Professor Michael Klarman of Harvard Law has an interesting post on Balkinization about what he sees as unjustified worship of our Constitution. His four main points are:
- The Framers’ constitution, to a large degree, represented values we should abhor or at least reject today.
- There are parts of the Constitution with which we are still stuck today even though we would never freely choose them and they are impossible to defend based on contemporary values.
- For the most part, the Constitution is irrelevant to the current political design of our nation.
- The rights protections we do enjoy today, the importance of which I do not minimize, are mostly a function of political and social mores, which have dramatically evolved over time and owe relatively little to courts using the Constitution to protect them.
I encourage you to read the entire address here.
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