Due process traditionalism

Michigan Law Review

Volumn 106, Issue 8, 2008, Pages 1543-1570

  Sunstein, Cass R ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ASSISTED SUICIDE; HUMAN; JURISPRUDENCE; LEGAL ASPECT; PRIVACY; REVIEW; UNITED STATES;

HUMANS; PRIVACY; SUICIDE, ASSISTED; SUPREME COURT DECISIONS; UNITED STATES;

EID: 46649098929     PISSN: 00262234     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (132)

1. E.g., Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 720-21 (1997); Michael H. v. Gerald D., 491 U.S. 110, 122-24 (1989); Moore v. City of E. Cleveland, 431 U.S. 494, 503 (1977).
2. 521 U.S. at 720-21.
3. 198 U.S. 45, 76 (1.905) (Holmes, J., dissenting).
4. Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 1.65, 1.69 (1952) (quoting Malinski v. New York, 324 U.S. 401, 416-17 (1945)).
5. See supra notes 1, 3-4.
6. See Glucksberg, 52.1 U.S. at 723, 728.
7. See generally David A. Strauss, Common Law Constitutional Interpretation, 63 U. Cm. L. REV. 877 (1996) (proposing a common law approach, to constitutional interpretation).
8. Such a rule was suggested in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 854-55 (1992).
9. See Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 593 (2003) (Scalia, J., dissenting) (quoting Reno v. Flores, 507 U.S. 292, 303 (1993)). The full quotation - that a state regulation violates the Due Process Clause only when it "offends some principle of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental" - comes from Justice Cardozo's majority opinion in Snyder v. Massachusetts, 291 U.S. 97, 105 (1934).
10. See Lawrence, 539 U.S. at 586-92 (Scalia, J., dissenting). Of course it is true that due process traditionalists must come to terms with the Equal Protection Clause, which operates as a constraint on long-standing practices, such as discrimination on the basis of race. Due process traditionalists might well acknowledge the tradition-rejecting nature of the equal protection guarantee while also insisting that long-standing practices are the best guide to understanding the scope of substantive due process.
11. See id. at 571.-72 (majority opinion).
12. See Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 153-54 (1973).
13. 539 U.S. at 571-72.
14. Compare id. at 572 (rejecting exclusive use of tradition), with id. at 593-98 (Scalia, J., dissenting) (arguing that use of substantive due process should be disciplined by reference to tradition), and Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 720-21 (1997).
15. See, e.g., Raich v. Gonzales, No. 03-15481, 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 5834, at *34-40 (9th Cir. Mar. 14, 2007) (upholding a ban on use of marijuana by reference to tradition); Williams v. Morgan, 478 F.3d 1.316, 1322-23 (1.1th Cir. 2007) (upholding a ban on sexual devices by reference to tradition); see also Cook v. Rumsfeld, 429 F. Supp. 2d 385, 391.-96 (D. Mass. 2006) (upholding the U.S. Military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy but reflecting ambivalence about role of tradition in due process cases).
16. See Brian Hawkins, Note, The Glucksberg Renaissance: Substantive Due Process Since Lawrence v. Texas, 105 MICH. L. REV. 409, 426-27 (2006).
17. EDMUND BURKE, REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE (1790), reprinted in THE PORTABLE EDMUND BURKE 416 (Isaac Kramnick ed., 1999).
18. See F.A. Hayek, The Origins and Effects of Our Morals: A Problem for Science, Address at the Hoover Institution (Nov. 1, 1983), in THE ESSENCE OF HAYEK 318 (Chiaki Nishiyama & Kurt R. Leube eds., 1984); see also MICHAEL OAKESHOTT, Rationalism in Politics, in RATIONALISM IN POLITICS AND OTHER ESSAYS 1 (1962).
19. BURKE, supra note 17, at 451.
20. Hayek, supra note 18, at 321.
21. See JOHN HART ELY, DEMOCRACY AND DISTRUST 14-21 (1980).
22. See generally ADRIAN VERMEULE, JUDGING UNDER UNCERTAINTY (2006).
23. See Cass R. Sunstein, The Right to Die, 1.06 YALE L.J. 1123 (1996).
24. See Cass R. Sunstein, What Did Lawrence Hold? Of Autonomy, Desuetude, Sexuality, and Marriage, 2003 SUP. CT. REV. 27 (arguing that the Court would have done better to root its decision in equal protection, principles and that if the Due Process Clause was to be invoked, desuetude was a preferable approach).
