Understanding Legal Redundancies

This short essay responds to John M. Golden, Redundancy: When Law Repeats Itself, 94 Texas L. Rev. 629 (2016), http://ssrn.com/abstract=2754266. I begin the essay with evaluating Professor Golden’s pioneering account that identifies, categorizes, and explains overlapping rules and institutional practices that pervade our legal system. I commend this account for its contributions to legal theory along a number of dimensions that include common law, statutory interpretation, and economics of legal rules. I then move on to supplement this account by identifying and analyzing puzzling redundancies in evidence law and in the constitutional doctrine of equal protection. Lastly, I introduce an equality constraint for redundancies that function as backup protections against errors in civil cases. I argue that lawmakers should distribute those protections equally across plaintiffs and defendants.