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 Beyond Tate’s published articles, they include five unpublished articles and a selection of his letters, most accompanied by Tate’s comments, and a collection of photographs of Tate.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

Professorial Speech, the First Amendment, and the 'Anti-CRT' Laws

Many scholars of American politics implicitly or explicitly assume a model of congressional dominance. This standard narrative has been made explicit in principal-agent models of interbranch relations, in which the executive serves as a mere agent of the legislative principal. There are important limitations to the applicability of principal-agent models in the political context, and the assumption of congressional dominance obscures many important features of American politics. Over the course of American history, institutional development has often been driven by either autonomous executive action or conflicts between Congress and the executive. The argument is illustrated by reference to three cases: the growth of the federal extension service, the rise of national security intelligence operations, and the growth of the presidential impoundment power.

Executive Power in American Institutional Development

This paper elaborates a model of the political decision to sanction courts for their exercise of the power of judicial review. The paper examines the logic for why elected officials might preserve, and when they might subvert, an independent judiciary armed with the power of constitutional review. The paper identifies several reasons why legislators might value independent judicial review, and identifies the circumstances in which the political costs of such review would outweigh its political benefits. The argument is illustrated in the historical experience of court-curbing activities in the U.S. Congress.

Legislative Sanctions and the Strategic Environment of Judicial Review

The 1930s is generally understood to be a period of constitutional revolution in the United States, with a restrictive conservative U.S. Supreme Court giving way to a latitudinarian liberal Court. The politics of judicial review and the substance of constitutional law in the states has rarely been considered. This article begins to integrate the states into the broader story of American constitutional development in these pivotal years. Focusing on a sample of four state courts between 1925 and 1945, this article argues that the U.S. Supreme Court and the struggle over federal constitutional law may have been more idiosyncratic and exceptional than typical of the constitutional politics of the period. Judicial review in the state courts and the elaboration of state-level constitutional law are characterized by continuity rather than transformation during this period. State courts were able to routinely use the power of judicial review to invalidate legislation across this time period, but they rarely found themselves obstructing the core policies being advanced by the other parts of the state governments.

State Constitutional Law in the New Deal Period

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested by Montgomery, Alabama, police officers after she violated a city ordinance by refusing to move to the back of a bus as ordered by the driver. What neither the driver nor the police officers knew was that Parks was a member of the local NAACP and had been looking for a vehicle to protest the way African-Americans were treated on city buses. That night, civil rights organizations began distributing leaflets throughout the African-American community declaring “Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday.” The Montgomery bus boycott had begun. Initially, the protestors demanded only polite treatment and the right to sit in the front of the bus when there were no white riders. Two months of local intransigence and violence convinced the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), led by a young pastor named Martin Luther King, to make greater demands. By February 1956, the MIA was insisting that Montgomery buses desegregate and sponsoring a lawsuit aimed at declaring segregation on city buses unconstitutional. The federal district court in Browder v. Gayle by a divided vote and the Supreme Court of the United States by a unanimous vote declared unconstitutional segregation on city buses. While the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) did not explicitly overrule Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Judge Rives’s majority opinion for the district court assumed that Plessy for all practical purposes had been overruled. Was he correct in making that assumption? Should lower federal courts have waited for an explicit declaration that Plessy had been overruled? Could lower court justices have at some point inferred that Plessy had been overruled from the Supreme Court’s practice of issuing one sentence opinions in segregation cases? Gayle v. Browder is an example of a one sentence Supreme Court opinion declaring segregation unconstitutional in light of Brown. The Supreme Court issued similar one sentence per curiam opinions when reviewing lower federal court rulings on the constitutionality of laws mandating segregation in state dining facilities and restrooms, athletic contests sanctioned by the state, state parks, state golf courses, state beaches, state entertainment facilities, state buildings, jails and courthouses. What do you make of this practice? Were the justices implicitly asserting that the unconstitutionality of segregation was obvious? Did the per curiam opinions mask disagreement over the reasons why segregation was unconstitutional? Was this part of the judicial strategy not to unduly antagonize the South?

Keith E. Whittington

Papers

Professorial Speech, the First Amendment, and the 'Anti-CRT' Laws

Executive Power in American Institutional Development

Legislative Sanctions and the Strategic Environment of Judicial Review

State Constitutional Law in the New Deal Period

American Constitutionalism: Volume II: Rights & Liberties