Volume 102

Judicial Capacity and Executive Power

The budget of the United States executive branch is roughly 500 times greater than that of the judicial branch. The executive workforce is more than fifty times greater. How do these enormous disparities affect the practical ability of courts to police executive power? Our judicial capacity model of Supreme Court decision making is the first attempt to take this question seriously. Briefly, in most executive power domains, the limits of judicial capacity create strong pressure on the Supreme Court to adopt hard-edged categorical rules, defer to the political process, or both. The reason is straightforward. In these domains, a departure from deferential or rule-based decisions would invite more litigation than the Court could handle without sacrificing minimum professional standards.

Our model explains why the Supreme Court has historically deferred to congressional delegations of power and avoided interfering with presidential administration, despite significant ideological temptations to intervene. It also explains the few areas of executive power in which the Court has been willing to act aggressively, as well as the one area in which the Court has employed indeterminate standards—as opposed to categorical rules—to invalidate government action. In so doing, the judicial capacity model clarifies when, if at all, it is sensible to urge the courts to constrain executive power in future cases. Finally, the judicial capacity model sheds light on some of the most significant issues in constitutional theory, including judicial competence, judicial independence, and the formalist-functionalist divide over separation of powers. For all of these reasons, judicial capacity deserves a central place on the agenda of executive power scholarship and constitutional theory more generally. 

“Necessary AND Proper” and “Cruel AND Unusual”: Hendiadys in the Constitution

Constitutional doctrine is often shaped by the details of the constitutional text. Under the Necessary and Proper Clause, the Supreme Court first considers whether a law is “necessary” and then whether it is “proper.” Some justices have urged the same approach for the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause: First ask if the punishment is “cruel,” then if it is “unusual.” That each clause has two requirements seems obvious, and it is has been the assumption underlying vast amounts of scholarship. That assumption is incorrect.

This Article argues that “necessary and proper” and “cruel and unusual” are best read as instances of hendiadys. Hendiadys is a figure of speech in which two terms, separated by a conjunction, work together as a single complex expression. It is found in many languages, including English: For example, “rise and shine,” “nice and fat,” “cakes and ale,” “open and notorious.” When “cruel and unusual” is read as a hendiadys, the clause does not prohibit punishments that merely happen to be both cruel and unusual. Rather, it prohibits punishments that are unusually cruel, that is, innovative in their cruelty. If “necessary and proper” is read as a hendiadys, then the terms are not separate requirements for congressional action. The word “necessary” requires a close relationship between a statute and the constitutional power it is carrying into execution, while “proper” instructs us not to interpret “necessary” in its strictest sense. “Proper” also reminds us that the incidental power Congress is exercising must belong to an enumerated power.

To read each of these constitutional phrases as a hendiadys, though seemingly novel, actually aligns closely with the early interpretations, including the interpretation of the Necessary and Proper Clause in McCulloch v. Maryland. The readings offered here solve a number of puzzles, and they better capture the subtlety of these clauses

Confronting and Adapting: Intelligence Agencies and International Law

Intelligence activity is—or, more accurately, was—the last bastion of foreign relations unconstrained by international law. States could steal diplomatic secrets, covertly assess rivals’ military capabilities, and disseminate propaganda inside other states without fear of international legal sanction. This absence of regulation made sense as long as a state’s intelligence activities were primarily directed at foreign states and their officials. However, intelligence activity now implicates private actors as never before, as states engage in bulk data collection, steal secrets from corporations, and expand their focus on non-state actors such as terrorist groups. As a result, some states and advocates are now pressing for a formalist approach to international law, claiming that states should interpret various bodies of existing international law as applicable to state intelligence activities. Others contend that intelligence activities will and should remain untouched by international legal constraint. Both approaches are flawed: The realpolitik view of the (nonexistent) relationship between intelligence and international legal constraints is unsustainable and creates troubling legal black holes. The formalist view fails to acknowledge important reasons why state-on-state intelligence activities are distinct from diplomatic and military actions that states view as constrained by international law.

This Article identifies a better way to mediate the relationship between intelligence and international law. Rather than rejecting international law altogether or, alternatively, imposing a rigid legal framework on intelligence activity, it argues that states should differentiate between international laws that protect individuals against tangible harm (such as international humanitarian law and human rights treaties) and those that protect states against harms that are often dignitary (such as respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity). The Article proposes a sliding interpretive scale whereby states engaged in intelligence activity have less freedom to interpret and apply individually-focused international rules and more freedom to interpret state-protective rules.  It also illustrates how several states have begun to pursue this approach in practice.  Ultimately, this Article argues that states and human rights advocates both must adapt—in different ways—their expectations about the proper role of international law in the world of intelligence operations.

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