The Rehabilitationists
回归主义者
作者：Brian Beutler，《新共和》高级编辑 @ 2015-08-30
译者：@Ghostmarine
来源：《新共和》（The Republic）
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122645/rehabilitationists-libertarian-movement-undo-new-deal
How a small band of determined legal academics set out to persuade the Supreme Court to undo the New Deal—and have almost won.
一小撮坚定的法学家如何游说最高法院撤销新政，并如何距成功一步之遥。
In November 2013, a who’s who of America’s conservative legal establishment descended on the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., for an annual meeting of the Federalist Society, the most influential conservative legal organization in the country. Current presidential candidates Scott Walker and Ted Cruz each made appearances, ingratiating themselves with the influence peddlers in attendance. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was a featured speaker at the event’s black-tie-optional dinner.
2013年11月，美国保守派法律界名流纷纷降临华盛顿特区五月花酒店，参加全美最具影响力的保守派法学组织——联邦党人协会（Federalist Society）举办的年会。眼下正在争取总统获选人党内提名的斯科特·沃克和泰迪·克鲁兹也分别到场，搔首弄姿，试图赢得与会大佬们的垂青。最高法院大法官克拉伦斯·托马斯作为特邀演讲嘉宾出席年会的半正装宴会。
One of the biggest stars of the conference, however, was neither a Senate-confirmed official nor an elected politician, but a libertarian law professor at Georgetown named Randy Barnett. This wasn’t Barnett’s first turn as a Federalist Society eminence, but his reception that year was especially rapturous.
然而，年会上最耀眼的明星并非是由参议院批准的法官，也不是民选政客，而是一个来自乔治城、名叫兰迪·巴奈特的法学教授，是个自由意志主义者。巴奈特并非首次在联邦党人协会上出风头，但那年，他格外火。
“The younger people, the people in law school, they seem to be gravitating toward people like Randy,” said attendee Josh Blackman, an associate law professor at the South Texas College of Law and a close friend of Barnett’s. “When he gets off the stage he’s mobbed. ... There’s a crowd of people five or six feet deep surrounding him.”
“年轻人，法学院的学生们，他们为兰迪这样的人所倾倒，”与会者、巴奈特的密友、南德克萨斯法学院副教授乔什·布莱克曼如是说。“他下台时，被围住了······围在他身边的人群足有五、六英尺那么厚。”
Barnett had been invited to participate in a lunchtime debate against J. Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan-appointed judge serving on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, on the topic of whether courts are too deferential to legislatures. The event was sold out.
巴奈特曾被邀请参加午餐辩论，对手是里根任命的第四巡回上诉法院法官J·哈维·威尔金森，讨论法院是否对立法机关过于顺从。那次活动的票卖得精光。
Thinking back on that day recently, Barnett marveled at his emergence as a celebrity. “One of the leaders of the Federalist Society—one of the senior staff—said clearly I had the room,” Barnett told me. “It wasn’t that I beat J. Harvie Wilkinson in a debate—who knows?—it’s just that the room was with me. The room would not have been with me ten years ago.”
回想起那天的情形，巴奈特依然为自己成为一个明星而惊讶不已。“联邦党人协会的一名领导，高管，再明白不过地告诉我，说那间屋子是我的，”巴奈特对我说。“不是说我在辩论中赢了J·哈维·威尔金森，那种场合哪有胜负可言，他是指那间房子里全是我的支持者。要在十年前，根本不会出现这种情况。”
Back then, Barnett was one of a handful of academics on the fringes of conservative legal thought. Today, their views are taking hold within the mainstream of our politics. Barnett and his compatriots represent the vanguard of a lasting shift toward greater libertarian influence over our law schools and, increasingly, throughout our legal system. They’re building networks for students and young lawyers and laying the foundation for a more free-market cast of federal judges in the next presidential administration. Their goal is to fundamentally reshape the courts in ways that will have profound effects on society.
十年前，巴奈特只是保守派法学思想边缘的少数几名学者之一。而今天，他们的观点开始在我们主流政治视野中显山露水。在长久以来自由意志主义向法学院乃至整个法律体系逐渐扩大影响的过程中，巴奈特和他的同袍们扮演了急先锋的角色。他们为学生和年轻律师构建了一个网络，打造了更为壮大的拥护自由市场的联邦法官阵容，为下一届政府选拔法官奠定了基础。他们的目标是，用一种能够对社会产生深远影响的方式，彻底重塑法庭体系。
Barnett’s political philosophy took root when he was a child. His father was a conservative, and he became one, too. When he was a junior at Northwestern University, one of his professors introduced him to libertarianism, as distinct from the more staid Republicanism of his youth. While attending law school at Harvard, a classmate took him to New York to meet the famed but controversial theorist Murray Rothbard, an encounter that inspired his lifelong affiliation with the libertarian movement and its prominent institutions, like the Cato Institute. His lone professional detour outside that world was a four-year stint as a prosecutor in Illinois. After that, he obtained a fellowship at the University of Chicago under Richard Epstein, a giant of American law in the twentieth century and a patron saint of modern libertarian scholars.
巴奈特的政治哲学植根于儿提时代。父亲是个保守派，他也成了保守派。在西北大学读大三时，一位教授向他介绍了自由意志主义，这套理论显然与他青年时所信仰的更为古板的共和主义大相径庭。进入哈佛法学院后，一位同窗带他前往纽约，拜见名满天下谤亦随之的思想家罗斯巴德。这次邂逅促成了他终生卷入自由意志主义运动之中，并与加图研究所这样的运动重镇始终保持良好关系。巴奈特孤寂的职业生涯并非起步于学术界，他最初在伊利诺伊清贫地干了四年检察官。此后，二十世纪美国法学巨擘理查德·爱泼斯坦主持下的芝加哥大学为他提供了一份奖学金，要知道，爱泼斯坦可是现代自由意志主义学者的守护神。
Barnett’s career as an academic began far from the center of the action, however, at Chicago-Kent College of Law, where he became a professor in 1982. “It was a good school,” Barnett told me, “but one reason it was a bummer to teach there was no one had ever heard of it.”
