Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

This is a review of Collected Works of John Tate. Parts I, II, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island, 2016. For several decades it has been clear to the friends and colleagues of John Tate that a “Collected Works” was merited. The award of the Abel Prize to Tate in 2010 added impetus, and finally, in Tate’s ninety-second year we have these two magnificent volumes, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. Beyond Tate’s published articles, they include five unpublished articles and a selection of his letters, most accompanied by Tate’s comments, and a collection of photographs of Tate. For an overview of Tate’s work, the editors refer the reader to [4]. Before discussing the volumes, I describe some of Tate’s work. 1. Hecke L-series and Tate’s thesis Like many budding number theorists, Tate’s favorite theorem when young was Gauss’s law of quadratic reciprocity. When he arrived at Princeton as a graduate student in 1946, he was fortunate to find there the person, Emil Artin, who had discovered the most general reciprocity law, so solving Hilbert’s ninth problem. By 1920, the German school of algebraic number theorists (Hilbert, Weber, . . .) together with its brilliant student Takagi had succeeded in classifying the abelian extensions of a number field K: to each group I of ideal classes in K, there is attached an extension L of K (the class field of I); the group I determines the arithmetic of the extension L/K, and the Galois group of L/K is isomorphic to I. Artin’s contribution was to prove (in 1927) that there is a natural isomorphism from I to the Galois group of L/K. When the base field contains an appropriate root of 1, Artin’s isomorphism gives a reciprocity law, and all possible reciprocity laws arise this way. In the 1930s, Chevalley reworked abelian class field theory. In particular, he replaced “ideals” with his “idèles” which greatly clarified the relation between the local and global aspects of the theory. For his thesis, Artin suggested that Tate do the same for Hecke L-series. When Hecke proved that the abelian L-functions of number fields (generalizations of Dirichlet’s L-functions) have an analytic continuation throughout the plane with a functional equation of the expected type, he saw that his methods applied even to a new kind of L-function, now named after him. Once Tate had developed his harmonic analysis of local fields and of the idèle group, he was able prove analytic continuation and functional equations for all the relevant L-series without Hecke’s complicated theta-formulas. Received by the editors September 5, 2016. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 01A75, 11-06, 14-06. c ©2017 American Mathematical Society

The collected works

Scholars of culture, humanities and social sciences have increasingly come to an appreciation of the importance of the legal domain in social life, while critically engaged socio-legal scholars around the world have taken up the task of understanding "Law's Empire" in all of its cultural, political, and economic dimensions. The questions arising from these intersections, and addressing imperialisms past and present forms the subject matter of a special symposium issue of Social Identities under the editorship of Griffith University's Rob McQueen, and UBC's Wes Pue and with contributions from McQueen, Ian Duncanson, Renisa Mawani, David Williams, Emma Cunliffe, Chidi Oguamanam, W. Wesley Pue, Fatou Camara, and Dianne Kirkby. This paper introduces the volume, forthcoming in late 2007. The central problematique of this issue has previously been explored through the 2005 Law's Empire conference, an informal but vibrant postcolonial legal studies network.

Law's Empire

Taking Rights Seriously.

New democracies around the world have adopted constitutional courts to oversee the operation of democratic politics. Where does judicial power come from, how does it develop in the early stages of democratic liberalization, and what political conditions support its expansion? This book answers these questions through an examination of three constitutional courts in Asia: Taiwan, Korea, and Mongolia. In a region that has traditionally viewed law as a tool of authoritarian rulers, constitutional courts in these three societies are becoming a real constraint on government. In contrast with conventional culturalist accounts, this book argues that the design and functioning of constitutional review are largely a function of politics and interests. Judicial review - the power of judges to rule an act of a legislature or national leader unconstitutional - is a solution to the problem of uncertainty in constitutional design. By providing 'insurance' to prospective electoral losers, judicial review can facilitate democracy.

