Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-kl59c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-21T09:19:50.278Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Search for an Anchor: Living Constitutionalism from the Progressives to Trump

Review products

Balkin, Jack. The Cycles of Constitutional Time. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 1 + 246.
Chemerinsky, Erwin. We the People: A Progressive Reading of the Constitution for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Picador, 2018. Pp. xv + 300.
Pozen, David, and Adam Samaha. “Anti-Modalities.” Michigan Law Review 119, no. 4 (2021): 729–96.

Show more reviewed productsShow more reviewed products

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2021

Calvin TerBeek
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Over a century after the Progressives’ devised “living constitutionalism,” its latter day adherents have fought conservatives’ originalism to an intellectual standstill and a political rout. Bookended by discussions of three books by legal liberals (Jack Balkin, Erwin Chemerinsky, Geoffrey Stone and David Strauss) and a book and article by progressive constitutional scholars (Mark Tushnet, David Pozen and Adam Samaha), this essay argues that legal liberalism today is intellectually exhausted. In developing a “critical constitutionalism,” those to their left have better identified constitutional law and theory’s pathologies and potential. The overarching claim is that professional and ideological factors have led legal liberals to misapprehend the uses and limitations of constitutional theory. The essay concludes by suggesting legal liberals move past debates about originalism and begin to think anew about what (legal) liberalism has to offer American constitutionalism.

Information

Type
Review Essays
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , August 2021 , pp. 860 - 889
Copyright
© 2021 American Bar Foundation

