Judicial challenges to order-maintenance policing apparently are leading some city officials to adapt the tools of property regulation to a task traditionally reserved for the police—the control of disorderly people. Examples of efforts to regulate disorder, ex ante, through land-management strategies include homeless campuses that centralize housing and social services, neighborhood exclusion zone policies that empower local officials to exclude disorderly individuals from struggling communities, and the selective targeting of inner-city neighborhoods for aggressive property inspections. These tactics employ different management techniques—some concentrate disorder and others disperse it—but they have same goal: to relocate urban disorder from one place (where it is perceived to be harmful) to another (where it hopefully will be more benign). These developments are not surprising. Urban policymakers long assumed that regulations ordering land uses effectively curb disorder (an assumption that I have questioned). And, moreover, the broad deference granted to the government-qua-regulator makes disorder-relocation policies particularly attractive. Unfortunately, these new disorder-relocation policies may create what Dan Kahan has called a cost of rights problem: In an effort to avoid constitutional challenges, local governments may adopt policies that impose costs at least as significant as their order-maintenance-policing substitutes. This Article seeks to understand what those costs might be.
“The Indispensable Basis of Democracy”: American Catholicism, the Church-State Debate, and the Soul of American Liberalism, 1920-1929
Several recent works of scholarship explore how Establishment Clause jurisprudence has been shaped by broader political debates over the role of religion in public life. This literature focuses on the politics of anti-Catholicism, particularly during the early years of Establishment Clause jurisprudence in the1940s and 1950s. While not questioning the centrality of this period to the historical narrative, this Note argues that the political contest over church and state took shape in an earlier debate over the compatibility of Catholicism and the Constitution during the 1920s. The Church’s response to the anti-Catholicism of this period was of particular importance. Catholic apologists actively challenged the widespread argument that Catholicism could not be reconciled with a democratic liberal political order. In fact, Catholics not only defended the doctrinal compatibility of Catholic social thought and the constitutional separation of church and state. They argued that Catholicism was ideally suited to preserving the moral foundations of the free society. Far from imperiling American democracy, Catholicism was, in the words of the Church’s leading social theorist, “The Indispensable Basis of Democracy.” Thus, rather than aiming to depoliticize the church-state fracas of the 1920s, American Catholics drove the issue ever more fully into the realm of politics and culture. In the process, Catholics developed a worldview that now stands at the heart of Establishment Clause politics.
Justifying Self-Defense: A Theory of Forced Consequences
Why do we have a right to self-defense? Over the years, this seemingly simple question has proved difficult to answer. The right to self-defense arises in situations that involve culpable, non-culpable or non-agent aggressors. The difficulty is to find an explanation that justifies self-preference in each of these instances and maintains the moral distinction between the permitted killing of aggressors and the prohibited killing of innocent bystanders.
This Essay examines three lines of justifications that have been developed over the past three decades: lesser harmful results, forced choice and the rights theory. The “lesser harmful result” argument maintains that the killing of the aggressor is a lesser harm than the death of the defender. The “forced choice” argument says that self-defense is either justified because the defender is uniquely forced to choose between his life and the life of the aggressor, or excused because the he lacks real choice. Finally, the “rights theory” justifies self-defense by the prevailing right of the defender not to be killed over that of the aggressor.
This Essay argues that all three explanations fall short of the comprehensive justification needed to answer this question. It develops a new justification based on a theory of forced consequences. This justification combines two principles: the commonly recognized civil-law principle of fault-based selection and the principle according to which—in situations where either A or B must pay the costs for A’s “bad luck”—A must be the one to pay these costs and may not transfer the burden onto B.