My column in today's LAT begins by wondering if Con Law professors "really have a subject to teach," and ends by commenting: "Despite its all-too-human origins, we treat our Constitution as revealed truth, and we want our judges to serve as its infallible priests. And this, perhaps, is the best I can offer my students: the suggestion that in the United States today, constitutional interpretation is best understood as a form of theology rather than law. "
Comments on that are welcome, and since I could not really say this in the piece itself, I will say here that it is my husband (and co-blogger!) Peter Brooks who has spoken and written most thoughtfully on Constitutional-Law- As-Theology. I hope he will add his thoughts, which are more elaborate and interesting than mine on this topic (as on many, as a matter of fact).
Interesting Op-Ed. So, if students really treat the Constitution as religion and its justices as the recipients of revealed truth, then legal realism hasn't done nearly the amount of damage that many presuppose, I guess. Ditto for CLS, or Critical Race Theory, or Feminist Jurisprudence, Law and Economics, or.... Does this mean that today's students (and public) never really subscribed to these "isms" or that they've recovered?
The Constitution, if it is taken as religion by so many, seems to hearken back to an earlier liberal tradition. Here, I'm reminded of Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: "of lawe there can be no lesse acknowledged, then that her seate is the bosome of God...."
There were deeply political and serious reasons for such lofty (and, well, pretty silly) rhetoric. It was meant to establish the now familiar liberal distinction between law v. politics, justification v. power, rights v. arbitrary royal whim.
Is the Constitution--as religion--useful to further these goals? Or do its purportedly religious qualities originate from and further something else like the creation of our nation?
I'd love to hear some responses.
Posted by: John M. Kang | January 20, 2006 at 04:16 PM