Law Commons^™

A New Constitutionalism For Liberals?, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It has been apparent for at least a decade that liberal constitutional theory is in deep trouble. Of course there are many versions of liberal constitutional theory, but they have essentially no connection to existing practices of constitutional law, considering as practices of constitutional law all the activities of our institutions of government that implicate - interpret, advance, deal with, whatever - fundamental principle. Instead, liberal constitutional theory's vision of the future is nostalgia for the past. For liberal constitutional theorists the Warren Court, or Justice Brennan, basically got everything right, at least in their approach to identifying constitutional law. …