Professor Jack Balkin’s Memory and Authority is a good book by a great constitutional theorist, but it gives me some pause. Balkin’s account of legitimate constitutional construction is so capacious and seemingly accepting of a results orientation that it may be difficult to discern when someone is doing it wrong. Balkin repeatedly implies that more is better, both regarding the number of modalities of constitutional interpretation and the kinds of history that are relevant to making constitutional arguments. Moreover, he repeatedly declares that “history is a resource and not a command.” But modality creep may make it more challenging for pluralists to answer the charge that their methodology makes it possible for users to reach whatever outcome they want. Likewise, history must be both a resource and a constraint if an interpretive theory is also to restrain, not just to license, interpretive discretion. More is not necessarily better when one imagines constitutional law being made by people who do not share one’s values. In the United States, constitutional law is made by Supreme Court Justices who do not share the values of a significant percentage of the country, and the problem is worse during a polarized era. Although Balkin does not emphasize them, certain concepts and practices have been central to the generations-long effort to constrain judicial discretion: a general allegiance to judicial restraint, a genuine commitment to stare decisis in constitutional disputes, a presumption in favor of incrementalism in judicial decision making, and a dedication to giving principled reasons for judicial decisions. Those ideas and others discussed in this Essay fall under the heading of judicial role morality, which has long been discussed by the legal profession due to the perceived importance of identifying constraining conceptions of a Justice’s institutional role.
Neil S. Siegel (Thu,) studied this question.