Introduction to "25 Years of Law and Positive Political Theory: Past, Present and the Future"
本文是2010年西北大学法学院研讨会的导言，介绍10篇论文，重点阐述Eskridge的“否决门”模型如何分析立法过程中的多重阻碍点及其对司法解释的规范意义。
Nearly three decades in the making, the Law and Positive Political Theory (Law & PPT) movement continues to enrich the political-legal analysis of policy-making institutions. On October 7, 2010 and October 8, 2010, a Research Symposium was held at the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth at Northwestern Law School entitled 25 Years of Law and Positive Political Theory: Past, Present and the Future. The symposium produced 10 papers—some applying the current logic of PPT methods, some illustrating future techniques that challenge our current empirical approaches to the law, and one highly cited influential paper that, until this issue, laid unpublished for almost 30 years. Four of those papers, carefully studied by the symposium participants and peer-reviewed for this journal, are now presented in this issue of this Journal. The first paper, “Vetogates,” was written by William Eskridge, Jr., whose contributions to the field of Law and PPT cannot be overstated. One of the first law scholars to recognize the value of the PPT framework for law, Professor Eskridge, has brought the methodology and insights of PPT to long-standing and perplexing issues of legal doctrine in the fields of constitutional law and statutory interpretation. His work explores insightly the normative implications for judging public law issues in a system defined by political-institutional competition and change. In this project, he again demonstrates the power of the Law and PPT approach by exploring the ramifications of a model of lawmaking where legislation can be stopped at many points in the legislative process—the “vetogates.” These stoppage points include bicameralism and presentment, legislative committees, unanimous consent decrees, and filibusters, to name a few. Because of these vetogates, statutes are difficult to enact, are characterized by compromise and delegation, and are hard to repeal. Professor Eskridge notes that the costs and benefits of this system have important implications for judicial treatment of statutes through the application of legal doctrine and judicial temperament. For example, Eskridge’s vetogates model supports the normative policy of judges consulting legislative history when interpreting statutes, and likewise suggests the virtue of deliberation-rewarding interpretive cannons when courts review statutory interpretations by agencies. This paper, along with Professor Eskridge’s earlier work and that of other Law and PPT scholars, presents a comprehensive, yet still growing, PPT framework to the field of statutory interpretation.