The Neo-Hamiltonian temptation

Yale Law Journal

Volumn 123, Issue 8, 2014, Pages 2676-2697

  Strauss, David A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LAW SCHOOL   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84902802732     PISSN: 00440094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Bruce Ackerman, WE THE PEOPLE: THE CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION (2014).
2. United States v. Carolene Prods. Co., 304 U.S. 144-152 n.4 (1938).
3. THE FEDERALIST NO. 78, at 380 (Alexander Hamilton) (Terence Ball ed., 2003).
4. 411 U.S. 677 (1973) (plurality opinion).
5. Id. at page typefirst682/page (footnotes omitted).
6. Id. at page typefirst685/page.
7. Id. at page typefirst687/page.
8. Id. at 687-88 (footnote omitted) (quoting H.R.J. Res. 208, 92d Cong. (1972)).
9. Id. at 691 (Powell, J., concurring in the judgment).
10. Id. at 692.
11. Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190-197 (1976) (establishing intermediate scrutiny for sexbased classifications).
12. David A. Strauss, The Irrelevance of Constitutional Amendments, 114 HARV. L. REV. 1457 (2001).
13. ACKERMAN, supra note 1, at 3 (arguing that conventional constitutional lawyers have "failed" the challenge of understanding popular constitutional change).
14. Reva B. Siegel, She the People: The Nineteenth Amendment, Sex Equality, Federalism, and the Family, 115 HARV. L. REV. 947 (2002)
15. , argues that the constitutional law governing sex discrimination should have "take[n] its critical and normative bearings from the debates over women's citizenship that begin with the drafting of the Fourteenth Amendment and culminated over a half century later with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment."
16. Id. at 966. This form of "synthetic interpretation," id., is related to the idea that constitutional law is the work of We the People
17. bruce ackerman, WE THE PEOPLE: FOUNDATIONS 86-130 (1991).
18. It is not entirely clear what the justification for this method of synthesis is, as I say below. But in any event, in the case of sex discrimination, this synthetic account is frankly revisionist-at odds with the way the doctrine actually developed. See Siegel, supra, at 949. And, on this synthetic account, the decisive act of We the People occurred, if I understand correctly, when the Nineteenth Amendment was adopted-well before the Supreme Court's decisions.
19. Jane J. Mansbridge, WHY WE LOST THE ERA (1986).
20. In fact, Professor Ackerman's treatment of the development of the constitutional law of sex discrimination-which he provided in an earlier article, not in We the People: The Civil Rights Revolution-seems to abjure the claim that the Court's decisions in this area were an effort to carry out decisions that We the People had made about sex equality.
21. Bruce Ackerman, Interpreting the Women's Movement, 94 CALIF. L. REV. 1421-1436 (2006) (asserting that the Court was not "thinking of itself as the mouthpiece of the movement struggling for ratification of the ERA" and suggesting that the Court was not engaged in "higher lawmaking" but rather in "a very conventional exercise in constitutional interpretation"). The question, then, is how Professor Ackerman justifies "conventional ... constitutional interpretation" if the neo-Hamiltonian rationale-that the interpreter is simply implementing the will of the People-is inapplicable.
22. ACKERMAN, supra note 1, at 34.
23. Id. at 335.
24. David A. Strauss, THE LIVING CONSTITUTION (2010).
25. ACKERMAN, supra note 1, at 34 n.15
26. Harlan Fiske Stone, The Common Law in the United States, 50 HARV. L. REV. 4, 12-13 (1936) (arguing that courts should consider a statute to be a "recognition of a policy" that might constitute "a social datum or ... a point of departure for the process of judicial reasoning").
27. Justice Harlan's opinion in Moragne v. States Marine Lines, Inc., 398 U.S. 375, 379-93 (1970), is a well-known example of this kind of use of statutes in common law decisionmaking.
28. 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
29. 388 U.S. 1 (1967).
30. Justin Driver, The Consensus Constitution, 89 TEX. L. REV. 755, 821-25 (2011).
31. id. at 825.
32. ACKERMAN, supra note 1, at 291, 296-300.
33. Id. at 296.
34. Id. at 291.
35. id. at 5 (noting that Brown "put the issue of racial equality at the very center of a great generational debate").
36. David A. Strauss, The Common Law Genius of the Warren Court, 49 WM. & MARY L. REV. 845, 862-68 (2007).
37. 235 U.S. 151 (1914)
38. 245 U.S. 60 (1917).
39. 305 U.S. 337 (1938).
40. 339 U.S. 629 (1950).
41. 339 U.S. 637(1950).
42. Louis Michael Seidman, Brown and Miranda, 80 CALIF. L. REV. 673, 708 (1992) ("Given what came before, the real question is why Brown needed to be decided at all.").
43. Michael J. Klarman, FROM JIM CROW TO CIVIL RIGHTS: THE SUPREME COURT AND THE STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL EQUALITY 173-96 (2004).
44. ACKERMAN, supra note 1, at 51 ("Higher lawmaking in America is never a matter of a single moment; it is an extended process, lasting a decade or two ...).
45. Larry Kramer, THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES: POPULAR CONSTITUTIONALISM AND JUDICIAL REVIEW (2004)
46. Mark Tushnet, TAKING THE CONSTITUTION AWAY FROM THE COURTS (2000)
47. Adrian Vermeule, JUDGING UNDER UNCERTAINTY: AN INSTITUTIONAL THEORY OF LEGAL INTERPRETATION, at ch. 8 (2006)
48. Jeremy Waldron, The Core of the Case Against Judicial Review, 115 YALE L.J. 1346 (2006).
49. 60 U.S. 393 (1856).
50. 198 U.S. 45 (1905)