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Judicial Review in New Democracies: Constitutional Courts in Asian Cases

The independence of the judiciary cannot be assumed The creation and maintenance of an independent judiciary are difficult political problems, chiefly because independent social and political institutions necessarily make life more difficult for those holding political power Powerful political actors constantly face the temptation to subvert judicial independence and transform the court system into a more malleable political instrument serving their own immediate needs Such temptations may be particularly great when the courts become obstructive and the means for overpowering the courts seem readily at hand The constitutional response to this difficult problem is to attempt to insulate the courts from political pressure The US Constitution employs various devices to this end, including giving federal judges lifetime appointments and prohibiting the reduction of their salaries Of course, there are limits as to how independent the courts can or should be It must be possible to hold even independent judges accountable for their actions, through impeachment, for example Given the political power entrusted to judges, it would seem prudent to ensure that they are at least somewhat responsive politically, a goal typically achieved through a political appointment process Nonetheless, protecting a judge’s autonomy is of paramount importance In a variety of other ways, the formal protections of the constitutional text are only the first step toward securing effective judicial independence There remain myriad loopholes that determined elected officials might use to punish the judiciary for its actions and reduce its independence1 The American federal judiciary, therefore, may be better understood as “interdependent,” rather than truly independent, and the degree of independence that federal judges enjoy is, in fact, a function of the cooperation of elected officials and the degree of judicial independence they are willing to tolerate Judicial independence is not “grounded so firmly in the Constitution that it cannot be threatened by politicians or interest groups”2

Legislative sanctions and the strategic environment of judicial review

The field of "public law" in political science is somewhat ill defined. Its practitioners range from political theorists interested in the normative underpinnings of the law to statisticians interested in the correlates of judicial voting. The output of the Supreme Court, however, looms large on the landscape for many approaches to the field. In the first decades of the century, political scientists were unlikely to focus specifically on the explanations for the Court's decisions but were more likely to be interested in a broad range of issues related to the courts and the law. Since the "behavioral revolution" that swept the social sciences in the 1950s, however, judicial decision making has been at the core of the field. Over the past several decades, substantial progress has been made in identifying patterns of judicial voting behavior and the determinants of Court decisions. That progress, though real, has also been narrow. The scholarly focus has been on individual justices and how they cast their votes, leaving a great deal of the judicial process relatively unexplored.

Once More Unto the Breach: PostBehavioralist Approaches to Judicial Politics

In striking contrast to the legislatures in most modern democracies, Congress retains an important place in American politics and policy making. Especially in recent years, this has led many observers to question the importance of the presidency and bureaucracy to the real work of American governance and the extent to which political actors in the executive branch generally exercise power. This narrative of congressional dominance has been particularly bolstered by recent scholarly interest in principal-agent models of interbranch relations. The assumption of congressional centrality, however, obscures many important features of American politics. Over the course of American history, institutional development in particular has often been driven by either autonomous executive action or conflicts between Congress and the executive. We develop an approach for assessing executive power in institutional politics and illustrate the logic of executive influence with three cases: the rise of federal food-and-drug and forestry regulation, and the growth of the federal farm extension service in the early twentieth century; the rise of the national security state in the mid-twentieth century; and the evolution of budgeting and spending practices over the course of the twentieth century.

Executive Power in American Institutional Development

The concept of social capital has revitalized the study of civil society. Alexis de Tocqueville's examination of 19th-century America is a major source of inspiration for much of this work. Tocqueville's analysis has been used to help support the idea that a strong civil society is crucial to democratic success. A reconsideration of Tocqueville's analysis, and, more important, of his American case, however, suggests that an active civil society is not an unalloyed good for democratic politics. A strong society can be not only a support but also a threat to democracy and liberal democratic ideals. One's evaluation of the health of democratic polities must depend on a study of the effects of political institutions and constitutional structures, as well as of civil society.

Revisiting Tocqueville's America : Society, Politics, and Association in the Nineteenth Century

New originalist theories of judicial review and constitutional interpretation that have emerged since the 1980s can be distinguished from an older set of theories that were predominant in the 1970s and 1980s. This article distinguishes these older and newer versions of originalism and places them within their intellectual and political contexts. Whereas the old originalism developed largely to serve as the basis for criticizing the constitutional doctrine developed by the Warren and early Burger Courts, the new originalism has developed with the Rehnquist Court in mind and is less concerned with criticizing judicial review than with guiding it.

Keith E. Whittington

Papers

Legislative sanctions and the strategic environment of judicial review

Once More Unto the Breach: PostBehavioralist Approaches to Judicial Politics

Executive Power in American Institutional Development

Revisiting Tocqueville's America : Society, Politics, and Association in the Nineteenth Century

The New Originalism