Faculty Bibliography

This brief essay, forthcoming in the NLU Delhi Journal of Legal Studies, describes several versions of transformative constitutionalism., all of which are aimed at transforming a deeply unsatisfying status quo. Most scholarship on the topic has focused on material deprivation and inequality, with some attention to cultural conditions. After describing some of the well-known institutional implications of materially transformative constitutionalism, the essay turns to cultural transformations, which are in general anti-cosmopolitan, and distinguishes between anti-colonial and reactionary cultural transformative constitutionalism.

In the early twenty-first century, constitutionalism confronts numerous pressures and critiques. Some prominent critics are concerned that constitutionalism’s modern form, in which high courts play a large role, limits popular self-governance. By committing their nations to detailed social and economic policies—from neoliberal requirements for balanced budgets to constitutionalized social welfare and environmental rights—many modern constitutions might make promises they cannot keep and be unduly rigid in the face of changing social, economic, and environmental conditions. Meanwhile, the rise of proto-authoritarian elected leaders around the world shows that constitutions are vulnerable to, and may even enable, democratic backsliding. Mark Tushnet and Bojan Bugarič argue that addressing each of these serious concerns through constitutional design and innovation is potentially valuable, but paradoxically, every remedy also carries with it the possibility that it will intensify the very conditions it seeks to ameliorate. Instead, Tushnet and Bugarič propose a “thin” idea of constitutionalism and suggest that we should scale back our expectations for what constitutionalism can achieve. Political mobilization, led by people attuned to the economic and cultural causes of democratic backsliding, is a better bet.

This chapter offers some reflections that aim to help us arrive at a more analytic understanding or classificatory system of constitutionalism’s varieties. It explores different avenues to arrive at such an understanding, suggesting that it may be instructive to consider differences in what is constitutionally entrenched and how strong such entrenchment is as well as the role of courts. The chapter also considers regional constitutionalism and argues that it is difficult to identify distinct regional institutions, rights and ideas that cannot also be found, in some form, outside the region in question. It concludes that scholars attach adjectives to the word “constitutionalism” because they believe that doing so illuminates the specific topic with which they are concerned. The adjective ties that form of constitutionalism to other nouns to which the adjective is attached, such as values, politics and culture. Seen in this way, we can classify varieties of constitutionalism no better than we can classify those other nouns.

Constitutions typically contain provisions describing how they can be amended. Yet, constitution-drafters and, more important, those who try to theorize about constitutions, might see provisions purporting to prescribe precise mechanisms for constitutional amendment as somewhat paradoxical. The constitution is the expression of the people's will, and yet prescribing amendment procedures means that sometimes the constitution will thwart the people's will. This occurs when a proposed amendment cannot work its way through the prescribed procedures even though the amendment “actually” or “in reality” reflects the people's will. This chapter first describes the discussions of amendments in two major constitution-framing efforts, the US Constitutional Convention of 1789 and the French Constituent Assembly of 1789–91. Then it develops a perspective based on the idea of constitutions as vehicles for the exercise of a people's power to constitute itself and its government. That perspective in turn is deployed to discuss the possibility that constitutional amendments adopted through constitutionally regular procedures might nonetheless be unconstitutional. The concluding section suggests that, in light of the theories outlined earlier, we should understand constitutional provisions dealing with amendments—procedurally and substantively—as prudential recommendations to the polity rather than as binding legal constraints. They are only recommendations because the procedures, like the constitution's substantive provisions, might be flawed. Note, though, that treating amendment procedures as recommendations deprives them of the character, associated with the rest of the constitution, that the constitution is binding law. That in turn raises the possibility of treating the entire constitution as a set of recommendations rather than as binding law.

This Research Note is an effort to lay out some ways of thinking about the relation between political time and judicial time. Political time identifies two general categories of time periods: periods in which a political regime or political order is consolidated and relatively stable, and periods in which a political regime has become unstable and seems to be in transition to some new, as yet ill-defined new regime (or, possibly, to the reconsolidation of the seemingly decayed one). I believe that we have decent general descriptive theories of Supreme Court behavior when a political regime is consolidated and seemingly stable, but that descriptive theories about the Court’s behavior during “transitional” periods are under-developed. The Research Note’s contribution is to identify some lines along which such theories might be developed. The analysis is highly speculative, identifying possibilities and offering anecdotal examples as illustrations. Future research into the matters discussed here will undoubtedly deepen, qualify, and refute some of those speculations.

