An article from last October's "Keeping Faith with the Constitution in Changing Times" symposium, co-sponsored by Constitutional Interpretation and Change Issue Group and Vanderbilt University Law School. The symposium was held at Vanderbilt University Law School in October 2006.

Frank I. Michelman, Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard University, examines notions of constitutional legitimacy in Fidelity and Legitimacy. Professor Michelman explains, “Not everything that might call itself a constitution or that has the formal look of one can be considered . . . capable of casting a mantle of legitimacy . . . over whatever so-called laws pass muster under its provisions. There will have to be something flattering that we can say about any given constitution, by way of explaining why compliance with that constitution should be allowed to work such a redemptive magic on laws including some . . . that we cannot bring ourselves to deny are bad and wrong. But what that necessary, flattering constitutional attribute is--what sort of attribute it is--is not so clear. People can and do have differing ideas about the necessary properties or features of a legitimation-worthy constitution, and those differing ideas apparently can connect with differing conceptions of constitutional fidelity.” Michelman then sets forth a number of such ideas and explores their implications for constitutional interpretation.

An article from last October's "Keeping Faith with the Constitution in Changing Times" symposium, co-sponsored by Constitutional Interpretation and Change Issue Group and Vanderbilt University Law School. The symposium was held at Vanderbilt University Law School in October 2006.

In Originalism Within the Living Constitution, Keith Whittington, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University, justifies a jurisprudence of originalism. Professor Whittington contends that, in recent times, “The authority of the original meaning of the Constitution has been routinely challenged in basic ways. The claim that the Constitution should be understood differently—that it is a “living Constitution” that means something different today than it meant when it was adopted, for example—is now itself quite old. It is now thought that adherence to original meaning is one alternative among many, a choice that might be made or that might not. If originalism is not exactly on the defensive, it at least has to be defended.”

An article from last October's "Keeping Faith with the Constitution in Changing Times" symposium, co-sponsored by Constitutional Interpretation and Change Issue Group and Vanderbilt University Law School. The symposium was held at Vanderbilt University Law School in October 2006.

In Recognizing and Respecting Constitutional Structure, Michael S. Greve, John G. Searle scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, contends, “Our real constitutional problem . . . is not democracy. It is stability, or the lack thereof.” Greve continues, “Political competition and churning is the recipe for constitutional stability. The judicial task, I believe, it to protect that general institutional framework. As I have argued elsewhere, the principle of the New Deal Constitution was ‘cartels at every level.’ I would turn that paradigm upside down and have the Court act as a political antitrust agency of sorts.”