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What's So Great About Constitutionalism?

93 Nw. U.L. Rev. 145, *

Copyright (c) 1998 Northwestern University Law Review
Northwestern University Law Review

Fall, 1998

93 Nw. U.L. Rev. 145

WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT CONSTITUTIONALISM?

NAME: Michael J. Klarman *

BIO: Michael J. Klarman *

* James Monroe Professor of Law and F. Palmer Weber Research Professor of Civil Liberties and Human Rights, University of Virginia School of Law. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Mike Seidman, who not only provided his usual incisive comments on an earlier draft but also has exerted a profound influence on my thinking about constitutional theory generally. I am also grateful to Daryl Levinson, David Strauss, and George Cohen for their helpful comments. Versions of this paper were presented at a panel of the same title at the 1997 annual meeting of theAmerican Political Science Association in Washington, D.C., and at faculty workshops at the DePaul College of Law, the University of Virginia School of Law, and the Marshall-Wythe School of Law at the College of William and Mary. I benefited from the comments and criticism that I received on each of those occasions. Last but not least, Jason Carey provided outstanding research assistance.

SUMMARY:
... Missing from the vast constitutional law literature is a comprehensive account of the different purposes served by constitutionalism. ... This precommitment notion of constitutionalism differs from the agency conception in this sense: The latter conceives of legislators as agents and the People, speaking through their Constitution, as sovereign, while the former understands both the Constitution and legislation to represent the will of the People, though one takes the form of long-term precommitments and the other the form of short-term preferences that may be inconsistent with those precommitments. ... If judicial review manifests the same self-aggrandizing tendency as does legislative power - and the course of American constitutional history suggests that it may - then the checks-and-balances conception of judicially-reviewable constitutionalism is normatively problematic. ... It is worth noting a preliminary oddity in this conception of constitutionalism: The American constitution of 1787 represented a dramatic departure from tradition. ... A defender of the educational conception of constitutionalism might respond that even if the Court is not always successful in shaping public opinion, at least the Justices manage to get public policy debates started, which is a good thing. ... The same would be true for majoritarian endorsement of slavery, religious persecution, and so on. ...

TEXT:
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Missing from the vast constitutional law literature is a comprehensive account of the different purposes served by constitutionalism. This Article aims to fill that gap by identifying and evaluating ten leading accounts of constitutionalism that can be garnered from the cases and commentary: enforcement of a principal-agent relationship; enforcement of societal precommitments; providing a mechanism for checks and balances; protection of minority rights; maintenance of continuity or tradition; symbolizing national unity; serving an educational function; securing finality for disputed issues; providing a rule of recognition for law; satisfying a majoritarian preference for constitutionalism.

In addition to describing these ten leading accounts of constitutionalism, Part I offers positive and normative criticism of each. I shall argue, first, that none of these accounts provides a very satisfactory description of how our constitutional system operates. Second, I shall argue that none of these proffered justifications for constitutionalism is unambiguously attractive. Specifically, each justification possesses virtues and vices, the balancing of which entails controversial value judgments. Thus, if one core function of constitutionalism is to provide some common area of agreement for those who disagree about the merits of particular controversies, such as abortion or affirmative action, I shall argue that it fails in its objective. The normative evaluation of any particular account of constitutionalism requires value judgments no different in kind from those that infuse our disagreements regarding the merits of particular constitutional controversies.

Part II of the Article offers a concise alternative description of our constitutional practices, which I believe to be more accurate than the accounts [*146] considered in Part I: The Supreme Court, in politically unpredictable ways, imposes culturally elite values in marginally countermajoritarian fashion. In Part III, I offer a brief normative assessment of this alternative description of American constitutionalism.

One preliminary point warrants brief attention. Throughout this essay, when I discuss constitutionalism I am principally concerned with its judicially-enforceable variety. I do not, of course, mean to deny the possibility of constitutionalism without judicial review. Most American states experienced precisely that version of constitutionalism in the decade before the Philadelphia Convention, 1 and numerous constitutional commentators recently have investigated the question of constitutional interpretation outside the courts. 2 Still, constitutionalism without judicial enforceability poses a less interesting question because so much less is at stake. A constitution as textually open ended as our own allows even constitutionally conscientious legislators to do pretty much as they please. As we shall see, constitutionalism without judicial review shares many of the virtues and vices of its judicially-enforceable variety, but usually in less robust form.

I. Ten Leading Accounts of Constitutionalism

A. Agency

On one prominent account, constitutionalism consists primarily of an agency relationship: the sovereign People constrain their government agents through the instrument of a written constitution. Judicial review, from this perspective, is the enforcement mechanism for that agency relationship. This is pretty much the view of constitutionalism espoused by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 78 3 and by Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison. 4 It also suffuses Bruce Ackerman's notion of "constitu [*147] tional dualism," in which the sovereign will of the People voiced through "constitutional politics" constrains the actions of legislative agents engaged in "ordinary politics" through the mechanism of "preservationist" courts. 5

Descriptively, this agency conception of constitutionalism suffers both from the Supreme Court's failure to enforce agency restrictions that are specified in the Constitution and its willingness to manufacture restrictions that are not. As to the former, consider the Court's substantial evisceration of the Contracts Clause in the twentieth century, 6 its general unwillingness (until very recently) to supply any concrete content to the Tenth Amendment, 7 its refusal to enforce the constitutional requirement that wars be declared by Congress, 8 and its unwillingness to require that Congress rather than the president legislate. 9 As to the Court's willingness to manufacture new agency restrictions, consider the entire doctrine of substantive due process in both its Lochner-era and modern privacy incarnations, 10 the expan [*148] sion of the Equal Protection Clause to cover unanticipated beneficiaries, 11 or the application of the First Amendment to a plenitude of subjects never contemplated by the Framers, such as commercial speech, pornography, campaign finance, and hate speech. 12

To a certain extent, judicial expansion and contraction of the original agency relationship seems inevitable given the relative indeterminacy of the Constitution, which, for this very reason, comprises a lousy set of agency instructions. Given such an open-textured document, it seems inevitable that courts entrusted with its enforcement will be imposing their own notion of the appropriate agency relationship rather than enforcing the one designed by the Constitution's Framers. Terms such as "necessary and proper," "commerce," "freedom of speech," and "equal protection" seem to invite, indeed require, judicial creativity. 13 Yet it is uncertain whether the cause of popular sovereignty is better served by having unelected judges impose their own view of an appropriate agency relationship than by having the imperfectly constituted sovereign People redefine the agency relationship through popular elections. So the first normative objection to the agency conception of constitutionalism inheres in the relative indeterminacy of our Constitution; a document drafted with greater precision might ameliorate the problem of the enforcement mechanism inventing rather than enforcing agency restrictions.

Yet more specific agency instructions would exacerbate a second normative problem: the deadhand objection to enforcing an agency relationship that was, in substantial part, designed over two hundred years ago. Why should the People of 1998 be bound by a set of agency restrictions designed by a People possessed of radically different ideas and confronted with radically different circumstances? 14 For example, the principals of 1787 plainly possessed a limited conception of national government power that was appropriate to a world with primitive transportation and communication, little mobility among the citizenry, a barely developed market economy, and a paranoid fear of distant government power. It is unclear why the principals of 1998, inhabiting a radically changed world, should presumptively be bound by the original set of agency restrictions imposed upon the national government. Nor does the possibility of constitutional amendment solve [*149] this deadhand problem, though it does ameliorate it. The supermajority requirements of Article V unduly privilege the status quo and thus confound any argument that today's principals have manifested their consent to deadhand agency restrictions by acquiescing in them. 15

The agency conception of constitutionalism is subject to another objection with both positive and normative dimensions. Usually, to be effective, agency restrictions require an impartial enforcement mechanism. But there is no such mechanism available for enforcing the federal constitution. Federal courts are part of the federal government and state courts are part of their state governments, with corresponding incentives to expand and contract the powers conferred by the agency relationship upon their respective governments. Both Antifederalist opponents of the original Constitution and Jeffersonian critics of the Marshall Court's great nationalizing decisions raised precisely this objection to the claim that the federal courts would be the arbiter of federal/state conflicts. 16

Not only might federal courts have an abstract bias in favor of expanding the power of the government with which they are affiliated, but they also might possess a concrete incentive to expand national government power and thereby augment their own jurisdiction vis-a-vis state courts. [*150] Specifically, Article III's "arising under" head of jurisdiction 17 creates the possibility that expanded national legislative power will result in expanded national judicial power. Antifederalist and Jeffersonian critics repeatedly made this point as well. 18 Indeed, the theoretical underpinning of southern nullification and secession arguments was the absence of any neutral arbiter of the agency relationship. 19 Because neither federal nor state courts were neutral with regard to construing Congress's powers under the federal constitution, only the sovereign People, meeting in their state conventions, could arbitrate federal/state conflicts. 20

The lack of neutrality of federal courts is especially significant when one recalls that they are not only the enforcement mechanism for the agency relationship, but also are among the agents supposedly constrained by that relationship. If, as Chief Justice Marshall warned, Congress cannot be [*151] trusted with construing its own powers, 21 it is not clear why federal courts are better entrusted with defining their own powers. Much of our constitutional history confirms the notion that federal judges possess strong incentives to augment their powers by distorting the agency relationship in their favor. 22 Consider the following examples, which are meant to be illustrative rather than exhaustive. First, the relaxation and eventual near-abandonment of federalism restrictions on Congress 23 might confirm the Antifederalist suspicion that federal courts benefit, both abstractly and concretely, from expanded national legislative power. Second, consider the Court's century-long experiment in the making of federal common law under Swift v. Tyson 24 - an especially striking illustration of judicial self-aggrandizement because it occurred in an era when the Court almost certainly would have invalidated congressional efforts to impose similar rules through legislation. 25 Third, note the revolutionary expansion of federal equity jurisprudence in the context of railroad receiverships 26 and labor union injunctions 27 near the end of the nineteenth century, extending judicial oversight to bankruptcy and labor policy in the absence of congressional authorization. Finally, the Supreme Court's stunning expansion of individual rights protections over the past four decades, from the political left and right simultaneously, seems to corroborate the imperialist impulses of the nation's judiciary. 28 Every time the Supreme Court declares the existence of a new constitutional right - a right to use contraceptives or to obtain abortions, a right against affirmative action or regulatory takings 29 - it [*152] seizes judicial control over a new area of public policy. One must not forget that courts too are agents theoretically bound by the agency relationship; 30 to invest them with authority definitively to construe that relationship is normatively problematic, given their obvious incentive to distort their interpretations in favor of expanding their own power. The relative political insulation of courts only exacerbates this problem by diluting the most powerful constraint upon this self-aggrandizing tendency - direct electoral accountability.