Could voluntary or negotiated secession or separation be a solution to the problems of maintaining a single government for a highly polarized polity? Negotiated secession would convert political negotiations over the terms of domestic law into negotiations over the terms of international treaties regulating relations between separate nations. The existence of bilateral and multilateral treaties across a range of topics reduces the costs of individual negotiations because such treaties offer “off-the-shelf” models. Tradeoffs across topics can provide protections for the “minorities within minorities” problems historically associated with secession and separation. The overall model can be described as one in which the parties exchange conditions for concessions. In the end, outcomes will result from relative bargaining power and the related question of the intensity with which the polarized entities hold their views on the list of items on the policy agenda. This is not dramatically different from how outcomes result from bargaining within the polarized polity, with the important exception that secession or separation changes the default outcome from policy paralysis to pursuit of distinct policies within the separated entities.

Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin by any recipient of federal funds. Discrimination occurs when members of a protected class have their access to the institution’s programs restricted when other members of the community have unrestricted access. One form of discrimination occurs when a hostile environment for a protected group has the effect of denying them equal access to the college’s programs. How is a hostile environment created? Sometimes in part or almost exclusively by words uttered by people present on the campus, including other students, faculty members, members of the staff, and casual invitees. Title VI is violated when race- or national-origin-disparaging words pervade the campus. Imposing liability on the basis of statements brings free expression considerations into the picture. This Essay, written by someone versed in free speech law but not in the details of Title VI law, examines the interaction between free speech principles and institutional liability under Title VI for hostile environment discrimination created mainly by words. Section II examines what kinds of utterances can be taken into account when we try to figure out whether a hostile environment exists, and how that class of utterances can be taken into account. After distinguishing between targeted utterances aimed at an identifiable individual and general statements that disparage a racial or nation-origin group, the Section deals with targeted utterances. Section III turns to general statements, typically of a rather clearly political sort. After describing the quite limited circumstances under which individuals can be held liable for general statements, the Section argues that such statements can be part of the “dossier” about hostile environment discrimination, exposing the institution, though not the individuals who make the statements, to liability. Section IV examines some available institutional responses to the possibility that words contribute to the creation of a hostile environment. It proposes that Title VI liability should be similar to that emerging for liability for disseminating objectionable content on social media platforms. Under such a system colleges and universities would have a duty to create a unit charged with receiving complaints about race- and national-origin-disparaging statement. That unit’s reports should be regularly reviewed for accuracy by higher-level institutional actors. If the reports disclose problems arising from words, the institution should have and enforce rules against targeted statements but not similar rules against general statements. Instead, the institution should develop counterprogramming and take other ameliorative actions with the aim of assuring members of protected groups that they are indeed as welcome on the campus as everyone else. The Section then applies its analysis to agreements between the University of Michigan, Muhlenberg College, and the U.S. Department of Education resolving an investigation into the University’s compliance with Title VI. A brief conclusion emphasizes that nothing in this Essay is novel in discussions of Title VI and free speech. Its contribution, if any, is to focus more closely on distinctions and legal categories than one finds in more casual treatments.

Despite recent criticisms ably presented by Sergio Verdugo, the concept of constituent power seems essential to explain how irregular constitutional changes—those brought about by processes not authorized by the constitution in place—are or become legally binding. Properly understood, the concept of constituent power is not used properly either “in the moment” or prospectively, that is, as partisans advocate for irregular changes or implement irregular processes to put such changes in place. Rather, the concept is properly used only retrospectively, not as Verdugo suggests to support a claim that a unified people actually endorsed the changes when they first occurred, but rather to identify those irregular changes that “stick”—that a nation’s people come over time to accept as legally binding.

