Richard M. Re

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Essay
Volume 92.7
Legal Realignment
Richard M. Re
Professor, Harvard Law School.

I am grateful to many thoughtful commentators, including workshop participants at Stanford University, the University of Virginia, Wayne State University, Harvard University, and Boston College, as well as attendees at a presentation at Boston University and a panel at the AALS annual conference. This essay borrows some text and ideas from my keynote address at the 2024 National Conference of Constitutional Law Scholars. See generally Richard M. Re, The One Big Question (Feb. 26, 2024) (Nat’l Conf. of Const. L. Scholars Keynote Address) (available on SSRN). Many thanks to the organizers and attendees at that event. Finally, I am indebted to the editors of this journal.

The widely understood alignment between political ideology and legal methodology—conservativism and constraint versus liberalism and discretion—explains judicial behavior with diminishing accuracy. In this Essay, Richard M. Re describes a "legal realignment" comprising moves toward conservative discretion and liberal constraint at the U.S. Supreme Court. The Essay develops a model of ideological change at the Court by describing the tendency for governing coalitions and opposition parties to embrace discretion and constraint, respectively. The Essay continues by detailing the mechanisms through which individuals and generations of legal thinkers undergo ideological shifts before concluding with what the model portends for the U.S. judiciary.

Jurisprudence
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Article
86.6
Clarity Doctrines
Richard M. Re
Professor, UCLA School of Law.

Many thanks to Will Baude, Pamela Bookman, Dan Epps, Barry Friedman, Mark Greenberg, Josia Klein, Anita Krishnakumar, Maggie Lemos, Marin Levy, Leah Litman, Michael Morley, Anne Joseph O’Connell, Larry Rosenthal, Steve Sachs, Joanna Schwartz, Dan Schweitzer, Mila Sohoni, and participants in the St. John’s Faculty Workshop and the Duke Law School Judicial Administration/Judicial Process Roundtable. I am also grateful to Caleb Peiffer and Taylor Pitz for excellent research assistance, and to the superb editors of The University of Chicago Law Review.

Legal practice is riddled with claims about when the law is or isn’t “clear.” If a statute is unclear or ambiguous, a court might defer to an agency, side in favor of lenity, or avoid interpretations that would render the statute unconstitutional.

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84.3
"Equal Right to the Poor"
Richard M. Re
Assistant Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law

Many thanks to Michelle Wilde Anderson, Will Baude, Josh Blackman, Sam Bray, Grace Bridwell, Craig Chosiad, Ryan Doerfler, Laura Donohue, Elliot Dorff, Greg Dubinsky, Kristen Eichensehr, Jonah Gelbach, Robert Goldstein, Mark Greenberg, Tara Leigh Grove, John McGinnis, Aaron Nielson, Jide Nzelibe, Jim Pfander, Alex Potapov, Sabeel Rahman, Larry Sager, Seana Shiffrin, Ganesh Sitaraman, Mila Sohoni, Sabine Tsuruda, Mark Tushnet, Margo Uhrman, David Waddilove, Eugene Volokh, Adam Winkler, Rebecca Zietlow, The University of Chicago Law Review, and participants in the Northwestern Constitutional Law Colloquium, the University of Pennsylvania Legislation Workshop, the Junior Scholars Federal Courts Workshop, and the UCLA School of Law Faculty Colloquium.

During the confirmation hearings for then-Judge John Roberts, Senator Richard Durbin asked about economic equality.

Courts Due Process Judges Judicial Decision-Making Poverty Law

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