Articles
John Brown's Constitution, Boston College Law Review (2010)
It will surprise many Americans to learn that before John Brown and his men briefly...
Constitutional Borrowing (with Nelson Tebbe), Michigan Law Review (2009)
Borrowing from one domain to promote ideas in another domain is a staple of constitutional...
Reconsidering Gobitis: An Exercise in Presidential Leadership, Washington University Law Review (2008)
In June of 1940, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Minersville School District v. Gobitis...
Democracy's Handmaid, Boston University Law Review (2006)
Democratic theory presupposes open channels of dialogue, but focuses almost exclusively on matters of institutional...
Sacred Visions of Law, Iowa Law Review (2005)
Around the time of the Bicentennial Celebration of the U.S. Constitution’s framing, Sanford Levinson called...
Fire, Metaphor, and Constitutional Myth-Making, Georgetown Law Journal (2004)
From the standpoint of traditional legal thought, metaphor is at best a dash of poetry...
Speech and Strife, Law and Contemporary Problems (2004)
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz once observed that “[a]t the political center of any complexly organized...
Conceptualizing Constitutional Litigation as Antigovernment Expression: A Speech-Centered Theory of Court Access, American University Law Review (2002)
This Article proposes a speech-based right of court access. First, it finds the traditional due...
Books
Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture (2008)
This book presents a general theory to explain how the words in the Constitution become...
Reviews
Sovereignty as Discourse, Constitutional Commentary (2008)
This is a review of Howard Schweber's book, "The Language of Liberal Constitutionalism" (Cambridge University...
The System Worked: Our Schizophrenic Stance on Welfare, Yale Law Journal (1996)
This is a review of Steven M. Teles's book, Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics...
Unpublished Papers
Langston Hughes: The Ethics of Melancholy Citizenship (2009)
As a body of work, the poetry of Langston Hughes presents a vision of how...