然而，巴奈特的学术之旅可谓发轫于蛮荒，他于1982年在芝加哥肯特法学院获得教授职称。“那是所好学校，”巴奈特告诉我道，“但是在那教书令人困扰的是，没几个人听说过那座学校。”
Eventually, Barnett clawed his way to Boston University, and then to Georgetown, where he joined the faculty in 2006. (“I love the situation here,” he said of his current digs. “I don’t need to be on the outs.”) But even as his career took off, his legal views remained decidedly anti-establishment. Barnett believes the Constitution exists to secure inalienable property and contract rights for individuals. This may sound like a bland and inconsequential opinion, but if widely adopted by our courts and political systems it would prohibit or call into question basic governmental protections—minimum wages, food-safety regulations, child-labor laws—that most of us take for granted. For nearly a century now, a legal counterculture has insisted that the whole New Deal project was a big, unconstitutional error, and Barnett is a big part of that movement today.
最终，巴奈特费尽九牛二虎之力，辗转波士顿大学，于2006年成为乔治城的教员。（“我喜欢这里的环境，”他谈及自己当前的教职。“再不用跟别人格格不入了。”）虽然职业生涯平步青云，他依然坚定地秉承反建制派的法学观点。巴奈特深信，宪法存在的意义是为了确保个人财产和订约权不被侵犯。这种观点似乎是一种陈词滥调，无关紧要。但，如果美国的法院和政治体系能够彻底吸纳这种观点，就会彻底禁绝基本的政府保护行为，至少也会对我们绝大部分人都视作理所当然的一些举措，例如最低工资、食品安全管制、禁止童工法等等，产生怀疑。近百年来，法律界的非主流观点一直声称，整个新政项目都是一个巨大的违宪错误，而今天，巴奈特正在该运动中扮演重要的角色。
The main object of this group’s obsession is the Supreme Court’s 1905 decision in
Lochner v.
New York. Joseph Lochner was the owner of a bakery in Utica, New York, at the turn of the last century, who sought relief from the Bakeshop Act, under which he was fined for allowing an employee to work more than 60 hours a week. He believed that the act’s workplace-safety rationale was in fact a government-sanctioned tool for the bakers union to attack nonunion bakeries like his own and that it deprived him and his employees of their right to enter into their own contracts. The Supreme Court narrowly agreed. Its 5–4 ruling struck down the law and, more importantly, provided the rationale justices would use to invalidate other legislation over the course of a generation.
这群人念念不忘的是1905年最高法院就洛克纳诉纽约州（
Lochner v.
New York）一案的判决。约瑟夫·洛克纳是纽约尤蒂卡一家面包坊的主人，上世纪之交，由于让员工一周工作超过六十小时，受到了《面包坊法》（Bakeshop Act）的处罚，他决定找法院说理。他认为，《面包坊法》所谓基于工作场所安全的理由，其实是面包师工会的一种得到政府批准的工具，用于整治像自己这样的非工会面包师，而且这种法律也侵犯了他和员工之间自由订立契约的权利。最高法院勉强认同了他的观点。判决结果5-4，推翻了《面包坊法》。更重要的是，此次判决提供了一种司法逻辑依据，本足以颠覆此后整整一代所修筑而成的法律体系。
For decades now, legal academics and elites have considered the early twentieth century one of the Supreme Court’s darkest eras.
Lochner, it’s been viewed, belongs with
Dred Scott v.
Sandford, the 1857 decision holding that neither slaves nor freedmen were U.S. citizens, and
Plessy v.
Ferguson, the 1896 decision upholding racial segregation under the separate-but-equal doctrine, in a Malebolge of rejected rulings.
最近几十年来，法学学者和精英们都将二十世纪早期视为最高法院的黑历史阶段。洛克纳一案，与1857年裁定奴隶和已解放奴隶均不享有公民权的斯科特诉桑福德案（
Dred Scott v. Sandford），以及1896年在“隔离但平等”的原则下实行种族隔离的普莱西诉弗格森案（
Plessy v.
Ferguson）一道，被视为奇葩判决的典型。
In 1936, after the Supreme Court struck down a New York minimum-wage law, one of a series of New Deal measures it ruled unconstitutional, a dejected Franklin D. Roosevelt complained to the press that the Court had created “a ‘no-man’s land’ where no government—state or federal—can function.”
1936年，最高法院宣布新政措施之一、纽约州最低工资法违宪，沮丧的富兰克林·德拉诺·罗斯福对媒体抱怨道，最高法院开辟了“一片‘真空地带’，无论是联邦政府还是州政府，在这里都无能为力。”
A year later, after Roosevelt had been reelected overwhelmingly on a New Deal platform, the Supreme Court effectively repudiated
Lochner when a 5–4 majority upheld Washington’s state minimum-wage law for women. “More than 25 years ago we set forth the applicable principle in these words, after referring to the cases where the liberty guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment had been broadly described,” the Court ruled. “But it was recognized in the cases cited, as in many others, that freedom of contract is a qualified, and not an absolute, right. There is no absolute freedom to do as one wills or to contract as one chooses.” In addition to forming the basis of the modern American social contract, this decision was a hard-fought victory over fierce opposition to government regulation by employers and property owners. The enduring postwar political consensus about the proper role of government may have masked that opposition, but it was never completely vanquished.