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

“A Question of Constitutional Law.” Outlook, January 11, 1908.Google Scholar
“Notes and Recent Cases,” Tennessee Law Review 18, no. 4 (1944): 388–93.Google Scholar
Abbott, Andrew. The System of Professions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amidon, Charles F. “The Constitution and the Corporations.” Outlook, September 7, 1907.Google Scholar
Arnold, Thurman. “Professor Hart’s Theology.” Harvard Law Review 73, no. 7 (1960): 1298–317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bali, Asli, and Rana, Aziz. “Constitutionalism and the American Imperial Imagination.” University of Chicago Law Review 85 (2018): 257–92.Google Scholar
Balkin, J.M. “Original Meaning and Constitutional Redemption.” Constitutional Commentary 24 (2007): 427–532.Google Scholar
Barnett, Vincent. “Constitutional Interpretation and Judicial Self-Restraint.” Michigan Law Review 39, no. 2 (1940): 213–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baude, William, and Sachs, Stephen. “The Law of Interpretation.” Harvard Law Review 130, no. 4 (2017): 1079–147.Google Scholar
Baumgardner, Paul. “Originalism and the Academy in Exile.” Law & History Review 37, no. 3 (2018): 787–807.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baumgardner, Paul. “Retrenchment Rivals: Critical Legal Studies, Law-and-Economics, and the Legal Academy of the Long 1980s.” PhD diss., Princeton University, Department of Politics, 2020.Google Scholar
Beard, Charles. “The Living Constitution.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 185, no. 1 (1936): 29–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernstein, David. Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bickel, Alexander M. The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.Google Scholar
Black, Charles L. “The Lawfulness of the Segregation Decisions.” Yale Law Journal 69 (1960): 421–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bobbitt, Philip. Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Bobbitt, Philip. “Is Law Politics?” Stanford Law Review 41 (1989): 1233–312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bonica, Adam, and Sen, Maya. The Judicial Tug of War: How Lawyers, Politicians, and Ideological Incentives Shape the American Judiciary. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021.Google Scholar
Bowman, Harold M. “Congress and the Supreme Court.” Political Science Quarterly 25, no. 1 (1910): 20–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bozell, L. Brent. The Warren Revolution: Reflections on the Consensus Society. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1966.Google Scholar
Braden, George D. “The Search for Objectivity in Constitutional Law.” Yale Law Journal 57, no. 4 (1948): 571–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brest, Paul. “The Fundamental Rights Controversy: The Essential Contradictions of Normative Constitutional Scholarship.” Yale Law Journal 90, no. 5 (1980): 1063–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.Google Scholar
Broockman, David, Ferenstein, Gregory, and Malhotra, Neil. “Predispositions and the Political Behavior of American Economic Elites: Evidence from Technology Entrepreneurs.” American Journal of Political Science 63, no. 1 (2019): 212–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cardozo, Benjamin. The Nature of the Judicial Process. Feather Trail Press, 2009 [1921].Google Scholar
Chafee, Zehariah. “Some New Ideas About Law.” Indiana Law Journal 11, no. 6 (1936): 503–23.Google Scholar
Cohen, Morris R. “Shall the Judges Make the Laws?” New Republic III, no. 28 (1915): 31–33.Google Scholar
Compton, John W. The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cornell, Saul. “ Heller, New Originalism, and Law Office History: ‘Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.’” UCLA Law Review 56, no. 5 (2009): 1095–125.Google Scholar
Cornell, Saul. “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Constitutional Ideas: The Intellectual History Alternative to Originalism.” Fordham Law Review 82, no. 2 (2013): 721–55.Google Scholar
Corwin, Edward. “Constitution v. Constitutional Theory: The Question of the States v. the Nation.” American Political Science Review 19, no. 2 (1924): 290–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corwin, Edward. “The Constitution as Instrument and as Symbol.” American Political Science Review 30, no. 6 (1936): 1071–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Craig, Douglas. After Wilson: The Struggle for the Democratic Party, 1920–1934. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Croly, Herbert. Progressive Democracy. New York: Macmillan, 1914.Google Scholar
Davis, Horace A. The Judicial Veto. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914.Google Scholar
Dearborn, John A. Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeWitt, Benjamin. The Progressive Movement. New York: Macmillan, 1915.Google Scholar
Douglas, William O. “Chief Judge Stanley H. Fuld.” Columbia Law Review 71, no. 4 (1971): 531–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dworkin, Ronald. “Hard Cases.” Harvard Law Review 88, no. 6 (1975): 1057–1109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eisenach, Eldon. The Lost Promise of Progressivism. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ely, John Hart. “On Discovering Fundamental Values.” Harvard Law Review 92, no. 1 (1978): 5–55.Google Scholar
Ervin, Sam J. Jr., and Clark, Ramsey. Role of the Supreme Court: Policymaker or Adjudicator?. Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Frankfurter, Felix. The Public and Its Government. Boston: Beacon Press, 1930.Google Scholar
Friedman, Barry. “The Birth of an Academic Obsession: The History of the Countermajoritarian Difficulty, Part Five.” Yale Law Journal 112, no. 2 (2002): 153–259.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gienapp, Jonathan. The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, Arthur J. Equal Justice: The Warren Era of the Supreme Court. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971.Google Scholar
Goodnow, Frank. Social Reform and the Constitution. New York: Macmillan, 1911.Google Scholar
Greene, Jamal. “Foreword: Rights as Trumps?” Harvard Law Review 132, no. 1 (2018): 28–132.Google Scholar
