Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks — The Legal Process: Basic Problems in the Making and Application of Law (Tentative Edition, 1958), Volume 2

394 published claims from this book.

• A collective bargaining agreement is private legislation creating private courts and administrative processes.
• A custom allowing indemnity substitution was established beyond dispute
• A formally valid election is unconstitutional if any influence deters voters’ free will
• A gap separates the President’s formal paper powers from his real accumulated powers
• A general clause accepted without debate grew into Germany’s dominant corrective rule
• A government-recoverable penalty distinguishes a penal statute from a private forfeiture
• A legislature’s omission of a known exception signals deliberate intent to exclude it
• A lottery legally requires the three elements of prize, chance, and consideration
• A penal statute’s silence on a subject implies no legislative intent to regulate it
• A picture-based libel claim requires pleading the picture’s defamatory character in the complaint
• A powerless legislative minority need not understand the laws it votes on
• A powerless neighborhood hearing board can sort compliant owners before formal court
• A preponderance of small producers and buyers must effectuate enormously complex coordination
• A protective agency refuses to bless settlements unless they reflect full statutory liability.
• A settled statutory interpretation binds later courts like law, not dictum.
• A single housing code standard cannot serve both slums and conservation areas
• A six-page adhesion contract burying an arbitration clause raises questions about lawyer ethics.
• A small commercial dispute took three years to reach formal administrative decision
• A standard of identity can serve as a private anticompetitive weapon
• A state may not retroactively eliminate all remedies for a right it cannot destroy
• A statute’s purpose is qualified by the costs its legislature contemplated
• A statutory statement-of-grounds requirement pressured an agency into developing reviewable decision criteria.
• A total ban on union campaign spending destroys rather than merely curbs union politics
• A wartime OPA toy-price prior-check system collapsed under its own volume
• A written-notice requirement serves both a fourth amendment analogue and a record-keeping function
• Absence of unfair surprise never justifies overruling precedent alone
• Absurd consequences outweigh the doctrine of strict construction of penal statutes.
• Ad hoc adjudication breaks litigant participation and undermines its legitimacy
• Adjudication imposes solutions and is not the same as mediation
• Adjudication proceeds through adversarial claims, proofs, and counterproofs to a decision
• Adjudication requires impersonal criteria of decision applicable across similar cases
• Administrative bodies complete inchoate legislative will through secondary legislation
• Advisory agencies avoid becoming effective power by refusing to measure their own success.
• Agency discretion is delegated when legislatures cannot foresee future conduct
• Agency grouped all related industry cases into pooled multi-defendant trials
• Airlines once excluded valuables from baggage liability while still carrying them
• All official power is limited by a general prohibition against arbitrariness.
• All-risk insurance by the railroad could eliminate the whole liability question
• Amendment-by-implication doctrine can ratify an agency’s contested interpretation when Congress touches a statute
• American courts adopted only the English common law applicable to local conditions
• American courts embraced western miners’ customs over English common-law doctrines
• American courts never formally barred legislative history, only weighed it case by case.
• An ‘acceptance final’ clause bars only quality-based rejections, not rejections for material breach
• An agency cannot achieve through regulation what Congress declined to legislate
• An agency’s statutory breadth and continuity exceed its technical expertness as grounds for respect
• An aide’s encyclopedic grasp of state law made legislative battles unwinnable for opponents
• An injunction-only sanction deters neither deliberate violators nor forces construction to consider retroactive liability
• An outmoded liability rule should not shield utilities at the cost of human life
• Analyzing law is best done through actor positions, not their reflections.
• Anti-discrimination policy justified barring private carrier-shipper agreements that vary from filed tariffs.
• Any private decision can be converted into a group appeal.
• Applying newly changed law retroactively would let posterity govern the living
• Appointing officials owe no reasoned consistency across their decisions.
• Appropriations acts carry legislative directions beyond mere fund listings
• Appropriations committees hold a standing veto over policies Congress has already enacted
• Arbitration’s praised finality is only a benefit to winners, not losers
• Ballot-box accountability fails for decisions of great complexity and detail
• Better drafting means clearer principle, not exhaustive special-case detail
• Buyers would reject shipments if they could still recoup damages
• Buying a legislator’s vote is legitimate for voters but not for paid lawyers
• Calling interpretation ‘discretion’ obscures the deciding officer’s duty to seek the right answer.
