Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
2018
Abstract
The U.S. Constitution embodies a conception of democratic sovereignty that has been substantially forgotten and obscured in today’s commentary. Recovering this original idea of constitution-making shows that today’s originalism is, ironically, unfaithful to its origins in an idea of self-rule that prized both the initial ratification of fundamental law and the political community’s ongoing power to reaffirm or change it. This does not mean, however, that living constitutionalism better fits the original conception of democratic self-rule. Rather, because the Constitution itself makes amendment practically impossible, it all but shuts down the very form of democratic sovereignty that authorizes it. No interpretive strategy succeeds in overcoming the dilemma of a constitution that at once embodies and prohibits democratic sovereignty.
Citation
David Singh Grewal & Jedediah S. Purdy, The Original Theory of Constitutionalism, 127 Yale Law Journal 664-705 (2018) (reviewing Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (2016))
Library of Congress Subject Headings
Jurisprudence, Constitutional law--Philosophy, Democracy--Philosophy, Sovereignty
Included in
Constitutional Law Commons, Law and Politics Commons, Political Theory Commons, Rule of Law Commons
Available at: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/3773