Grand Visions in an Age of Conflict

In the spring of 2005, Professor Laurence H. Tribe commented that federal constitutional law is in a state of intellectual disarray. No doubt fortuitously, two of our most formidable constitutional scholars, Akhil R. Amar and Jed Rubenfeld, have published systematic studies that implicitly challenge Tribe’s conclusion that “ours [is] a peculiarly bad time to be going out on a limb to propound a Grand Unified Theory - or anything close.” With admirable boldness, Professors Amar and Rubenfeld have done precisely that - gone out on a limb, or rather two very different limbs, to propound their own accounts of what American constitutionalism is, or should be. This article reviews both Amar’s America’s Constitution and Rubenfeld’s Revolution by Judiciary, which are alike in that each is its author’s synthesis of a remarkable effort, sustained over a number of years, to develop a comprehensive vision of the Constitution. Where the two books most sharply diverge is that Revolution by Judiciary has as its ultimate focus the actual practice of constitutional law, while America’s Constitution is concerned with unveiling a set of textual meanings that are not finally rooted in history or law. Perhaps most importantly, however, both these books suggest that the right response to the existing discord in constitutional law and scholarship is not to retreat to small-scale projects, but to seek with renewed zeal a grand vision of constitutional meaning. Professor Amar and Professor Rubenfeld have shown real moral courage in going out on Professor Tribe’s limb to offer us broad-ranging attempts to speak about the whole of their respective, somewhat different, subjects.