Judicial Decision-Making

I am grateful to Jajah Wu for research assistance and to Douglas Baird, Rosalind Dixon, Saul Levmore, Victor Quintanilla, and Adam Samaha for comments on an earlier draft.

Thanks to Jake Gersen, Todd Henderson, Daryl Levinson, Jens Ludwig, Richard McAdams, Tom Miles, Matthew Stephenson, David Strauss, Adrian Vermeule, Noah Zatz, and participants at a workshop at The University of Chicago Law School for helpful comments.

Deep thanks to Professors Miles and Sunstein for sharing their draft with me in time to permit this response, and to the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review for agreeing to print it in the same issue.

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.

I am grateful to participants in workshops at the Harvard, University of Virginia, University of Michigan, and University of Chicago Law Schools, and to Mary Anne Case, Barry Cushman, Elizabeth Emens, Richard Fallon, Barry Friedman, Don Herzog, Christine Jolls, Michael Klarman, Jacob Levy, Eric Posner, Richard Primus, Adam Samaha, Kirsten Smolensky, Geoffrey Stone, Cass Sunstein, John Sylla, and Adrian Vermeule for comments on earlier versions of this Article. I also thank Mark Sherman and Karen Courtheoux for excellent research assistance and the Sonnenschein Faculty Fund at The University of Chicago Law School for financial support.

Thanks to John Gardner, Leslie Green, Mark Greenberg, and Scott Shapiro for useful discussion of these issues on various occasions, and to Greenberg for quite helpful discussion of an early draft of this Article. I also benefited from questions and comments by students in my Spring 2007 Jurisprudence class at the University of Texas at Austin when we discussed this topic. Workshop audiences at a variety of venues provided valuable feedback and discussion: the Faculty of Law and Program in Social and Political Theory, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University; UCLA School of Law; the Institute for Philosophical Investigation, National Autonomous University of Mexico; the jurisprudence departments of the Faculties of Law at the Universities of Genoa in Italy and Girona in Spain, and the University of Chicago Law School. Of the many who helped me on these occasions, I should mention especially Peter Cane, Riccardo Guastini, Larry Laudan, Adam Muchmore, Martha Nussbaum, Giovanni Ratti, Jane Stapleton, and Ed Stein.

In the spirit of its subject matter, this Article was made available for public comment, and we incorporated excellent suggestions from Steve Charnovitz, David Fontana, Fred Lawrence, Ronald Levin, Eric Lipman, Chip Lupu, and Richard Pierce.

Thanks for helpful comments to Ittai Bar-Siman-Tov, Will Baude, Noa Ben-Asher, Brett Dakin, Elizabeth Emens, Robert Ferguson, Chad Flanders, Abbe Gluck, Jamal Greene, Adam Gustafson, Ranjit Hakim, Philip Hamburger, Joseph Landau, Jennifer Laurin, Henry Monaghan, Jessica Roberts, Bertrall Ross, Elizabeth Schneider, Henry Smith, James Stewart, Tracy Thomas, Andrew Varcoe, and workshop participants at Columbia Law School.