B. Precommitment

A second, related account holds that the Constitution consists of a set of precommitments undertaken by the sovereign People. Courts, because of their relative insulation from short-term passions, are entrusted with enforcement of those precommitments against repudiations manifested in the form of legislation inconsistent with the Constitution. This precommitment notion of constitutionalism differs from the agency conception in this sense: The latter conceives of legislators as agents and the People, speaking through their Constitution, as sovereign, while the former understands both the Constitution and legislation to represent the will of the People, though one takes the form of long-term precommitments and the other the form of short-term preferences that may be inconsistent with those precommitments. This precommitment notion of constitutionalism is widely embraced. Consider, for example, Alexander Bickel's notion of courts enforcing "enduring values" as against "the current clash of interests," 31 Alexander Hamilton's vision of courts checking the "ill humours" frequently manifested in legislation, 32 or Justice Brennan's notion of courts passing [*153] "sober constitutional judgment" because legislators sometimes are influenced "by the passions and exigencies of the moment." 33

This precommitment model also fails to account adequately for our constitutional practices. Very few of the Court's recent landmark individual rights decisions fit the precommitment paradigm. When the Court invalidated race discrimination, 34 sex discrimination, 35 school prayer, 36 abortion restrictions, 37 malapportionment in legislatures, 38 or obscenity regulations, 39 it plainly was not restraining short-term departures from long-term precommitted values. Quite to the contrary, each of these practices was deeply entrenched in American tradition when the Supreme Court ruled against it.

Conversely, the Court frequently has declined to intervene when this paradigm calls for judicial involvement - when legislatures perpetrate short-term departures from long-term principles. The most notable illustrations here are the Justices' refusal to invalidate Japanese-American internment during World War II 40 or virtually unprecedented speech restrictions during World War I 41 and the early Cold War. 42 [*154]

Normatively, proponents of this conception of constitutionalism generally fail to justify the privileging of long-term precommitments over short-term efforts to repudiate them. Yet both decisionmaking contexts have something to be said for them. Abstract long-term precommitments have the advantages of relative impartiality (because the concrete consequences of such decisions may be unknowable) 43 and of affording time for deliberation and insulation from passion. On the other hand, a concrete short-term decisionmaking context affords the advantages of experience, awareness of changed circumstances, and knowledge of the concrete consequences of abstract principles, which can be an advantage as well as a disadvantage. 44 Thus, for example, one plausibly might argue that unforeseeable changed circumstances may warrant either a temporary exemption or a permanent departure from a precommitted value. As to the former, consider, for example, President Lincoln's argument that an otherwise unconstitutional presidential suspension of the writ of habeas corpus might be justified in light of the South's massive insurrection against the Union and the Constitution, 45 or the Supreme Court's acknowledgement in Blaisdell that the Constitution temporarily might assume new meaning during an economic calamity as severe as the Great Depression. 46 Contemporaneously, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to judge whether a particular governmental action is a product of passions run amok that a court should resist or of short-term exigencies justifying drastic solutions that a court should accommodate. Think of how difficult it would have been to distinguish be [*155] tween these scenarios for one charged with making contemporaneous evaluations of the Japanese-American internment or McCarthyism. 47

As to permanent repudiations of precommitted principles in light of changed circumstances, consider President Franklin Roosevelt's criticism of the "Nine Old Men" for foisting a "horse and buggy" conception of commerce on a radically transformed nation 48 or the Supreme Court's eventual acquiescence in the virtual elimination of the "public purpose" requirement from its substantive due process and takings jurisprudence. 49 It is far from obvious in either of these contexts - temporary departures or permanent repudiations - that abstract precommitted principles normatively should trump inconsistent subsequent concrete preferences. Problematically, any choice between the advantages and disadvantages of these two decisionmaking contexts is likely to be influenced by the context in which it is made; there is no neutral vantage point from which to make the assessment. 50

Moreover, the precommitment conception of constitutionalism suffers from the same indeterminacy and deadhand problems already considered in connection with the agency account. Specifically, if constitutional precommitments are indeterminate, and in our tradition they generally are, then the precommitment's enforcer (the judiciary) is as likely to be imposing its own preferences as interpreting those of the precommitment's maker (the People). And even if constitutional precommitments are determinate, they tend to be very old; to invalidate the will of a contemporary generation on the basis of a past generation's precommitments is normatively problematic. [*156]

C. Checks and Balances

A third defense of constitutionalism relies on the notion of checks and balances. This conception is distinct from the agency account, under which courts impose restrictions designed by the People on their legislative agents; it is also distinct from the precommitment notion, under which courts use the People's long-term precommitments to constrain the same People's short-term passions. Rather, this checks-and-balances account of constitutionalism conceives of judicial review as one set ofagents (courts) controlling another (legislatures and executives). On this view, to be effective, the paper separation of powers contained in the Constitution requires a checking mechanism in the form of judicial review. In the absence of such a mechanism, one is left with ineffectual "parchment barriers." 51 Such a scenario would be especially unsettling for a Founding generation preoccupied with fears of the legislative "vortex" 52 - the plausible notion that the most powerful branch of the government would simply accumulate additional power once the system was up and running. Thus judicial review confers a salutary checking power upon the "least dangerous" branch, 53 regardless of whether one understands that branch to be enforcing agency restrictions as originally designed or simply making them up in its efforts to check legislative self-aggrandizement. On this view, judicially enforceable constitutionalism is analogous to the presidential veto; it is a mechanism that confers discretionary power on less threatening institutional actors in order to check more powerful ones. 54

Descriptively, the checks-and-balances version of constitutionalism fails to account for the most fundamental shifts in governmental powers over the course of our constitutional history. The Court occasionally intervenes at the margin, but rarely resists fundamental changes that reflect an altered material reality. The Court has not resisted the growth of an imperial presidency by, for example, consistently enforcing the nondelegation [*157] doctrine. 55 The Court generally has acquiesced in the exponential increase in national government power vis-a-vis the states. 56 And the Court has shown little inclination to check the growth of the modern administrative state by insisting on the compartmentalization of executive, legislative, and judicial power apparently contemplated by ArticlesI, II, and III. 57

In all three of these areas, the Court's interventions can accurately be described, I think, as fairly trivial. The Court occasionally and unpredictably intervenes in separation-of-powers cases, but allows to go unchecked the more significant departures from the original design. 58 Recently, the Court has begun reinvigorating its federalism jurisprudence, but thus far the result has been trivial compared to the massive centralization of power that the Court has legitimized since the New Deal. 59 And the Court has made no effort to check the concentration of legislative, executive, and judicial power in the hands of administrative agencies. 60 Generally speaking, the Court has interpreted the Constitution to permit fundamental adjustments to the original structural scheme in order to accommodate changing reality.

The principal normative objection to the checks-and-balances conception of constitutionalism is this: When the Court does intervene to check the power of other institutional actors, inevitably it augments its own power (at least in one sense), which is not so easily checkable because of the federal courts' relative insulation from politics. Chief Justice Marshall sought to [*158] evade this objection in Marbury by conceiving of judicial review as an objective enforcement mechanism for determinate constitutional text. 61 But, as I already have suggested, the constitutional text is sufficiently indeterminate to permit any number of plausible interpretations, and judges may possess the same incentive as legislators to expand their power.

Nor is it obvious that the federal judiciary is any longer the least dangerous branch that the Founders and Chief Justice Marshall assumed it to be. 62 Federal courts had a far more limited stature and jurisdiction in the early years of the Republic than they do today. 63 Moreover, the Founding generation seems to have possessed a dramatically more limited conception of judicial review than that generally entertained today. 64 Specifically, the Framers apparently believed that the practice would be limited to cases of the "clear constitutional violation," such as the examples Chief Justice Marshall invokes in Marbury v. Madison to demonstrate that the existence of a written constitution logically implies the practice of judicial review. 65 Further, they probably conceived of judicial review in classically Madisonian separation-of-powers terms. That is, courts would invalidate only legislation involving matters of "peculiar judicial concern," such as the jurisdictional issue in Marbury, the non-judicial duties thrust upon federal judges by the statute invalidated in Hayburn's Case 66 or the divestiture of jury trial rights implicated in most of the early state cases that raised the issue of judicial review. 67

When one considers the breadth and importance of the social policy questions constitutionalized by the Supreme Court in the last few decades, it is far from clear that the Court plays the sort of "least dangerous branch" role that might render palatable an uncabined checking function. Abortion, the death penalty, school desegregation, affirmative action, gay rights, women's rights, the role of religion in public life, the right to die, campaign finance reform - these are only the issues that head the list. If judicial review manifests the same self-aggrandizing tendency as does legislative power - and the course of American constitutional history suggests that it [*159] may 68 - then the checks-and-balances conception of judicially-reviewable constitutionalism is normatively problematic.

Another normative objection to the checks-and-balances account relates to the deadhand problem. The Constitution's Framers saw legislative abuse, as manifested in the debtor relief and paper money schemes enacted by state legislatures in the 1780s, as the principal vice of the existing scheme of government. 69 One of Madison's principal objectives in Philadelphia was to curb state legislatures, preferably through adopting a national government veto on state legislation, but alternatively through a combination of Article I, section 10's bar on state redistributive tendencies, the Supremacy Clause of Article VI, and the mechanism of judicial review. 70 Thus, for Founders appalled by what they regarded as the confiscatory tactics of overly populist state legislatures, judicial review might play a useful checking function.

