Abstract

This short contribution argues that Professor Mark Tushnet’s scholarship has always been animated by his deep commitment to democratic ideals. Tushnet’s writings on different constitutional law topics reveal his consistent commitment to democracy as a foundational value of his constitutional thinking. As a constitutional law scholar, he is particularly interested in the concept of popular constitutionalism. The key feature of popular constitutionalism is that the people ultimately control the interpretation of constitutional law. In his own articulation of popular constitutionalism, Professor Tushnet seeks to retrieve and reinvent this prominent tradition of American constitutionalism. Building upon the work of Larry Kramer’s seminal historical account of popular constitutionalism, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review, Professor Tushnet argues that one key feature of this model is that it is a dialogic process. The picture that emerges from the sketches of popular constitutionalism clearly reveals that Professor Tushnet’s conceptualization of popular constitutionalism is not the case against judicial review as such, or, even worse, against the courts and their independence. The core claim of his work is that judges are no better than citizens in making informed decisions about their political choices.