Constitutional Scholars as Constitutional Actors

Constitutional Theory, Constitutional Culture

Constitutional theorists and other constitutional commentators make heavy use of a paradigm that mistakes certain aspects of our current constitutional decisionmaking process for inherent parts of our constitutional structure and ignores other important aspects of that process entirely. These distortions and elisions raise concerns about the accuracy of much descriptive constitutional commentar...

Constitutional Economics/Constitutional Politics

Why does the treatment of American constitutional politics presented in We the People depart so radically from models of constitutional deliberation developed in the type of constitutional economics pioneered by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock? The paper defines three premises that account for the divergence, and concludes by proposing an inquiry into constitutional design that requires insig...

Constitutional Amendment by Constitutional Desuetude

Scholars have shown that written constitutions may be informally amended in various ways, for instance by judicial interpretation, statute, or executive action. But scholars have yet to fully appreciate that written constitutions may also be informally amended by desuetude. Informal amendment by constitutional desue-tude occurs when a constitutional provision loses its binding force upon politi...

Public Consensus as Constitutional Authority

Barry Friedman's new book The Will of the People attempts to dissolve constitutional law's countermajoritarian difficulty by showing that, in practice, the Supreme Court does only what the public will tolerate. His account succeeds if "the countermajoritarian difficulty" refers to the threat that courts will run the country in ways that contravene majority preference, but not if the "the counte...

Hastings Constitutional