1937 Redux?: Reflections on Constitutional Development and Political Structures

This Essay, forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, argues that ideas associated with the field of American political development can assist constitutional scholars interested in constitutional development. It speculatively examines structural features of contemporary constitutional politics using such ideas as the possibility that President Obama is (or might be) a reconstructive or transformative President and the institutional thickening of structures of resistance to reconstruction, to suggest how APD ideas might be of use in setting the contingencies of quotidian politics into a larger structural framework.