Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Eastman on Chemerinsky

It should be no surprise that John C. Eastman is not a fan of Erwin Chemerinsky's judicial philosophy, but this Claremont Institute review was sort of a shock. A mild excerpt:

The most recent submission in this genre of psychological fiction, The Conservative Assault on the Constitution, comes from Erwin Chemerinsky, one of the deans of the living Constitution movement and actual Dean of the University of California, Irvine, School of Law. Chemerinsky's premise is obvious from the book's title, its cover depiction of the Constitution's "We the People" in the familiar calligraphy, and the book jacket's blurbs about the need to "reclaim the Constitution" and preserve "our constitutional birthright." His tactic is clever: each leftward evolution of the Constitution's meaning becomes a new fixed baseline of constitutional law, and any move to return to the original meaning amounts to a repudiation not of the wayward interpretation but of the Constitution itself. A nice exercise in intellectual jujitsu for the living Constitution crowd, if he can get away with it.

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