• Carrier liability limits required notice and opportunity before the ICC Acts
• Cheap flood insurance creates moral hazard by encouraging settlement in flood-prone areas
• Citizen complaints can trigger a court inquiry into a prosecutor’s fitness
• Citizens must accept that changing law disappoints settled expectations
• Civil codes promulgated as exclusive sources still cannot anticipate all disputes
• Code-based systems require case law alongside written codes
• Codified law ages while human circumstances change continuously
• Collective bargaining exists because many workplace rules cannot be set individually
• Commerce requires irreducible minimum certainty about legal meaning
• Common carriers were held liable as insurers of goods, with only five excepting causes
• Common-law doctrine’s pre-industrial concepts need reformulation for the industrial corporation.
• Comparing a statute to prior law often only raises questions requiring further evidence.
• Competent fact-finding must describe events without using the legal terms at issue
• Complaint-based housing enforcement shifts to proactive area-wide inspections
• Complaint-only enforcement practices were replaced by proactive block enforcement in Baltimore
• Complex law makes adjudication reward legal skill over just causes
• Compulsory arbitration is a makeshift appropriate only for desperate emergencies.
• Conduct judged negligent in one era need not be negligent in another
• Conflict-of-laws rules exist to keep forum choice from altering primary law
• Conflicting statutory provisions can criminalize the very act the law says may be withheld
• Congress can confer exclusive jurisdiction on a specific federal court for disaster claims
• Congress can withhold executive power through legislative history as decisively as through enacted words
• Congress created the 1914 antitrust laws to override judicially invented purpose tests
• Congress created the FTC because the Justice Department’s antitrust enforcement lacked continuity across administrations
• Congress has long used insurance and indemnity devices across many federal programs
• Congress often acts as a ratifying agency for agreements reached outside it.
• Congress passed the Federal Tort Claims Act to replace private bills with court access
• Congress steadily delegates private claims adjudication to courts and agencies
• Congressional inaction following judicial construction can count as adoption of that construction
• Congressional opponents framed pure-food regulation as an unconstitutional federal police power
• Congressional staffing creates a new principal-agent problem between legislators and their experts.
• Constitutional validity can only be judged against concrete facts in real cases
• Contextual familiarity, not legal training, governs interpretive competence.
• Continuous observation of law in action is needed to trigger reform.
• Contract law differentiates sealed instruments from simple contracts as to undisclosed principals
• Contract-based controls can reach results regulation cannot because obligations rest on agreement
• Contribution can rest on mutually exclusive liabilities rather than identical common liability
• Corporate power lets private groups make binding decisions with continuing effect
• Corrupting legislation and corrupting trials violate the same ethical duty
• Court advocacy assumes roughly matched adversaries to reach justice
• Court remedies fail small traders because individual losses cannot justify litigation cost.
• Courts can act on apportionment only where a prior legal standard supplies criteria
• Courts can choose prospective scope when announcing new constitutional rules
• Courts can include new subjects under old statutes despite absent legislative intent
• Courts can pervert ambiguity doctrine to rewrite unambiguous contracts
• Courts cannot decline to make law because every merits judgment necessarily resolves the dispute
• Courts cannot preserve congressional power that Congress fails to use
• Courts cannot supply the constitutional wisdom a people lacks.
• Courts construe legislative silence as deliberate intent, though silence admits other readings
• Courts decide constitutional questions only when a live case compels it
• Courts hesitate to imply lease conditions, forcing lawyers to draft explicit contingency clauses
• Courts imply contract terms only when parties would obviously have included them
• Courts invoking legislative default can disguise abdication as adherence to stare decisis
• Courts lack legislature’s freedom to set narrow rules without precedent costs
• Courts make law only as a byproduct of their adjudicative function
• Courts may not amend a statute however desirable policy change may be
• Courts may not let moral condemnation override their limited institutional role
• Courts may retroactively invalidate conduct though litigants often dispute it
• Courts may revise common-law rules even where legislatures have failed to act
• Courts need legislative facts, not just adjudicative facts, to make law.
• Courts refuse to invent meaning where an empowered agency has already regulated.
• Courts refused to enforce contracts opposed to public policy regardless of criminality
• Courts reinterpreted precedents at the cost of fair warning to parties
• Courts share an obligation to modernize outdated common-law rules
• Courts should attribute purpose to statutes and interpret words to serve it
• Courts should consult legislative policy signals even outside the jurisdiction to void contracts
• Courts should not adjudicate malapportionment despite admitting its unfairness
• Courts should not let rate adequacy dictate negligence liability for utilities
• Courts should rarely infer legislators intended to freeze a decision’s rule
• Courts, not legislatures, are responsible for molding remedial law when statutes fall silent.
