Legal Theory Commons^™

An Address: The Constitution And The Dilemma Of Historicism, Roger S. Ruffin

San Diego Law Review

In thinking about the Constitution, we should keep in mind the commonplaces that lace our thinking. We must keep them in sight at both levels: content and character, commonplace and commonplaceness–else their importance may escape us. Maitland’s view that "the history of law must be a history of ideas" is one such commonplace. Another was noticed by Edward Corwin: the "commonplace that every age has its own peculiar categories of thought; its speculations are carried on in a vocabulary which those who would be understood by it must adopt . . . ." These are tow of the commonplaces of …