For the past decade or so, we have been worrying about democratic backsliding – movement toward autocratic rule in nations that we thought were stably democratic. Our attention to backsliding may have distracted us, though, from another important phenomenon – front-sliding, so to speak. If backsliding is a move from democracy toward autocracy, frontsliding is a move from autocracy to democracy. Professors Dan Slater and Joseph Wong’s important book From Development to Democracy offers an elegant argument that sometimes autocrats themselves initiate movement toward democracy even when they are not facing imminent collapse. They show how dominant political parties in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan gave up a seeming guarantee of remaining in power through continuing repression in order to remain in power through reasonably free and fair elections instead. Their argument, which I outline in Part ii, is that sometimes democracy occurs because the dominant party is strong rather than weak and on the verge of collapse. That opens up the possibility of similar frontsliding transformations in other authoritarian, autocratic, or quasi-autocratic nations, including Singapore and, most intriguingly, China. I examine this possibility in Part iii.

♦“Brown”♦—the case as it has been assimilated into U.S. constitutional culture—combines several stories of success and failure. One failure is familiar: the promise of integration that some found in ♦Brown♦ was betrayed in its implementation. This essay tells a different story. ♦Brown♦’s success lies in the inspiration its result provided organizers and participants in the civil rights movement and in a doctrinal accomplishment that was far superior to any available alternative. In this telling, its failure lies in its real-world effects on important elements in African American culture and in a politically unfortunate perpetuation, perhaps even creation, of the myth of U.S. courts as instruments for advancing progressive policy goals.

Hate speech consists of words of abuse or disparagement about racial and other minorities. Advocates for its regulation contend that hate speech contributes to the silencing of its targets, makes them feel unwelcome in public spaces, and reinforces existing practices of discrimination. Legal regulation of hate speech can alleviate those harms, though its effectiveness might be limited. Enforcement of laws against hate speech can cause collateral damage by deterring some speakers from saying things about public policy affecting minorities that might be mistakenly characterized as hate speech, and by discriminatory enforcement. The United States is exceptional among the world's liberal democracies in its unwillingness to treat hate speech regulation as consistent with the constitutional protection of expression. The reasons for this exceptionalism include differences among constitutional texts, doctrines dealing with the direct effects of constitutional guarantees of equality on private actors, variation in institutional capacity to guard against abusive enforcement of hate speech laws, and variations the public trust 1 This is a draft chapter. The final version will be available in Elgar Companion to Free Expression edited by Alan Chen and Ashutosh Bhagwat, to be published in 2025, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.

Western European nations offer an alternative to strict bans on abortion that holds out the promise of protecting life—both fetal and maternal life—as much as possible. More important than the details of policies directly aimed at abortion access are Western European systems of social support for women before, during, and after pregnancy—a thick social safety net in which contraception is readily available, as is medical care during pregnancy and after delivery, with generous family leave policies and widespread availability of child care. And these policies are all set in a “culture of life” that extends beyond the abortion issue itself. These Western European policies emerged from bargains among political parties with distinctive ideologies and histories. However, the contours of U.S. party politics make it difficult to imagine how the Western European model could be implemented in the United States.

This Research Handbook deals with the politics of constitutional law around the world, using both comparative and political analysis, delivering global treatment of the politics of constitutional law across issues, regions and legal systems. Offering an innovative, critical approach to an array of key concepts and topics, this book will be a key resource for legal scholars and political science scholars. Students with interests in law and politics, constitutions, legal theory and public policy will also find this a beneficial companion.

