It has only been a decade, but the mood in America since the new millennium has largely been one of anger and disenchantment. This decade began with a disputed presidential election, followed by 9/11, two wars, a bad economy, and numerous natural disasters that have captured the public imagination. Pundits from the right and left […]
In contemporary Western jurisprudence it is never appropriate for emotion””anger, love, hatred, sadness, disgust, fear, joy””to affect judicial decision making. A good judge should feel no emotion; if she does, she puts it aside. To call a judge emotional is a stinging insult, signifying a failure of discipline, impartiality, and reason. Insistence on judicial dispassion […]
How central should hedonic adaptation be to the establishment of sentencing policy? In earlier work, Professors Bronsteen, Buccafusco, and Masur (BBM) drew some normative significance from the psychological studies of adaptability for punishment policy. In particular, they argued that retributivists and utilitarians alike are obliged on pain of inconsistency to take account of the fact […]
Growing concern about poverty in the late 1960s produced two sweeping legal revolutions. One gave welfare recipients specific legal rights against arbitrary eligibility rules and benefit terminations. The other gave low-income tenants recourse when landlords failed to repair their homes. The 1996 welfare law exposed the welfare rights revolution’s frailty by ending Aid to Families […]
If Professor Pildes is correct, American democracy is in long-term, serious trouble. Our political system “over the last generation has had one defining attribute: the rise of extreme partisan polarization.”1This “hyperpartisanship”2 is not just caused by “divisive political elites and leaders,”3 but is a reflection of the “poisonous party polarization”4 of the electorate itself, the […]
Professor Richard Pildes provides a very thorough and persuasive overview of the key arguments about the causes of partisan polarization in the United States. I am especially sympathetic to his argument that deep macro- historical factors such as the partisan alignment of the South””rather than idiosyncratic events, elections, and personalities””bare the primary blame. But I […]
I commend Professor Richard Pildes for offering such a creative and cogent discussion of polarization in contemporary American political life. I especially appreciate that he has brought such a calm, dispassionate, and admirably scholarly tone to a discussion that is too often””well, polarized. Yet I do wonder if in the effort to find a stable […]
Politics as partisan warfare: that is our world. Over the last generation, American democracy has had one defining attribute: extreme partisan polarization. We have not seen the intensity of political conflict and the radical separation between the two major political parties that characterizes our age since the late nineteenth century. Within Congress, the parties have […]
