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Popular constitutionalism

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Experimenting With Religious Liberty The Quasi-Constitutional Status Of Religious Exemptions, Bruce Ledewitz Dec 2013

Experimenting With Religious Liberty The Quasi-Constitutional Status Of Religious Exemptions, Bruce Ledewitz

Bruce Ledewitz

This article deals with an episode of constitutional development in which the voice of the people, rather than that of the Supreme Court, has been dominant. The constitutional value at issue is religion - its free exercise and its establishment. The Court has taken a step back in developing this constitutional value. Under Establishment Clause jurisprudence, despite fairly extensive doctrinal development, the Supreme Court has recently refrained from hearing some cases that it might have heard in the past, under the rubric of nonjusticiability. Much more dramatically, the Court limited the substantive reach of the Free Exercise Clause in 1990, …

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Popular Constitutionalism And Relaxing The Dead Hand: Can The People Be Trusted?, Todd E. Pettys Jan 2008

Popular Constitutionalism And Relaxing The Dead Hand: Can The People Be Trusted?, Todd E. Pettys

Todd E. Pettys

A growing number of constitutional scholars are urging the nation to rethink its commitment to judicial supremacy. Popular constitutionalists argue that the American people, not the courts, hold the ultimate authority to interpret the Constitution’s many open-ended provisions whose meanings are reasonably contestable. This Article defends popular constitutionalism on two important fronts. First, using originalism as a paradigmatic example of the ways in which courts frequently draw constitutional meaning from sources rooted deep in the past, the Article contends that defenders of judicial supremacy still have not persuasively responded to the familiar dead-hand query: Why should constitutional meanings that prevailed …

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