• Courts’ instinct that carriage is a vital public function outran their stated rationales
• Custom fills gaps but must never contradict express contract terms
• Detailed statutes force legislatures into future amendment burdens that interpretation could carry
• Different questions demand different kinds of decision procedures
• Direct government action governs its own employees through management, not law’s distinctive means
• Disclosure regulation relies on informed donors and press scrutiny for deterrence.
• Discretion differs by whether the actor must relate reasons across decisions.
• Discretion lets a society’s intelligence bear directly on unresolved problems.
• Disproportionately harsh sanctions erode their own enforcement because officials decline to use them
• Divergent state liability rules made interstate carriage outcomes unpredictable
• Drafters deliberately used flexible standards for timing but specific rules for scope.
• Driver licensing emerged because after-the-fact damage suits proved inadequate
• Election votes select candidates rather than deciding specific measures.
• Emergency conditions justify exercising power but do not themselves create it
• Equal operation of law prevents officials escaping political backlash through selective enforcement.
• Equitable construction applies only to remedial statutes, not to rules of public policy
• Equitable construction can restrain, enlarge, or contradict a statute’s letter
• Equity must extend common-law principles to novel wrongs produced by new social conditions
• Ethical canons permit lawyers to lobby only publicly by reasoned argument
• Ethical rules too strict to obey or too vague to guide real lobbying practice
• Even a governor’s formal power is limited against recalcitrant agencies
• Even the most private decisions presuppose and are shaped by prior institutional arrangements.
• Exclusive-dealing contracts can violate the law through practical effect, not only express words
• Executors best serve policy aims by not reading general directions literally
• Fair trade acts targeted loss-leader selling of branded goods as an injurious practice
• Federal aid conditioned local housing codes on workable anti-slum programs
• Federal legislative-history practice grew through two sequential expansions.
• Federal standards for produce fill one hundred fifty-four pages of regulations.
• Flood insurance cannot be actuarially self-supporting because risk is unpredictable
• Floods are the natural behavior of streams, not abnormal events
• Floods cause more suffering and damage than any other U.S. natural disaster
• Food standardization law assumes consumers cannot read or understand labels.
• Forfeiture serves both punishment and health-protective prevention
• Formal equality is the only equality any legal system can guarantee
• Forward-looking food-id standards require prior administrative rulemaking
• Free government requires that the executive act only under law made by parliamentary deliberation
• Future-dispute arbitration waivers differ morally from submitting an existing dispute
• Gasoline pump leases survived antitrust challenge because many competitor brands were available
• General incorporation laws dissolved a major instrument of social control
• Geographic quotas can function as covert racial discrimination that is nearly impossible to prove
• German courts resisted creative use of good-faith clauses for their first decades
• Government contracts can control private conduct by inducement rather than regulation
• Government insurance programs arise only where private supply has failed
• Government research into testing techniques can aid private voluntary compliance with law
• Government services face challenge only on scope, not propriety, when private supply fails
• Government trade terms function as optional facilities that private parties may adopt or replace
• Governmental assurance steers conduct without defining it, unlike reward-based inducement
• Group-membership arbitrators tend to be blind to outsiders’ interests
• Hearing transcripts rarely influence committee bill decisions
• Hearings serve political-barometer and safety-valve functions beyond fact-finding
• Hohfeld’s second quartet of positions are mere reflections of another’s position.
• Hotly contested congressional statutes prove highly durable once enacted as permanent law.
• Housing quality incentives depend on neighborhood character, demanding area-based planning
• Housing regulation disputes hinge on whether standards mean health or decency, not mere enforcement
• Implied malice is a fiction masking the objective standard of criminal liability
• Imposing fire-loss liability on water utilities would create unlimited, indeterminate liability
• Inchoate rules postpone policy and delegate power to addressees.
• Incidences crossing state lines become commerce when materially significant
• Indiscriminate budget-cutting distorts rational appraisal of information-service value
• Individualized regulation exists when officials must apply rules case by case
• Individuals routinely have law made for them without personal consent in our legal system.
• Indulging equitable discretion too far would make every judge a legislator.
