SelectedWorks @ Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law
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Local Government, One Person, One Vote, and the Jewish Question
No full textEnlightenment thinkers were transfixed by “the Jewish Question”– how to incorporate the manifestly unassimilated Jewish community into a modern nation-state predicated on the idea of a uniform and homogenous citizenry. Their solution was to strip the Jewish community of its collective political character and recapitulate the Jews as abstract citizens of the state. Each Jew was henceforth to be “a man on the street and a Jew at home.”
American constitutional law has confronted its own version of the Jewish question in the problematic position of local governments. Like the Jewish ghettos of feudal Europe, cities historically were autonomous corporate entities that stubbornly resisted the sovereign authority of the state. Thus, just as the Enlightenment purported to resolve the Jewish question by formally abolishing the Jewish community as a corporate body, our jurisprudence has sought to assimilate municipalities into the state by conceptualizing them as mere aggregations of individuals rather than as collective political entities. For example, in the landmark decisions of Reynolds v. Sims and Avery v. Midland County, the United States Supreme Court mandated that states and local governments, respectively, apportion voting power in accordance with the principle of “one person, one vote,” thereby ensuring that only individuals, and not collectivities, would be admitted to the political sphere.
This article argues, though, that while Reynolds and its progeny have presumed to emasculate local governments, those decisions have had exactly the opposite impact. Under the guise that local governments have been rendered inert, courts surreptitiously permit municipalities to exercise a substantial degree of autonomy. The one person/one vote rule provides local governments with a veneer of legitimacy that enables courts to rationalize self-serving local behavior as the effectuation of a grand public interest. This seeming inconsistency in the courts’ treatment of local governments reflects an uneasy compromise between the Enlightenment dream to dissolve groups such as the Jewish community into the abstract “rights of man” and a pragmatic realization that group identity is ineradicable. This compromise, I argue, has troubling consequences: it enables those with sufficient political or financial power to retreat into insulated enclaves under the aegis of state neutrality, while foreclosing recompense for those excluded from such enclaves by deploying the fiction that they still retain their abstract rights. The article concludes accordingly that the egalitarian promise of the one person/one vote jurisprudence rings hollow
Old World Monkeys are More Similar to Humans Than New World Monkeys When Playing a Coordination Game
No full textThere is much debate about how humans’ decision-making compares to that of other primates. One way to explore this is to compare species’ performance using identical methodologies in games with strategic interactions. We presented a computerized Assurance Game, which was either functionally simultaneous or sequential, to investigate how humans, rhesus monkeys, and capuchin monkeys utilized information in decision-making. All species coordinated via sequential play on the payoff-dominant Nash equilibrium, indicating that information about the partner’s choice improved decisions. Furthermore, some humans and rhesus monkeys found the payoff-dominant Nash equilibrium in the simultaneous game, even when it was the first condition presented. Thus, Old World primates solved the task without any external cues to their partner’s choice. Finally, when not explicitly prohibited, humans spontaneously used language to coordinate on the payoff-dominant Nash equilibrium, indicating an alternate mechanism for converting a simultaneous move game into a sequential move game. This phylogenetic distribution implies that no single mechanism drives coordination decisions across the primates, while humans’ ability to spontaneously use language to change the structure of the game emphasizes that multiple mechanisms may be used even within the same species. These results provide insight into the evolution of decision-making strategies across the primates
The Law of Direct Democracy
No full textThe Law Of Direct Democracy is the first casebook on direct democracy. This book uses state and federal judicial opinions, the text of ballot initiatives, statutes and constitutional provisions to compare and contrast the various state laws that govern the ballot initiative, the referendum and the recall. This book also contemplates the role of interest groups, voters, courts and elected officials and examines their ability to utilize, influence and limit the initiative process. It provides students and instructors both the information they need to learn the law of direct democracy and the tools to pursue further inquiry on discrete topics of interest
