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Abstract Democracy: A Review Of Ackerman's We The People, Terrance Sandalow
Abstract Democracy: A Review Of Ackerman's We The People, Terrance Sandalow
Reviews
We the People: Foundations is an ambitious book, the first of three volumes in which Professor Ackerman proposes to recast conventional understanding of and contemporary debate about American constitutional law. Unfortunately, the book's rhetoricinflated, self-important, and self-congratulatory-impedes the effort to come to terms with its argument. How, for example, does one respond to a book that opens by asking whether the reader will have "the strength" to accept its thesis? Or that announces the author's intention of "engaging" two of the most influential works of intellectual history of the past several decades-and then discusses one in two and one-half pages …
An Interpretivist Agenda, Gary S. Lawson
An Interpretivist Agenda, Gary S. Lawson
Faculty Scholarship
As I write these words, bevies of law clerks assigned to cases involving the Bill of Rights are dutifully editing their bench memos for publication in the national reporter system. Once printed, these bench memos will be solemnly treated by lawyers, scholars, other law clerks, and the occasional judge who runs across them as legally significant, or even binding, interpretations of the Constitution. Two features of this burgeoning mass of otherwise unpublishable law review comments bear mention. First, most of them are tedious, tendentious, pretentious, and badly reasoned when reasoned at all, just as one would expect from authors who …
Constitutional Interpretation, Terrance Sandalow
Constitutional Interpretation, Terrance Sandalow
Book Chapters
"[W]e must never forget," Chief Justice Marshall admonished us in a statement pregnant with more than one meaning, "that it is a constitution we are expounding." Marshall meant that the Constitution should be read as a document "intended to endure for ages to come, and, consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs." But he meant also that the construction placed upon the document must have regard for its "great outlines" and "important objects." Limits are implied by the very nature of the task. There is not the same freedom in construing the Constitution as in constructing …
Against Constitutional Theory, Paul Campos