Vol. 13 No. 8 (August 2003)

NEGLECTED POLICIES: CONSTITUTIONAL AND LEGAL COMMENTARY AS CIVIC EDUCATION by Ira L. Strauber.  Duke University Press, 2002.  266 pages.  $21.95 Paperback. $64.95 Hardcover.  ISBN:  0-8223-2041-5 (pb), 0-8223-2945-x (hb).

Reviewed by Marc Georges Pufong, Department of Political Science, Valdosta State University, mpufong@valdosta.edu

In modern American politics, constitutional discussions and legal commentaries on the constitution are often confusing as well as difficult to follow. Admittedly, much of the confusion and difficulties can be attributed to the over-politicization of the constitution rather than to the sophistry of the arguments presented by proponents of either side of the issues at stake.  Yet politics need not be avoided for passionate exchanges on important constitutional issues of the day. In NEGLECTED POLICIES: CONSTITUTIONAL AND LEGAL COMMENTARY AS CIVIC EDUCATION, Professor Ira Strauber challenges the centrality of what is often said, how it is often said, and the impact of what is said. In a way, he challenges ideas, commentaries, and their effects with an urgency that scholars and critics of constitutional jurisprudence think differently and carefully about the constitution and its interpretation. He evinces particular sensitivity and concern that set ideas, issues, and personalities apart. Strauber argues that various strands of engagements do in fact, repress awareness of the difficulties involved in making a more meaningful democratic contribution to constitutional commentary on matters of both law and policies.

The villains in this book are teachers and critics, particularly those outside legal academies. Strauber’s challenge is premised on the proposition that they—i.e., the scholars and critics—are unreflectively and mistakenly devoted to a complex group of intellectual and political ideas on constitutional and legal commentary that needs to be challenged. To Strauber, their self-image as civic educators in an interpretative community and their ideas about the law’s “formalisms” are critically important.  By “formalisms,” he means “law’s argumentative rules and structures, principles, concepts, and doctrines” (p.1).  Strauber also focuses on their views and ideas of the Constitution as a text, the reasoning and arguments of litigators and adjudicators, philosophical theories, and the role of the courts in liberal-democratic politics. He argues that it is a mistake to engage in unreflective devotion to self-image and ideas, notably in the “ideology of involvement” and “intellectual jurisprudence” because both extract too high a cost in constitutional and legal commentary (pp.16-27). 

The “ideology of involvement” in Strauber’s assessments leads teachers and critics to presume that they are more efficacious as civic educators, than they actually are or can be. It assists in repressing the awareness of how difficult it is to make a more democratic contribution to commentaries about law and policies that breaks with intellectual jurisprudence. In Strauber’s view, it is this “intellectual jurisprudence” that leads teachers—critics as well as their audiences—to neglect too much what is important about law, politics, and especially, policies in a liberal-democratic polity. Furthermore, Strauber is concerned with pursuing the implications of giving more attention to the context-specific, circumstantial, and consequentialist social fact considerations that at their core collide with political perspectives and controversies in pluralist polities. Yet, pragmatically, Strauber foresees limits. For example, he acknowledges that it is not practical, nor is it intellectually or politically prudent, to replace either “the ideology of involvement or intellectual jurisprudence.” Rather, for a more politically sufficient commentary, he proposes in the alternative, a set of tenets that fosters a “habit of mind” over one fostered by the “ideology of involvement” (pp.2, 23-27). This habit of mind is called “agnostic skepticism,” oriented and designed to shape a more prudent and hopefully, efficacious approach to civic education.

Agnostic skepticism Strauber argues, owes its tenets and origins to sociological jurisprudence, legal realism, and critical legal studies. The sine qua non of agnostic skepticism according to Strauber is its mandate to resist an unreflective devotion to lawyerly methods and legal, political, and moral abstractions as ordinarily deployed in doctrinal analysis, jurisprudence, and legal philosophy.  According to Strauber, in a most unlawyerly way, an agnostic mandate calls for commentary that mixes and merges these methods and abstractions with commonplace contingent and/or circumstantial social-facts, social-scientific, and consequentialist considerations. This approach, he maintains, requires a willingness to be situated “on the outside looking in” on the law, its advocates, its judges, and its commentators.  Above all, Strauber argues, an agnostic requires a “habit of mind” ultimately at home with a relativism based on the premise that constitutional and legal commentary should always be understood in terms of various shades of gray (p.3).

