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A Constitution of Many Minds: Why the Founding Document Doesn't Mean What It Meant Before
by Cass R. Sunstein (Author)
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Product Details
- Binding: Hardcover
- ISBN-10: 0691133379
- ISBN-13: 9780691133379
- Number Of Pages: 240
- Publication Date: January 19, 2009
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
Product Features
- ISBN13: 9780691133379
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Product Description
The future of the U.S. Supreme Court hangs in the balance like never before. Will conservatives or liberals succeed in remaking the court in their own image? In A Constitution of Many Minds, acclaimed law scholar Cass Sunstein proposes a bold new way of interpreting the Constitution, one that respects the Constitution's text and history but also refuses to view the document as frozen in time.
Exploring hot-button issues ranging from presidential power to same-sex relations to gun rights, Sunstein shows how the meaning of the Constitution is reestablished in every generation as new social commitments and ideas compel us to reassess our fundamental beliefs. He focuses on three approaches to the Constitution--traditionalism, which grounds the document's meaning in long-standing social practices, not necessarily in the views of the founding generation; populism, which insists that judges should respect contemporary public opinion; and cosmopolitanism, which looks at how foreign courts address constitutional questions, and which suggests that the meaning of the Constitution turns on what other nations do.
Sunstein demonstrates that in all three contexts a "many minds" argument is at work--put simply, better decisions result when many points of view are considered. He makes sense of the intense debates surrounding these approaches, revealing their strengths and weaknesses, and sketches the contexts in which each provides a legitimate basis for interpreting the Constitution today.
This book illuminates the underpinnings of constitutionalism itself, and shows that ours is indeed a Constitution, not of any particular generation, but of many minds.
Customer Reviews
Rating: -
Cass Sunstein publishes new material almost hourly, and I am not always impressed with his output. When he's good (Nudge), he's edgey, supremely confident, and worth a good deal of head-scratching. When he's bad, he can be a partisan suck-up (Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts are Wrong for America). Most of the time, he serves up brilliant ideas, but half-baked. (Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge).
But this is the book that Sunstein's been laying groundwork for with his last four or five. It's worth the wait. He applies the Condorcet Jury Theorem (recently popularized by Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds) to constitutional jurisprudence, and he gets quite a bit of mileage out of it. This is the best "con law and economics" book since Hayek's Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order. And it's the single most original argument for creative progress in constitutional law in the last 50 years.
If there is a weakness, it's that he has gazed too long into the abyss of cognitive psychology, and come back with the power to mislead. Sunstein obsessively "frames" the debate with the heavy use of straw men. He invents, considers, and rejects three alternative modes of constitutional thinking he dubs "traditionalism," "populism," and "cosmopolitanism." This clever act of creative pigeonholing permits him to characterize the Scalia originalists as "populist radicals," even as he positions himself to the right of Anthony Kennedy (a latte-sipping, foreign-law-citing "cosmopolitan").
I find these faux-contrarian positions wildly, laughably implausible. I can't believe Cass has lost a moment's sleep worrying about America's constitutional sovereignty. But he seems to be suffering "loss aversion." He has chosen to ride the high horse of judicial minimalism until it dies, and then flog it some more. I think he needs new talking points, but the jury will decide...
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