• Informal negotiation is the default first step in administrative dispute resolution
• Injunctions function as primary commands when underlying law is too vague
• Institutional allocation of rule-making duty depends on the type of question at stake
• Institutional design must assign who thinks about the rationale of decisional rules
• Insurance availability can incentivize municipal zoning and state flood-loss reduction
• Insurance rate classifications can shape private behavior like tax categories do
• Interline ticket contracts legally fuse successive carriers into one operation
• Interpretation has two genuine tasks distinct from filling gaps in deficient rules
• Interpreting officials must decide like cases alike and respect legislative position.
• Interstate commerce defeated state-by-state pure food regulation, pushing federal law
• Invisible institutional arrangements coordinate activity as much as visible technology does.
• Judges are layered products of legal, judicial, national-bench, and period-style conditioning.
• Judges believe themselves unable to overturn entrenched rules, so the rules persist.
• Judges deciding on personal notions of right create incalculable future mischief through precedent
• Judges test statutory reach by asking how the lawmaker would answer if consulted
• Judicial disagreement about precedent is a difference of philosophy, not law
• Judicial discretion means choosing among alternatives thought equally permissible rather than reasoned elaboration
• Judicial independence from short-run politics drives public acceptance of rulings
• Judicial review merely extends a settled hierarchy-of-laws principle upward
• Judicial rulings on carrier liability long failed to reach legislative draftsmen
• Judicial-legislative competence and law’s form are separable but linked questions
• Juries may convict of lesser crimes than evidence warrants through sympathy
• Jury determinations cannot generalize into law because juries lack a recorded rationale.
• Law is not reducible to commands backed by sovereign force
• Law often codifies autonomous private practice into universal obligation rather than inventing new forms.
• Law operates best as present, prospective force serving the parties and society
• Law pursues human satisfaction through many techniques beyond command
• Lawyer involvement may substitute for judicial supervision in approving employee settlements
• Lawyer-legislators acted as agents for organized interests, not mere occupational representatives.
• Lawyers must master even a defective process to protect good causes
• Lawyers should prefer workable settlements over laying foundations for lawsuits
• Lay reliance on assumed outcomes should outweigh lawyers’ technical reliance on precedent
• Legislative bill language can be ridiculously dense even for simple provisions
• Legislative compromise structurally selects for nondogmatic lawmakers
• Legislative inaction is itself a distinct technique of control
• Legislative workload precludes any informed deliberation on each bill
• Legislative-inaction doctrine would freeze all judicial creativity if extended
• Legislators alone can choose administered regulation over self-applying law.
• Legislators chose disaster-relief over fault-based framing to set award ceilings
• Legislatures can quietly bury bills rather than defeat them by open vote
• Legislatures can use declaratory language to correct unwelcome judicial decisions
• Legislatures cannot foresee every result of unguarded statutory language
• Legislatures cannot resolve all problems alone and depend on other decision agencies.
• Legislatures may appropriately wait for courts to act first on an issue.
• Letting a murderer inherit would disgrace the state’s jurisprudence
• Licensing schemes serve several distinct ends beyond mere revenue collection
• Limited legislative sessions crippled planning and shifted lawmaking initiative to executives
• Long-accepted administrative or popular constructions can fix statutory meaning.
• Long-term contracts can paralyze even prospective legislative power
• Many exchangeable values can be intentionally destroyed without compensation
• Maxims of construction reassure rather than dictate meaning
• Negligence letting an obsolete statute stand enables later legal abuse.
• News has a dual character separating its informational substance from its expression.
• No state has ever repealed its direct-legislation provisions once enacted
• No statute can be interpreted without attributing purpose to it.
• Nonsigner state provisions were inoperative by supremacy, not direct Sherman Act prohibition
• Official agencies can regulate private law-making without supplanting it
• One statute’s administration illustrates nearly every major feature of the legal system.
• One-person-one-vote equality rests on a contested image of legislatures as mirrors of popular will.
• Only some dispute types are apt for settlement by adjudication
• Opponents mocked federal food standards as sumptuary regulation by ignorant experts
• Parties can find the same statutory language clear while reading it differently.
• Party platforms give voters a preview of governing accommodations.
• Passive prosecutorial readiness to respond does not satisfy enforcement duty
• Patent medicines routinely contained opiates and mislabeled poisons before 1906
• Patent medicines sold at huge markups with negligible active ingredients
• Penal statutes are strictly construed in favor of the accused
• Permanent-exclusion licensing sanctions are so powerful they are rarely invoked, weakening their deterrent value
• Personal insurance pools natural-disaster risk because location barely affects injury odds
• Plain-meaning interpretation itself presupposes a policy rule favoring literal reading
• Policies state objectives while principles justify them with reasons.
