Prior to recent decades, the United States Supreme Court often invoked the political question doctrine to avoid deciding controversial questions of individual rights.For a flavor of the former view, see Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 266–330 (1962) (Frankfurter, J., joined by Harlan, J., dissenting). For the modern view, see id. at 208–37 (opinion of the Court) (holding that an equal protection challenge to state legislative apportionment did not present a political question). By the 1970s and 1980s, standing limits traced to Article III’s case-or-controversy language had replaced the political question doctrine as the favored justiciability device.See, e.g., Warth v. Seldin, 422 U.S. 490 (1975) (denying standing to low and moderate income plaintiffs claiming that town’s exclusionary zoning practices denied them housing); id. at 519 (“Standing has become a barrier to access to the federal courts, just as ‘the political question’ was in earlier decades.”) (Douglas, J., dissenting). Although both political question and standing doctrines remain tools in the Court’s arsenal of threshold decision making,See, e.g., Nixon v. United States, 506 U.S. 224 (1993) (holding that a challenge to the Senate’s use of a committee to hear testimony for judicial impeachment presented a political question); Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992) (denying standing to environmentalists suing the Secretary of the Interior to require consultation regarding the environmental impact of overseas projects). in the last decade the Court has turned with increasing frequency to the distinction between facial and as-applied challenges to perform the gatekeeping function. However, although there is a considerable body of scholarship concerning the conventional justiciability doctrines, scholars have only recently begun to address the range of questions implicated by the Court’s approach to the relation between constitutional rights and challenged legal rules—and they have generally focused on narrow doctrinal questions about the proper treatment of discrete rights such as abortion, free exercise of religion, and freedom of speech. The papers in this issue of Legal Theory and the next view these issues in a broader jurisprudential context.