一年后，随着罗斯福挟新政以绝对优势连任，最高法院以5-4的多数支持华盛顿州女性最低工资法，事实上推翻了洛克纳案先例。 “二十五年前，在大量援引了明显涉及宪法第十四修正案所保障的众多自由的案件后，我们以这样的字眼陈述了一条适用原则，”法庭裁定。“然而，我们需要认识到，像其他所有案件一样，在所引用的案例中，订立契约的自由是一种具有限制的权利，而非绝对权利。并不存在随心所欲行事的绝对自由，也不存在任意订立契约的绝对自由。”此判决除了奠定现代美国社会契约基础外，还艰难地战胜了雇主和业主对政府管制的强烈反对。虽然战后长期以来，关于政府恰当角色的政治共识掩盖了这种反对，但反对的声音从未彻底消失。
All libertarians want to fight federal regulations in Congress and the executive branch. But Barnett and his allies think courts should be empowered to throw regulations out even if political majorities support them. These
Lochner revivalist professors have established beachheads at law schools across the country. In 2002, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh founded a blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, as a hub for libertarian ideas, including Lochner revisionism. Today, it has become the most prominent academic legal blog in the country and now publishes under the auspices of
The Washington Post. It boasts nearly two dozen contributing professors and mainlines detailed and informed libertarian legal arguments to thousands of the nation’s top lawyers, law students, clerks, judges, and opinion-makers every day.
所有自由意志主义者都试图在国会和行政分支与联邦管制作斗争。然而，巴奈特和他的盟友认为，即使政治主流乐见管制，司法系统也应当有能力推翻管制。这些以复兴洛克纳案为己任的教授们已经在全美各地的法学院建立起滩头阵地。2002年，加州大学洛杉矶分校的法学教授尤金·沃洛克创建了一个名叫“沃洛克共谋”的博客，成为自由意志主义理念，的大本营，其中就包括洛克纳修正主义。今天，该网站已经成为美国最引人瞩目的法学博客，并在《华盛顿邮报》的资助下结集出版。网站声称，有二十多位教授参与博客内容撰写，网站涉及大量详尽而具体的自由意志主义法学热点，每天有数以千计的国内顶级律师、法学院学生、书记员、法官，以及意见领袖浏览。
The contributors to The Volokh Conspiracy teach at the University of Minnesota, Northwestern, Emory, Duke, and elsewhere. Several hold positions at George Mason University’s law school, which is famous for its conservative faculty and, in 36 short years, has rocketed to prominence as one of the 50 best law schools in the country. In 2011, GMU law professor and Volokh Conspiracy contributor David Bernstein published a book titled
Rehabilitating Lochner, and that’s exactly what he, Barnett, and their contemporaries have been attempting to do.
“沃洛克共谋”的撰稿人在明尼苏达大学、西北大学、埃莫里大学、杜克大学，以及其他地方任教。还有几人把持乔治梅森大学法学院教席，该大学最引人注目之处就是其保守派教员，以及在短短三十六年时间里，以火箭的速度攀升至全国法学院前五十强。2011年，乔治梅森大学法学教授、沃洛克共谋撰稿人大卫·伯恩斯坦出版了一本名为《回归洛克纳》的书，而这正是伯恩斯坦、巴奈特，以及他们的同袍们所一直努力加以实现的目标。
That project aims to extend the reach of their dissident school of thought beyond academia and into the workings of government. In 1991, two former members of the Reagan administration, Chip Mellor and Clint Bolick, founded the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm now based in Arlington, Virginia, with $350,000 a year in seed money from the oil and gas magnate Charles Koch. They’ve challenged state licensing laws on behalf of hair braiders, florists, and other tradespeople across the country, but have also undertaken loftier crusades, including a doomed effort to overturn the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires that contractors pay their employees competitive wages on government-funded projects.
自由意志主义运动旨在扩展这一思想异端学派的影响力，从学术界渗透入政府运作领域。1991年，曾在里根政府任职的奇普·梅勒和克林特·波力克创立了一家自由意志主义公共利益律师事务所——司法研究所，该机构目前位于弗吉尼亚阿灵顿市，每年由石油大亨查尔斯·科赫慷慨解囊三十五万美元作为种子基金。研究所已经代表全国的编辫工、花匠，以及其他生意人挑战了各州的特许经营法，同时他们还在进行一场更为深远的变革，其中包括彻底推翻《戴维斯—培根法》（Davis-Bacon Act），因为该法案要求在政府出资的项目上，承包商应向员工支付具有竞争力的工资，虽然这项努力前景不妙。
The Volokh Conspiracy, too, was designed not just as a place where law professors could talk with each other, but as a platform from which to broadcast libertarian ideas to a wider audience. Barnett joined the blog as a contributor in 2004. In its early days, its views could be read as a counterpoint to prevailing conservative legal thought. In the summer of 2005, for example, when the overwhelming majority of conservative elites were celebrating John Roberts’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Barnett interjected with a typically contrarian but in some ways fundamental caveat. “Who is John Roberts?” he asked in a Volokh Conspiracypost. “We know nothing about what he stands for.”
