On Perennial Re‐examination of the U.S. Constitution

A bstract . The United States Constitution is still shrouded in myths, clothed in broad terms and garbed with ambiguities. These require constant reinterpretation. If a continuing constitutional convention is thus endemic to the American political system , then is it, as Jefferson said, “a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary”? Justice Jackson wrote that “we are infallible only because we are final,” but it is a maxim of American politics that the Court follows the election returns. In the last analysis, there is a higher court in a republican democracy, the Court of Public Opinion (of which scholars and publicists are the officers) which achieves revision by periodic reinterpretation and re‐examination

Constitution · Convention · Democracy · Maxim · Political science · Politics · Reinterpretation · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law · Legal and Constitutional Studies · Philosophy

• The Fall of the First British Empire

  B D Bargar, Robert W Tucker et al.•The William and Mary Quarterly•1983

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