Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

Abstract

This article is part of a larger project to study the counterrevolution against private enforcement of federal law from an institutional perspective. In a series of articles emerging from the project, we show how the Executive, Congress and the Supreme Court (wielding both judicial power under Article III of the Constitution and delegated legislative power under the Rules Enabling Act) fared in efforts to reverse or dull the effects of statutory and other incentives for private enforcement. An institutional perspective helps to explain the outcome we document: the long-term erosion of the infrastructure of private enforcement as a result of judicial decisions, despite the counterrevolution’s struggles in landscapes of democratic politics. This perspective also highlights normative concerns that arise when changes bearing on the fate of rights enforcement are not the result of public deliberation and democratic politics — indeed, when they may not be noticed by the public at all.

In this article, we explore further the theoretical underpinnings of our intuitions concerning public awareness of the relevant judicial decisions, and, for the first time, seek to determine whether they have empirical support. To that end, we explore relationships among the Supreme Court’s turn against rights enforcement, public understanding, and public preferences by analyzing an original dataset that comprises news coverage of (1) Supreme Court opinions ruling on substantive rights, and (2) opinions adjudicating opportunities and incentives to enforce those rights, such as standing, damages, fees, and the class action. Drawing on both theory and this empirical evidence, we argue that the Court’s decisions on rights enforcement, because of their lower public visibility, are less constrained by public opinion and therefore less tethered to democratic governance. We suggest, further, that the relatively subterranean quality of law affecting private enforcement of rights may help to explain why it has become even more ideologically divisive on the Court than substantive rights themselves.

Keywords

Empirical legal studies, public opinion and awareness, news coverage, issue salience, litigation, private attorney general, Supreme Court of the United States, politics of the judiciary, democracy, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, rulemaking, rights retrenchment, conservative legal movement

Publication Title

DePaul Law Review

Publication Citation

65 DePaul L. Rev. 293 (2016)

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