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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
It's The Constitution, Stupid: Two Liberals Pay Tribute To Antonin Scalia's Legacy, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean
It's The Constitution, Stupid: Two Liberals Pay Tribute To Antonin Scalia's Legacy, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean
Adam Lamparello
Living constitutionalism may achieve “good” results, but with each Roe v. Wade, and Bush v. Gore, the Constitution’s vision takes more shallow breaths, and democracy fades into elitism’s shadow. The debate over constitutional interpretation is, in many ways, reducible to this question: if a particular outcome is desirable, and the Constitution’s text is silent or ambiguous, should the United States Supreme Court (or any court) disregard constitutional constraints to achieve that outcome? If the answer is yes, nine unelected judges have the power to choose outcomes that are desirable. If the answer is no, then the focus must be on …
It's The Constitution, Stupid: Two Liberals Pay Tribute To Antonin Scalia's Legacy, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean
It's The Constitution, Stupid: Two Liberals Pay Tribute To Antonin Scalia's Legacy, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean
Adam Lamparello
Living constitutionalism may achieve “good” results, but with each Roe v. Wade, and Bush v. Gore, the Constitution’s vision takes more shallow breaths, and democracy fades into elitism’s shadow. The debate over constitutional interpretation is, in many ways, reducible to this question: if a particular outcome is desirable, and the Constitution’s text is silent or ambiguous, should the United States Supreme Court (or any court) disregard constitutional constraints to achieve that outcome? If the answer is yes, nine unelected judges have the power to choose outcomes that are desirable. If the answer is no, then the focus must be on …
Popular Constitutionalism And Relaxing The Dead Hand: Can The People Be Trusted?, Todd E. Pettys
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 …