As characterized, Strauber’s “agnostic skepticism” gives narrative shape to commentary in three major ways. First, Strauber argues that agnostic skepticism provides descriptions and analyses of conditions and relationships that challenge unmerited solace in the political credibility of legal, political, and moral abstractions. Second, Strauber argues its descriptions and analyses provide strong reasons to resist the allure of predetermined conclusions, on both the left and the right, about the strengths and weakness of liberal-democratic law and facets of political power, as well as about when law and policies ought to be conserved or criticized. Third, and lastly, Strauber maintains that agnostic skepticism’s descriptions and analyses also provide strong enough reasons to oppose the compulsion to read constitutional and legal opinions in terms of whether they are rightly decided or not, and to oppose fixed or totalistic conceptions of the role of courts in major controversies. Thus, the narratives of agnostic skeptical commentary are summarily meant to incline teachers and critics, and those who learn from them, to take a more “experimental and venturesome approach” than usual to the materials of legal and political commentary.

Admittedly, while Strauber’s agnostic skepticism cannot predict outcomes—i.e., of what is yet to take place—he contends that its experiments could well have substantively different results. Thus, Strauber urges that case studies presented and referred to in this book should be read in light of that possibility. Interestingly, Strauber’s own experiments are borrowed from Justice Benjamin Cardozo’s “ordered liberty” conception of rights, powers, and interests related to maintaining the common good, political stability and popular rule or sovereign interests. From that perspective, however, Strauber touts the implications of ordered liberty beyond Cardozo’s conception and known case laws. He does so by drawing on often heavily qualified hypothetical social fact claims and accounts of the “under-determinacy” of legal formalisms and political and moral abstractions.  By “under-determinacy,” Strauber means the tendency of legal formalisms and abstractions to justify a multiplicity of competing and equally credible results. These results, he argues, are very often logically inconsistent with one another, such as having different policy implications from case to case, instance to instance, or incongruous with more practical social, economic, political, and historical considerations. 

With caution, however, Strauber maintains that legal formalisms and political and moral abstractions are not necessarily fatally flawed by virtue of their inconsistency or incongruity with social fact considerations. Strauber sees three major civic education lessons arising out of agnostic skepticism’s commentary and experiments with hypotheticals and under-determinacy. The first lesson is that hypotheticals and under-determinacy might well take agnostics to conclusions at odds with their political or moral preferences. The second lesson Strauber sees is that commentary to a middle course may lead one to shuttle back and forth between arguments that justify both conservation and criticism of the law’s formalisms and facets of political power. Lastly, the third lesson Strauber sees is that there is less certainty and more doubt to be had about the widespread conviction that courts are always a politically prudent venue for articulating the uppermost political and moral aspirations of the polity. Thus, to Strauber, these lessons bear directly on the place and role played by teachers and critics as civic educators within an interpretive community.

Contrasting these lessons to commentary hassling “intellectual jurisprudence and ideology of involvement,” Strauber admittedly does not follow up with counsel for either changing or improving what litigants, adjudicators, public policy-makers, or courts do.  Rather, he holds back steadfastly preferring instead to recommend that skeptical commentators abjure the pleasure of giving any such counsel because it is likely going to be inefficacious. To Strauber, common social facts about knowledge, power, law, and policies lead to the obvious recommendation that teachers and critics concentrate their energies on a potentially more efficacious, but less hard to accomplish, goal: civic education in a more “Jeffersonian civic culture.” Strauber’s view of a Jeffersonian civic culture is one in which an elite of properly educated citizens is increasingly predisposed to learn about law, politics, and policies so that they can tolerate legal and political ambiguities and contradictions inherent in a pluralistic polity. This predisposition, he insists, would make them suspicious and tentative about all claims having to do with the Constitution, law, and policies—be they claims from lawyers, scholars, journalists, or the people themselves. 

Strauber argues further that when people are predisposed to learn in this way, they exhibit a kind of pragmatic judiciousness of enlightened self-interest traditionally identified with the American mind and citizens’ relations (p.4). Thus, within Strauber’s continuum of analysis and recommendations, he sees agnostic commentary as an attempt to pragmatic judiciousness that fulfills four commitments. With regards to the first commitment, Strauber argues that agnosticism does not try to evade the inevitable complexity, ambiguity, inconsistency, and incongruity of things. For instance, he maintains that arguments – one’s own or those of others – which appear to be certain or beyond rejoinder, ought to be appreciated for their rhetorical robustness and then treated suspiciously as insufficient.

