His successor, Mark Carney, has come to embody this view, eschewing fixed policy rules in favor of the constrained discretion implied by guidance ranges for key indicators.
Serving notice that banks would in future be able to expand much less quickly than in the past, he added: "The introduction of simple and robust policy tools into a regulatory regime based on the exercise of constrained discretion would make it easier to resist overly rapid expansion of financial institutions".
A form of "constrained discretion" might work best, if the criteria used to make the judgment are known by all.One aspect of default that could not be set by a rule is the size of the "haircut"—ie, how big a loss creditors have to bear.
Once Kennedy makes up his mind, however, he is far more willing than O'Connor to embrace broad principles that constrain his discretion in future cases.
In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the guidelines, since they are only advisory, "do not constrain the discretion of district courts and, thus, have no legal effect on a defendant's sentence".
7 In modern health care systems, policy makers often implement measures to constrain doctors' discretion in order to achieve cost containment.
He writes, "The history test, for all its promise of constraining judicial discretion, carries with it a host of unanswered methodological questions and does not always guarantee the sort of certainty one might perhaps hope for".
Regulators, however, have so tightly constrained the discretion of health care payers to reimburse for treatment that doctors prescribing Sovaldi are creating a gigantic burden on their health systems.
Former Representative Ken Bentsen of Texas, perhaps less constrained by political discretion than many, said he expected the Republicans to use the Boston convention "to paint Kerry as a Ted Kennedy liberal and try to box him into that role".
"As far as we can tell, Congress has never delegated so much power to an executive agency with so little to constrain the agency's discretion," the memorandum concluded, calling the result "a classic violation of the nondelegation principle".