同样，沃洛克共谋也不仅仅是个供法学教授们谈天说地的所在，而是一个向更多听众传播自由意志主义理念的平台。2004年，巴奈特成为该博客的撰稿人。起先，该博客的观点更像是保守派同行们所奉行法学观点的对位旋律。例如，2005年夏，当绝大多数保守派精英为约翰·罗伯茨被任命为最高法院首席大法官而欢呼雀跃时，巴奈特以一种典型的鹤立鸡群的姿态，问了一个更为本质的问题，“约翰·罗伯茨是谁？”他在沃洛克共谋发帖写道。“我们对于他所持有的立场一无所知。”
Few professors see their academic work reflected in the public realm, and fewer still after cutting so aggressively against the grain. In 2004, when Barnett argued his first and only case before the Supreme Court,
Lochner was a distant specter, and libertarian influence over the law more generally was hard to detect. The case concerned two women, Angel Raich and Diane Monson, who used marijuana to treat their chronic medical conditions. Monson’s homegrown medical marijuana plants were seized and destroyed by federal agents pursuant to the Controlled Substances Act. Barnett contended the law was an overbroad application of the Commerce Clause to regulate economic activity. He lost 6–3. The following year, the Rehnquist Court dealt libertarians another major blow when it ruled 5–4 in
Kelo v.
New London that the Connecticut city could use its eminent domain powers to condemn private property and hand it over to private developers. The plaintiffs in that case were represented by the Institute for Justice.
做研究的很少能看到自己的成果反映在公共领域中，如果他们还如此咄咄逼人地与主流观点相悖，可能性就更微乎其微了。2004年，当巴奈特为他第一个也是唯一一个案子在最高法院展开唇枪舌战时，洛克纳只是一个遥远的幽灵，自由意志主义对于整个法律体系的影响微乎其微。那起案子关乎两名女性，安吉尔·赖希和黛安·蒙森，她们利用大麻治疗自己的慢性病。联邦探员依据《管制药品法》（Controlled Substances Act），查抄并销毁了蒙森在自己家种植的药用大麻。巴奈特慷慨陈词，认为利用商业条款对经济活动进行管制实在过于宽泛。他以3-6输了官司。来年，伦奎斯特法庭给了自由意志主义者又一击重拳，在凯洛诉新伦敦市一案（
Kelo v.
New London）中以5-4裁定，这座康涅狄格小城可以行使土地征用权，征收私人地产，并将其转售给私人开发商。这起案子的原告凯洛就是由司法研究所代理。
To anyone who lived through
Bush v.
Gore it might seem strange that a judiciary as conservative as the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts would rule for the government so regularly. But the dominant strain of conservative legal thought for the last half-century has largely been shaped by the right’s backlash to the social revolution stemming from the 1960s and the Warren and Burger Courts’ use of the Constitution to further progressive ends like desegregation and access to abortion. For conservatives, the main villain of the last 50 years has been creeping liberal judicial activism and a willingness to overturn legislative action. Conservative legal scholars and jurists like Robert Bork held that judges should refrain from projecting personal or political values into their judicial opinions. This principle became a cornerstone of traditional conservative legal thought, but it effectively created a presumption that democratically enacted laws are constitutional. Such a restrained judicial philosophy makes it difficult for judges to void properly enacted laws like the Controlled Substances Act.
对于任何经历过布什诉戈尔案（
Bush v.
Gore）的人来说，看到伦奎斯特法庭和罗伯茨法庭这种如此保守的司法机构却这般频繁地做出有利于政府的判决，难免惊诧莫名。然而，源于1960年代的社会革命，再加上沃伦法庭和伯格法庭以宪法为武器，达到诸如废除种族歧视、堕胎合法化之类的进步主义目的，这一切导致过去五十年间右翼反弹，进而塑造了保守派法学思潮的主要观点。在保守派看来，过去五十年中，最大的敌人一直是如影随形的自由派司法能动主义，以及法院推翻立法行动的强烈意愿。类似罗伯特·伯克这样的保守派法学学者和法学家，坚持认为，法官应当努力克制，避免将自己的私人政治价值观投射进司法意见之中。这种原则构成了传统保守法学思想的基石。然而这种价值观实际会产生一个假定：凡经民主程序颁布的法律一定合宪。一旦法官需要酌情废止诸如《管制药品法》之类的法规时，这样一种克制的司法哲学，就会显得力不从心。
But it has been nearly 30 years since Chief Justice Warren E. Burger retired. For many younger conservatives, the Court’s cardinal sin isn’t
Brown v.
Board of Education or even
Roe v.
Wade. And Barnett and his allies have helped make many conservatives more comfortable with the idea of judicial activism.
然而，伯格首席大法官退休已近三十年。对很多年轻一代保守派而言，最高法院的头等大罪并非是布朗诉托皮卡教育局案（
Brown v.
Board of Education），甚至也不是罗诉韦德案（
Roe v.
Wade）。巴奈特和他的战友们已经帮助很多保守派对于司法能动主义更为习以为常。
With five offices around the country, a legal clinic training students at the University of Chicago Law School, and a staff of nearly 100, the Institute for Justice has become a proving ground for aspiring, ideologically committed lawyers. Every year, the group sends lawyers to law schools around the country to give presentations on public-interest law and recruit students into its ranks. “It’s certainly done with the intent to make sure that libertarian-minded law students know who we are and what we have to offer,” Clark Neily, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, said of the group’s outreach. Each summer, a couple dozen clerks join the group in its Beltway headquarters and state offices. From there, these young lawyers typically move on to more traditional clerkships at law firms and federal courts—one former Institute for Justice clerk worked for Chief Justice Roberts from 2008 to 2009—and when the Institute hires new staff attorneys, it often culls from the ranks of these same pupils.
