Minnesota News Council: Principles, Precedent, and Moral Authority

Precedent and Legal Authority: A Critical History

Precedent and Authority in Antonin Scalia's Jurisprudence

The authority of Supreme Court precedent

We construct the complete network of 30,288 majority opinions written by the U.S. Supreme Court and the cases they cite from 1754 to 2002 in he United States Reports. Data from this network demonstrates quantitatively the evolution of the norm of stare decisis in the 19th Century and significant deviation from this norm by the activist Warren Court. We further describe a method for creating aut...

Political Liberalism, Political Independence, and Moral Authority

As I use the term here, the central component of political liberalism holds that political institutions are not to be guided by substantive principles of the good about which reasonable people may disagree. If a particular policy or institutional action is a requirement of justice, this cannot be because this policy or action promotes human welfare, well-being, or flourishing. Morality, on the ...

Moral Principles Are Not Moral Laws