Veil of ignorance rules in constitutional law.

Yale Law Journal, November, 2001 by Vermeule, Adrian

A veil of ignorance role (more briefly a "veil role") is a role that suppresses self-interested behavior on the part of decisionmakers; it does so by subjecting the decisionmakers to uncertainty about the distribution of benefits and burdens that will result from a decision. (1) A veil rule may produce this distributive uncertainty by either of two methods. One method is to place decisionmakers under a constraint of ignorance about their own identities and attributes. John Rawls coined the phrase "veil of ignorance" to describe a hypothetical original position in which principles of justice are chosen under precisely this constraint. (2) But that is a special case of veil roles generally, indeed a radical case. Rawls's thought experiment introduces uncertainty by...

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