Today, however, we live in a very different world. The redistributive tendencies that the Framers sought to curb have been largely sanctified in the modern welfare state. In such a world, judicial checks on the legislative "vortex" may be undesirable. It all depends on one's normative perspective as to whether the unregulated market or legislative intervention will produce better results. The Framers feared legislative redistribution, so naturally they approved of judicial checks, which, at a minimum, were unlikely to make things worse. For those possessed of a more beneficent vision of legislative redistribution, though, it is not obvious that this checking function is normatively attractive. 71 It depends on whether one believes that courts or legislatures are more likely to accomplish one's redistributive objectives. There is substantial reason to doubt that courts are likely to redistribute wealth more aggressively than legislatures. Indeed, for most of our [*160] constitutional history, they have checked redistribution rather than compelling it. 72

D. Minority Rights

One popular justification for judicially-enforceable constitutionalism is the need to protect minority rights from majoritarian overreaching. To the extent that the minority rights being protected derive from the text of the Constitution, this account is just one application of the precommitment conception of constitutionalism. But most advocates of this minority rights notion do not limit themselves to judicial enforcement of the constitutional text. Rather, they argue more generally for a judicial role in protecting minority rights from majoritarian interference - whether those rights derive from natural law, societal consensus, or some other source. Consider, for example, Justice Black's famous statement that courts stand "as havens of refuge for those who might otherwise suffer because they are helpless, weak, outnumbered, or because they are nonconforming victims of prejudice and public excitement" 73 or Justice Jackson's proclamation in his celebrated opinion in the second flag salute case that "the very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities." 74 This minority rights conception of constitutionalism also differs from the simple checks-and-balances notion, which focuses on legislative self-aggrandizement rather than on whether legislatures are protecting or persecuting minority groups.

[*161] Descriptively, this minority rights account of constitutionalism is surprisingly deficient, given its prevalence in conventional wisdom. Much as the Court has been unwilling to enforce precommitted values after they have lost their attraction, so has it generally declined to protect minority rights against dominant majoritarian norms. 75 The limited countermajoritarianism of the Court is partly attributable to political checks that constrain the Justices' capacity to frustrate strong public opinion but perhaps more significantly to internal cultural checks that limit their inclination to do so. 76

The romantic image of the Court as countermajoritarian savior is shattered by historical reality. The Supreme Court sanctioned rather than attacked slavery, legitimized segregation for much of the Jim Crow era, validated the Japanese-American internment during World War II, sanctioned McCarthyism, and approved sex discrimination until after the emergence of the modern women's movement. 77 The most celebrated examples of the Court's supposed countermajoritarian heroics are less than compelling. The Brown decision was the product of a broad array of political, social, economic and ideological forces inaugurated or accelerated by World War II; by the time of the Court's intervention, half the nation no longer supported racial segregation. 78 Similarly, Roe v. Wade was decided at the crest of the modern women's movement and was supported by half the nation's population from the day it was handed down. 79 Finally, the Court protected gay rights for the first time in Romer v. Evans 80 only after a social and political gay rights movement had made substantial inroads against traditional attitudes toward homosexuality.

[*162] None of this is to deny that the Supreme Court possesses some marginal countermajoritarian capacity. 81 Clearly the Court's decisions invalidating school prayer or flag-burning prohibitions and protecting the procedural rights of alleged criminals have not commanded majority support. 82 Even with regard to these decisions, though, it is important to appreciate the limits of the Court's countermajoritarian thrust. For example, the Justices invalidated school prayer only after the relative demise of the nation's unofficial Protestant establishment. 83 And the countermajoritarian force of the Court's criminal procedure revolution has been largely blunted by the unwillingness of legislatures to adequately fund defense counsel. 84

Normatively, perhaps we should applaud, rather than lament, the Court's failure to fulfill its heroic countermajoritarian role, given the absence of any uncontroversial theory of which minority rights deserve protection. 85 A countermajoritarian Court can appear either as hero or villain, depending on one's political preferences and the flow of history. It is not clear why one would expect the Justices to do a better job than majoritarian politics of selecting the right minority groups for protection. Brown probably has deluded us into thinking the Court has some comparative advantage in this enterprise, but taking a broader historical perspective corrects that misimpression.

For much of its history, the Court protected the minority group for which the Framers entertained the greatest sympathy - property owners. Madison candidly revealed his minority rights sympathies in Federalist No. 10, when he identified as a principal virtue of the large republic its capacity to inhibit "a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project." 86 Until the New Deal constitutional revolution, the Court established a track record of protecting certain property-owning minorities from majoritarian redistribution, whether in the form of debtor relief laws, a mildly progressive national [*163] income tax, or protective union legislation. 87 In perhaps its most infamous decision, the Court in Dred Scott protected the rights of one of American history's classic minority groups, southern slave owners. 88 More recently, the Court in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. 89 secured the equal protection rights of Richmond's minority white population by invalidating a city council affirmative action plan that awarded racial preferences in construction contracts. The point, to reiterate, is that protecting minority rights is normatively attractive only if the Court protects the "right" minorities. It is unclear why the Court should possess some inherent institutional advantage over legislatures in that enterprise, and the historical record confirms that the Justices have blundered as often as they have succeeded.

E. Continuity

Another justification for constitutionalism is that it promotes continuity within a political community. 90 This is related to, but distinct from, the enforcement-of-precommitments function already discussed. There, the emphasis was on preserving specific precommitted values from impulsive repudiation. The continuity account of constitutionalism, though, emphasizes the importance of protecting custom, mores, and tradition (as opposed to conscious precommitments) from evisceration (whether impulsive or deliberate).

[*164] It is worth noting a preliminary oddity in this conception of constitutionalism: The American constitution of 1787 represented a dramatic departure from tradition. Madison's theory of the large republic, the creation of a powerful executive branch, the very notion of federalism, the conceptual shift from state to popular sovereignty - all of these aspects of American constitutionalism represented momentous shifts from the political status quo. It was the Antifederalists, far more than the Federalists, who embodied continuity and tradition in their political and constitutional theory. 91 So if American constitutionalism does serve this preservation-of-continuity function, it is only in a forward-looking sense.

Empirically, it is hard to say whether having a written constitution makes America more tradition-bound than it otherwise would be; there is no control group against which to run this experiment. Americans frequently observe that the British seem more constrained by tradition, yet they have no written constitution. 92 This hardly constitutes compelling proof, though it may be suggestive.

Descriptively, it seems plain that judicial review makes little contribution to preserving continuity with the past. Most of modern constitutional law doctrine challenges tradition, much to Justice Scalia's chagrin. 93 Brown (school segregation), Roe (abortion restrictions), Engel v. Vitale (school prayer), VMI (exclusion of women from a military academy), Reynolds v. Sims (legislative malapportionment), Davis v. Bandemer (political gerrymandering), Rutan (political patronage) - just to note several prominent examples - illustrate the tradition-frustrating tendency of American constitutional law. Not only does modern judicial review frequently intervene against tradition, but it also generally declines to intervene against de [*165] partures from tradition. Thus, as we already have noted, the Court generally has refused to enforce traditional notions of federalism and separation-of-powers to inhibit the growth of the modern welfare state and the imperial presidency. 94 Similarly, the Court has declined to enforce traditional constitutional notions that would have inhibited undeclared wars, 95 military conscription, 96 imperial acquisitions, 97 Japanese-American internment, 98 debtor relief laws, 99 mandatory drug testing, 100 and so forth.

Normatively, we might have cause for concern had the Court done a better job of maintaining continuity with the past. Continuity does have its advantages - predictability, stability, the fulfillment that derives from having integrated projects over time (what Charles Fried calls "constitutive rationality" and Ronald Dworkin labels "integrity"). 101 Yet the continuity conception of constitutionalism suffers from the same deadhand problem we already have encountered. When decisions made in the past presumptively determine the course of the present, one sacrifices the benefits of experience and runs the risk that the accumulated wisdom of the past will have been rendered obsolete by changed circumstances. Thus, it seems plausible that the normative force of tradition should be greater in a society not experiencing dramatic change - that is, someplace other than nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. 102 The problem is compounded when the normative force of tradition is compromised by past generations' [*166] now-antiquated conception of who should count in constituting its traditions - in our experience, predominantly white Anglo-Saxon male property-holders. Finally, it is worth noting that tradition exercises an inexorable pull on the present even in the absence of any constitutional bulwark; barring weighty reasons to the contrary, the political regime generally will continue to conduct business as usual. 103 It is not obvious that the virtues of continuity warrant supplementing this inexorable weight of tradition with the further entrenching effect of constitutionalism.

Many scholars and judges have sought to preserve the virtues of continuity while ameliorating its vices by embracing some version of "moderate" or "soft" originalism. 104 That is, they argue that principles embraced by past generations ought to be "translated" into modern contexts to reflect changed circumstances. 105 This position has acquired renewed currency in recent years. 106 Unfortunately, as I have endeavored to show elsewhere, this translation enterprise is fatally flawed. 107 It solves neither the deadhand problem of originalist interpretive methodologies nor the judicial subjectivity problem of nonoriginalist methods.

Consider an example. 108 Scholars committed to the translation enterprise might ask how the Framers' commitment to federalism principles should be adjusted to reflect the reality of a modern, industrial, highly integrated economy. 109 Perhaps the right question to ask, however, is whether [*167] the Framers would retain their commitment to federalism at all in light of these radically changed circumstances. After all, at least some of the Founders embraced federalism less out of political principle than political necessity - the fact that state legislatures, which could not be entirely cut out of the Constitution's ratifying process, would be loath to relinquish too much of their power. 110 This is not to deny that federalism retains many of its virtues even today. For example, it fosters experimentation, encourages competition between states, arguably maximizes preference satisfaction in a geographically diverse nation, enhances citizen participation in government, and ensures the existence of competing governmental power sources. 111 Yet federalism also has many disadvantages, some of which are simply the flip-sides of its advantages. Federalism permits races to the bottom, prevents realization of efficiencies of scale, frustrates efforts to create an economic common market, arguably creates greater opportunities for minority oppression (the converse of Madison's point in Federalist No. 10) and obstructs implementation of federally guaranteed rights (think of massive resistance to Brown). Plainly, balancing the competing virtues and vices of federalism is a complicated enterprise. My only point here is that freed from the political reality that made federalism commitments unavoidable and apprised of the massive political, social, and economic changes that arguably render federalism obsolete, it is entirely plausible that the transplanted Founders would choose to reject federalism altogether rather than to translate it.