The idea of judicial dialogue entered into scholarly discussion in the late twentieth century and is used in connection with different phenomena at the transnational and domestic levels. In the transnational context, it refers to exchanges among courts and judges that belong to different national and international legal regimes. In the domestic context, judicial dialogue refers to interaction between courts and other branches of government, particularly legislatures. Each phenomenon is associated with a form of politics. Transnational judicial dialogue occurs in a literal sense when judges communicate and network with each other, but it also occurs in a figurative sense when judges engage in comparative legal research and consider each other’s work. Either way, it can resemble a specialized form of international relations, in which courts seek to bolster their own standing by affiliating themselves with more prestigious peers, and to exercise soft power and influence over less prestigious peers. Transnational dialogue is often opaque or invisible to outsiders and usually lacks domestic political ramifications. In a handful of settings, however, judges who make conspicuous use of foreign law by explicitly citing it in high-profile or controversial opinions can expect to face normative criticism for doing so.Dialogue at the domestic level is associated with alternative forms of judicial review that give legislatures the power to override or avoid judicial rulings of unconstitutionality. Such institutional configurations are said to strike a balance between legislative and judicial supremacy, and to take the sting out of the charge that constitutional courts are inevitably ‘countermajoritarian.’ Scholarly use of the dialogue concept envisions a discursive form of constitutional politics that is differentiated from, and superior to, the usual politics surrounding judicial review. However, it is unclear whether such a distinctive and elevated species of politics can be achieved in practice. On the one hand, if ‘dialogue’ is defined in a thin fashion as including any back-and-forth on constitutional questions between legislatures and courts, the concept becomes so broad as to be indistinguishable from ordinary politics. On the other hand, if ‘dialogue’ is defined in a thick fashion as substantive exchange on the merits of constitutional questions, there may be no country capable of satisfying the definition. The case of Canada, often held up as the leading example of judicial dialogue, illustrates the severe definitional challenges surrounding the concept.

¿Cuál es el papel adecuado de los tribunales en un Estado de Derecho? ¿Pueden reemplazar o corregir las decisiones de las legislaturas, integradas por personas elegidas por el voto de las mayorías? ¿Deberían compartir con el Congreso la potestad de interpretar las leyes? Dicho de otro modo, ¿quién debería tener la última palabra en la traducción de la Constitución y las leyes a la vida cotidiana? En este libro de extraordinaria influencia, que renovó de raíz el pensamiento jurídico contemporáneo, Mark Tushnet despliega los efectos positivos de un papel más débil por parte del Poder Judicial, un sistema en el que los legisladores y los funcionarios del Poder Ejecutivo participen abiertamente en la interpretación constitucional. Postula, además, una concepción más fuerte de los derechos sociales y económicos, que deberían quedar bajo la custodia activa de todas las ramas de gobierno (en primer lugar, las ramas políticas). Fundador de la corriente de los estudios críticos del derecho en los años setenta, rara avis en el derecho norteamericano como jurista de izquierda que ocupa un lugar central en la discusión constitucional contemporánea, Tushnet pone a prueba su propuesta comparando el derecho de los Estados Unidos con los de Australia, Canadá o el Reino Unido, y demuestra que un control de constitucionalidad débil, como el que aplican esos países, puede ser compatible con el autogobierno democrático y la garantía del cumplimiento efectivo de los derechos para todas las personas. Mientras en la región se multiplican los conflictos entre poderes ejecutivos y judiciales y su solvencia y legitimidad para tomar decisiones, Siglo XXI acerca a los lectores de lengua castellana una obra clave para enriquecer y matizar esas discusiones, que en el fondo hablan de la fortaleza o debilidad de nuestras democracias.

This essay, to appear in a revised version in the Elgar Research Handbook on Constitutionalism and Legal Theory, deals with two broad varieties of constitutionalism: political versus legal/judicial constitutionalism, and procedural (liberal) and programmatic (substantive) constitutionalism. The varieties are continuums rather than sharply defined categories, of course. It examines the arguments political constitutionalists use to reject challenges that the rules of ruling must be entrenched against majoritarian revision and enforced as law by courts, and their defense of political constitutionalism as a sufficiently stable method of resolving disagreements about the rules of ruling. It then examines the arguments legal/judicial constitutionalists make for a two-fold proceduralization to deal with reasonable disagreements about substantive policy, the first into a constitution and the second into judicial resolution of disagreement through the use of modes of reasoning that do not reproduce the underlying disagreements (and notes the challenge that such reasoning actually reproduces such disagreements but obfuscates that fact). Merely procedural constitutions must deal with, among other things, the constitutional version of the liberal paradox of tolerance, which some do through doctrines of militant democracy. Substantive constitutions here are divided into three subcategories: identitarian (ascribing a specific vision of nationhood, often ethnonationalist, into the constitution); constitutions incorporating second- and later generation rights (economic and environmental); and transformative constitutions. The essay examines various difficulties associated with each of these forms.