司法研究所拥有员工近百人，全国设有五家办事处，在芝加哥大学法学院开设一间用于学生培训的法律诊所，是志向远大、笃定于意识形态的律师一试身手的理想所在。每年，研究所都会派遣律师前往全国各地的法学院，就涉及公共利益的法律进行演讲，同时招兵买马，扩充队伍。“这些举措显然融入了我们的目的，就是确保具有自由意志主义意识的法学院学生知道我们是谁，我们能提供什么，”谈及研究所正在努力扩大影响时，司法研究所高级律师克拉克·莱利评论道。每年夏天，研究所位于特区政治圈的总部和各州的办事处都会迎来几十名书记员。这些年轻律师通常会从这里起步，跻身律师事务所和联邦法院担任传统书记员——其中有位司法研究所的前书记员在2008年至2009年期间听候首席大法官罗伯茨的差遣——而一旦研究所需要聘用新律师时，就会从这些曾经的学生中精挑细选。
“Ten to 15 years ago, conservatives who were in positions of influence—educating young lawyers, or in a position to hire them to politically desirable positions—were unified by what you might call Borkian restraint, or knee-jerk deference,” Neily said. “What has really changed in the last four or five years is a real skepticism, particularly but not exclusively among young law students, toward this kind of acquiescence to whatever government does.”
“十到十五年前，调教年轻律师、能够在政治职位上安插自己人的这些举足轻重的保守派，信奉的都是那种所谓的伯克（Bork）式克制理念，你也可以管那套哲学叫做‘下意识的顺从’，”莱利批评道。“过去四五年里真正的变化就是出现了一种真正的怀疑主义，主要体现在那些法学院青年学生中，他们会怀疑这种默认政府一切举动的做法。”
In 2013, the Institute for Justice enjoyed one of its biggest successes to date. It prevailed in a federal appeals court on behalf of the Benedictine monks of St. Joseph Abbey in Louisiana, who had sued for the right to sell handmade, inexpensive funeral caskets after the state Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors ordered them to desist. Like
Lochner, the case represents a challenge to government health and safety rules. And like
Lochner, it could theoretically become the basis for invalidating scores of unrelated business regulations. The Supreme Court declined to hear the state board’s appeal in that case, but different appeals courts have taken different views of this general dispute, which means the Supreme Court—now more conservative than it was a decade ago—may well step in to settle it at some point.
2013年，司法研究所迎来了迄今最大的胜利。研究所在联邦上诉法院帮路易斯安那圣约瑟夫修道院的一群本笃僧打赢了官司，推翻了州殡葬业委员会对僧侣们销售自己手工制作廉价棺材的禁令。和洛克纳案一样，这起案子是对政府健康和安全领域管制的挑战。同样，和洛克纳案一样，这起案子能够成为推翻众多其它商业管制的起点。最高法院拒绝听取州委员会就该案件的上诉意见，然而，不同的上诉法院对同类案件有着不同的理解，这或许意味着，有朝一日，相比十年前更加保守的最高法院将会置身其中，一举解决类似分歧。
Each success on behalf of an everyman struggling against the government serves the libertarian cause well, but these victories pale in comparison to the role that President Obama and the Affordable Care Act have played in convincing mainstream conservatives to give judicial activism a second look.
平凡个人与政府抗争所取得的每一个胜利，都令自由意志主义更加强大，然而在奥巴马总统和《平价医疗法案》面前，这些胜利显得黯然失色，迫使主流保守派不得不重新打量司法能动主义。
Barnett has been at the forefront of the fight against Obamacare, and the 2012 constitutional challenge to the law’s insurance-coverage mandate was largely his brainchild. He argued that requiring private citizens to purchase health insurance against their will exceeded Congress’s powers. A clearly conflicted Chief Justice Roberts ultimately bent over backwards to construe the law in a constitutional way, out of deference to the elected branches, enraging the entire right. If Barnett viewed Roberts as an enigma back in 2005, it’s clear to him now that he finds the chief justice’s approach to the law deeply wanting, and many conservatives agree with him.
巴奈特始终战斗在抵制奥巴马医改的最前线，2012年就《平价医疗法案》中的保险涵盖范围规定上诉最高法院进行宪法挑战，很大程度上就是出自他的思想成果。巴奈特声称，要求私人违背个人意愿，购买健康保险，属国会越权。最终，出于对民选分支的尊重，倍感分裂的首席大法官罗伯茨使出浑身解数，从宪法的角度为该法案再三辩解，令整个右翼暴怒。如果说，2005年，巴奈特还将罗伯茨视作一团迷雾，那么现在他已经看清了，首席大法官对于法律的理解完全不及格，而很多保守派对巴奈特的这一评论颇为激赏。
“Selecting judges with the judicial mindset of ‘judicial restraint’ and ‘deference’ to the majoritarian branches leads to the results we witnessed,” Barnett warned in another Volokh Conspiracy post this summer, after Roberts once again saved the health care law. To Barnett, the proper role for judges isn’t modest or deferential at all, and it’s time for Republicans to start promoting conservatives who will embrace a more activist approach on the bench. “If conservative Republicans want a different performance from the judiciary in the future,” Barnett argued, “they must vet their presidential candidates to see whether they understand this point.”
“选一个信奉‘司法克制主义’，对政府、国会‘言听计从’的法官会带来什么后果，我们都已经见识过了，”罗伯茨再次拯救医保法案后，今年夏天，巴奈特在沃洛克共谋的另一篇帖子中敲响警钟。对巴奈特来说，想要当法官，就绝不能温良恭俭让，共和党现在就应该开始动员保守派，将一个更为积极的人推上最高法院。“如果保守派共和党希望将来在司法系统能够有所作为，”巴奈特大声疾呼，“就必须好好敲打敲打总统候选人，看看他们能不能搞清楚这个问题。”
Barnett’s opposition to Obamacare made him a hero to the conservative legal establishment. It was for this reason that he was greeted with such enthusiasm at the Federalist Society meeting in Washington two years ago. And it’s what catapulted his ideas about the proper role of judges fully into the mainstream.