Grewal, David Singh. “The Laws of Capitalism.” Harvard Law Review 128, no. 2 (2014): 626–67.Google Scholar
Grey, Thomas. “Do We Have an Unwritten Constitution?” Stanford Law Review 27, no. 3 (1975): 703–718.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griswold, Erwin. “Of Time and Attitudes—Professor Hart and Judge Arnold.” Harvard Law Review 74, no. 1 (1960): 81–196.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gunther, Gerald. “Foreword: In Search of Evolving Doctrine on a Changing Court: A Model for a New Equal Protection” Harvard Law Review 86, no. 1 (1972): 1–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henkin, Louis. “Some Reflections on the Current Constitutional Controversy.” University of Pennsylvania 109, no. 5 (1961): 637–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henry, John M. Nine Above the Law. Pittsburgh: R.T. Lewis, 1936.Google Scholar
Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.Google Scholar
Hollis-Brusky, Amanda. Ideas With Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Hollis-Brusky, Amanda, and Wilson, Joshua. Separate But Faithful: The Christian Rights’ Radical Struggle to Transform Law and Legal Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horwitz, Morton. The Transformation of American, 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Johnson, Olatunde. “Inclusion, Exclusion, and the ‘New’ Economic Inequality.” Texas Law Review 94, no. 7 (2016): 1647–65.Google Scholar
Kalman, Laura. Legal Realism at Yale, 1927–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1986.Google Scholar
Kalman, Laura. Abe Fortas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Kalman, Laura. The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Kalman, Laura. “The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the New Deal.” American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (2005): 1052–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kalman, Laura. Yale Law School and the Sixties. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Karlan, Pamela. “Foreword: Democracy and Disdain.” Harvard Law Review 126, no. 1 (2012): 1–71.Google Scholar
Karol, David. Party Position Change in American Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, Duncan. A Critique of Adjudication. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Kelman, Mark. A Guide to Critical Legal Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Kessler, Jeremy, and Pozen, David. “Working Themselves Impure: A Life Cycle Theory of Legal Theories.” University of Chicago Law Review 83, no. 4 (2016): 1819–92.Google Scholar
Kloppenberg, James. “Pragmatism: Old Name for Some New Way of Thinking.” Journal of American History 83, no. 1 (1996): 100–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kornhauser, Anne. Debating the American State: Liberal Anxieties and the New Leviathan, 1930–1970. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kramer, Larry. The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Kurland, Philip. “Equal in Origin and Equal in Title to the Legislative and Executive Branches of the Government.” Harvard Law Review 78 (1964): 143–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, Frances. “Patronage, Logrolls, and ‘Polarization’: Congressional Parties of the Gilded Age, 1876–1896.” Studies in American Political Development 30, no. 2 (2016): 116–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Link, Arthur. Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era. New York: Harper, 1954.Google Scholar
Link, William, A. The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880–1930. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Liu, Goodwin, Karlan, Pamela, and Schroeder, Christopher. Keeping Faith with the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Martin, Peter W. “Of Law and the River of Nihilism and Academic Freedom.” Journal of Legal Education 35, no. 1 (1985): 1–26.Google Scholar
McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
McMahon, Kevin J. Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Michelman, Frank. “On Protecting the Poor Through the Fourteenth Amendment.” Harvard Law Review 83, no. 1 (1969): 7–282.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michelman, Frank. “In Pursuit of Constitutional Welfare Rights: One View of Rawls’ Theory of Justice.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 121, no. 5 (1973): 962–1019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michelman, Frank. “Welfare Rights in a Constitutional Democracy.” Washington University Law Quarterly 1979, no. 3 (1979): 659–94.Google Scholar
Milkis, Sidney. Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2009.Google Scholar
Miller, Arthur. “Notes on the Concept of the Living Constitution.” George Washington Law Review 31 (1963): 881–918.Google Scholar
Miller, Arthur, and Howell, Ronald. “The Myth of Neutrality in Constitutional Adjudication.” University of Chicago Law Review 27, no. 4 (1960): 661–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Monroe, Alan H. “The Supreme Court and the Constitution.” American Political Science Review 18, no. 4 (1924): 737–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Munro, William Bennett. The Makers of the Unwritten Constitution. New York: Macmillan, 1930.Google Scholar
Nelles, Walter. “Towards Legal Understanding.” Columbia Law Review 34, no. 5 (1934): 862–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newman, Roger K. Hugo Black: A Biography. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Noel, Hans. Political Ideology and Political Parties in America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nourse, Victoria. “A Tale of Two Lochners: The Untold History of Substantive Due Process and the Idea of Fundamental Rights.” California Law Review 97, no. 3 (2009): 751–99.Google Scholar
Pearson, Drew and Allen, Robert. The Nine Old Men. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1936.Google Scholar
Peller, Gary. “Neutral Principles in the 1950s.” Michigan Journal of Law Reform 21, no. 4 (1988): 561–622.Google Scholar
Perry, Michael. “Abortion, The Public Morals, and the Police Power.” UCLA Law Review 23, no. 4 (1976): 689–736.Google ScholarPubMed
Post, Robert, and Siegel, Reva. “ Roe Rage: Democratic Constitutionalism and Backlash.” Harvard Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 42, no. 2 (2007): 373–433.Google Scholar