At the most general descriptive level constitution-making processes can be understood as bargains struck among groups each of which sees advantages in establishing a (temporarily) stable governing order. This essay, a contribution to a handbook on the politics of constitutional law, seeks to identify some more granular processes. Section 1 describes three prominent approaches to theorizing about the politics of constitution-making Ackerman’s theory of “constitutional moments”; Elster’s identification of “upstream” and “downstream” constraints on constitution-making; and studies of post-conflict, post-crisis, and “imposed” constitution making, with a brief discussion of constitution-making in “normal” times. Section 3 offers a sequential account of the politics of constitution-making, beginning with the proposal stage, then turning to the selection of the process by which the constitution will be made before addressing some specific issues associated with constitution-making by constituent assemblies. A discussion of the politics of the drafting process follows, after which the essay considers the politics of adoption/ratification or rejection. The discussion concludes with what some have identified as the “afterlife” of constitutional processes that do not produce a new ratified constitution.

This Article offers a critique of one Progressive argument for the administrative state, that it would base policies on what disinterested scientific interests showed would best advance the public good and flexibly respond to rapidly changing technological, economic, and social conditions. The critique draws on recent scholarship in the field of Science and Technology Studies, which argues that what counts as a scientific fact is the product of complex social, political, and other processes. The critique is deployed in an analysis of the responses of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Food and Drug Administration to some important aspects of the COVID crisis in 2020. The COVID virus had characteristics that made it difficult to develop policies to limit its spread until a vaccine was available, and some of those characteristics went directly to the claim that the administrative state could respond flexibly to rapidly changing conditions. The relevant administrative agencies were bureaucracies with scientific staff members, though, and what those bureaucracies regard as "the science" was shaped in part by bureaucratic and political considerations, and the parts that were so shaped were important components of the overall policy response. Part II describes policy-relevant characteristics of knowledge about the COVID virus and explains why those characteristics made it quite difficult for more than a handful of democratic nations to adopt policies that would effectively limit its penetration of their populations. Part III begins with a short presentation of the aspects of the science and technology studies (STS) critique of claims about disinterested science that have some bearing on policy responses to the pandemic. It then provides an examination shaped by that critique of the structures of the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, showing how those structural features contributed to policy failures. Part IV concludes by sketching how the STS critique might inform efforts to reconstruct--rather than deconstruct--the administrative state, proposing the creation of Citizen Advisory Panels in science-based agencies.

Governments are put in place to carry out policies. Effective governance means that they have the capacity to implement those policies. As Samuel Huntington observed, “[t]he most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government.” For our purposes, state capacity is the ability of a government-in-place to develop and implement policies that its leaders believe will improve national well-being. The capacity to govern includes having the required material resources, the personnel for whatever is necessary to deliver the policies to their beneficiaries, and a bureaucratic organization that enables high-level officials to implement policies. How does state capacity feature in constitutional adjudication? And how can courts contribute to effective governance? Of course, they can interpret constitutions and statutes to authorize government officials to use whatever capacity they have to implement their chosen policies.

When calls for regulating lies collide with free expression values

This Review Essay uses the publication of Martin Loughlin’s Against Constitutionalism and Roberto Gargarella’s The Law as a Conversation Among Equals as the occasion for reflections on the tension between contemporary constitutionalism and constitutional democracy, a tension both authors identify and analyze in detail. After laying out their concerns, the Review Essay constructs an argument for a different kind of constitutionalism, one that is predicated on deliberative interactions among the people, flexible, and respectful of fundamental rights. In that form of constitutionalism, structural arrangements and specifications of fundamental rights are always provisional, subject to revision after considered deliberation among the people. The Review Essay concludes that such arrangements deserve the honorific label “constitutionalist,” and addresses some arguments to the contrary.