25. See Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (Steel Seizure), 343 U.S. 579, 594-97 (1952) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
26. See Elk Grove Unified Sch. Dist. v. Newdow, 542 U.S. 1, 26-32 (2004) (Rehnquist, C.J., concurring).
27. See, e.g., Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677, 686-92 (2005) (plurality opinion).
28. I explore a Burkean approach in some detail in Cass R. Sunstein, Burkean Minimalism, 105 MICH. L. REV. 353 (2006). My goal there was to reconstruct, as sympathetically as possible, the nature and foundations of Burkean approaches to the Constitution; here I ask more critically whether that approach is proper for the Due Process Clause. For an especially illuminating discussion of these issues, see Adrian Vermeule, Common Law Constitutionalism and the Limits of Reason, 107 COLUM. L. REV. 1482 (2007).
29. BURKE, supra note 17, at 451.
30. Id.
31. Id. at 443.
32. Id. at 451.
33. Id. at 451-52.
34. See id. at 451.
35. See, e.g., JAMES SUROWIECKI, THE WISDOM OF CROWDS (2004).
36. See SCOTT E. PAGE, THE DIFFERENCE: HOW THE POWER OF DIVERSITY CREATES BETTER GROUPS, FIRMS, SCHOOLS, AND SOCIETIES (2007); SUROWIECKI, supm note 35, at xiii-xiv.
37. For a clear outline of the Jury Theorem, see William. P. Bottom, et al., Propagation of Individual Bias through Group Judgment: Error in the Treatment of Asymmetrically Informative Signals, 25 J. RISK & UNCERTAINTY 147, 152-54 (2002). For an illuminating account of the wisdom of crowds, or large groups of diverse people, that does not rely on the Jury Theorem, see PAGE, supra note 36.
38. For an overview, see CASS R. SUNSTEIN, INFOTOPIA: HOW MANY MINDS PRODUCE KNOWLEDGE (2006).
39. See generally PAGE, supra note 36; SUNSTEIN, supra note 38.
40. An ambitious version of this view can be found in RONALD DWORKIN, JUSTICE IN ROBES (2006). Contested moral or political arguments might seem to be avoidable if we could agree that the text of the clause forbids substantive due process, or if we conclude that the word "liberty" should be given content by reference to the original understanding. But the appearance is misleading. A controversial normative argument is needed on behalf of originalism, or of the view that the text should be taken to forbid substantive due process in light of many decades of decisions employing substantive due process.
41. There is extensive philosophical literature on this point. E.g., BERNARD WILLIAMS, MORALITY (1972); see also JOHN RAWLS, A THEORY OF JUSTICE (1971) (giving an account of reflective equilibrium).
42. I am grateful to Adrian Vermeule for pressing this point.
43. See Vermeule, supra note 28, at 1506-10.
44. See id.
45. See PAGE, supra note 36, at 205-1.4 (showing that if individuals are especially inaccurate, group average will be inaccurate too, though number of group errors will be lower than individual errors if group is diverse).
46. MARQUIS DE CONDORCET, ESSAY ON THE APPLICATION OF MATHEMATICS TO THE THEORY OF DECISION-MAKING (1785), reprinted in CONDORCET: SELECTED WRITINGS 33, 62 (Keith Michael Baker ed., 1976).
47. BURKE, supra note 17, at 451.
48. See id. at 428.
49. For purposes of constitutional law, Condorcet's reference to "prejudice" suggests the possibility that the Equal Protection Clause might be used to test the question whether the tradition embeds discrimination.
50. It remains possible that tradition-rejecting initiatives will cause serious problems in authoritarian societies, simply because citizens will refuse to accept those initiatives. See JAMES C. SCOTT, SEEING LIKE A STATE 101-02 (1998). But this pragmatic argument addresses the difficulty in overturning traditions, not the wisdom of those traditions, and hence is not a point in favor of many minds traditionalism.
51. Of course there are complex questions here about the relationship between culture and law. Perhaps legal initiatives cannot succeed if they fit poorly with culture, at least if they cannot change culture. For an illuminating discussion, see id.