Relative to the second agnostic commitment, Strauber contends that if nothing is certain or beyond rejoinder, then it is judicious to differentiate not only between weaker and stronger reasoning and justification, but also to discover what is weak in the stronger and vice versa. The primary benefit of this judiciousness, Strauber insists, is that it acts as a check against premature judgments and an unjustifiable confidence that judgments are rightly decided.  The costs, he adds, are that one may lose one’s certainty of argumentative touch, or wander off into pitfalls and fallacies of thought. The third agnostic commitment has to do with cost. Accordingly, Strauber maintains that although costs may seem high compared to the benefits, they are worth paying if they help to purchase civility and tolerance which themselves entail a self-critical and emphatic (if not compassionate) regard for unpredictability of the course of political events. The fourth commitment is the good of civility and tolerance. According to Strauber, they are worth purchasing if they are as useful, if not more so, for private relations as they are for legal and political relations (pp.4-5). Interestingly, only the first three of the four commitments are developed fuller in various ways throughout the book. The fourth is undeveloped since Strauber claims that it may not be recognized as tacit in case studies, because it blurs the distinction between lessons about public and private relations.

On the whole, the discussions in this book are framed and divided into three main parts. Part 1 consists of three chapters. Chapter 1, titled “The Purpose of an Interpretive Community,” introduces the main arguments about the ideology of involvement jurisprudence mostly embedded in the discussions above. It clearly identifies Strauber’s concerns about the need for a more politically sufficient commentary.  Furthermore, he seeks to demonstrate that a gulf exists indeed between the reasons and arguments made in the course of “advocacy, judgment and scholarly analysis” and the practical and quite common social, economic and political conditions and relationships. More importantly, Strauber also defines and elaborates on the core terminology and concepts that embody his arguments in this book—namely, “the ideology of involvement, intellectual jurisprudence, political sufficiency and agnostic jurisprudence.” As noted above, these terms do more. For example, they establish the context for analytical points Strauber makes throughout the book about the gulf between legal reasoning and politics. They explain why it is costly to constitutional and legal commentary; and finally they also explain how commentators might go about reducing those costs and recovering neglected policies (pp.15-35). 

Chapter 2, “Formalisms: An Efficacious Enemy of Politically Sufficient Commentary,” presents the first case study, a criticism of conventional commentary on the First Amendment flag burning case. Here Strauber illustrates how the tenets of political sufficiency direct one to keep a critical eye on the way commentary tries to answer the rightly decided questions that lead to neglected policies. On law’s formalism, Strauber argues that if teachers, critics and their audience adopt agnostic skepticism, then they need to learn to challenge at every turn the unmerited solaces inherent in its formalism—that is, to draw attention to its argumentative rules and structures, its principles, concepts and doctrines, and “the habits of mind” that ensues from them. Law’s formalisms he maintains, are the natural places to begin because they are at the heart of intellectual jurisprudence that constitute an intrinsic limit on efforts to democratize the intellectual authority of law (pp.36-51).

Chapter 3, “Skepticism and Neglected Policies” (pp.52-63), again revisits TEXAS v. JOHNSON (initially presented in Chapter 2). The chapter assesses the central formalism of an opinion, and in this instance, whether marketplace formalism is merited or not. Strauber acknowledges that marketplace formalism provides no legal criteria to justify the claim that one interpretation of sovereignty interest in “public discussion as public policy” is better. It only requires only that ethical and political principles be addressed. On the core debate between Justice Brennan and Chief Justice Rehnquist over whether JOHNSON was rightly or wrongly decided, Strauber maintains that the case should not be treated solely as a conflict between liberalism and communitarianism. In his view, it is more to the point to read the eminent political theory of the opinion as a conflict over interpretation of sovereignty interests and the use of market place formalism (p.61).

Part II consists of six chapters sharing a central aim and theme of the book. These chapters define and situate agnostic skepticism’s exact place in jurisprudence. They further explain how the tenets of political sufficiency lead to a deeper appreciation of the ways in which the law’s formalism and facets of liberal-democratic political power obscure important political conditions and relationships.  For example, Chapter 4, titled “Formalisms: Facets of Political Power and Neglected Policies,” introduces the issue of complicated differences and similarities between skepticism and a principal source of its inspiration, critical legal studies (CLS) (pp.67-90). Specifically, a case study of market place formalism and facet of regulatory power in another First Amendment case, FCC v. LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS, is compared with a treatment of marketplace formalism, governmental power, and sovereignty interests. This comparison is made even livelier with Roberto Unger’s version of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) called “radical revisionism.”  According to Strauber, this comparison reveals that despite the extent to which solace in legal formalisms and facets of regulatory power may be viewed as unmerited, agnosticism does not buy in to the “revisionist agenda” that liberal-democratic law and politics is necessarily flawed or attend to its call for radical transformations. 

