David Pozen (Columbia Law School) has posted Self-Help and the Separation of Powers (Yale Law Journal, volume 124, issue 1, October 2014, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Self-help doctrines pervade the law. They regulate a legal subject's attempts to cure or prevent a perceived wrong by her own action, rather than through a third-party process. In their most acute form, these doctrines allow subjects to take what international lawyers call countermeasures -- measures that would be forbidden if not pursued for redressive ends. Countermeasures are inescapable and invaluable. They are also deeply concerning, prone to error and abuse and to escalating cycles of vengeance. Disciplining countermeasures becomes a central challenge for any legal regime that recognizes them.
How does American constitutional law meet this challenge? This Article contends that a robust set of unwritten, quasi-legal norms shapes and constrains retaliation as well as cooperation across the U.S. government, and it explores how these conventions of self-help correspond to regulatory principles that have emerged in public international law. Reenvisioning intragovernmental conflict through the lens of self-help gives us new descriptive and critical purchase on the separation of powers outside the courts. By attending to the phenomenon of constitutional countermeasures and the conventions of self-help, the Article tries to show, we can advance familiar debates over "historical gloss," legislative obstruction, and presidential adventurism, and develop richer models of constitutional contestation within and beyond the branches.
Very interesting and highly recommended. Download it while its hot!
