Deference is perhaps the most important concept and practice in law. It lies at the core of every system of precedent, appellate review, federalism, and separation of powers, all of which center on how one actor should deal with previous decisions. Oddly enough, deference is also one of the most under-analyzed and under-theorized legal concepts and practices, perhaps because its applications are so varied. This book's goal is to provide a definition of deference and a vocabulary for discussing it that can be used to describe, explain, and/or criticize deference in all of its manifestations, including some manifestations that are not always identified by legal actors as instances of deference. This project does not seek to prescribe whether and how any legal system should apply deference in any specific circumstance or to critique any particular deference doctrines. Rather, it aims to bring the concept of deference to the forefront of legal discussion; to identify, catalogue, and analyze at least the chief among its many applications; to set forth the many and varied rationales that can be and have been offered in support of deference in different legal contexts; and thereby to provide a vocabulary and conceptual framework that can be employed in future projects, whether those projects are descriptive or prescriptive.

Deference: The Legal Concept and the Legal Practice

Lawson, Gary

Seidman, Guy I.

Rules & Procedures

Oxford University Press

How does one prove the law? If your neighbor breaks your window, the law regulates how you can show your claim to be true or false; but how do you prove that in breaking your window your neighbor has broken the law? American jurisprudence devotes an elaborate body of doctrine—and an equally elaborate body of accompanying scholarly commentary—to worrying about how to prove facts. It establishes rules for the admissibility of evidence, creates varying standards of proof, and assigns burdens of proof that determine who wins or loses when the facts are unclear. But the law is shockingly inexplicit when addressing these issues with respect to the proof of legal claims. Indeed, the entire language of evidentiary proof, so sophisticated when it comes to questions of fact, is largely absent from the American legal system with respect to questions of law. As Gary Lawson shows, legal claims are inherently objects of proof, and whether or not the law acknowledges the point openly, proof of legal claims is just a special case of the more general norms governing proof of any claim. As a result, similar principles of evidentiary admissibility, standards of proof, and burdens of proof operate, and must operate, in the background of claims about the law. This book brings these evidentiary principles for proving law out of the shadows so that they can be analyzed, clarified, and discussed. Viewing legal problems through this lens of proof illuminates debates about everything from constitutional interpretation to the role of stipulations in litigation. Rather than prescribe resolutions to any of those debates, Evidence of the Law instead provides a set of tools that can be used to make those debates more fruitful, whatever one’s substantive views may be. As lawyers, judges, and legal subjects confront uncertainty about what the law is, they can, should, and must, Lawson argues, be guided by the same kinds of abstract considerations, structures, and doctrines long used to make determinations about questions of fact.

Evidence of the Law: Proving Legal Claims

University of Chicago Press

The Constitution of Empire offers a constitutional and historical survey of American territorial expansion from the founding era to the present day. The authors describe the Constitution's design for territorial acquisition and governance and examine the ways in which practice over the past two hundred years has diverged from that original vision. Noting that most of America's territorial acquisitions-including the Louisiana Purchase, the Alaska Purchase, and the territory acquired after the Mexican-American and Spanish-American Wars-resulted from treaties, the authors elaborate a Jeffersonian-based theory of the federal treaty power and assess American territorial acquisitions from this perspective. They find that at least one American acquisition of territory and many of the basic institutions of territorial governance have no constitutional foundation, and they explore the often-strange paths that constitutional law has traveled to permit such deviations from the Constitution's original meaning.

The Constitution of Empire

History

Seidman, Mr. Guy

Americas

Yale University Press

Professor Lawson has adopted three strategies to reduce the Administrative Law course to a manageable set of materials. 
First and most importantly, the book deliberately concentrates on federal administrative law, to the near total exclusion of state administrative law. 
Second, the book concentrates on administrative law, e.g., the casebook is self-consciously doctrinal, focusing on the formal legal doctrines that establish the framework within which policymakers, lobbyists, and lawyers can ply their trades. 
Third, the book strongly emphasizes the four fundamental branches of administrative law: the constitutional foundations of the administrative state, the law (both constitutional and statutory) governing agency rulemaking and adjudicatory procedures, the law governing the timing and availability of judicial review. 
The book is student-friendly, designed to tell the story of modern federal administrative law in a straightforward yet sophisticated fashion.

Federal Administrative Law (American Casebook Series)

Administrative Law

West

Federal Administrative Law (American Casebooks)

West Group Publishing

The Fifth Edition of Lawson’s Federal Administrative Law, like the previous four editions, emphasizes doctrine and its historical evolution in exploring the four basic foundations of federal administrative law: separation of powers, statutorily- and constitutionally-required procedures for agency adjudication and rulemaking, scope of judicial review of agency action, and the availability and timing of judicial review. The book concentrates on federal administrative law in order to provide the fundamental knowledge necessary to understand the subject in other jurisdictions. It also maintains the straightforward organization and don’t-hide-the-ball presentation that has characterized the book since its inception.

Lawson's Federal Administrative Law, 5th (American Casebook Series)

West Academic Publishing

West Group

This casebook emphasizes current doctrine and its historical evolution in exploring the four basic foundations of federal administrative law: separation of powers, statutorily- and constitutionally-required procedures for agency adjudication and rulemaking, scope of judicial review of agency action, and the availability and timing of judicial review. The book concentrates on federal rather than state administrative law in order to provide the fundamental knowledge and concepts necessary to understand the subject, on the belief that an understanding of federal law can be translated into other settings. The book also maintains the straightforward organization and don’t-hide-the-ball presentation that has characterized the book since its inception. The Sixth Edition contains seven new principal cases, thirteen new note cases, and updated treatments of all major topics.

The Origins of the Necessary and Proper Clause

The Necessary and Proper Clause is one of the most important parts of the U.S. Constitution. Today this short thirty-nine word paragraph is cited as the legal foundation for much of the modern federal government. Yet constitutional scholars have pronounced its origins and original meaning a mystery. Through three independent lines of research, the authors trace the lineage of the Necessary and Proper Clause to the everyday law of the Founding Era - the same law that American founders such as Madison, Hamilton, and Washington applied in their daily lives. Origins of the Necessary and Proper Clause are found in law governing agencies, public administration, and corporations. Moreover, all of those areas were undergirded by common principles of fiduciary responsibility - reflecting the Founders' view that a public office is truly a public trust. This explains the choice of language in the clause and provides clues about its meaning. This book thus serves as a reference source for scholars seeking to understand the intellectual foundations of one of the Constitution's most important clauses.

Natelson, Robert G.

Miller, Geoffrey P.

Constitutional Law

Cambridge University Press

Legal History

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Books by Lawson, Gary