巴奈特对于奥巴马医保改革的反对让他在保守派法学界成为一名英雄。这正是两年前的华盛顿特区联邦党人协会的年会中，他受到如此狂热欢迎的原因所在。也正是由于这样的原因，他关于法官适当人选的看法才得以被主流所了解。
To dismiss the debate between libertarians and traditional conservatives over
Lochner as an academic sideshow is to misunderstand the stakes. “A full-fledged return to
Lochner would put a constitutional cloud over a whole host of laws that we all take for granted today,” said Sam Bagenstos, a liberal constitutional scholar at the University of Michigan who has argued cases before the Supreme Court. “Laws guaranteeing workers the right to join a union without being fired, and the right to earn a minimum wage and receive overtime if working more than 40 hours a week, laws protecting worker safety, and laws protecting workers and customers against discrimination based on race or other protected statuses, just for starters.”
如果简单认定，自由意志主义者和传统保守派关于洛克纳案的争论仅仅是一场无伤大雅的学术小插曲，那就彻底没认清问题的利害所在。“彻底回归洛克纳案，将在我们今天习以为常的整套法律体系上，罩起一片宪法乌云，”曾在最高法院交锋过的密歇根大学自由派宪法学者塞缪尔·巴根斯托斯认为。“保障工人加入工会而不被开除的法律、保证工人把最低工资挣到手、每周工作超过四十小时能拿到加班费的法律、保护工人安全的法律、防止工人和消费者受到种族歧视或者别的什么歧视的法律，统统完蛋，而这统统只是前菜。”
I asked Barnett whether the social welfare laws on the books today would be permitted under his reading of the Constitution. “Probably not at the federal level,” he said.
我问过巴奈特，依照他于宪法的理解，今天这些关乎社会福利的成文法还能不能通过。“大概在联邦层面不可能，”他回答。
That’s why Barnett and his contemporaries prefer to root their arguments in specific injustices rather than categorical abstractions. Why
shouldn’t bakers be allowed to work more than 60 hours a week, or individuals be allowed to remain uninsured? Why
should the government be allowed to regulate out of existence my right to hail a driver or your right to rent a stranger’s house for a weekend?
这就是为什么巴奈特和他的同袍们更愿意将论点放在具体的不公正上，而不是推而广之，形成一套抽象的体系。为什么面包师就不能一周工作六十小时？为什么一个人就不能不买保险？我招个司机，你租个陌生人的房子过周末，政府有什么资格无事生非地对这些权利指手画脚？
Even if you believe these regulations are the result of collusion between government and industry cronies, that doesn’t mean they should be constitutionally prohibited, or even that they have no merit. Once courts are empowered to invalidate sordid government regulations, they are also on a slippery slope to tossing out standards that serve useful purposes—in part because some laws that appear unprincipled at a glance actually do important work. If an Airbnb customer and a hotel guest are each badly burned in preventable fires, the hotel guest is likely to have a great deal more recourse—and would have government regulation to thank.
就算你认为这种管制是政府及其行业亲信共谋的结果，也并不意味着这些管制就应该被彻底禁绝，也并不意味着这些管制就丝毫没有优点。一旦法院有权将这些肮脏的政府管制统统取消，就有可能引发雪崩，将某些发挥重要作用的标准也随之抛弃——部分原因就在于，某些大眼一看不符合原则的法律，却在现实中发挥中重要的作用。要是Airbnb和一个酒店的顾客都在一场本可避免的火灾中被严重烧伤，酒店的顾客很可能享有更多的追索权。这时他或许会对政府管制千恩万谢。
That’s not a persuasive rationale in Barnett’s mind. “You should have your own insurance,” he told me emphatically. “You should be insured. You should have health insurance, you should probably have life insurance, disability insurance. I insure myself.” (The irony of this position should be lost on no one—had Barnett’s Obamacare challenge succeeded, 16 million fewer people would have health insurance today.)
在巴奈特看来，这套说辞并没什么说服力。“你是该有自己的保险，”他断然告诉我，“你该有个保障。你该有套健康保险，你或许还该套生命保险、残疾保险。我就为自己投保。”（这种姿态的讽刺意味倒是路人皆知——要是巴奈特挑战奥巴马医保法案成功，有保险的人就会比今天少一千六百万。）
The movement to rehabilitate
Lochner now faces a crucial test: Can it endure after the spasms of resistance to the Obama presidency have quieted, or will it burn out along with them? When I put this question to Barnett, he demurred. “I didn’t really have a strategy to get us this far,” he said.
目前，回归洛克纳案运动面临一个非常严峻的挑战：随着奥巴马总统任期结束，对其政策抵抗的退潮，这项运动能否延续下去？还是会随之偃旗息鼓？当我向巴奈特抛出这个问题时，他不以为然。“我们能发展到今天这步，也并不是靠一套什么战略。”巴奈特说道。
Nevertheless, Barnett believes that he and his contemporaries have laid a solid foundation for turning back the legal clock to
Lochner. “I don’t think it’s top-down,” Barnett said of the overall approach. “You don’t get Justice Whatever without having a huge bottom-up.”
