A Turn to Politics: Sanford Levinson's Our Undemocratic Constitution and Debates in Contemporary Constitutional Theory

In the last generation, politics has replaced philosophy as constitutional theory's center of gravity. While theorists once focused on judicial authority and looked to philosophy to validate the principles of justice that judges enforced, they now tend to consider how judges fit into the broader political process that defines constitutional doctrine. This essay considers how the change obscures important questions about the nature of democratic government. It does so by examining Sanford Levinson's recent book, Our Undemocratic Constitution--an attempt to bridge academic theory to the practice of politics that is emblematic of constitutional theory's emphasis of politics over philosophy.