Derek Webb, Senior Research Scholar at the Yale Law School, has posted The Lost History of Judicial Restraint, which is forthcoming in the Notre Dame Law Review:
--Dan ErnstThis article attempts to answer a question of great contemporary significance – what role courts should play in our democracy. Specifically, it attempts to answer the question of what standard of review courts should use in deciding constitutional cases.
James Bradley Thayer (wiki)
It does so by recovering a lost history of how American jurists conceived that role from the American founding to the close of the nineteenth century. It draws upon a voluminous and diverse array of nineteenth century treatises, legal dictionaries, encyclopedias, case books, and manuals of federal practice, on the one hand, most of which have never before been examined, and federal and state supreme court cases in all fifty states on the other, to show, contra prominent legal historians and many leading contemporary originalists, that by the close of the nineteenth century, there was an overwhelming consensus in favor of the presumption of constitutionality, clear error rule, and reasonable doubt standard. James Bradley Thayer, who popularized those rules and gave them a unique theoretical justification in his classic 1893 article “The Origin and Scope of the American Doctrine of Constitutional Law,” did not just invent those rules. He was not, as Learned Hand put it, and many of his critics have subsequently agreed, the “prophet of a new approach.” Rather, he was just one – albeit distinguished and influential – member of a vast yet now forgotten chorus of treatise writers and jurists throughout the country, eventually in all fifty states, who defended a cautious, deferential, and restrained approach to invalidating the acts of democratic bodies.
My thesis is that over the course of America’s first century, there emerged a much broader and richer historical consensus around judicial restraint than the advocates or critics of restraint have ever acknowledged. From its earliest origins in the transatlantic constitution, and through piecemeal legal practice in state and federal courts, before and after the creation of the Constitution, the “Thayerian” “rules of administration” associated with judicial restraint were eventually adopted by both the U.S. Supreme Court and all fifty state supreme courts in the country.
This has implications not only for legal history but for understanding the scope of the judicial power and duty today. By attempting to recapture this mostly "lost history of judicial restraint," I argue that during America’s first century, through the “discussions” in legal treatises and the “adjudications” in all the country’s apex supreme courts, all pointing overwhelmingly and uniformly in the direction of restraint, the Constitution’s standard of review, and the very meaning of "the judicial power" in Article III, appears to have been fixed or “liquidated" during America's first century.
