ORCID
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-15-2014
Abstract
It is a virtual axiom in the world of law that legal norms come in two prototypes: rules and standards. The accepted lore suggests that rules should be formulated to regulate recurrent and frequent behaviors, whose contours can be defined with sufficient precision. Standards, by contrast, should be employed to address complex, variegated, behaviors that require the weighing of multiple variables. Rules rely on an ex ante perspective and are therefore considered the domain of the legislator; standards embody a preference for ex post, ad-hoc, analysis and are therefore considered the domain of courts. The rules/standards dichotomy has become a staple in economic analysis of the law, as well as in legal theory in general.
The Essay seeks to contribute to the jurisprudential literature by unveiling a new form of legal command: the catalog. A catalog, as we define it, is a legal command comprising a specific enumeration of behaviors, prohibitions, or items that share a salient common denominator and a residual category—often denoted by the words “and the like” or “such as”—that empowers courts to add other unenumerated instances. We demonstrate that the catalog formation is often socially preferable to both rules and standards and can better enhance the foundational values of the legal system. In particular, catalogs are capable of providing certainty to actors at a lower cost than rules, while avoiding the costs of inconsistency and abuse of discretion inimical to standards. Moreover, the use of catalogs leads to a better institutional balance of powers between the legislator and the courts by preserving the integrity and autonomy of both institutions. We show that these results hold in a variety of legal contexts, including bankruptcy, torts, criminal law, intellectual property, constitutional law, and tax law—all discussed throughout the Essay.
Keywords
Legislation, jurisprudence of rules & standards, dichotomy of rules v. standards, catalog’s structure and subject matter, strong and weak discretion, family resemblance, criminal law, torts, constitutional law, tax law, evidence, ubiquity of catalogs, interpretation, legislative & social benefits
Publication Title
Columbia Law Review
Repository Citation
Parchomovsky, Gideon and Stein, Alex, "Catalogs" (2014). All Faculty Scholarship. 1039.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1039
Included in
Constitutional Law Commons, Courts Commons, Criminal Law Commons, Evidence Commons, Jurisprudence Commons, Law and Society Commons, Legal Theory Commons, Legislation Commons, Other Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration Commons, Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons, Tax Law Commons, Torts Commons
Publication Citation
115 Colum. L. Rev. 165 (2015)