然而无论如何，巴奈特坚信，他和他的同袍们已经打下了坚实的基础，为法律的钟摆回归洛克纳案创造了条件。“我不觉得这项运动是自上而下组织的，”论及运动的整体方式，巴奈特说道， “没有一个巨大的底层基础，什么法官你都提不起来。”
That bottom-up effect has arguably had a big impact on the judiciary already. The 2010
Citizens United decision upended the government’s ability to limit campaign spending by corporations. In 2012, four conservative Supreme Court justices declared, in a dissenting opinion, that the entire Affordable Care Act should be vacated as an improper use of Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. This was
Lochner cloaked in fresh garb: The government can’t tell me how many hours I can work at a bakery; the government can’t tell me to buy insurance. Roberts salvaged the law, but on the basic point about compulsion, he agreed with Barnett, too. It wasn’t just four conservative justices who bought into a kind of Lochnerism. It was all five.
或许可以这么说，自底向上的效果已经对司法体系产生了影响。2010年，联合公民诉联邦选举委员会案的裁决推翻了政府对于企业竞选资金的限制。2012年，四位保守派大法官在反对意见中声称，《平价医疗法案》应当被彻底取消，因为这是国会滥用权力，干涉州际贸易。其实就是把洛克纳案这样陈年老酒装进了一个新瓶子：政府不能告诉我在面包坊工作几个小时；政府不能逼我买保险。虽然罗伯茨拯救了该项法律，但是对强制性的基本看法，他和巴奈特没什么不同。并不是只有四名保守派法官具有一定的洛克纳主义倾向。所有五名保守派法官全都持有类似观点。
Ultimately, the success of any bottom-up movement will depend as much on voters as on legal scholars and the activists they inform. The biggest setback for Lochnerians could be an establishment Republican like Jeb Bush winning the presidency and cannibalizing the grassroots right’s enthusiasm for taking apart the Obama-era administrative state. A Hillary Clinton presidency would put off a Lochner revival for another four or eight years, but it would keep the fires of opposition to big government raging in the meantime. Bush, by contrast, is an advocate of judicial restraint, and once he started appointing traditional conservatives to the bench, it would be difficult to stop him. But Barnett and the Lochnerians hope that the right’s antipathy toward Obama, the Affordable Care Act, and the Roberts Court’s interventions to salvage it will give a Republican president no choice but to move in a new direction.
从根本上来说，任何自底向上的运动要想取得成功，一方面的确需要法学学者的摇旗呐喊，另一方面，选民也发挥着同样重要的作用。洛克纳分子们所能遭遇的最大挫败就是像杰布·布什这样倾向于大政府的共和党人赢得总统大选，挪用草根右翼的热情，向奥巴马时代的行政举措开火。一旦希拉里·克林顿当政，洛克纳的回归大业将会延后那么四到八年，但同时，这也会为反对大政府的熊熊烈火上浇上几桶热油。而相反，如果像布什这样鼓吹司法克制主义的人当了总统，只要他开始提名传统保守主义者当法官，局面几乎铁定难以挽回。但是，巴奈特和洛克纳分子们希望，奥巴马、《平价医疗法案》，以及罗伯茨法庭对于法案的挽救，已经让右翼分子深恶痛绝，这将会让共和党总统别无选择，只能另辟蹊径。
Conservatives, Barnett said, “have to decide, ‘Well, why am I furious? What am I furious at? ... They put John Roberts on the court. I didn’t put him on the court. Bill Clinton didn’t put him on the court. George Bush put him on the court, and he was considered by the Ted Cruzes of this world as a superstar, and then look what he does. There’s something wrong with this picture.”
巴奈特说道，保守派“必须痛下决心了”，“好吧，我为什么愤怒？是什么让我愤怒？······他们把约翰·罗伯茨抬上了首席大法官的宝座。不是我让他当的法官，不是比尔·克林顿让他当的法官，是乔治·布什任命他当了法官，泰迪·克鲁兹那群人把他当天皇巨星一样崇拜，可是你看看他都干了些什么。这种事压根就不对。”
The hope is that this anger propels a libertarian-minded president into office and inspires him to nominate less restrained judges. The next president will likely have the opportunity to appoint at least one, and possibly as many as four Supreme Court justices. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is now 82. Stephen Breyer is 77. Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia are both 79. If one of these justices retires under a Republican president, who then appoints a Lochnerian to fill the vacancy, it will change the Court profoundly. If more than one of them steps down, the Court will become unrecognizable.
洛克纳分子们所寄予厚望的就是，这种愤怒能够将一位具有自由意志主义思想的总统推进白宫，并启发他提名一些不那么束手束脚的大法官。下一任总统将至少有可能提名一位大法官，要是机缘巧合，说不定能提名四位大法官。鲁斯·巴德·金斯伯格今年82，斯蒂芬·布雷耶77，安东尼·肯尼迪、安东宁·斯卡利亚都是79。如果这些法官随便哪个在共和党总统任内退休，而总统又指定了一位洛克纳主义者填补空缺，这将能够彻底改变最高法院。如果他们中不止一位归隐，那最高法院将会彻底面目全非。
If that plan fails, Barnett’s cause will be set back years, and the project of pushing his ideas into the Republican mainstream will continue
sub rosa. But Barnett has influential allies.
如果计划难遂人意，巴奈特的回归大业将会蛰伏数年，将其理念变成共和党主流的进程也还会继续秘密推进。然而，巴奈特确有几位说得上话的朋友。
In July, the conservative columnist George Will made a provocative new demand of the next Republican president: “Ask this of potential court nominees: Do you agree that
Lochner correctly reflected the U.S. natural rights tradition and the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments’ affirmation of unenumerated rights?”
七月，保守派专栏作家乔治·威尔大肆宣扬，要为下一任共和党总统设置一个新的标准：“问他会提名谁当大法官：你是否认同洛克纳案正确地反映出美国自然权利传统，是宪法第九、第十四修正案对于宪法未规定公民权利的肯定。”
Thanks to the efforts to grow their ranks, there are a few suitable Supreme Court candidates already. In his column, Will identified one: Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett. In a footnote to a recent opinion, Willett celebrated the fact that “a wealth of contemporary legal scholarship is reexamining
Lochner, its history and correctness as a matter of constitutional law.”
