Laurence Tribe Explains End to American Constitutional Law
May 26th, 2005Harvard professor Laurence Tribe has announced in these letters to Justice “Steve” Breyer and to interested readers that he will not be completing and publishing the planned second volume to the 1999 third edition of his influential treatise American Constitutional Law (locally available on Boley Reserve).
Professor Tribe explains his decision over the course of both letters, saying:
I have come to the sobering realization that no treatise, in my sense of that term, can be true to this moment in our constitutional history–to its conflicts, innovations, and complexities. There is a time to write a constitutional law treatise… but this is not such a time. The reason is that we find ourselves at a juncture where profound fault lines have become evident at the very foundations of the enterprise, going to issues as fundamental as whose truths are to count and, sadly, whose truths must be denied. And the reality is that I do not have, nor do I believe I have seen, a vision capacious and convincing enough to propound as an organizing principle for the next phase in the law of our Constitution.
Read the letters here. There is much more in these fascinating and perhaps important letters (15 p.), forthcoming in The Green Bag legal journal as Tribe, The Treatise Power, 8 Green Bag 2d 291 (2005).
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