Washington and Lee law professor Alexi Pfeffer-Gillett has published an article in the BYU Law Review.
The article, “The Inconvenience Doctrine,” examines the legal reasoning of the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, commonly referred to as The Roberts Court.
Professor Pfeffer-Gillett connects The Roberts Court’s jurisprudence across many legal fields and identifies a consistent framework for its decision-making, which he calls “the inconvenience doctrine.”
“Under the inconvenience doctrine, the Court invalidates nearly any limitation on what it views as the full exercise of ‘core rights,’ while permitting the imposition of ‘mere inconveniences’ that make exercising a right more difficult but not impossible,” writes Professor Pfeffer-Gillett.
Although the doctrine may be facially neutral, Professor PfefferGillett argues that it ultimately “punishes marginalized communities, who lack the resources to easily circumvent inconveniences; and it rewards the wealthy and powerful, who are uniquely able to exercise the outermost limits of rights the Court vigilantly protects.”
The article traces the Court’s trivialization of inconveniences to free-market economic theory, which Pfeffer-Gillett asserts is inconsistent with the Court’s purported adherence to American history and tradition because the nation’s founders “viewed minimization of public inconveniences as a central function of government, with courts serving as a crucial safeguard.”
Professor Pfeffer-Gillett teaches Civil Procedure, Aggregate Litigation, and Consumer Protection Law. His research examines the legal contours and practical effects of modern consumer and employment relationships.
The full article is available online at the W&L Scholarly Commons.