多亏洛克纳分子们不遗余力地壮大队伍，现在已经有了几位理想的最高法院大法官人选。威尔在他的专栏中就点到了这么一位：德克萨斯最高法院法官丹·威利特。在最近一份判决意见的脚注中，威利特不无欣慰地写到，“当今法学界已经对洛克纳案作出了再三审视，审视其历史和其在宪法学上的正确性。”
As for Will’s proposed litmus test, a few Republican presidential candidates this cycle have passed it. Rand Paul has praised the
Lochner decision explicitly multiple times, most recently at the Heritage Action Conservative Policy Summit this January. “I’m not a judicial restraint guy,” he told an audience of avowed judicial activism foes. “I’m a judicial activist when it comes to
Lochner. I’m a judicial activist when it comes to the New Deal.”
至于威尔提出的资格审查测试，本轮有些共和党候选人已经合格。兰德·保罗曾多次明确盛赞洛克纳案，在今年一月传统保护保守派政策峰会（Heritage Action Conservative Policy Summit）上，他对听众中一位据称是司法能动主义的反对者说，“我不是司法克制主义者”，“谈到洛克纳案，谈到新政，我就是一个司法能动主义者。”
In August, Rick Perry boasted on Twitter that he was “proud” to have nominated Willett to the Texas Supreme Court, calling the justice “a model of conservative jurisprudence.” Whether they know it or not, both politicians are already speaking a language Barnett and his libertarian contemporaries have successfully injected into the mainstream of conservative strategic thought.
八月份，里克·佩里在推特上自吹，提名威利特进入德克萨斯最高法院是他的“骄傲”，称这位法官是“保守派法学界的楷模。”无论他们是否意识到了，这两位政治家操持的政治话语，正是由巴奈特和他的自由意志主义战友们成功注入主流保守派政策思想的。
These are dark horse candidates, but any Republican president will face much more pressure than George W. Bush ever did to nominate the kind of judges Paul or Perry might. Another candidate, Scott Walker, is more of an enigma, but he’s an equally doctrinaire opponent of economic regulation and has a liaison to the pro-
Lochner world in George Will’s wife, Mari, who is an adviser to his campaign. History shows it’s difficult to stop a determined president from shaping the courts to reflect a particular conception of law. “There was a whole series of hot-button issues that the Reagan administration decided were exceptionally important in articulating the right kind of judicial restraint,” Bagenstos explained. “Affirmative action was one. The exclusionary rule under the Fourth Amendment was another. ... So they had a whole hit list of legal principles that they thought were misguided, which got the Constitution wrong, and so they worked really hard to explain why the decisions they thought were wrong, were wrong.
他们都是黑马，但任何共和党总统在提名保罗或者佩里中意的那类法官时，都面临着远远大于乔治·W·布什所遇到的压力。另一位候选人斯科特·沃克更像是一团谜，但他同样在理论上反对经济管制，并且与洛克纳案阵营有着千丝万缕的联系，乔治·威尔的妻子毛伊正是他的竞选顾问。历史一再告诉我们，让一位心意已决的总统不要插手法律系统，以反映其所认同的某种特定法律理念，是非常困难的。“里根执政时期，曾经有一系列热点问题，被政府认为对于恰当地体现司法克制而言极为重要，”巴根斯托斯解释道。“平权运动是一个例子。第四条修正案下的证据排除法则是另一个例子······所以当局列了一个法律原则黑名单，把他们认为搞错的案子、和宪法起冲突的案子统统装进去，于是千辛万苦地解释为什么他们认为错误的案子是错误的。”
“It influenced the way they looked at judges, and once they put those judges on the lower court they started to put that agenda into action,” he continued. “Sometimes the Supreme Court went along with the more aggressive lower-court judges, and sometimes they didn’t. But you had this dynamic that things liberals thought they had won in the Burger and Warren Courts were not secure and suddenly were being contested.”
“这甚至还影响了政府对待法官的方式，一旦政府提名某些法官在下级法院任职，他们便开始行动起来。” 巴根斯托斯继续说到，“有时候最高法院会认同更为活跃的下级法院法官，有时则不会。但问题在这里，自由派原本以为在伯格法庭、沃伦法庭斩获的胜利果实，突然就变得岌岌可危起来，”
This is a lesson every Democrat, and really every establishment-minded Republican, should relearn, because a president who adopted the same model, with the goal of rehabilitating
Lochner, could erode the legal and administrative foundations of the past century in a matter of years. A rule change undertaken by Senate Democrats last Congress eliminated the filibuster for nominees to lower courts, and by the time the next president is sworn into office, three sitting Supreme Court justices will be over 80 years old.
历史为每一个民主党以及倾向于大政府思想的共和党拉响了警报，倘若一旦有位以里根为楷模，以回归洛克纳案为己任的总统上台，过去一百多年来构建的法律和行政基础几年以内就可能受到极大侵蚀。要知道，上届国会，民主党参议员们废除了本可用来抵御下级法院法官提名的阻挠议事规则，而等到下一位总统宣誓就职时，三位最高法院大法官将年过八十。
“The next Republican president will have a choice,” Bagenstos said. “I don’t know which way that choice is going to come out.”
“下一任共和党总统将有机会做出选择，”巴根斯托斯说道，“我只是不清楚这一选择会朝向何方。”
To Randy Barnett the choice is obvious.
对兰迪·巴奈特来说，答案明摆着。
订阅