Private law—the background legal rules of contract, property, and tort—determines legal entitlements to the material goods dealt with by constitutionally guaranteed economic and social rights. Courts have struggled to determine whether and how the constitution applies to private law. The jurisdiction of constitutional courts sometimes leads them to “develop” private law in light of the constitution. Once we recognize that many of the questions that have puzzled courts and commentators about the application of the constitution to private law actually involve puzzles about the constitution’s substance, most of the analytic difficulties are transformed. The questions that remain arise from specific institutional arrangements, and in particular from the distribution of law-declaring authority between constitutional and ordinary courts.

Secessionists typically have several goals. One is getting out from under rule by an oppressive “foreign” center, where the oppression takes the form of violations of what the secessionists and objective observers reasonably understand to be their basic rights. This paper, to be appear in a collection “Constitutional Law and Politics of Secession” edited by Antoni Abat i Ninet (Routledge), deals with secessionist movements in relatively prosperous regions that haven’t suffered from the effects of classical nineteenth century colonialism, whose residents aren’t in general grossly mistreated by the policies adopted by the larger nation of which they are part. The paper focuses on two goals other than relief from gross oppression. The first is policy autonomy, meaning the ability of the secessionist region/nation to determine for itself a wide range of policy goals without requiring the approval of the center/nation of which they were a part. The second is recognition in Charles Taylor’s sense, meaning the acknowledgement by the international community that the secessionist region/nation has a distinctive national identity (which is different from the formal idea of recognition in international public law). The paper is fundamentally Coasean. It rests on propositions about the bargaining power of the secessionist region/nation in a world in which modern technologies of multi-level governance are available. The most important of those technologies are asymmetrical federalism (within the nation in which the secessionist region is located) and networks of bilateral and multilateral treaties in which the newly independent secessionist nation and its “parent” both participate, along with older technologies such as confederation. With those technologies in hand, the parent nation and the secessionist region/nation will reach accommodations about both domestic and non-domestic policy that reflect their relative bargaining power. The Coasean point is that relative bargaining power needn’t (and probably doesn’t) change merely upon the achievement of independence by the secessionist nation.

This article uses Ernst Fraenkel’s concept of the “dual state” as the vehicle for examining the role of “lynch law” as a mode of governance of African Americans in the United States from 1865 to 1940 (roughly). It begins with a largely jurisprudential inquiry placing my interpretation of Ernst Fraenkel’s distinction between the normative state and the prerogative state in dialogue with a version of American Legal Realism, in which law consists entirely of “moves” such as permissible distinctions and analogies that are treated (sociologically) as acceptable by relevant professional communities. Seen through that lens the distinction between the normative state and the prerogative state thins out. The arbitrariness Fraenkel associates with the prerogative state infects the normative state and the prerogative state is pervaded by norms that aren’t mere simulacra of legal norms. The two kinds of state are different in degree rather than in kind—but differences in degree can matter. Part II uses the revised distinction in a preliminary examination of lynch law in the U.S. South. Lynch law was not an example of Fraenkel’s prerogative state; the norms enforced through lynch law might have been popular versions of norms drawn from the prerogative state. And yet “lynch law” was different not only in content from the rules of law formally applicable to all people in the United States but also in the lived experience of those subject to lynch law. Lynch law might not have been arbitrary in the sense that it had no knowable normative content, but, perhaps because the norms were popular rather than legislated or formal, it was substantially vaguer than the formal law and significantly less able to guide the choices made by those subject to it.

Modern constitutional theory deals almost exclusively with the mechanisms for controlling the exercise of public power. In particular, the focus of constitutional scholars lies in explaining and justifying how courts can effectively keep the exercise of public power within bounds. But there is little point in worrying about the excesses of government power when the government lacks the capacity to get things done in the first place. In this Article, we examine relations between the courts, constitutionalism, and state capacity other than through limiting state power. Through a series of case studies, we suggest how courts confront the problem of state building, and how the question of state capacity informs constitutional doctrine. Our studies consist of litigation over life-saving medication in Brazil, “engagement” remedies in South Africa, the problem of pretrial detention in India, and the validity of India’s recent biometric identification project. As we show, state capacity is a crucial variable in the development of constitutional doctrine—and while engaging with the issue of state capacity, courts often play a role in facilitating its expansion. The case studies identify a number of mechanisms that courts use to encourage capacity development: providing incentives to enhance capacity, guiding and directing the state to perform specific actions, compensating for weak capacity by absorbing the problem, and endorsing measures that purport to increase capacity. We then offer an expressly idealized model by which courts can negotiate capacity-related concerns. Courts can, in certain instances, respond to the problem of state capacity through weak-form, dialogic, experimentalist forms of review. The precise role that courts can and should play in this regard remains to be fully studied, but focusing on the question of state capacity allows us to better explain contemporary constitutional doctrine in several jurisdictions, and highlights the challenges involved in at once creating and limiting state power.