• Polycentric problems with interdependent judgments resist adjudication
• Postrequisites validate acts after performance instead of requiring prior approval
• Precedent expresses a universal human need for predictability, not a common-law peculiarity
• Predatory price cuts harm competition regardless of the seller’s intent
• Preliminary activities belong in negotiated wage rates, not stopwatch litigation
• President Truman sought to execute congressionally prescribed policy, disputing Black’s framing
• Presidential authority varies in strength across three zones defined by congressional disjunction
• Presidential command of public opinion weakens the checking effect of the other branches
• Primary-election ballot fraud violates federally secured voting rights.
• Principles and policies mainly guide trained official discretion.
• Prior approval works best when after-the-fact checks would be unjust or inadequate
• Prior checking before activity enables preventive rather than retrospective justice
• Prior interpretations can foreclose renewed inquiry into a statute’s basic purpose
• Prior law context is always relevant to interpreting a statute’s purpose.
• Prior-approval requirements have proliferated enormously in American life
• Prior-approval systems fail when they cannot be reduced to simple routine
• Private and official decisions mutually constitute each other in a non-linear loop.
• Private bills persist partly because Congress waives requirements courts would impose
• Private civil enforcement with treble damages was proposed as an alternative to criminal penalties
• Private law binding non-consenting parties is unobjectionable when the disadvantaged had no prior claim
• Private lawyers continuously create novel legal instruments that alter the economy’s structure
• Private market ordering can make legislative materials available once courts settle their interpretive utility.
• Private self-regulation via information exchange preceded state charitable solicitation law
• Private trade customs are shaped by the surrounding system of official settlements.
• Proper legal answers require understanding each process’s role in the whole system
• Property is legal exclusion, not mere exchangeable value
• Prospective overruling can stratify private law into dated temporal layers
• Prospective overruling shifts the judge role toward a political overreaching that no theory contains
• Proving discrimination requires showing manifest acts, not just prejudiced officials’ beliefs
• Publishing awards forces conformity pressure that distorts case-by-case justice
• Railroad workers faced battlefield rates of death from dangerous car coupling
• Rationing of scarce resources requires mechanisms of prior choice
• Reading a statute’s specific procedure as exclusive prohibition is a contested interpretive choice
• Reading meaning into statutes corrupts once legislation becomes an available remedy
• Recording reasons and evidence makes arbitrary-action review more feasible.
• Refusing the inheritance punishes nothing beyond the criminal law’s own terms
• Refusing to make law itself becomes a lawmaking act with systemic costs
• Regulated trade terms bind licensees to their defined meanings
• Relaxing evidence rules shifts their burden from protection to exposure depending on one’s position
• Reliable long-run flood loss data did not exist to price the program
• Reliance on legislative history makes law inaccessible to ordinary lawyers and citizens.
• Reliance-based limitations may refine prospective overruling doctrine
• Remedial doctrine is historically made by tribunals, not by custom or general understanding
• Required statutory clarity varies with the literacy of its addressees
• Requiring universal inter-coupling between all cars would have created a coupler monopoly
• Respondents themselves requested broadening evidence across grouped cases
• Restatement black-letter rules had to state universally true propositions of law.
• Retroactive statutes are rarely challenged because prospective operation is the strong tradition.
• Risk-shifting contract terms trade against lower produce prices
• Royal writs defined which disputes the King’s courts would hear
• Seizure scale determines whether it initiates a test case or permanently destroys a business
• Self-funding shifts political attack from cost to displacement of private enterprise
• Social Security refused to credit NLRB back pay as wages.
• Some associations merit autonomy so their members can develop their own institutions.
• Some delayed entrants are forced out of business by waiting alone
• Some disputes resist rational adjudication because they lack general criteria
• Specifying one civil remedy need not foreclose other civil remedies.
• Stability is sometimes unwisely chosen over progress in judicial lawmaking
• Standards demand qualitative appraisal, whereas rules only need factual findings.
• Standing committees, not the full chambers, actually make congressional policy
• Stare decisis can produce internally inconsistent patterns of decision
• Stare decisis scope depends on whether Congress legislates general ideas or specific applications.
• Stare decisis, unlike repose doctrines, wrongly perpetuates future inequality.
