Note

Specialize the Judge, Not the Court: A Lesson from the German Constitutional Court

The federal courts of appeals are in the midst of a crisis. The exploding volume of cases in those courts and the increasing complexity of the law present a real threat to the quality of appellate justice. Borrowing Adam Smith’s basic insight about the division of labor, many commentators have argued that the federal appellate courts might manage this crisis through greater specialization. The particular mode of specialization that has come into favor is the establishment of appellate courts with limited and exclusive jurisdiction over a set of subject matters. An example of such a court is the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the apparent success of this court in the rationalization and harmonization of patent law has engendered proposals for many other specialized courts of appeals.

However, there are a host of problems with relying on such “specialized courts,” including judicial “tunnel vision,” the lack of cross-pollination of legal ideas, judicial capture by special interests, and excessive judicial policymaking. Commentators often defend their proposals for more specialized courts by pointing to the success that some European countries have had with highly specialized appellate judiciaries. But the apparent success of the European experience with specialized courts may be peculiar to the civil law philosophy of judging; borrowing a distinctly civil law solution for the American common law landscape may not be successful.

This Note proposes a different mode of specialization: staffing cases with a mix of expert and non-expert judges. The German Constitutional Court has used a similar system for many years. Since this solution is being borrowed from a constitutional court, which is far more like an American court than a civil law court, problems of translation are reduced. The proposal balances our desire for generalist judges with the need for judicial expertise as law grows increasingly complex. It helps solve the problem of exploding caseloads by allowing the federal appellate courts to take on more judges without sacrificing intra-circuit coherence of federal law. It achieves the goal of expertise by leveraging the differing abilities and interests of appeals court judges. While doing all this, the proposal also avoids many of the problems with the use of specialized courts of limited, exclusive jurisdiction.

“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.

Massachusetts v. EPA’s Regulatory Interest Theory: A Victory for the Climate, Not Public Law Plaintiffs

Standing doctrine’s development is often framed as a struggle between two competing models of adjudication. The private law model views the court’s role as the adjudicator of individual rights and conditions access to the court on a party’s showing of a discrete injury at the hands of another party. The opposing public law model favors congressional power to create causes of action that confer standing without requiring a showing of differentiated injury, and conceives of the judiciary’s role as integral to ensuring executive compliance with the law. Many commentators view Massachusetts v. EPA, a recent Supreme Court decision addressing global climate change, as liberalizing standing doctrine and as a significant victory for the public law model of adjudication.

This Note departs from this commentary by arguing that, on the whole, the standing theory advanced in Massachusetts places the case within the Court’s trend towards a more restrictive interpretation of the case-and-controversy requirement. This Note first analyzes the Massachusetts opinion, the history of state standing doctrine, and subsequent judicial treatment of the decision, in order to show that the Court’s standing decision is based on a finding of injury to Massachusetts’ governing interest: the ability of Massachusetts to regulate a harm that threatens the Commonwealth’s territorial integrity. The Note then argues that this “regulatory interest theory” creates a standing regime that may be a variation of the public law model, but one that is potentially highly restrictive of both state and individual standing. In fact, the regulatory interest theory may create a standing regime where state attorneys general have monopoly power over public law adjudication, a possibility that threatens both core public and private law model values. This Note concludes that a Positivist approach to standing that predicates state and citizen standing on positive statutory enactment provides a relatively straightforward, far more workable approach to the case-and-controversy requirement.

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