The Constitutional Bind – LPE Project https://lpeproject.org The Law and Political Economy Project Tue, 20 Aug 2024 16:47:10 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.1 https://lpeproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/cropped-LPE_Favicon_512px_BlackBG-450x450.png The Constitutional Bind – LPE Project https://lpeproject.org 32 32 Venerating Constitutional Veneration? https://lpeproject.org/blog/venerating-constitutional-veneration/ Thu, 09 May 2024 11:00:00 +0000 https://lpeproject.org/?p=10310 The Constitutional Bind provides a vital resource for appreciating how the American ideology of constitutional reverence was constructed. Yet insofar as Rana blames such an ideology for thwarting essential democratic reform, we might wonder whether this magisterial work ironically gives its subject too much credit — venerating the very constitutional veneration that it deconstructs.]]> This post is part of a symposium on Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them. Read the rest of the posts here. *** Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind upends the standard story of constitutional veneration in not one but two ways. Against the notion that “Americans have treated the United States Constitution . . . as a sacred symbol” since “the...

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]]> On Garrison, Douglass, and American Colonialism https://lpeproject.org/blog/on-garrison-douglass-and-american-colonialism/ Mon, 22 Apr 2024 11:00:00 +0000 https://lpeproject.org/?p=10260 The Constitutional Bind sets its sights breathtakingly high. Whether the book reaches those heights will likely turn on whether it offers a viable path from our creedal constitutional present to such a utopian future.]]> This post is part of a symposium on Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them. Read the rest of the posts here. *** Of the classical myths scholars of constitutional law invoke, few are more widely drawn upon than that of the dual and dueling protagonists William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. The fable we tell ourselves about these two...

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]]> Constitutional Politics and Dilemmas on the Left https://lpeproject.org/blog/constitutional-politics-and-dilemmas-on-the-left/ Tue, 16 Apr 2024 11:00:00 +0000 https://lpeproject.org/?p=10211 This post is part of a symposium on Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them. Read the rest of the posts here. *** Aziz Rana is an invaluable scholar and public intellectual. No one has done more to push legal scholarship to examine law’s part in the construction of American empire and the building of the United States as a settler colonial...

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]]> Toward a New Constitutional Politics https://lpeproject.org/blog/toward-a-new-constitutional-politics/ Mon, 15 Apr 2024 11:00:00 +0000 https://lpeproject.org/?p=10229 The Constitutional Bind, by reflecting on the path that led to our current political predicament, and how long-buried Left thinking about state and economy might help us find our way out of it.]]> This post introduces a symposium on Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them. Read the replies here. *** In recent years, the anti-democratic flaws of the U.S. Constitution have become increasingly apparent. Commentators now routinely worry over the system’s exaggerated checks on popular authority: the lopsided grant of power to certain states...

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