Remnants of Belief: Contemporary Constitutional Issues

by Louis Michael Seidman, Mark V. Tushnet

Popular debate about constitutional issues such as abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty, and free speech, has become increasingly polarized, with a persistent and growing tendency to treat constitutional questions such as these as if they were easy and the answers obvious. In Remnants of Contemporary Constitutional Issues , Seidman and Tushnet investigate this phenomenon, tracing its beginning to the transformation of American government that accompanied the New Deal revolution over a half century ago. In their investigation, the authors examine the debates on issues such as free speech, criminal procedure, discrimination, and capital punishment, and the views of prominent figures in the field such as Robert Bork, Laurence Tribe, and Cass Sunstein. The book explores popular constitutional argument and suggests some common reasons why all sides of modern constitutional debate are unsatisfactory. It explores the reasons why constitutional argument has ceased to
serve its primary to bridge the gaps between citizens by appealing to the principles that unite them.

240 pages, Paperback

First published March 7, 1996

About the author

Louis Michael Seidman is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1971, Professor Seidman served as a law clerk for J. Skelly Wright of the D.C. Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He then was a staff attorney with the D.C. Public Defender Service until joining the Law Center faculty in 1976. He teaches a variety of courses in the fields of constitutional and criminal law. He is co-author of a constitutional law casebook and the author of many articles concerning criminal justice and constitutional law. His most recent books are Silence and Freedom (Stanford 2007), Our Unsettled Constitution: A New Defense of Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (Yale 2001) and Equal Protection of the Laws (Foundation 2002).