Empirical students of the U.S. courts successfully explain some court decisions through the party of the executive or legislature that appointed the judge. Others (including some judges) find these studies offensive. In taking offense, they miss a crucial implication: appointment politics...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. We first develop a contractarian theory of redistribution. The existence of rules of redistribution is explained without any recourse to the risk-aversion of individuals. Hence, we depart from the standard legitimization of redistribution as fundamental...