Article

Legal Design for the “Good Man”

Consequentialist analysts of legal rules tend to focus their attention on Holmes’s “bad man,” who conforms to legal rules only out of fear of legal sanctions. On this view, legal rules should be designed to give self-interested legal subjects sufficient reason to choose socially optimal actions. But many people conform to legal rules simply because they are the rules, even when their self-interest dictates doing otherwise.

At first glance, this focus on the bad man seems to make sense. Lawmakers, it is plausible to suppose, don’t have to worry about the “good man” when designing legal rules because he will do what they want him to do anyway by conforming to the law. In other words, good man analysis of law is simple and so can be safely ignored.

But good man analysis of law is much more complex than scholars have previously supposed, and ignoring the good man will therefore lead consequentialist lawmakers to err. People are motivated to comply with legal rules for various different kinds of reasons, and this variety matters for their behavior by affecting both their short-run responses to legal rules and their long-run attitudes towards the law. A lawmaker ought to design legal rules in a way that attends to this variety if her aim is to design socially optimal rules.

This Article systematically analyzes the problem of legal design in the face of the diversity of motivational types that exist in the population of legal subjects. Part I develops a typology of good persons by exploring the causes and consequences of legal norm internalization—the ways in which a person’s preferences are transformed such that he comes to value complying with legal rules for the sake of the rules. Part II argues that a good person’s type matters for his behavior in a number of important ways. For example, it affects the way in which he chooses among actions that conform to legal norms and the ways in which he responds to the various kinds of uncertainty to which the legal system exposes him. Part III derives normative implications of my analysis for consequentialist lawmakers, while also addressing the converse worry that good man analysis of law is too complex to be tractable. The overall aim is to systematically examine the ways in which a diversity of motivations in the population complicates the problem of legal design for legislators, judges, and administrative officials, and to develop an organizing framework that can be used to think about the problem rigorously, which I illustrate by exploring some examples.

The Positive Right to Marry

Obergefell v. Hodges held same-sex couples have a right to legal marriage. As the dissenters emphasized, this right to marry is anomalous, doctrinally and normatively. Most rights in the United States Constitution are negative liberty rights. For example, the states may not interfere with procreative choices, but individuals have no right to public funds for contraception. Moreover, if children have no right to public funds for education, it seems morally dubious to claim a right to public support for adult marriages. What is this positive right to marry and what justifies it? This Article reconstructs a conceptual and normative foundation for the positive right to marry. Previous theories of the right to marry as a negative liberty right or an equality right are unsatisfactory, because they fail to justify the connection between intimate liberty and marriage law. The right to marry is a positive right, but one of a specific kind. Unlike the right to education, it is not a claim to public benefits. It is a “power right,” a right to create legal duties for intimate relationships. This right is not simply a means to promote valuable relationships; it is necessary to ensure equal liberty. Relationships carry open-ended commitments that threaten to subordinate the partners to one another. A right to legal marriage is necessary to reconcile intimate liberty with equality.

The Rationality of Rational Basis Review

Through the “rational basis” test, the Supreme Court asserts the authority to assess whether laws are “rationally related to a legitimate governmental interest.” Although it gives the Court an effective substantive veto over all legislation, rationality review is poorly understood and under-theorized. Developed haphazardly over time, rationality review is not the product of either a considered formula or a particular theory of constitutional law, and though it is clothed in the language of rationality, it represents the Court’s own decidedly intuitive understanding of the proper sphere of state regulation. At one time, that understanding was based in a widely held conception of the “police power,” but the connection to the police power was severed after the Court’s decision in United States v. Carolene Products. Since then, the Court has developed ad hoc a conception of the proper role of government that has become almost entirely utilitarian in nature.

This Article examines the Court’s view of how rationality should (and by virtue of the power of judicial review must) feature in legislation by tracing the development of rationality review and comparing it to more rigorous understandings of political rationality. Comparison reveals the Court’s limited conception of rationality, which allows the Court to avoid difficult questions in pursuit of seemingly uncontroversial instrumental ends. Examination of the Court’s approach to rationality demonstrates the need for a broader conception of legislative rationality – one that includes “constitutive ends.” Recognizing constitutive legislative ends, combined with an information-forcing rule for revealing those ends, can both improve democratic discourse in the legislature and lead to a richer and more intellectually honest form of rationality review.

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