Constitutional Advocacy Explains Constitutional Outcomes

This Article seeks to show that scholars, especially constitutional scholars, must pay more attention to the ways advocates frame their controversies at the "capital of the world." If the Anti-federalists' prophecy was that an overly complex constitution would accrete power around its ambiguities, then the perpetual refinement of the Constitution by lawyers in controversy—from article to section to sentence to clause to phrase to word—has given the best protection against inflexibility. This thesis is timely because lawyering is more accessible with the Court's recent decision to post oral arguments "on the same day an argument is heard by the Court." The topic is pragmatic because scholarly attention to judges' courtroom conversations with lawyers may help close the divide between the academy and the legal profession.