Legal Commentary

Yale Law School is holding a conference next month to discuss the recent publication of a book spearheaded by Yale professors, The Constitution in 2020.  Leading up to the conference, the organizers have set up a blog on which the conference participants (including at least three of the permanent Prawfsblawgers) will be commenting on the book.  First up: David Law, who argues that constitutional theory is often over-romanticized and focused on narrow and insular matters, and instead should "concern[ ] itself with questions of institutional design, and on ascertaining which interests and outcomes are privileged by what kinds of rules, practices, and structures."  These will not, I predict confidently, be the last words on institutional design on the Constitution in 2020 blog!  

I hope folks will read and comment on the posts that appear in the coming couple of weeks on the Constitution in 2020 blog.  By way of preview, one of my posts will talk about why, if the book is to amount to more than just a brief for progressive politics, constitutional and otherwise, it should have been titled The Constitution in 2030.  The book has been reasonably criticized, in my view, but there is some merit in trying to imagine how we might do constitutional law in the relatively near future, and I hope the blog will spark some discussion of this question.