52. This point should be accepted even by those who seek to cabin the scope of the Equal. Protection Clause by rooting its requirements in the defining case of discrimination on the basis of race. Even if the domain of the Equal Protection Clause is narrow, it rejects practices of discrimination that have been time-honored.
53. Vermeule, supra note 28, at 1.3.
54. Id.
55. See Eric A. Posner & Cass R. Sunstein, The Law of Other States, 59 STAN. L. REV. 131, 160 (2006) (discussing the possibility that decisions of other U.S. states may be uninformative because of cascades).
56. See Sushil Bikhchandani et al., Learning from the Behavior of Others: Conformity, Fads, and Informational Cascades, 12 J. ECON. PERSP. 151, 167 (1998).
57. See Cristina Bicchieri & Yoshitaka Fukui, The Great Illusion: Ignorance, Informational Cascades, and the Persistence of Unpopular Norms, in EXPERIENCE, REALITY, AND SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION 89, 101 (Maria Carla Galavotti & Alessandro Pagnini eds., 1999). Of course moral judgments might well be a product of relevant information, in which case moral cascades are informational, cascades too.
58. STANLEY COHEN, FOLK DEVILS AND MORAL PANICS (3d. ed. Routledge 2002) (1972).
59. See Bicchieri & Fukui, supra note 57, at 104-05.
60. See David Hirshleifer, The blind leading the blind: Social influence, fads, and informational cascades, in THE NEW ECONOMICS OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR 188, 192 (Mariano Tommasi & Kathryn Ierulli eds., 1995).
61. See TIMUR KURAN, PRIVATE TRUTHS, PUBLIC LIES: THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF PREFERENCE FALSIFICATION 105-17 (1995); Bicchieri & Fukui, supra note 57, at 89.
62. See Gregory J. Moschetti, Individual Maintenance and Perpetuation of a Means/Ends Arbitrary Tradition, 40 SOCIOMETRY 78, 79 (1977).
63. See Vermeule, supra note 28.
64. See PAGE, supra note 36, at 197-235; SUNSTEIN, supra note 38, at 25-38.
65. See Hayek, supra note 18, at 324.
66. Id. at 321.
67. Id.
68. Id. at 322.
69. Id.
70. Id.
71. Id. at 324.
72. Ibid
73. Ibid
74. Id.
75. Id. at 325-26; see also OAKESHOTT, supra note 18.
76. Hayek, supra note 18, at 329.
77. Id.
78. See F.A. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society, 35 AM. ECON. REV. 519 (1945), reprinted in THE ESSENCE OF HAYEK, supra note 18, at 211.
79. See Edna Ullmann-Margalit, The Invisible Hand and the Cunning of Reason, 64 Soc. RES. 181 (1997).
80. See THE ADAPTED MIND: EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND THE GENERATION OF CULTURE (Jerome H. Barkow et al. eds., 1992).
81. This is one way to understand the striking finding in Michael Koenigs et al., Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgments, 446 NATURE 908, 909-1.0 (2007), which shows that those with certain kinds of brain damage are willing to smother a small child to save other people. It is plausible to think that, in light of this study, certain moral proscriptions are embedded in certain sectors of the brain and that if those sectors are damaged, moral judgments will take a different form. Natural selection might well account for moral prohibitions of multiple kinds.
82. Thus the line of decisions associated with Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905), might be defended on Hayekian grounds, at least to the extent that those decisions strike down legislation invalidating practices consistent with the evolved moral order. For Hayek's own views on these questions, see F.A. HAYEK, THE CONSTITUTION OF LIBERTY (1960).
83. See 1 F.A. HAYEK, LAW, LEGISLATION AND LIBERTY: RULES AND ORDER 22 (1973).
84. Cf. Ullmann-Margalit, supra note 79 (exploring uses and limits of invisible hand arguments).
85. See HAYEK, supra note 83, at 5-36.
86. The question is illuminatingly pressed in Ullmann-Margalit, supra note 79.
87. I put to one side questions about the relationship between welfare and efficiency. For such an inquiry, see MATTHEW D. ADLER & ERIC A. POSNER, NEW FOUNDATIONS FOR COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS (2006).
