Cass R. Sunstein

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Essay
Thayerism
Cass R. Sunstein
Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard University.

I am grateful to Zachary Goldstein for superb research assistance.

In the late nineteenth century, James Bradley Thayer urged that an act of Congress should not be struck down unless the constitutional violation “is so clear as to leave no room for reasonable doubt.” Thayer’s beyond-a-reasonable-doubt test helped define constitutional understandings for more than a half-century; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Learned Hand, Benjamin Cardozo, and Felix Frankfurter were practicing Thayerians. Thayerism provided crucial orientation for Alexander Bickel’s conception of judicial review and his embrace of “the passive virtues,” and also for John Hart Ely’s democracy-reinforcing approach to constitutional law. But Thayerism seems to have dropped out of contemporary constitutional law.

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Article
75.2
The New Legal Realism
Thomas J. Miles
Assistant Professor of Law, The University of Chicago
Cass R. Sunstein
Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor, The Law School and Department of Political Science, The University of Chicago

We are grateful to Susan Bandes, Elizabeth Foote, Jacob Gersen, Brian Leiter, Anup Malani, Richard McAdams, Elizabeth Mertz, Jonathan Nash, Eric Posner, Adam Samaha, Larry Solum, David Strauss, Noah Zatz, and participants in a work-inprogress lunch at The University of Chicago Law School for valuable comments. We are also grateful to the Chicago Judges Project, and in particular to Dean Saul Levmore, for relevant support.

Administrative Law Empirical Analysis
2
Article
75.2
The Real World of Arbitrariness Review
Thomas J. Miles
Assistant Professor of Law, The University of Chicago
Cass R. Sunstein
Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor, The Law School and Department of Political Science, The University of Chicago

We thank Eric Posner, Richard Posner, Peter Strauss, and Adrian Vermeule for helpful comments. We are also grateful to Rachael Dizard, Casey Fronk, Darius Horton, Matthew Johnson, Bryan Mulder, Brett Reynolds, Matthew Tokson, and Adam Wells for superb research assistance.

Administrative Law Empirical Analysis Judicial Decision-Making
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Essay
84.1
The Unbearable Rightness of Auer
Cass R. Sunstein
Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard University
Adrian Vermeule
Ralph S. Tyler Jr Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School

We are grateful to Ron Levin, John Manning, Arden Rowell, David Strauss, participants at a Harvard Law School faculty workshop, and participants at a University of Chicago symposium for valuable comments, and to Evelyn Blacklock and Maile Yeats-Rowe for superb research assistance. Parts of this Essay significantly expand and revise, while drawing on, a section of a near-contemporaneous, and much longer, article, Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, The New Coke: On the Plural Aims of Administrative Law, 2015 S Ct Rev 41. We are grateful for permission to draw on that section here.

I.  Cases and Problems

Administrative Law Best Practices Chevron Regulation Statutory Interpretation

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