Law Commons^™

Constitutional Citizenship, Paul Brest

Cleveland State Law Review

Our practices for determining issues of public morality are deeply flawed. We rely too heavily on the Supreme Court of the United States to determine them for us. We give too much responsibility to the Court, and too little to other institutions; we evade our own responsibility as citizens in a democratic polity. The problem is not that too many issues are "constitutionalized," for many of our most important public moral issues are quite properly treated as constitutional questions. The problem, rather, is that we assume that only the Court is authorized to decide, or is capable of deciding, constitutional …