Summarily, Chapters 4 through 6 explain why agnosticism owes a great deal to CLS when it comes to evaluating the inevitable ambiguity, inconsistency, and incongruity that attend law, politics, and policies (p.69). Chapter 5, “The Internet: Distorted Ideals and Practices,” sets out a brief analysis of the controversy over sexually explicit materials on the Internet (pp.91-103). Here, Strauber relates the various issues to agnostic assessments of the controversy. He commits to the notion that under-determinacy is central to politically sufficient commentary that shuttles back and forth between arguments for conservation and criticism of law.  Furthermore, he argues that mixing and merging empirical claims about facets of power with formalistic ones reveals the extent to which the subject matter of legal commentary ought to be thought about in terms of under-determinacy.  There is, however, a limit. Accordingly, Strauber also maintains that a line of under-determinacy also establishes the extent to which one should be skeptical about blanket condemnations or celebrations of the law’s formalisms. This is the case he argues, even though skepticism may in fact confirm inconsistency and incongruity in the use of legal formalism (p.102-3).

Chapter 6, “Agnostic Skepticism About Radical Rejectionism,” presents an in-depth analysis of formalism in the federalism and sovereignty interests in MCCULLOCH v. MARYLAND, by comparing Critical Legal Studies (CLS) assessments (pp. 104-126). In this chapter Strauber places his analysis in the context of a case study derived from a variant of Mark Tushnet’s “radical rejectionism.” Radical rejectionism, Strauber maintains, is driven by the belief that the rule of law is a myth, that liberal–democratic law and policies are simply incapable of doing anything but obscuring the severity of societal dysfunctions, and that federalism is a sham as rule-of-law imposes limits on federal power. Put simply, liberal-democratic laws defeat all hope for social change. Strauber is not persuaded with this proposition. He instead contends that, although law may be inconsistent and incongruent with political conditions, this condition, alone, does not constitute sufficient grounds for concluding that “rule of law” is a myth and/or that liberal-democratic politics is incorrigibly dishonest (p.121).

To explain why he believes the social fact and formalistic claims in MCCULLOCH provide a rationale, he offers the perspective of politically sufficient commentary, for a more forgiving conception of the law’s formalisms and routine politics. This rationale, he argues, holds despite the fact that a “rejectionist” criticism of MCCULLOCH is partially credible.  Finally, Strauber explains why agnostics ought to take seriously (even with a bit of skepticism) what litigators and adjudicators say about law’s formalism and routine politics in order to recover neglected politics and policies.  His explanations leverage two related issues that all constitutional commentary must address: the text of the Constitution and the political structure of the polity. In this chapter, Strauber locates the two issues on formalism of sovereignty interests, federalism (the vehicle for understanding those interests), and the various cases. Finally he provides a defense of politically sufficient commentary with agnostic skepticism.

In Chapters 7 and 8 Strauber exhibits a shift in assessment that explores causes of neglected policies in particular areas of federalism. In Chapter 7, “Agnosticism, Federalism, and Constitutionalism” (pp. 127-141), contrary to his emphatic condemnation of “radical rejectionism” for “presuming too much and explaining too little,” Strauber concedes that there is some merit to Tushnet’s rejectionist critique. He notes, however, that selecting more federalism cases and public law consideration, indicates considerable solace in the idea and practice of federalism. In Chapter 8, titled “A Middle Course on Reform,” Strauber presents an amended originalism regarding ordered liberty (pp.142-159).  Here Strauber depicts a MCCULLOCH-like dynamic of rights and powers to orient commentary toward troublesome uncertainties attending efforts to reform federalism. This dynamic he explains, melds textual consideration of sovereignty and participant interests and plain political consideration about governmental responsiveness, articulation of the politics of interests, and budding issues of human capital development. Accordingly, he argues that such commentary is not problematic, so long as agnosticism is not conceived as advice to lawyers and judges about how they rightly decide cases if they would just imitate commentary in their work. Rather, agonistic commentary, he insists, is advice for critics, teachers, and students to pursue Jeffersonian critical citizenship, whereby they experiment with what is practical and best in law, politics and policies.

