection of these opinions reveals more than just a simple debate about democratic disagreement. It is a debate about what role democratic disagreement should play in stare decisis and, therefore, in the Supreme Court as an institution. Thus, it is no wonder that stare decisis, as a doctrine, is unsettled. Stare decisis has become the battleground for America’s oldest contest: departmentalism or judicial supremacy.

This Note argues that stare decisis is much better understood when one analyzes the doctrine in connection with the broader discussions surrounding departmentalism and judicial supremacy. In doing so, this Note develops in three Parts. Part I examines the necessary background of stare decisis and its relationship to interbranch conflict. Part II surveys the three cases of Payne, Casey, and Dobbs, paying particular attention to how the Justices in these cases are, in truth, guided by their views of departmentalism or judicial supremacy. Part III further highlights the relationship between disputes over stare decisis and departmentalism versus judicial supremacy and provides the reader with a potential theoretical framework to explicitly incorporate the concept of departmentalism within precedent. Departmentalism and judicial supremacy will forever be negotiated. Ultimately, in stare decisis, a home has been found for this great American debate.