Powell, Jefferson H. “Rules for Originalists.” Virginia Law Review 73, no. 4 (1987): 659–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pritchett, Herman C. The Roosevelt Court. New York: Macmillan, 1948.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Purcell, Edward, A. Brandeis and the Progressive Constitution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Rakove, Jack. Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution. New York: Vintage, 1997.Google Scholar
Ransom, William Lynn. Majority Rule and the Judiciary: An Examination of Current Proposals for Constitutional Change Affecting the Relation of Courts to Legislation. New York: Scribner, 1912.Google Scholar
Reich, Charles. “Mr. Justice Black and the Living Constitution.” Harvard Law Review 76, no. 4 (1963): 673–754.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rodgers, Daniel T. “In Search of Progressivism.” Reviews in American History 10, no. 1 (1982): 113–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenberg, Gerald. The Hollow Hope. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Rosenfeld, Sam. The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Ross, Dorothy. The Origins of American Social Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Rudolph, Frederick. “The American Liberty League, 1934-1940.” American Historical Review 56, no. 1 (1950): 19–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saldin, Robert, and Teles, Steven. Never Trump: The Revolt of Conservative Elites. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sandalow, Terrance. “Judicial Protection of Minorities.” Michigan Law Review 75, nos. 5–6 (1977): 1162–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schlegel, John Henry. American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Schlegel, John Henry. “Sez Who? Critical Legal History Without a Privileged Position.” In Oxford Handbook of Legal History. Edited by Dubber, Markus and Tomlins, Christopher, 561–76. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Skinner, Quentin. Visions of Politics: Regarding Method. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Skowronek, Stephen. Building a New American State. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skowronek, Stephen. The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Skowronek, Stephen, Dearborn, John, and King, Desmond. Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skowronek, Stephen, Engel, Stephen, and Ackerman, Bruck, eds. The Progressives’ Century: Political Reform, Constitutional Government, and the Modern American State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skowronek, Stephen, and Orren, Karen. “The Adaptability Paradox: Constitutional Resilience and Principles of Good Government in Twenty-First Century America.” Perspectives on Politics 18, no. 2 (2020): 354–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Allen, J. The Spirit of American Government. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1965 [1907].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Solum, Larry. “Originalism Versus Living Constitutionalism.” Northwestern University Law Review 113, no. 6 (2019): 1243–96.Google Scholar
Stearns, Harold. Liberalism in America: Its Origin, Its Temporary Collapse, Its Future. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919.Google Scholar
Stern, Seth, and Wermeil, Stephen. Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010.Google Scholar
Strauss, David. The Living Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Sunstein, Cass. “Beyond the Republican Revival.” Yale Law Journal 97, no. 8 (1988): 1539–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tani, Karen. States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935–1972. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Teles, Steven. The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Teles, Steven. “Kludgeocracy in America.” National Affairs, Fall 2013.Google Scholar
Teles, Steven. “How the Progressives Became the Tea Party’s Mortal Enemy: Networks, Movements, and the Political Currency of Ideas.” In The Progressives’ Century: Political Reform, Constitutional Government, and the Modern American State. Edited by Skowronek, Stephen, Engel, Stephen, and Ackerman, Bruck, 453–77. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
TerBeek, Calvin. “‘Clocks Must Always Be Turned Back’: Brown v. Board of Education and the Racial Origins of Constitutional Originalism.” American Political Science Review (forthcoming 2021).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tushnet, Mark. “Truth, Justice, and the American Way: An Interpretation of Public Law Scholarship in the Seventies.” Texas Law Review 57, no. 8 (1979): 1307–60.Google Scholar
Tushnet, Mark. “The Critique of Rights.” SMU Law Review 23, no. 1 (1994), 23–34.Google Scholar
Unger, Roberto. The Critical Legal Studies Movement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Urofsky, Melvin. Felix Frankfurter: Judicial Restraint and Individual Liberties. Woodbridge, CT: Twayne, 1991.Google Scholar
Vrooman, Frank. The New Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1911.Google Scholar
Weinrib, Laura. The Taming of Free Speech: American’s Civil Liberties Compromise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weyl, Walter. The New Democracy. New York: Macmillan, 1912.Google Scholar
Whittington, Keith. The Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Whittington, Keith. Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress From the Founding to the Present. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wiebe, Robert H. The Search for Order, 1877–1920. New York: Hill & Wang, 1967.Google Scholar
Wolfskill, George. The Revolt of the Conservatives: A History of the American Liberty League, 1934–1940. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.Google Scholar
Wright, Skelly, J. “Professor Bickel, the Scholarly Tradition, and the Supreme Court.” Harvard Law Review 84, no. 4 (1971): 769–805.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zackin, Emily. “Popular Constitutionalism’s Hard When You’re Not Very Popular: Why the ACLU Turned to Courts.” Law & Society Review 42, no. 2 (2008): 367–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar