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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

ISSN

1942-857X

Publisher

Texas Law Review Association

Language

en-US

Abstract

his essay responds to Professor Aziz Rana's review essay, "The Many American Constitutions," 93 Texas Law Review 1193 (2015).

He contends: (1) my portrayal of American constitutionalism might contain a “hidden” teleological understanding of the development of constitutional law; (2) my notion of "conventional sovereignty" sometimes seems content-free and at other times "interlinked with liberal egalitarianism"; and (3) a focus on failed constitutions "inadvertently tends to compartmentalize the overall tradition."

I answer in the following ways: (1) I reject any sense that constitutional law has moved in an arc of steady progress toward Enlightenment and instead embrace a tradition of warring, eclectic, constitutional ideas; (2) the concept of conventional sovereignty captures the locus of mainstream constitutionalism at any given moment in time and doesn't try to insulate any particular governing ideas from contestation; and (3) the constitutions analyzed are exemplars of these popular concepts--some ignored or rejected by mainstream constitutionalism--but they don't purport to represent the entirety of the tradition.

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