By Jack M. Balkin
ISBN-10: 0674058747
ISBN-13: 9780674058743
Political constitutions, hammered out via imperfect people during times of severe political controversy, are continually compromises with injustice. What makes the U.S. structure valid, argues this bold booklet, is american citizens’ enduring religion that the Constitution’s can provide can sometime be redeemed, and the constitutional method be made “a extra ideal union.”A prime constitutional theorist, Balkin argues eloquently that the yankee constitutional undertaking relies in religion, desire, and a story of shared redemption. Our trust that the structure will carry us from evil exhibits within the tales we inform each other approximately the place our state got here from and the place it's headed, and within the means we use those ancient touchstones to justify our fervent (and antagonistic) political creeds. simply because american citizens have believed in a narrative of constitutional redemption, we've got assumed the perfect to make your mind up for ourselves what the structure capacity, and feature labored to cajole others to set it at the correct direction. for this reason, constitutional rules have usually shifted dramatically through the years. they're, actually, frequently political compromises in disguise.What will any such structure develop into? we won't recognize. yet our trust within the legitimacy of the structure calls for a bounce of faith—a gamble at the final vindication of a political undertaking that has already survived many follies and near-catastrophes, and whose future remains to be over the horizon. (20111228)
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Additional info for Constitutional Redemption: Political Faith in an Unjust World
Sample text
My claim is that people— including the hypothetical reasonable people that legal and political theorists like to talk about—need faith and story to make their judgments of political legitimacy. I will make three basic points. Each of them concerns the temporal nature of judgments of legitimacy—the fact that legitimacy is not a judgment about the way things are at a particular point in time, but a judgment about the constitutional/legal system that looks backward to the past and forward to the future.
So one person might regard the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade23 as a terrible mistake that will someday be corrected, or as a demerit against an otherwise respect-worthy system, and will interpret the scope of the Roe decision and the principles announced in it very narrowly so that it does as little harm as possible. Another person will regard Roe v. Wade as an important reason why the system is respect-worthy—because it secures equality for women—and will interpret the decision and its principles robustly.
Contingent events—wars, waves of immigration and settlement, new religions and technologies, economic booms and depressions—all play an enormous role. The future is something that we make, with our narrative self-understanding as our goad and guide. In every generation it is given to us to redeem the promises of the Declaration and the Constitution in ever new ways. The revolutionaries who signed the Declaration and the founders who ratified the Constitution could not have known about the women’s movement, the Civil War, the populists, the New Deal, or the civil rights movement.
Constitutional Redemption: Political Faith in an Unjust World by Jack M. Balkin
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