• State courts may treat overruled decisions as law for intermediate transactions
• State courts remained free on undecided issues to follow or reject the Restatements
• State law required legislative-segregated funds for any land appropriation
• Statutes emerge as skeletons that agencies flesh out through regulation.
• Statutes must be interpreted in light of their whole historical and systemic context.
• Statutes need general language because draftsmen cannot anticipate all applications.
• Statutes serve courts as analogies and points of departure, not controlling rules
• Statutory de novo trials make agency findings only prima facie evidence.
• Statutory language is a social institution constraining what words can mean
• Statutory meaning in doubt resolves by sponsors’ words, not opponents’ fears.
• Statutory overruling language sometimes gets tested for civil-law habits
• Statutory rights can be quietly whittled away through private contracting
• Strict-construction canons and harsh criminal liability doctrines sit in unresolved tension
• Successful rule operation is remarkable and never fully eliminates uncertainty.
• Summary multiple-seizure power can destroy a business without prior adjudication
• Technological change creates personal-relations harms that rigid common-law rules cannot address
• Termination-right clauses work best when hedged with tenant protections against their abuse
• The common law can resolve every dispute arising within the social order
• The common law denied wives any action for criminal conversation
• The common law’s own flexibility compels re-testing old rules against new conditions
• The contract clause bars depriving expected benefits, not imposing new burdens
• The discretionary-function exception replaced activity-specific carve-outs in 1942 tort bills
• The Enlightenment reduced the judge to an intellect insulated from character and values
• The five-year phase-in shows Congress contemplated a substantial equipment change
• The FTC’s formal enforcement machinery could only handle around a hundred cases yearly
• The function of choosing officeholders is analytically distinct from judging, legislating, and executing
• The government conceded Congress may regulate the President’s executive procedures
• The House’s 21-day rule briefly checked the Rules Committee’s veto power
• The law sanctions competing for profits that are largely another’s unearned reward
• The lawyer’s role was invention of private-law instruments under unclear doctrine
• The mine union itself favored face-to-face pay to protect marginal mines
• The party system gives presidents extraconstitutional control over other branches
• The plain-meaning rule forced lawyers into dual-level arguments about statutory meaning.
• The referendum is a popular veto, not a device for innovating law
• The same ballot measure can be summarized in rival framing accounts
• The Securities Act of 1933 regulates securities by mandated disclosure rather than by prohibition
• The statute in force during the period worked, not when paid, governs back-pay classification.
• The statutory definition of work was created by judges, not Congress
• The strict-construction canon can be expressly abolished by statute
• The Tucker Act made the United States widely suable on contract and constitutional claims
• The underlying standard keeps measuring an elaborated rule’s adequacy.
• The word wrongful in the FTCA does not import strict liability, only trespass
• Three presumptions govern how courts attribute purpose to statutes.
• Tightly detailed legislation strips interpreters of law-development and forces relentless amendments
• Trade custom carries no moral authority when an industry is evenly split
• Two-party elections rarely yield a mandate for any single policy.
• Uncertain damages amount, not uncertain fact of damage, permits approximate awards.
• Uncommitted hearings function as interest-alignment signaling rather than evidence evaluation
• Unconstitutional presidential acts can escape judicial review when Congress later ratifies them
• Undefined technical terms in statutes take the meaning trade usage gives them.
• Unfair trade harms by misrepresentation appropriating the first user’s earned credit
• Unilateral wage setting without bargaining power is unilateral law-making
• Union and operators jointly obtained an administrative ruling on face-to-face pay
• Unsanctioned executive power, if it exists, knows no legal limits
• Unwritten decisional common law remains the underlying framework of American state legal order
• Utility commissions’ power to order construction stays unused because responsibility stays private
• Vague legal arrangements can articulate tightly when applied to concrete facts
• Vagueness doctrine need not protect grifters choosing profitable illegal conduct
• Walking time on an employer’s premises is compensable work regardless of industry custom
• When a statute addresses judges, its meaning can be reshaped both ways
• Whether a question is law or fact is really a policy choice in disguise
• Whether legislatures or courts better adjudicate claims is an unsettled comparative question
• Whether settlements bind depends on whether a statute is individually administered or self-applying
• Widespread small fraud escapes private enforcement when no single victim suffers enough harm
• Witness hearings cannot establish the truth of policy predictions
• Word meanings are social facts no individual user can unilaterally change.
• World courts are useless without prior bonds of reciprocity and shared aims among peoples