Nor does translation solve the problem of uncabined judicial rule. There are two distinct problems. First, when asking what the Framers would have done under modern circumstances, which aspects of their world do we vary and which do we leave in place? Second, assuming we can answer the question of which changed circumstances are relevant to the translation, how do we calculate what the Founders would have done in light of those changes?

Consider first the question of which changed circumstances to incorporate into the translation. A rather large problem immediately presents itself: If we treat all changed circumstances as relevant variables, then we simply will have converted the Framers into us, and asking how they would resolve a problem is no different from asking how we would resolve it. Yet a decision to treat some changed circumstances as variables and others as constants seems entirely arbitrary. For example, it is wholly uncontroversial to vary the existing state of technology when translating the congressional power to regulate interstate commerce. I am aware of nobody who argues [*168] that Congress cannot regulate airplanes because they did not exist when the Constitution was adopted; airplanes are a modern analogue of ships, so certainly Congress can regulate their interstate movement. Yet in translating Congress's Commerce Clause power, why is it any less justifiable to treat as relevant variables all of the other changed circumstances that might influence one's attitude toward federalism - for example, the modern proliferation of national and international markets, the transportation and communications revolutions, the nation's growing international role, the increased mobility of the American population, and so forth?

Even if we could agree on which changed circumstances are relevant, we still would need to figure out whether the extent of the change has been sufficient to justify a translation. For example, Lawrence Lessig has argued that by the 1930s changed circumstances - both conceptions of the nature of law and political and social variables, the most notable of which was the Great Depression - justified the Supreme Court's repudiation of the Lochner era's commitment to laissez-faire economics and limited national government power. 112 Lessig's empirical claim about changed circumstances seems convincing. The pathologies of a complex urban, industrial society plainly did reduce the allure of laissez-faire and increase support for national government regulation by the 1930s. Yet a court charged with the complex task of translating the Framers' intentions needs to know more than the general direction of changing circumstances; it needs to identify with precision the point at which those changes have become sufficient to justify a translation. The problem is that at any particular point in time, reasonable people will disagree about whether the change in circumstances has been sufficient to justify a translation of the Framers' intentions. As late as 1937, the Four Horsemen still had not spotted sufficient changes in circumstance to justify translation of laissez-faire and federalism concepts. 113 On the other hand, as early as 1905 or 1910, some Justices and scholars already had identified sufficient change to warrant a translation. 114 Furthermore, it is difficult to believe that one's view of the sufficiency of changed circumstances does not reflect, to a substantial degree, one's normative commitments. The Four Horsemen, for example, would have been unconvinced of the sufficiency of changed circumstances in 1937 largely because they liked things better the old way. Measuring the extent of changed circumstances and assessing whether they are sufficient to justify a translation are tasks certain to yield controverted conclusions. One can phrase this in terms of translation - would the Framers have considered the changed circumstances [*169] sufficient to justify altering their constitutional commitments? Because the answer to that question, however, is so obviously indeterminate, it appears that the real ground of controversy is over what we think should be done, rather than over what the Framers would have done in our changed circumstances. Translation solves the judicial subjectivity problem no better than it does the deadhand problem.

F. Symbolizing National Unity

The American constitution is sometimes praised as a unifying symbol. 115 Just as the continuity conception of constitutionalism stressed the importance of securing unity across time, so the "symbolic" account emphasizes the value of promoting unity across geography and culture. Especially in a country as racially, religiously, and ethnically diverse as the United States, one might deem indispensable a set of shared symbols such as our Constitution.

Descriptively, it is uncertain whether the Constitution and judicial review have played this role in American history. Again, in the absence of a control group, it is hard to tell. Conversely, some countries, such as Great Britain, have cohered for much longer than the United States without a written constitution or judicial review. Other countries possessed of a written constitution, such as the Soviet Union, have been burst asunder. But, of course, those other countries faced different circumstances, making it difficult to draw reliable inferences from their experiences about the importance of constitutionalism to maintaining national unity. My own suspicion is that James Madison was right in his basic insight in Federalist No. 10: Racial, religious, and ethnic diversity actually help rather than hinder national unity by fostering a culture of relative tolerance. 116 On this view, it is pluralism rather than constitutionalism - "parchment barriers," in Madison's pejorative term - which promotes national unity. 117 Further, even if [*170] the Constitution played an important symbolic role when the nation was in its infancy, filling a vacuum created by the absence of a common tradition and ancestry, the significance of this function is open to doubt in a nation with two centuries of history, tradition, and mythmaking under its belt. 118

Finally, it would be odd if the Constitution has performed this unifying function because it is very much a false symbol of unity. To the extent that the Constitution succeeds in producing national consensus, it does so only by embodying principles at such a high level of abstraction as to generate little controversy. 119 The Constitution guarantees "equal protection" but does not tell us whether this bars racial segregation in public schools, the exclusion of women from the Virginia Military Institute or gays from the military, or the malapportionment and gerrymandering of state legislatures. The Constitution guarantees "freedom of speech" but does not tell us how this affects regulation of subversive speech, commercial speech, campaign finance, smut on the Internet, or flag burning. Thus, southerners and northerners in the 1850s could both believe that the Constitution legitimized their diametrically opposed positions on congressional power to prohibit slavery in the territories, 120 while a hundred years later they could continue to believe that the Constitution supported their respective positions on school segregation. 121 Can it be true that consensus secured on principles articulated at this level of abstraction has any genuine unifying effect on the nation?

[*171] Occasionally the Constitution does take a stand on a particular issue at a much greater level of specificity. Most post-1791 constitutional amendments, though not the Fourteenth, are examples of this phenomenon. Interestingly, though, these highly specific constitutional provisions tend to be so consonant with public opinion that it is hard to say that their embodiment in the Constitution produced rather than reflected national unity. The Eleventh Amendment overruling Chisholm v. Georgia, 122 the Twelfth Amendment responding to the electoral debacle of 1800, 123 the Sixteenth Amendment overruling Pollock v. Farmers Loan & Trust Co., 124 the Seventeenth Amendment altering the method of selecting senators, 125 the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchising women, 126 the Twenty-fourth Amendment forbidding poll taxes, 127 and the Twenty-sixth Amendment enfranchising eighteen-year-olds 128 all illustrate this phenomenon.

[*172] On the relatively rare occasions when the Constitution takes a clear stand on a still contested issue, it plainly fails to secure national unity. 129 Prohibition is one such instance; the Eighteenth Amendment quickly was repealed by the Twenty-first. The Fifteenth Amendment, forced upon southerners against their will, 130 is another; by the turn of the century, white southerners effectively had disfranchised blacks through a combination of force, fraud, and evasion. 131

Ordinarily, though, the Constitution is fairly abstract, and only judicial interpretations make it concrete. More frequently than is commonly acknowledged, those interpretations are consonant with dominant national norms and thus are best described as reflecting rather than producing national unity. This is the phenomenon I have elsewhere described as deploying a national consensus to suppress outliers, 132 and it accurately accounts for landmark Supreme Court cases such as Griswold v. Connecticut, 133 Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 134 Moore v. City of East Cleveland, 135 Coker v. Georgia, 136 Plyler v. Doe, 137 and United States v. Virginia. 138

On numerous other occasions, the Court's efforts to supply concrete meaning to abstract constitutional phraseology are genuinely controversial. [*173] In these cases, the Court confronts social disputes that genuinely rend the nation in half and awards victory to one side or seeks to split the difference. I believe this is a fairly accurate description of Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 139 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 140 Brown v. Board of Education, 141 Furman v. Georgia, 142 Roe v. Wade, 143 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 144 and Romer v. Evans. 145 On these occasions, the Court plainly is not reflecting national unity. But neither do its decisions produce that unity. 146 Once Prigg v. Pennsylvania rendered concrete the meaning of the Fugitive Slave Clause, northern states found ways to evade or even to defy the decision. 147 Dred Scott hardly settled the slavery-in-the-territories question by rendering concrete constitutional language from which both northerners and southerners previously had drawn sustenance; if anything, the decision mobilized Republicans to defend the legitimacy of their party, which the Court essentially had ruled unconstitutional. 148 Brown crystallized southern white resistance to changes in the racial status quo, 149 and Roe v. Wade arguably mobilized a right-to-life movement that previously had not played a prominent role in politics. 150 Examples might easily be multiplied, but the point seems evident: The Justices may believe that their pronouncements "call[] the contending sides of a national controversy to [*174] end their national division," 151 but there is little evidence that such disputes are so easily salved.

Normatively, is it clear that achieving a false, or even a genuine, national consensus is an unambiguous good? The "consensus" historians of the 1950s arguably reflected the apparent lack of conflict in the broader society of which they were a part. 152 From the perspective of the conflict-ridden 1960s, 153 though, the consensus of the preceding decade was very much one of appearance rather than reality. That appearance of consensus was rendered possible only through the suppression of minority viewpoints, such as those of African-Americans, feminists, gays and lesbians. 154 To consider one constitutional manifestation of this phenomenon, Jews and other religious minorities were inhibited during the McCarthy era from raising Establishment Clause challenges to public displays of (Protestant) religiosity. 155 Similarly, black leaders, consciously or subconsciously, reined in the aggressive civil rights campaign of the late 1940s to avoid the tincture of Communist complicity. 156 Furthermore, securing a false consensus has the consequence of deluding us into believing that real problems do not exist. The race riots of the 1960s reflected conditions that had existed in the 1950s but had gone unredressed partially because they had gone unacknowledged in an era of false consensus.