Rejecting “radical rejectionism”—a variation on the Tushnet position—Strauber indicates a preference for Hirsch’s  (1992) views of “liberty as an organizing idea.” He does so with an agnostic tinge, while remaining vigilant of motives and implications for doctrinal analysis and social fact considerations (p. 127). Thus, Strauber’s agnostic variant of “liberty,” for example, breaks away with Hirsch’s commitment to advance minority rights, because in agnosticism substantive commitment contradicts the resolve that nothing, even minority rights, is beyond rejoinder. Also, he argues that agnostics must part with Hirsch’s commitment, because politically sufficient commentary includes issues of power and sovereignty interests equal to considerations of rights.  While urging agnostics to remain skeptical of “revisionism and rejectionism” because of the politics and policies they neglect, Strauber values their importance, particularly in breaking the grip traditional interpretations of rights and powers have had on people. Thus, an agnostic sensibility inevitably leads agnostics to balance formalisms, social fact considerations, and the Constitution as they try to craft commentary that fulfills agnosticism’s mandate for neglected policies. To undertake such an effort can be immobilizing, but as Strauber argues, it is a necessary risk if we are to break with intellectual jurisprudence (p.128-9).

In Chapter 9, “Ordered Liberty and Political Morality” (pp.160-175), Strauber finalizes the definition of agnostic skepticism’s place in jurisprudence in explaining the problematic relationship of agnosticism to legal philosophy.  Strauber sees a dichotomy. On one hand, legal philosophy is an enemy of agnostic skepticism because it is so deeply rooted in the teaching lessons about rightly decided questions and about the centrality of moral abstractions to legal and political commentary. However, on the other hand, legal philosophy makes important contributions to our understanding of the relationship between moral and legal concepts.  To Strauber, therefore, there is and must be a space for legal philosophy and moral abstraction but one wherein they are used skeptically: their lessons cannot be independent of, logically superior to, or weightier than those learned from circumstantial and context-specific fact considerations.  For illustration, Strauber compares Ronald Dworkin’s assessment of PLANNED PARENTHOOD v. CASEY (the decision that sustained and revised ROE v. WADE) with an agnostic treatment. He sees Dworkin as the implacable foe of  legal pragmatism that informs the interpretive strategies of agnosticism. With his own assessment, Strauber demonstrates how agnosticism and moral convictions can coexist in political space.  Yet, his analysis and Dworkin’s are quite dissimilar. The difference between the two is a function of competing “rhetorics of utility tied to social fact considerations” and “rhetoric of analyticity heavily dependent to logical considerations both of which are competing rhetorics of agnosticism and moral philosophy” (p.173).

Part III consists of the three final chapters. In the first of two case studies, Strauber illustrates agnostic commitment to relativistic and skeptical advocacy about law, politics and moral commitments.  In the second, he presents an account of agnostic struggles of tolerating skepticism and relativism in constitutional and legal commentary as civic education.  In Chapter 10, “Deeper Skepticism” (pp.179-201), and Chapter 11, “Qualified Solace in the Law’s Formalisms” (pp.202-219), he illustrates the different ways that commentary addressing ordered liberty recovers neglected policies and counsels a middle course by shuttling between conservation and criticism of law. In both chapters Strauber presents different understanding of the function of courts in liberal-democratic politics, especially with regards to their perceived role in providing guidance to higher political and moral values within the body polity.  Chapter 10 for example, focuses on the issue of pornography. Strauber raises penetrating questions about solace in the role of abstract, mutually exclusive freedom-of-expression and equality principles and the role that the Supreme Court plays in all of this. He frames the issues for understanding what is at stake in the controversy over regulated pornography and its role in subordinating women and producing harms to the cultural environment. AMERICAN BOOKSELLER ASSOCIATION v. HUDNUT (1985) serves here as an important illustrative vehicle. 

Chapter 11 provides the last set of analyses on the controversy over what constitutes a “family” as well as “family relations” as manifested in the public law of adoption custody battles. Veering away from mainstream legal and political commentaries, Strauber uses adoption custody examples to demonstrate the practical need for and successful accomplishment of adjudication to find a middle course.  Adoption and custody battles, he insists, ought to be understood as raising crucial public policy issues. Strauber also bridges the problem confronted by judges in adjudicating “family and family relations” cases to other problems that “skeptical teachers and critics should expect to experience in reaction to their commentary and efforts on civic education.”  He concludes his exposé of this chapter with a synopsis of charges against agnostic skepticism that test its strength and weaknesses. In constructing rejoinders to these charges, Strauber confronts the problem of civic education gone awry, tied to cognitive dissonance in agnostic skepticism as civic education.

