Acknowledgments

Although writing is often a lonely endeavor, this book allowed me to cross paths with many exceptional, and exceptionally generous, people. I count these connections and dialogues among the most gratifying rewards of this project.

For insightful and often long conversations about the finer details of the contexts I study here, I am grateful to Gautam Bhatia, David Bilchitz, Sheila Camerer, Dennis Davis, Jackie Dugard, Holger Greve, Justice Dieter Grimm, Nicholas Haysom, Christoph Möllers, Ignatius Rautenbach, Christian Starck, Justice Leona Theron, Alexander Tischbirek, Johan van der Vyver, and Hoyt Webb.

For the opportunity to present my work and receive essential feedback, I am indebted to Ran Hirschl, Ayelet Shachar, the University of Göttingen, and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Additionally, I am grateful to the Societas Aperta Feminarum in Iuris Theoria, the American Political Thought Journal Workshop, Justin Dyer and the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, the Penn State Law Working Paper Series, and various meetings of the American Political Science Association and Midwest Political Science Association for the opportunity to receive feedback on early versions of these chapters.

I am profoundly grateful to Stephen Gardbaum, Tarunabh Khaitan, Heinz Klug, Jud Mathews, Georg Vanberg, and Mariah Zeisberg for their participation in a manuscript workshop. To dedicate so much time to reading someone’s work is a true gift, and this book is undoubtedly better as a result of their thoughtful engagement.

Support from the Institute for Humane Studies for a sabbatical semester and manuscript workshop was invaluable to completing this book, as was support from Notre Dame’s Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government and De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. I am grateful to Evelyn Behling and Bailey Baumbick for their superb research assistance, and to Rebecca Devine for truly excellent editing.

David Dyzenhaus, Tom Poole, and Marianne Nield at Cambridge University Press have supported this book with great enthusiasm and verve. I am thankful for their confidence in bringing this project to fruition. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their uncommonly helpful suggestions.

For friendship and solidarity in what otherwise would have been entirely solitary days of writing, I am deeply grateful to Katherine Bersch, Brookes Brown, Sarah Burns, Anna Fruhstorfer, Theresa MacArt, Abigail Moncrieff, Emma Planinc, and Jane Ryngaert. And for continual mentorship in navigating the writing and publishing process, I am grateful to Susan Collins, Mary Keys, Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Emilia Justyna Powell, and Stephen Wrinn.

In completing this and all future projects, I will always be indebted to the unmatched teachers from whom I learned at the University of Texas, chief among them Gary Jacobsohn, who took the ideas in this book seriously and made them better. I am also grateful to Daniel Brinks, J. Budziszewski, Victor Ferreres Comella, and Jeffrey Tulis for their generous mentorship.

To an even greater degree, I remain indebted to my family for loving and supporting me through every endeavor. I am thankful to Joshua for his constancy of love and confidence in me, to Daniel, who keeps me honest by asking almost daily if I did “big writing,” and to Isabel, who was the most loyal of writing companions from her first days in the world.

A version of Chapter 2 appeared in “Horizontal Rights: A Republican Vein in Liberal Constitutionalism,” Polity 52(3) (2020), 401–429.