Even genuine national consensus may not always be so normatively attractive. It really depends on the substance of the consensus. To a certain extent, the original Constitution did help foster consensus on the question of national government power over slavery in existing states. At the time of the Philadelphia Convention, there was virtually no sentiment in favor of national abolition; 157 thus, initially, the Constitution reflected rather than [*175] produced a consensus against national government power to interfere with slavery in the states. Yet over the course of the antebellum period, as the abolitionist movement deepened and broadened its support, the existence of the Constitution may well have inhibited many anti-slavery souls from advocating national interference with slavery in the states. The anti-slavery Republican Party, founded in opposition to the spread of slavery into the Kansas and Nebraska territories, consistently conceded the absence of congressional power to suppress slavery in existing states. 158 Possibly it was the Constitution that fostered this national consensus; alternatively, it may have been northerners' awareness that southerners instantly would have seceded from a Union that treated this question as open to debate. 159 In either event, is it obvious that national consensus on this question was desirable? Perhaps William Lloyd Garrison and his followers were right - that the Constitution's protection of slavery rendered it "a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell" 160 - and that the North would have been better off without slavery and without the South than as part of a unified nation with slavery.

In sum, even if judicially-reviewable constitutionalism does promote national unity, a supposition that I have argued is doubtful, the normative attraction of this conception of constitutionalism depends entirely on the substantive values being advanced by the nation.

G. Educational

Another related justification for constitutionalism and judicial review focuses on their educational function. Many Federalists and Antifederalists understood the Constitution primarily in this way. Reflecting their skepticism of the utility of "parchment barriers," many Founders argued that the principal value of constitutional text lay in its capacity to educate the citizenry regarding important values and to serve as a banner around which to organize opposition in times of government oppression. 161 Many scholars [*176] similarly have emphasized the educational function of the Supreme Court in its capacity as constitutional interpreter. 162

The descriptive objections to this educational conception of constitutionalism are similar to those raised against the unifying-symbol conception. The Constitution generally is written at such a high level of abstraction that one doubts whether it could have much educational effect. In the abstract, just about everyone agrees that "freedom of speech" and "equality" are good things; the citizenry does not require much educating on the worth of these concepts. Yet when the constitutional text becomes more specific, it risks alienating rather than educating those who disagree with its commitments. The original Constitution plainly sanctioned the institution of slavery, yet this failed to impede the rise of abolitionism by "educating" citizens to believe that slavery was morally acceptable. Presumably, the Prohibition amendment should have educated the nation into believing that alcohol was an evil, yet it plainly failed in that objective. The Thirteenth Amendment failed to educate white southerners out of the view that they had a proprietary interest in black labor, as evidenced by the panoply of legal and extralegal mechanisms used to perpetuate black peonage well into the twentieth century. 163 Likewise, the Fifteenth Amendment failed to educate white southerners into respecting black suffrage, as evidenced by the resolute, and ultimately successful, southern disfranchisement campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 164

If the Constitution itself fails to fulfill this educational function to any significant degree, what about the Supreme Court in its role as constitutional interpreter? Many commentators have argued that the Court does indeed play an educational role, and Brown v. Board of Education frequently [*177] is cited as proof of that proposition. On this view, Brown played a vital role in educating Americans, especially whites, on the evils of racial segregation. 165

Yet the historical accuracy of this account of the Court's educational function is dubious. On fundamental questions of social policy, it seems that Americans tend to make up their minds for themselves, heedless of the Court's instruction. As we have seen, while Prigg v. Pennsylvania invalidated northern states' personal liberty laws as inconsistent with the Fugitive Slave Clause, in the 1850s these same states evaded or even defied the Court's ruling with increasingly aggressive personal liberty laws. 166 Dred Scott failed to persuade northerners to acquiesce in the Court's judgment that Congress lacked constitutional power to bar slavery from the federal territories; quite to the contrary, the Republican Party after 1857 grew stronger, achieved majority status in the North, and during the Civil War simply ignored the Court's decision and excluded slavery from the federal territories. 167 Similarly, it seems doubtful that Roe v. Wade educated many Americans out of their right-to-life position or that Bowers v. Hardwick 168 convinced many who were not already convinced of the immorality of homosexuality. Indeed, one might argue that all of these Supreme Court decisions were more successful at mobilizing opposition than at rallying support by educating the citizenry. 169

Even Brown is less persuasive evidence of the Court's educational function than is commonly supposed. With regard to white opinion in the South, Brown, if anything, crystallized resistance to altering the racial status quo. 170 In the nation as a whole, opinion polls conducted in the years after Brown registered only minor movement in attitudes toward racial segregation - a gradual shift in opinion that plausibly is attributable more to political, social, economic, and ideological trends inaugurated or accelerated by World War II than to the educational impact of Brown. 171 The only incontrovertible educational effect of Brown was in teaching African-Americans, [*178] who surely appreciated the injustice of Jim Crow without Supreme Court instruction, that their racial grievances might now be redressable in court. 172

A defender of the educational conception of constitutionalism might respond that even if the Court is not always successful in shaping public opinion, at least the Justices manage to get public policy debates started, which is a good thing. Yet how plausible is it to believe that courts are responsible for commencing these debates? Conventional wisdom to the contrary notwithstanding, 173 the Court in Brown did not inaugurate the debate over American race relations. Indeed, the Justices who participated in the school segregation cases appreciated far better than have many subsequent commentators how significant were the advances in race relations that preceded the Court's intervention. 174 Similarly, the Court's sex discrimination cases of the 1970s plainly reflected, rather than inspired, the dramatic reconsideration of gender roles spawned by the women's movement. 175 Even Roe v. Wade culminated a half-dozen years' worth of frenetic legislative reform activity on the abortion issue. 176 The Court almost never inaugurates these sorts of fundamental public policy debates; the Justices are too much a part of popular culture to play that vanguard role. Rather, their interventions tend to come later - either when public opinion has become roughly evenly divided, or after a new consensus has emerged and the Justices use it to suppress lingering outliers. 177

As a normative matter, we should be glad that the Supreme Court's pronouncements do not have much educational effect. Over the long haul, the educational lessons conveyed by the Court are as likely to be bad as good. The same Court that gave us Brown also gave us Dred Scott, Plessy, Buck v. Bell, 178 Korematsu, and Bowers. We should applaud the Court's [*179] educational function only to the extent that we believe the Court's decisions are likely tobe normatively better than those of the political branches. And why, in general, should one believe this? Moreover, while there is little reason to believe that the Court's educational lessons are likely to be better on some consensus normative standard than those of the political branches, they certainly are likely to reflect more culturally elite values. It is this basic fact, I shall suggest in Part III, that constitutes the most fundamental objection to judicially-reviewable constitutionalism in a democracy.

H. Finality

Another supposed virtue of constitutionalism is that it promotes finality. 179 Finality is a virtue, on this view, because endless reconsideration of the same issues is wasteful, unsettling, and possibly destructive of social peace. James Madison defended such a view in opposing Jefferson's proposal for a new constitutional convention every generation. 180

Descriptively, the Constitution itself - unadorned by judicial interpretation - plainly does not secure final resolution of controverted issues. People constantly struggle to amend the Constitution to accord with their own preferences - whether through formal Article V mechanisms for amendment or through judicial construction. The mere possibility of formal amendment means that nothing ever can be settled definitively by the Constitution, except for issues resolved through unamendable amendments 181 (and why should anyone pay attention to those?). 182 Southerners appreciated this fact when seceding from the Union in 1860-61: Even if disagreements with the North temporarily could be compromised, southerners ultimately must be at risk within the Union, because demographic trends eventually would enable antislavery states to secure the three-quarters su [*180] permajority necessary to amend the Constitution to forbid slavery even in the South. 183

More important than formal amendment, as a practical matter, has been the possibility of changed construction, whether judicial or popular. Contemporaries plausibly might have believed that the original Constitution of 1787 conclusively resolved in the negative the question of the national government's power to regulate slavery in the existing states. 184 Yet this seemingly settled understanding did not prevent one strand of northern abolitionists from evolving a contrary interpretation. 185 On their view, the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment - which, Barron v. Mayor of Baltimore 186 notwithstanding, was deemed applicable to the states 187 - barred slavery as inconsistent with "liberty." Similarly, the fact that the actions and intentions of the Founders seemed clearly to authorize Congress to bar slavery from federal territories 188 did not inhibit most southerners by the 1840s and 1850s from embracing John C. Calhoun's "common property" view to the contrary. 189 One likewise might have thought that Article I, Section 10 would definitively establish the unconstitutionality of debtor relief legislation, yet state legislatures constantly were reopening the question, 190 until, in 1934, they finally convinced the Court to capitulate. 191 Nor did the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution conclusively resolve matters of racial equality. Not only did some white southerners continue to call for repeal of those amendments into the early twentieth [*181] century, 192 but more importantly, they hoped to secure judicial acquiescence in the amendments' evisceration through interpretation - a strategy that proved generally successful for many years. 193

Nor do judicial interpretations of the Constitution achieve final resolution of contested policy questions. Occasionally, those decisions are overruled by formal Article V methods. 194 More frequently, they are overruled by the course of events or by subsequent judicial decisions. Dred Scott was defied by Republicans during the Civil War and then was formally overruled by Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment. The interment of the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges and Immunities Clause in the Slaughter-House Cases 195 was functionally overruled by the development of substantive due process, culminating in the famous Lochner decision, 196 which in turn was functionally overruled by West Coast Hotel. 197 Plessy ultimately yielded to Brown. Restrictive commerce clause interpretations 198 yielded to Darby 199 and Wickard. 200 Additional examples easily might be cited, but the point seems evident. 201 The Justices possess a far more limited capacity to "call[] the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division" 202 than they apparently would like.

Normatively, this is good news, because it seems doubtful that finality frequently is more important than reaching the right result. The Constitu [*182] tion generally is not like the mailbox rule in contract law; 203 getting the rule right is more important than simply establishing a predictable rule. There may be occasional exceptions, such as the rule established in Dartmouth College 204 for treating corporate charters as contracts protected against impairment by Article I, Section 10; since the Court permitted corporate charters to reserve the state's right to change them at any time, 205 the ruling essentially functioned as a default rule for the parties to bargain around.

But this is not an accurate description of most constitutional rules. It matters greatly whether the Constitution sanctions slavery, permits establishment of a national church, or creates a national government of enumerated as opposed to inherent powers. The same is true for Court interpretations of the Constitution. It matters greatly whether racial segregation is consonant with the Equal Protection Clause, whether abortion regulation is consistent with the Due Process Clause, and whether school prayer is tolerable under the Establishment Clause. It strains credulity to suggest that it matters more that such issues be resolved finally than that they be resolved rightly. For this reason, the Court has been correct to treat the doctrine of stare decisis as less constraining in the constitutional context. 206

Finality is normatively dubious for another reason. While there are undeniable virtues to finality - efficiency, predictability, preserving social peace - there are also undeniable vices. If constitutional issues are finally resolved, either by the Constitution or by judicial construction, what are subsequent generations left to decide for themselves? The finality account of constitutionalism, if accurate, diminishes the political autonomy of subsequent generations. Since constitutional law has co-opted many of our most fundamental public policy issues, it would drain much of the meaning from our politics to treat constitutional resolutions of those issues as final. 207 This is, of course, the classic Progressive critique of judicial review - that the People must learn to rule themselves rather than having courts or the constitutional Framers do it for them. 208 The finality concep [*183] tion of constitutionalism is also subject to the deadhand objections previously described. 209

I. Rule of Recognition

On another account - call it the "rule-of-recognition" 210 conception - constitutionalism is not so much good as inevitable. That is, even in a system not authorizing judicial invalidation of statutes inconsistent with a written constitution, judges still require a set of background rules that establish the criteria for valid legislation - for example, to be valid, a law must be passed by which institution using what voting rule? 211 This is constitutionalism in the British sense.

Objections to this rule-of-recognition conception of constitutionalism are all descriptive; it seems pointless to offer normative criticisms of the inevitable. First, even if our Constitution does play this function, it also does a great deal more, and thus cannot simply be defended on inevitable, rule-of-recognition grounds. The Constitution ventures beyond a simple rule of recognition both in establishing substantive standards against which otherwise constitutional practices must be tested and by entrenching the rule of recognition against subsequent change.

The rule-of-recognition notion justifies, for example, constitutional provisions defining the conditions for the enactment of valid national legislation - passage by both houses of Congress and presidential acquiescence or congressional override of a presidential veto. But this limited conception of constitutionalism hardly justifies the numerous substantive limitations on the national lawmaking power contained in Article I, Sections 8 and 9, or in the Bill of Rights. While it is inevitable that even a system without a written constitution possess some background pre-constitutional rules, our own Constitution goes substantially farther in the multitude of fetters it places on national legislative power. Similarly, while the rule-of-recognition notion justifies Article VI's Supremacy Clause - because a court needs to know how to resolve conflicts between state and federal law - it cannot account for the numerous limitations on state legislative authority contained in Article I, Section 10, or in Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

[*184] Nor does the rule-of-recognition account of constitutionalism plainly justify the antimajoritarian amendment rule contained in Article V. While a rule of recognition itself may be inevitable, there is no reason that rule need be entrenched against change, which is precisely the effect of Article V with its supermajority requirements. 212 In other words, why can't the rule of recognition be amended so long as the amendment process itself complies with the rule of recognition? Specifically, if our rule of recognition for national legislation requires consent by both houses of Congress plus presidential acquiescence, that rule should be amendable by legislation that secures consent of both houses of Congress and presidential acquiescence. The Article V requirement that changes in the rule of recognition must secure supermajority assent in Congress and in the state legislatures is not justified by the minimalist rule of recognition conception of constitutionalism.

Second, while some background rule of recognition is inevitable, a written constitution establishing it certainly is not. In other regimes, tradition and custom establish the rule of recognition. Again, this is constitutionalism in the British sense. British courts figure out what counts as valid parliamentary legislation without a written constitution specifying the criteria.

More importantly, though, a written constitution is not only unnecessary to fulfilling the rule-of-recognition function, but it is also insufficient. A written constitution that purports to establish the rule of recognition for valid legislation cannot, as a simple matter of logic, establish the rule of recognition for itself. That is, while the written constitution specifies the criteria for the validity of legislation, it cannot specify the criteria for its own validity. 213 This is an infinite regress problem; everything must stand on something. Ultimately, the rule of recognition can be validated only by the bare fact of political acceptance, not by compliance with some meta rule of recognition. 214

Consider, more concretely, the legitimacy of the United States Constitution. That Constitution pretty clearly was illegal under the rule of recognition established by the preceding regime. 215 The Articles of [*185] Confederation required that amendments be approved unanimously by state legislatures, and made no provision for a constitutional convention of any sort. Yet the Philadelphia Convention, contrary to instructions under which many of its delegates labored, repudiated rather than amended the Articles, and provided that its handiwork go into effect upon ratification by nine out of thirteen special state ratifying conventions. Thus, our Constitution plainly was, at its inception, an illegal document. Yet arguments to this effect today would get one nowhere in public debate, much less in a court of law. 216 The reason is that the ultimate rule of recognition is public acceptance. The Antifederalists understood this fact quite well; thus, they generally ceased raising legitimacy arguments against the Constitution once the requisite number of states had ratified under Article VII. 217

Thus, while constitutionalism in the rule-of-recognition sense is inevitable, it also is impossible. The ultimate rule of recognition inheres not in any constitutional provision, written or unwritten, but in the bare fact of political acceptance.

Finally, in addition to the descriptive objections already raised against the rule-of-recognition conception of constitutionalism, one should note that our Constitution does an especially bad job of establishing rules of recognition: It fails even to provide clear criteria as to what counts as part of the Constitution. For example, the constitutional text says nothing about what a constitutional convention, one of the two recognized routes for amendment, would look like - how its delegates would be apportioned among the states or whether and how its agenda might be limited. 218 This uncertainty surrounding Article V conventions plainly has inhibited use of this alternative [*186] route to constitutional change. 219 Similarly, the constitutional text provides no guidance as to how long pending amendments remain ripe for ratification (thus the controversy over the Twenty-seventh Amendment), 220 whether states are permitted to change their minds about ratification while an amendment remains pending, 221 whether Congress can exact state ratification as a condition for granting some benefit otherwise within its discretion, 222 or whether state ratification is valid when Congress has forcibly reconstructed the state government in order to obtain it. 223 The Constitution answers none of these questions, yet each is vital to determining the validity of actual constitutional amendments. If the need for a rule of recognition is what justifies our Constitution, it does a lousy job of justifying itself.

J. Majoritarianism

A final, possibly unconventional, justification for constitutionalism is majoritarianism. According to this view, a judicially-enforceable constitution is a good thing because most people want it. 224 This account simply takes peoples' preferences at face value, rather than piercing the veil to investigate the reasons behind those preferences and whether they withstand investigation. In other words, this majoritarian account of constitutionalism builds upon the liberal premise that personal conceptions of the good re [*187] quire no objective justification; we simply aggregate individual preferences and make policy accordingly. 225 Again, on this view, constitutionalism is good simply because people want it; it requires no greater justification than, say, a preference for chocolate over vanilla ice cream. 226

The descriptive plausibility of this majoritarian account of constitutionalism boils down to an empirical question, the answer to which we simply do not know: Do most Americans endorse our current system of judicially-enforceable constitutionalism? We know that they do not revolt against it, and we know that they do not constitutionally amend it through Article V procedures. Yet one hardly can infer consent from failure to resort to revolutionary or supermajoritarian remedies. 227 It may well be that a majority of people do not endorse our current constitutional regime, but feel powerless to change it given the antimajoritarian amendment process enshrined in Article V. On the other hand, Americans today do seem to admire their Supreme Court, according to some opinion polls far more than they respect the other branches of the national government. 228 Further, some have argued that the Senate's defeat in 1987 of Judge Bork's Supreme Court nomination, given the candidate's strong endorsement of judicial restraint and an originalist interpretive methodology, indicates popular support for more activist, free-floating judicial review. 229

The principal normative objection to this majoritarian justification of judicially-enforceable constitutionalism is that it has no logical limitation: it might be deployed to justify a dictatorship as easily as our own vaguely countermajoritarian constitutionalism. For example, had the Philadelphia Convention endorsed, and the nation ratified, Alexander Hamilton's proposals for a life-tenured presidency and Senate, that regime would possess a majoritarian pedigree and, on this account of constitutionalism, be unobjectionable. 230 The same would be true for majoritarian endorsement of slavery, religious persecution, and so on. Because most defenders of [*188] constitutionalism draw heavily upon the institution's countermajoritarian capacity, 231 I doubt that this overarching majoritarian justification has a very broad normative appeal. Only a thorough-going majoritarian 232 would have trouble normatively rejecting this majoritarian account of constitutionalism, and even he or she could fall back upon the descriptive objection noted above.

II. A Better Description?

If none of the ten leading accounts adequately describes our system of judicially-enforceable constitutionalism, what would be a better description, and is it normatively attractive? I believe that the American system of judicial review essentially boils down to this: The Supreme Court, in politically unpredictable ways, imposes culturally elite values in a marginally countermajoritarian fashion. Let me briefly elaborate on all three components of this description.

By politically unpredictable, I mean that judicial review possesses no inherent political bias. The Warren Court legacy has deluded many into thinking otherwise, 233 and contemporary political rhetoric generally perpetuates this myth. 234 But one must recognize that it is just a myth: Judicial review has no intrinsic liberal political bias. 235 A broader historical perspective plainly establishes this point. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was political Progressives who criticized the activist Lochner Court for invalidating social welfare legislation. 236 Only since the Carolene Products 237 revolution in the conception of the Court's role has [*189] judicial review seemed even plausibly liberal in its implications. And since President Nixon reconstituted the Court around 1970, the performances of the Burger and Rehnquist Courts have corroborated the politically double-edged nature of activist judicial review. Conservative activism threatens affirmative action, minority voting districts, hate speech regulation, environmental land use restrictions, and campaign finance reform. 238 Liberal activism, on the other hand, invalidates school prayer, abortion regulation, restrictions on indecent speech, and discrimination against African Americans, women, and gays. 239 It is no accident that scathing critiques of the Court with the same title, Government by Judiciary, were written in 1932 by a left-wing critic and in 1977 by a right-wing one. 240 Judicial review has no intrinsic political bias.

To observe that judicially-enforceable constitutionalism is a politically double-edged sword is not to deny that the practice has any systematic bias; it is only to suggest that the bias operates along an axis other than partisan politics. It is not my claim that judicial review is a simple crapshoot, yielding no systematic winners and losers. Indeed, very much to the contrary, I believe that judicial review is systematically biased in favor of culturally elite values. 241 Justice Scalia put the point with characteristic flair in his Romer dissent: "When the Court takes sides in the culture wars, it tends to be with the knights rather than the villeins - and more specifically with the Templars, reflecting the views and values of the lawyer class from which the Court's Members are drawn." 242

Why this should be so is no mystery. Justices of the United States Supreme Court, indeed of any state or federal appellate court, are overwhelmingly upper-middle or upper-class and extremely well educated, usually at the nation's more elite universities. Moreover, unlike legislators who generally share a similar cultural background, federal judges enjoy a [*190] relative political insulation which significantly reduces any offsetting obligation to respond to the non-elite political preferences of their constituents. Throughout much of American history, this elite cultural bias of the federal judiciary yielded a constitutional jurisprudence that was somewhat more protective of property rights than was majoritarian politics, and possibly more nationalistic as well. 243 Since the constitutional revolution of the 1930s, though, social or cultural issues largely have displaced economic ones from the forefront of the constitutional agenda. 244 And on these issues, a culturally elite bias has roughly correlated with a politically liberal one. That is, on today's culture war issues - the place of religion in public life, abortion, pornography, gay rights, flag burning - liberal opinion tends to be strongly correlated with years of education and economic class. 245 It is this [*191] phenomenon of cultural elitism that, I think, most plausibly explains the remarkably liberal aspects of the "conservative" Burger and Rehnquist Courts' activism - landmark sex discrimination cases, protection for abortion rights, constitutional suspicion manifested toward the death penalty, dramatic expansion of free speech rights, continued commitment to a strong separation of church and state, and so on. 246 Yet when economic issues reappear on the constitutional agenda in a guise other than now-maligned substantive due process, the Justices' culturally elite biases produce no politically liberal spin, for on issues of economic redistribution the correlation between politically liberal attitudes and years of education/economic class no longer holds. Thus the Burger and Rehnquist Courts have produced markedly conservative results on issues such as campaign finance reform, 247 regulatory takings and exactions, 248 and commercial speech regulation. 249 And on structural constitutional issues like federalism, where there is no discernable culturally elite bias, the conservative Justices' political biases have, unsurprisingly, yielded politically conservative results. 250

Finally, our judicially-enforceable constitutionalism is only marginally countermajoritarian. That the Justices represent the elite segment of society [*192] should not blind us to the fact that they are products of the same cultural milieu that enacts the legislation they are called upon to review. It seems likely, to put the point somewhat differently, that the cultural differences that separate the elite Justices from popular opinion are generally less significant than the similarities they share as a result of inhabiting the same historical moment. To take one specific example, the racial views of culturally elite Justices in 1954 (the year of Brown) probably were more similar to those of the general population in 1954 than to those of the cultural elite in 1896 (the year of Plessy).

For this reason, judicial review has only marginally countermajoritarian potential. 251 Not only are judges subject to indirect political checks, but, more importantly, they are bound by internal cultural constraints. They are part of society, and thus are unlikely to interpret the Constitution in ways that radically depart from contemporary popular opinion. Only one who thinks about judicial review ahistorically and acontextually could subscribe to the romantic vision of the Court as countermajoritarian hero. 252 As I have put the point on another occasion, it is unrealistic to believe that the Court could have invalidated racial segregation in public schools before the dramatic transformation in American racial attitudes spawned by World War II, ... forbidden sex discrimination before the rise of the women's movement, articulated a constitutional right to sexual autonomy before the burgeoning of the gay rights movement, or banned prayer from the public schools before the gradual undermining of the unofficial Protestant establishment. 253

Most of the Court's famous individual rights decisions of the past half century involve either the Justices seizing upon a dominant national consensus and imposing it on resisting outliers or intervening on an issue where the nation is narrowly divided and awarding victory to one side or seeking to split the difference. 254 Neither of these paradigms fits the romantic vision of a heroically countermajoritarian Court.

III. A Normative Appraisal

If this description of our judicially-enforceable constitutionalism is accurate, what is its normative appeal? At first blush, this question would [*193] seem virtually to answer itself. How in a democratic society ostensibly committed to the notion that "all men are created equal" and that each person's vote should count the same, 255 can one justify entrusting resolution of fundamental questions of social policy to an institution possessed of a culturally elite bias? I do not mean to suggest that the Constitution's Framers would have balked at endorsing such a regime; a principal objective of their Founding project was to create a governmental structure that would facilitate rule by the "better sort." 256 Of course, they also endorsed race, sex, and wealth restrictions on the franchise - positions that our society long ago discarded as inconsistent with the democratic premise that the interests of all persons should count equally. 257 Nor do I mean to suggest that the culturally elite bias inherent in judicial review has dramatic consequences; the limited countermajoritarian capacity of the Court rules out that possibility. Yet even if the consequences of the Court's culturally elite bias are small, how can they be defended consistently with democratic premises?

It seems to me that there are three possible responses to this line of argument. First, one might contend that we enjoy no more consensus in our society about what democracy consists of than about how to resolve controversial constitutional questions such as abortion, affirmative action, or school prayer. Thus, for a court to refrain from imposing its culturally elite values by deferring to the political process involves a value choice that is every bit as controversial. 258 This argument is flawed. While it is true that we lack a consensus definition of what democracy is, there is widespread [*194] agreement as to what it is not. The notion that one segment of society should enjoy disproportionate influence on public decisionmaking simply because of its members' greater education or wealth seems inconsistent with our basic commitment to the political equality of all. Such a practice is roughly equivalent to affording certain individuals multiple votes, a practice that few persons today would defend as consistent with democratic principles.

Second, one might defend judicially-enforceable constitutionalism, notwithstanding its systematic biases, on the ground that the values of the cultural elite are good ones. There is nothing incoherent about such an approach, defending constitutionalism in terms of the results it achieves. The problem with this mode of defense, however, is that it is a conversation stopper; it leaves no ground for an appeal to common values. If a principal function of constitutionalism is to provide a broadly acceptable method of resolving our disputes over controversial issues such as abortion and affirmative action, then it has failed in its purpose when the ultimate defense proffered is in terms of those very disputed values. Concretely, those who reject culturally elite values have no reason to endorse constitutionalism if its ultimate justification is the advancement of the values they repudiate. It is for this very reason that most justifications of constitutionalism, such as those canvassed in Part I, defend the practice in terms of more abstract values upon which it is hoped a broader consensus can be achieved, such as "precommitment," "checks and balances," or "minority rights."

Finally, it is always possible, as we have seen, 259 to circumvent the anti-democratic objection by positing popular consent. That is, if the People endorse judicially-enforceable constitutionalism notwithstanding its culturally elite bias, then the practice becomes democratic by definition. So the ultimate question for me is the empirical one - do the American people consent to this system of judicially-enforceable constitutionalism? If they do, then it is hard to raise objections of the anti-democratic variety against it. Why they should want to do so is, of course, an entirely different matter.

FOOTNOTES:

n1. The first unambiguous instances of judicial review in the states did not
come until just before the meeting of the Philadelphia Convention - Bayard v.
Singleton, 1 N.C. 5 (Mart. 1787), and Trevett v. Weeden (RI 1786). For in-depth
discussion of these and other more ambiguous early exercises of the judicial
review power in the states, see Charles Groves Haines, The American Doctrine of
Judicial Supremacy ch. 5 (1932).

n2. See, e.g., Paul Brest, The Conscientious Legislator's Guide to
Constitutional Interpretation, 27 Stan. L. Rev. 585 (1975); Lawrence Sager,
Fair Measure: The Legal Status of Underenforced Constitutional Norms, 91 Harv.
L. Rev. 1212 (1978); Robin West, Progressive and Conservative
Constitutionalism, 88 Mich. L. Rev. 641, 717-21 (1990); Hal Krent, The
(Un)intended Consequences of Underenforcing Constitutional Norms (1997)
(unpublished manuscript, on file with author); Mark V. Tushnet, The
Constitution Outside the Courts ch.1 (1996) (unpublished manuscript, on file
with author).

n3. The Federalist No. 78, at 526 (Alexander Hamilton) (Jacob E. Cooke ed.,
1961) (because "the prior act of a superior ought to be preferred to the
subsequent act of an inferior and subordinate authority ..., whenever a
particular statute contravenes the constitution, it will be the duty of the
judicial tribunals to adhere to the latter, and disregard the former").

n4. 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 176 (1803) (observing that judicial review empowers
courts to invalidate legislation inconsistent with "fundamental" principles
embraced by the "supreme" will of the sovereign People).

n5. Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations chs. 1, 9-11 (1991). See also
Akhil Reed Amar, Philadelphia Revisited: Amending the Constitution Outside
Article V, 55 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1043, 1085 (1988).

n6. The critical decision here was Home Building & Loan Ass'n v. Blaisdell, 290
U.S. 398 (1934). The Court has not, of course, completely extinguished the
Contracts Clause. See, e.g., Allied Structural Steel v. Spannaus, 438 U.S. 234
(1978); United States Trust Co. v. New Jersey, 431 U.S. 1 (1977); David A.
Strauss, Common Law Constitutional Interpretation, 63 U. Chi. L. Rev. 877, 904
(1996) (noting that the Contracts Clause has been "interpreted to reach the
narrowest range of cases that it could reach without being effectively read out
of the Constitution").

n7. Compare Garcia v. San Antonio Metro. Transit Auth., 469 U.S. 528 (1985)
(Tenth Amendment is a truism) with New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144
(1992) (construing the Tenth Amendment to forbid congressional commandeering of
state legislatures) and Printz v. United States, 117 S. Ct. 2365 (1997)
(construing the Tenth Amendment to forbid congressional commandeering of state
executive officers). See, e.g., Gary Lawson, The Rise and Rise of the
Administrative State, 107 Harv. L. Rev. 1231, 1236 (1994) (noting that "the
Court has effectively acquiesced in Congress's assumption of general
legislative powers").