Finally in Chapter 12, “Qualified Solace in Agnosticism” (pp.220-226), Strauber offers recommendations and solutions for coping with cognitive dissonance and the degraded state of education. However, before doing so he cautions that skeptics appreciate the risk of not succeeding in their efforts to promote a “more Jeffersonian civic culture.” This risk, he insists, is all too easily ignored because “ideology of involvement” leads so effortlessly, even for agnostics, to the presumption that civic education will be efficacious (p.220).   Strauber suggests the merging of private and public lessons to enhance civic education that is suspicious and tentative.  Promoting Jeffersonian sensibilities requires considerable skepticism about successfully linking those sensibilities to formal education. Anticipating adverse reactions to his proposal on grounds of public/private sphere distinction, he nevertheless proposes that teachers and critics link legal and political lessons to people’s mundane concerns about private relations. Considering the risk of failure, he surmises that it is prudent to construct second best scenarios for civic education, and teachers and critics would be well-advised to invent stories tied to mundane incidents “closer to home” to enhance skeptical commentary about less familiar public issues. He concludes this chapter with examples relative to the foregoing analysis.

In this book, therefore, Strauber not only challenges teachers and critics of constitutional jurisprudence to think differently about the Constitution and its interpretation, but he demonstrates how such constitutional interpretations should be understood and, more importantly, how they should be consumed. In so doing, he advocates a Jeffersonian civic culture of learning, one in which we should expect citizens to be increasingly tolerant of the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in law and politics of a pluralistic society. Yet, within such expectations, he remains skeptical of its success—too skeptical in my view—but perhaps consistent with the theory he advances. His skepticism is presented especially well in the concluding Chapter 12, where he explores the recognition that agnostic skeptics risk failing in their effort to promote civic culture. As I have attempted to summarize, the theory of “agnostic skepticism,” questions and evaluates competitive jurisprudential notions that purport to generate “right answers” to legal questions through law’s formalism. In Strauber’s estimation, agnosticism demands attention to context-specific, circumstantial social facts relevant to given controversies, and it requires above all, a “habit of mind” that is at home with relativism. Indeed, his core argument in this book is that important aspects of law, policies, and politics are NEGLECTED because of legal formalisms. 

By shuttling through the intersections of various sub-disciplines of law, policy, politics and constitutional cases examples, Straber invites teachers and critics to take seriously the agnostic skepticism approach to constitutional policy evaluation. Readers should note that the criticisms of law’s formalism from either critical legal scholars or Strauber’s slant on agnostic skepticism presented in this book are not inherently radical.  Rather, together their arguments contribute to clearer thinking about law’s usefulness in expanding the horizons of our existing discourse on political and policy questions. In style and substance, this book is a valuable contribution to scholars in public law, policy, and politics, interested in constitutional interpretation and related questions of law and society. Faculty teaching graduate and upper-level undergraduate seminars in public law and policy broadly defined will find this book suitable as an additional text for their course.

 

REFERENCES:

Cardozo, Benjamin N. 1974. NATURE OF JUDICIAL PROCESS. New Heaven: Yale University Press

Dworkin, Ronald. 2000. SOVEREIGN VIRTUE: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF EQUALITY. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

Dworkin, Ronald. 1992. “The Center Holds: The Supreme Court’s July 29th 1992 Ruling in Planned Parenthood of Southern Pennsylvania et al versus Casey.” NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, 39: 29.

Hirsch, Harry N. 1992. A THEORY OF LIBERTY: THE CONSTITUTION AND MINORITIES, New York: Routledge.

Tushnet, Mark. 1988.  RED, WHITE AND BLUE: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE CONSTITUTION. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Unger, Roberto. 1986 .THE CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES MOVEMENT, 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

 

CASE REFERENCES:

AMERICAN BOOKSELLER ASSOCIATION v. HUDNUT, 771 F2d. 323 (7th Cir. 1985).

FCC v. LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS, 468 US 364 (1984).

McCULLOCH v. MARYLAND, 17 US 316 (1819).

PLANNED PARENTHOOD OF SOUTHERN PENNSYLVANIA et al v. CASEY, 505 US. 333 (1992).

ROE v. WADE, 410 US 113 (1973).

TEXAS v. JOHNSON, 491 US 397 (1989).

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Copyright 2003 by the author, Marc Georges Pufong.