This essay offers my explication of what I understand to be the principle propositions that constitute American legal realism. “Explication,” because I do not intend to defend the propositions, and “my” because the essay is not an exegesis of the work of major legal realists but is instead my personal version of what I take to be those propositions. The core assertion is that a person seeking to understand what the law is in some jurisdiction must engage in an empirical inquiry into social facts. These facts include matters such as the organization of the legal profession, culturally prevalent ideologies about law, and more. American Legal Realism, that is, in my view is fundamentally a sociological account of law.

This essay discusses how several institutions might be designed to implement popular constitutionalism within a liberal constitutionalism frame. The institutions are (1) forms of direct popular legislation such as referendums, (2) imperative mandates or instructions to representatives that the representatives must follow, sanctioned by automatically removing a noncompliant representative from office, and (3) modern communications technologies used to elicit citizen views as an alternative to voting (or polling). As to referendums, it critiques arguments (1) that referendums can oversimplify complex policy options in ways that sometimes produce outcomes that are indefensible in principle, incoherent, and inconsistent with what the people would prefer after the kind of deliberation that occurs in representative assemblies, and (2) that referendums systematically, though not inevitably, threaten rights of minorities that liberal constitutionalism guarantees. As to imperative mandates, it argues that objections track those to referendums, and offers parallel responses. And as to modern communications technologies, it focuses on such concerns that they fail to take advantage of specialized knowledge, and argues that overestimate the degree to which specialists actually have specialized knowledge and underestimate the degree to which such knowledge is available within a population of ordinary people and observes that sometimes domains in which specialized knowledge really is required can be identified in advance and exempted from these mechanisms.

"Steven Shapin began a classic work with this sentence: "There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it."1 This book’s theme might be put in similar terms. There was no Constitutional Revolution of 1937, and this is a book about it. As the book’s subtitle suggests, the Hughes Court from its inception in 1930 was in large measure a Progressive court, committed in a wide range of areas to the vision of active government associated with the Progressive movement in thought and politics. The Court was not dominated by a deep formalism, though most of the justices, liberals and conservatives alike, had their moments of formalism - and not merely for strategic reasons when controlling precedent forced formalism on them. At one time or another and cumulatively a great deal of the time, all of the justices incorporated ideas about good public policy in their interpretations of the Constitution and federal statutes"– Provided by publisher.

Recently the literature on free expression has turned to the question, should the law of free expression be adjusted because of the availability of new information technologies (hereafter NIT), and if so, how? The only thing about NIT that distinguishes them from traditional media is that disseminating expression via NIT is much less expensive than doing so via traditional media. The tenor of recent scholarship on NIT and free expression is that the invention of NIT does support some modification of free expression law. This Essay argues that that conclusion might be correct, but that many of the arguments offered in support move much too quickly. The Essay tries to slow them down and in so doing to suggest that the arguments require complex and contestable judgments about exactly how an expansion of expression might elicit new rules regulating it. My goal is to identify the lines of analysis that need to be pursued before we conclude that the existing law of free expression should be modified in response to NIT. In that somewhat limited sense the Essay is contrarian. The Essay’s overall theme is that the First Amendment rules in place probably already accommodate the concerns that motivate arguments for adjusting the law of free expression. The First Amendment, that is, is not obsolete.

Perhaps the wave of authoritarian populism has begun to recede. Rebuilding liberal constitutionalism in its aftermath now requires some attention, as Andrew Arato and András Sajó suggest. (This intervention addresses some but not all of the questions they raise.)

