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• W259571548 abstract "Forum In her recent article, Too Clever By Half. The Problem with Novelty in Constitutional Law, Professor Suzanna Sherry advances a sharp critique of constitutional scholarship and commentary.1 Professor Sherry rails against what she denounces as novelty in constitutional writings and what she views as the loss of quality in both scholarship and commentary. The article, however, appears to triumph over the novel with the banal,2 advancing such notable proposals as cautioning professors to treat scholarship as a serious intellectual endeavor and calling on faculty to more carefully consider the merits of a scholar's work.3 Putting such insightful observations aside, my interest in the piece concerns a different aspect of Sherry's critique-the exclusionary elements of constitutional discourse and the role of the academics in public controversies. As a threshold matter, it is important to acknowledge that parts of Professor Sherry's article did raise substantive issues as to the use of grand theories in constitutional law. Unfortunately, most of this material is lost in a remarkably self-serving attack on the theories of other academics. Sherry dismisses many academic writings on counter-majoritarian issues as often advancing merely theories and suggests that such theories are offered for purely self-advancing or marketing purposes. Sherry's writings, however, are viewed as substantial and not merely clever because she advocates a more complex view of the Constitution. Sherry not only suggests that academics are pandering for the academic consumer-market4 but that students and professors simply cannot recognize the quality of theories more ... well ... like her own. I am one of those academics who has preIMAGE FORMULA5 viously written on the counter-majoritarian problem and I am also one of those academics most uncomfortable with Sherry's call for a more fluid commonsense approach to interpretation. However, it would be the height of arrogance to denounce her theories as motivated by anything other than good-faith academic considerations. What is most striking about Professor Sherry's critique is its total absence of self-critique. For my part, one of the most worrisome developments in academic discourse is the increasing political element to academic work and the guild-like attacks that have emerged in the last few years. Sherry's article is an interesting example of both of these problems. As she notes in her article, Sherry was one of roughly 430 professors who signed a letter to Congress urging Congress to reject the calls for the impeachment of President Clinton. While Sherry labels the work of many scholars on grand theories as having aspects of a crusade,5 this criticism appears far more relevant to the advocacy of academics like Sherry in opposing impeachment. I have written extensively on the flaws in this letter and I will not repeat that critique.6 However, the letter itself is a striking example of academic advocacy through collective authentication. The implied message of the joint letter was that the relative merit of a particular interpretation could be multiplied by the sheer number of academic signatories. The authority of the interpretation was presented as obvious as if proven by academic plebiscite. Of course, at one time, a majority of academics would have signed on to the constitutionality of the separate but equal doctrine but such a petition would hardly have given the theory more legitimacy. Moreover, the vast majority of law professors did not sign the joint letter despite the widespread effort to gain a maximum number of signatures. This did not matter to democratic members and sympathetic media who predictably used the petition as the manifest judgment of the constitutional law academy. …" @default.
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• W259571548 date "2001-10-01" @default.
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• W259571548 title "The Constitutional Guild: The Problem with Banality in Constitutional Law" @default.
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