Thinking About Constitutional Change
After I finished the drafts of the dissertation and distributed them to my committee a week or so ago, I discovered a relevant book by Barry Cushman, Rethinking The New Deal Court: The Structure Of A Constitutional Revolution, that I had somehow missed during my early research.
I skimmed a fair amount of it at the gym tonight, and it's just outstanding. In fact, I'm going to have to incorporate parts of it in my introduction and conclusion for the defense (assuming I can actually assemble a committee at some point in the future).
Cushman's premises track beautifully with my own: Namely, that legal scholars tend to write about constitutional law in terms of narrow legal doctrines, and political scientists and historians tend to write about constitutional law in terms of the Supreme Court's reaction to and dependence upon politics or other social forces. Cushman looks at the constitutional revolution of 1937 (the focus of my dissertation, though in a much more narrow sense) and tries to fit that into its broader intellectual context (which is also what I do, although my focus is more specifically on developments in American political thought at the time). Cushman is not a political theorist, but his approach is not dissimilar to that of a political theorist. Further, he makes an excellent case (in the introduction) as to why he approaches his subject matter in the manner he does -- in some ways, a better case than I make (hence my need to bring this work into the introduction and conclusion).
[Posted at 23:40 CST on 08/26/02] [Link]