n8. See U.S. Const. art. I, 8, cl. 11. The numerous cases in which the Supreme
Court declined to hear challenges to the constitutionality of the Vietnam War
are itemized in Rodric B. Schoen, A Strange Silence: Vietnam and the Supreme
Court, 33 Washburn L.J. 275, 278-98 (1994). See also The Prize Cases, 67 U.S.
(2 Black) 635, 668-71 (1863) (noting that the Court is obliged to defer to the
president's determination that the nation is at war, even in the absence of a
congressional declaration to that effect); Bas v. Tingy, 4 U.S. (4 Dall.) 37
(1800) (endorsing the national government's authority to wage an undeclared war
with France). For a useful discussion of Bas v. Tingy, see William R. Casto, The
Supreme Court in the Early Republic: The Chief Justiceships of John Jay and
Oliver Ellsworth 120-24 (1995). See generally John Hart Ely, War and
Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and its Aftermath 54-67
(1993).

n9. See John Hart Ely, Democracy and Distrust 131-34 (1980); David Schoenbrod,
Power Without Responsibility: How Congress Abuses the People Through Delegation
(1993); Lawson, supra note 7, at 1237- 41. The Court has not used the
nondelegation doctrine to invalidate a congressional statute since the New Deal
period. See A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495
(1935); Panama Refining Co. v. Ryan, 293 U.S. 388 (1935).

n10. See, e.g., Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) (abortion); Griswold v.
Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) (contraception); Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S.
45 (1905) (liberty of contract).

n11. See, e.g., Romer v. Evans, 116 S. Ct. 1620 (1996) (gays and lesbians);
Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982) (children of illegal aliens); Reed v. Reed,
404 U.S. 71 (1971) (women); Graham v. Richardson, 403 U.S. 365 (1971) (aliens);
Levy v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 68 (1968) (nonmarital children).

n12. See, e.g., R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992) (hate speech);
Virginia State Bd. of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, 425 U.S.
748 (1976) (commercial speech); Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976) (campaign
finance); Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957) (pornography).

n13. See, e.g., Ely, supra note 9, at 12-14; Michael J. Klarman, The Puzzling
Resistance to Political Process Theory, 77 Va. L. Rev. 747, 769-70 (1991).

n14. I have elaborated at length upon the deadhand problem of constitutionalism
in Michael J. Klarman, Antifidelity, 70 S. Cal. L. Rev. 381, 383-87 (1997).

n15. See, e.g., Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and its Critics 136-37, 153 (1989);
Elaine Spitz, Majority Rule 151, 173 (1984); Amar, supra note 5, at 1073-74;
Ian Shapiro, Three Fallacies Concerning Majorities, Minorities and Democratic
Politics, in Majorities and Minorities, NOMOS XXXII, 79, 83 (1990).

n16. For Madison's claim that the federal courts would be the final arbiter of
such disputes, see The Federalist No. 39, at 256 (James Madison) (Jacob E.
Cooke ed., 1961) ("In controversies relating to the boundary between the two
jurisdictions [state and federal], the tribunal which is ultimately to decide,
is to be established under the general [federal] government."); see also Jack
N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the
Constitution 76 (1996) (noting a similar statement by Edmund Randolph at the
Philadelphia Convention). For Antifederalist criticism, see G. Edward White,
Recovering Coterminous Power Theory, 14 Nova L. Rev. 155, 168-72 (1989)
(discussing the views of the Antifederalist Brutus). For Jeffersonian
criticism, see, for example, Dwight Wiley Jessup, Reaction and Accommodation:
The United States Supreme Court and Political Conflict 1809-1835, at 145-46,
218-19, 226, 359 (1987); A Virginian's "Amphictyon" Essays, reprinted in John
Marshall's Defense of McCulloch v. Maryland (Gerald Gunther ed., 1969)
[hereinafter A Virginian's "Amphictyon" Essays]:

The states never could have committed an act of such egregious folly as to agree
that their umpire should be altogether appointed and paid by the other party.
The supreme court may be a perfectly impartial tribunal to decide between two
states, but cannot be considered in that point of view when the contest lies
between the United States, and one of its members.

Id. at 58. Madison remained committed to his initial view - that the federal
courts were the arbiters of federal/state conflicts - notwithstanding
Jefferson's imprecations to the contrary and Madison's qualms about the overly
nationalist bent of the Marshall Court in the decade after the end of the War
of 1812. See Letter from James Madison to Thomas Jefferson (June 27, 1823), in
3 The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and
James Madison 1776-1826, at 1867-70 (James Morton Smith ed., 1995) [hereinafter
The Republic of Letters]. Madison's later views on this subject are usefully
discussed in Drew R. McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the
Republican Legacy 70 (1989); 1 Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United
States History, 1789-1835, at 554-55 (1922); Ralph Ketcham, James Madison and
Judicial Review, 8 Syracuse L. Rev. 158, 160-61 (1956).

n17. U.S. Const. art. III, 2, cl.1.

n18. See Rakove, supra note 16, at 187; White, supra note 16, at 168-69.

n19. See Jesse Carpenter, The South as a Conscious Minority 1789-1861, at
136-38, 209-10 (1930); Jessup, supra note 16, at 339-40 (noting the Virginia
legislature's resolution in 1828 denying the existence of any neutral arbiter
on federal/state disputes and proclaiming that each state had a right to
construe the compact for itself); id. at 377 (noting Calhoun in 1828 denying
that the Supreme Court had authority to determine federal/state conflicts);
Lacy Ford, Jr., Inventing the Concurrent Majority: Madison, Calhoun and the
Problem of Majoritarianism in American Political Thought, 60 J. S. Hist. 19, 49
(1994). This notion that the federal courts lacked neutrality in resolving
conflicts between federal and state power also inspired numerous proposals
early in the nineteenth century to create a more impartial tribunal to resolve
such disputes, including awarding appellate jurisdiction to the United States
Senate. See, e.g., Jessup, supra note 16, at 145-46, 218-19, 384-85; Warren,
supra note 16, at 388-89, 518-19, 657-58. There was possibly some hypocrisy
here, because many southerners in the 1850s - when the Court was firmly in the
control of southerners - were happy to accept the Supreme Court as final
arbiter of constitutional disputes involving congressional power to regulate
slavery in the federal territories. See Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott
Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics 418 (1978); Barry Friedman,
The History of the Countermajoritarian Difficulty, Part One: The Road to
Judicial Supremacy, 73 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 333, 422-23 (1998) (collecting statements
to this effect); see also Carpenter, supra, at 162-63.

n20. See John C. Calhoun, South Carolina Exposition, in X The Papers of John C.
Calhoun 422-23 (Clyde N. Wilson & W. Edwin Hemphill eds., 1977):

To divide power, and to give to one of the parties the exclusive right of
judging of the portion allotted to each, is in reality not to divide at all;
and to reserve such exclusive right to the General Government (it matters not
by what department it be exercised), is in fact, to constitute it one great
consolidated government, with unlimited powers, and to reduce the States to
mere corporations.

Id.; see also John C. Calhoun, Fort Hill Address, in XI The Papers of John C.
Calhoun 506 (Clyde N. Wilson & W. Edwin Hemphill eds., 1977) [hereinafter
Calhoun, Fort Hill Address] (noting that federal judges represent the same
national majority as Congress and the president, and thus cannot be trusted to
defend the prerogatives of the states from national usurpation); Kentucky
Resolution of 1798, in 2 The Republic of Letters, supra note 16, at 1080 ("as
in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party
has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode
and measure of redress"). Cf. McCoy, supra note 16, at 69-70 (noting
Jefferson's argument that a convention of the people called either by Congress
or two-thirds of the states must be the arbiter of state/federal conflicts).

n21. See Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 178 (1803) (noting that in
the absence of judicial review, legislatures would enjoy "a practical and real
omnipotence"); see also City of Boerne v. Flores, 117 S. Ct. 2157, 2162 (1997)
(same).

n22. See Robert G. McCloskey, The American Supreme Court 129 (2d ed. 1994)
(noting "the old urge to monarchize" of the Supreme Court).

n23. The crucial decisions were United States v. Darby, 312 U.S. 100 (1941), and
Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942), and only recently has the Court evinced
any inclination to reenter the field. See United States v. Lopez, 115 U.S. 1624
(1995).

n24. 41 U.S. (16 Pet.) 1 (1842).

n25. See Erie R.R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64, 78-80(1938) (holding that
federal courts have no constitutional power to apply rules of general federal
common law in diversity cases); cf. Warren, supra note 16, at 164 (noting
Thomas Jefferson making a similar objection to the notion of a federal common
law of crimes).

n26. See Quincy, Mo. and Pac. R.R. Co. v. Humphreys, 145 U.S. 82 (1892). For a
brief discussion, see James W. Ely, Jr., The Chief Justiceship of Melville W.
Fuller 1888-1910, at 203-04 (1995).

n27. See In re Debs, 158 U.S. 564 (1895); see also Owen M. Fiss, Troubled
Beginnings of the Modern State, 1888-1910, at 65-73 (1993); David Currie, The
Constitution in the Supreme Court: Protection of Economic Interests, 1889-1910,
52 U. Chi. L. Rev. 325, 343-46 (1985); Daniel Novak, The Pullman Strike Cases:
Debs, Darrow, and the Labor Injunction, in American Political Trials (Michael
R. Belknap ed., 1981).

n28. I have developed this theme, with numerous examples, in Michael J. Klarman,
Majoritarian Judicial Review: The Entrenchment Problem, 85 Geo. L.J. 491, 544-51
(1997) [hereinafter Klarman, Majoritarian Judicial Review].

n29. See, e.g., Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 115 S. Ct. 2097, 2114-17
(1995) (affirmative action); Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 505 U.S.
1003 (1992) (regulatory takings); Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) (abortion);
Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) (contraceptives).

n30. See, e.g., Richard S. Kay, Preconstitutional Rules, 42 Ohio St. L.J. 187,
187 (1981); see also James Madison, Report on the Resolutions, reprinted in VI
The Writings of James Madison 341 (Gaillard Hunt ed., 1906) (noting that
"dangerous powers, not delegated, may not only be usurped and executed by the
other departments, but that the Judicial Department may also exercise or
sanct