Power to the People proposes that some forms of populism are inconsistent with constitutionalism, while others aren’t. By providing a series of case studies, some organized by nation, others by topic, the book identifies these populist inconsistencies with constitutionalism-and, importantly, when and how they are not. Opening a dialogue for the possibility of a deeper, populist democracy, the book examines recent challenges to the idea that democracy is a good form of government by exploring possibilities for new institutions that can determine and implement a majority’s views without always threatening constitutionalism.

The invention in the late twentieth century of what I call weak-form systems of judicial review provides us with the chance to see in a new light some traditional debates within U.S. constitutional law and theory, which are predicated on the fact that the United States has strong-form judicial review. Strong- and weak-form systems operate on the level of constitutional design, in the sense that their characteristics are specified in constitutional documents or in deep-rooted constitutional traditions. After sketching the differences between strong- and weak-form systems, I turn to design features that operate at the next lower level. Here legislatures or courts specify whether their enactments or decisions will receive strong- or weak-form treatment. I examine examples of legislative allocations of issues to strong- and weak-form review and identify some practical and conceptual problems with such allocations. Then I examine judicial allocations — of the courts’ own decisions — to Strong- or weak-form categories. Here I consider Thayerian judicial review and what Professor Dan Coenen has called semisubstantive doctrines as examples of judicial choices to give their decisions weak-form effects. My conclusion is that these allocation strategies reproduce within strong- and weakform systems the issues that arise on the level of constitutional design. Weak-form systems and allocation may seem to alleviate some difficultiesassociated with strong-form systems in constitutional democracies. My analysis suggests that those difficulties may persist even when alternatives to strong-form judicial review are adopted.

This symposium explores the role of “fourth branch” institutions, and specifically the role of independent electoral commissions (IECs) in protecting and promoting constitutional democracy. It does so by focusing on the global South, and Asia in particular. It aims to go beyond the “usual suspects” in comparative constitutional law, and put the constitutional experiences of countries such as Indonesia, Kenya, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka at the centre of a decolonized constitutional project and understanding, supplementing them with an examination of more-often-studied systems such as Australia and India.

"Late in the evening of September 1 the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order that many critics have described as effectively overruling Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision holding that the U.S. Constitution protected a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. That description, though technically inaccurate, does capture something important about the Court’s order: It made abortions unavailable as a practical matter for many women in Texas who would have had access to abortion services had the Court issued a different order."

"Chapter Nine of South Africa’s Constitution is titled, "State Institutions Protecting Constitutional Democracy." Its list of institutions that "strengthen constitutional democracy" includes the Public Prosecutor, the Human Rights Commission, the Auditor-General, and the Electoral Commission. Seen in the context of the Constitution’s written text, these institutions form a branch on a par with Parliament and the President. Textual placement may not be important in itself. The authors of the South African Constitution were on to something important, though. They saw that the traditional Montesqueian enumeration of three and only three branches of government no longer identified the complete set of desiderata for institutional design. Dissatisfaction with the Montesquiean enumeration was apparent as well in Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s False Necessity, published in 1987. That enumeration, Unger wrote, was "dangerous" because it "generates a stifling and perverse institutional logic...." The solution for Unger lay in multiplying the number of branches. He offered several examples: a branch "especially charged with enlarging access to the means of communication, information, and expertise," and a branch - labeled the "destabilization branch" - designed "to give every transformative practice a chance.""– Provided by publisher.

This brief essay, to appear in the Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law (Marti Loughlin & Jens Meierhenrich eds.), describes what critical legal scholars said – or perhaps more accurately – would have said – about the concept of the rule of law. Describing critical legal studies as a project in American legal thought rather than analytical jurisprudence, it argues that “the rule of law” is an ideological project, and can come in various versions – liberal, social democratic, and more. It addresses Morton Horwitz’s critique of E.P. Thompson’s assertion that the rule of law is an unqualified human good, and situates the CLS critique of the rule of law within more general discussion of the rule of law by Hayek and Fuller. It concludes by applying ideology-critique to the rule of law, arguing that in whatever form it takes the rule of law contributes to a culture of justification, which may indeed be an unqualified human good.