Roundtables by Jack Knight
Papers by Jack Knight
<p>This chapter addresses the challenges that social choice theory brings to normative clai... more <p>This chapter addresses the challenges that social choice theory brings to normative claims about democracy. Social choice theorists commonly critique democratic decision making on the grounds that voting is susceptible to unavoidable pathologies and that insofar as voting is essential to democracy, those pathologies subvert the normative legitimacy of democratic outcomes. Because voting is an essential component of any democratic institutional arrangement in any large, heterogeneous, complex society, the systematic instability and ambiguity that social choice theorists establish raises serious, unavoidable difficulties for some interpretations of democracy. Yet populism and liberalism hardly exhaust the theoretical vantage points from which such findings might be interpreted. Indeed, the chapter offers a reading of social choice theory that suggests an obvious, justifiable response to the putative dilemma fabricated by theorists who insist that the only available options are an impossible populism or an unpalatable liberalism.</p>
Duke Law Journal, 2009
This is a conference organized around the general topic of measuring judges and justice. The mand... more This is a conference organized around the general topic of measuring judges and justice. The mandate for the conference raises a number of interesting and challenging questions, of both a positive and normative nature, about judicial decisionmaking. The main theme throughout the conference is how social scientists’ empirical studies of the courts help to answer these questions. Regarding questions of “measuring judges,” the relevant focus is on the ways social scientists conceptualize, operationalize, and then explain judicial decisionmaking. Regarding questions of “measuring justice,” the relevant focus is on how these same studies might help to assess to what extent judges satisfy the normative requirements of their jobs. This latter set of concerns may be seen as one important way of measuring the quality of judicial decisionmaking, that is, assessing how well judges do their jobs. At the outset, I think that it is important to note that underlying this conference is an assumptio...
If the mark of a seminal study is the quantity and quality of the progeny it spawns, then Robert ... more If the mark of a seminal study is the quantity and quality of the progeny it spawns, then Robert A. Dahl's Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy-Maker,1 scores a bull's eye. From its publication, the Dahl Article has been cited by both social science journals and 2 law reviews every year to date. Even more important is the high quality and diversity of scholarship building on Professor Dahl's study, from research assessing the relationship between public opinion and the U.S. Supreme
Yale Law & Policy Review, 2000
For an institution that takes great pride in following various norms and conventions, the Supreme... more For an institution that takes great pride in following various norms and conventions, the Supreme Court of the United States is notorious for departing from those very norms and conventions when it sees fit or when the circumstances seem to necessitate it.1 Some incursions occur on a case-by-case basis: "The Rule of Four," dictating that the Court will grant review only to those certiorari petitions that obtain positive votes from four Court members, usually holds but sometimes does not; the principle of stare decisis, declaring that past decisions should guide future ones, appears as a rationale in many opinions but certainly not all.3 Other departures, once they have occurred, have had more lasting effects. The demise of the norm of consensus, under which the justices rarely made public their private disagreements, gave way to the dissent.4 Similarly, the junior vote rule, under which the newest member of
Chapter 12 Social Norms and the Rule of Law: Fostering Trust in a Socially Diverse Society Jack K... more Chapter 12 Social Norms and the Rule of Law: Fostering Trust in a Socially Diverse Society Jack Knight Sometimes alone, sometimes with the related concepts of social capi-tal and community, trust is regularly invoked to explain various forms of social cooperation in ...
The Rise of Neoliberalism and Institutional Analysis
Annual Review of Political Science
Contemporary political science takes bargaining to be the central mechanism of democratic decisio... more Contemporary political science takes bargaining to be the central mechanism of democratic decision making, though political theorists typically doubt that processes that permit the exercise of unequal power and the use of threats can yield legitimate outcomes. In this review, we trace the development of theories of institutional bargaining from the standpoint of pluralism and positive political theory before turning to the treatment of bargaining in the influential work of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Their ambivalence about bargaining gave rise to a new focus on the value of negotiation and compromise but this literature constitutes an unstable midpoint between the justificatory ambitions of deliberative democracy and the desire to provide plausible models of political decision making. Instead of advocating changes in mindset or motivation, we argue that a fair bargaining process requires institutional reform, as well as a justificatory framework centered on the preservation of ...
Political Theory
POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF PRAGMATISM JACK KNIGHT Washington University JAMES JOHNSON University o... more POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF PRAGMATISM JACK KNIGHT Washington University JAMES JOHNSON University of Rochester 1. INTRODUCTION What are the political consequences of pragmatism? Are pragmatiste committed in any strong sense to particular political ...
Oxford Handbooks Online
In the analysis of judicial behavior, “economics” has multiple meanings. Some studies emphasize t... more In the analysis of judicial behavior, “economics” has multiple meanings. Some studies emphasize the economic consequences of judicial decisions while others employ the concepts and tools of economic analysis to explain those decisions. Here we focus on studies proceeding from the assumption of rationality (regardless of their methodological approach). Even with this limited focus, the range of substantive topics is impressive. There are many ways to splice and dice them but six stand out: (1) the judge: motivations, careers and performance; (2) selection and retention of judges; (3) opinions and precedent; (4) collegial courts; (5) the hierarchy of justice; and (6) external actors. For each we synthesize the literature and offer directions for future work.
The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 1992
... Knight, Jack. 1992. Institutions and Social Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.M... more ... Knight, Jack. 1992. Institutions and Social Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Macedo, Stephen. 1990. Liberal Values. Oxford: Oxford University Press. March, James G., and Joban P. Olsen. 1989. Rediscovering Institutions. New York: The Free Press. ...
Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics JITE, 2001
What is the proper scope of government? In this paper, I argue that efforts to de-fine a clear an... more What is the proper scope of government? In this paper, I argue that efforts to de-fine a clear and distinct boundary for the scope of government are misplaced. This argument takes two forms. First, and primarily, I set out a positive argument for a pragmatic approach. Given ...
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Roundtables by Jack Knight
Papers by Jack Knight