88. For discussion of such issues, see, for example, CHICAGO STUDIES IN POLITICAL ECONOMY (George J. Stigler ed., 1988).
89. See Vermeule, supra note 28, at 32-33.
90. Cf. Ullmann-Margalit, supra note 79, at 183-84 (arguing that this question must be asked to evaluate the outcome of invisible hand processes).
91. See Michael H. v. Gerald D., 491 U.S. 110, 127 n.6 (1989).
92. On Burke's skepticism about democracy, see DON HERZOG, POISONING THE MINDS OF THE LOWER ORDERS 183-84 (1998).
93. For Hayek's complex and ambivalent view, see F.A. Hayek, Whither Democracy?, Lecture at the Institute of Public Affairs (Oct. 8, 1976), in THE ESSENCE OF HAYEK, supra note 1.8, at 352.
94. See Moore v. City of E. Cleveland, 431 U.S. 494, 496 (1977).
95. For valuable discussion, see Vermeule, supra note 28. Perhaps a deliberative democrat might fear that the public, swept up by short-term, considerations, may not show sufficient deliberation and that long-standing practices are preferable because they embed a degree of reflection over time. If true, this point might be understood as part of the democratic form of many minds traditionalism, with the ideal of democracy being specified in deliberative terms.
96. See ELY, supra note 21.
97. See, e.g., Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
98. See, e.g., Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965);
99. Pierce v. Soc'y of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925);
100. Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923).
101. See VERMEULE, supra note 22;
102. James B. Thayer, The Origin and Scope of the American Doctrine of Constitutional Law, 7 HARV. L. REV. 129 (1893).
103. See Thayer, supra note 98, at 144 (noting that laws "will seem unconstitutional to one man, or body of men, [that] may reasonably not seem so to another; that the constitution often admits of different interpretations; that there is often a range of choice and judgment").
104. Id.
105. Id. at 151.
106. 521 U.S. 702 (1997).
107. 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
108. 539 U.S. 558 (2003).
109. Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 1.26 S. Ct. 2749, 2780-86 (2006).
110. Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 499-500 (1965) (Harlan, J., concurring).
111. See, e.g., Planned Parenthood, of Se. Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 848-49 (1992);
112. Moore v. City of E. Cleveland, 431. U.S. 494, 499-503 (1977).
113. 431 U.S. at 504-06.
114. See Jack M. Balkin, Tradition, Betrayal, and the Politics of Deconstruction, 11 CARDOZO L. REV. 1, 613, 1619 (1990).
115. See, e.g., RONALD DWORKIN, LAW'S EMPIRE 53-55 (1986).
116. See Michael H. v. Gerald D., 491 U.S. 110, 127 n.6 (1989).
117. At the same time, specific readings will appeal to many minds traditionalists, who believe that the specific traditions have epistemic credentials, because those are the traditions of which many minds have approved. To see the point, suppose that someone claims that there is a general tradition in favor of respect for personal autonomy. Many minds traditionalists will ask: have many people, in fact, signed on to general respect for personal autonomy? If the answer is "no," the general reading will lack epistemic credentials. Of course many minds traditionalists will accept general readings to the extent that many people have, in fact, assented to them.
118. Michael H., 491 U.S. at 127 n.6.
119. Id.
120. See Lawrence H. Tribe, The Puzzling Persistence of Process-Based Constitutional Theories, 89 YALE L.J. 1063, 1066 n.9 (1980).
121. See VERMEULE, supra note 22.
122. On rule-consequentialism, see BRAD HOOKER, IDEAL CODE, REAL WORLD: A RULE-CONSEQUENTIALIST THEORY OF MORALITY (2000).
123. E.g., Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978, Pub. L. No. 95-630, 92 Stat. 3697 (codified as amended at 1.2 U.S.C. §§3401 (2000));
124. Privacy Act of 1974, Pub. L. No. 93-579, 88 Stat. 1896 (codified as amended at 5 U.S.C. §552a (2000)).
125. 198 U.S. 45 (1905).
126. 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
127. On minimalism in general, see CASS R. SUNSTEIN, ONE CASE AT A TIME: JUDICIAL MINIMALISM ON THE SUPREME COURT (1999).
128. ALEXANDER M. BICKEL, THE LEAST DANGEROUS BRANCH: THE SUPREME COURT AT THE BAR OF POLITICS 25 (1962).
129. Id.
130. Id. at 26.
131. Id.
132. See Sunstein, supra note 23, at 1146.