Received wisdom of the present moment in constitutional and statutory interpretation begins with the text and moves to the logic, structure, or context of that text, before then focusing on historical practice. What is the role of tradition in American constitutional law? Why do we so often keep coming back to it even when we have an elite legal culture that is now more focused than ever on ascertaining an objective meaning of text itself? That is the question at the center of Professor Marc DeGirolami’s new book, The Constitution of Practice: On Law and Tradition. It is a short book with a large claim: constitutional traditions are not ornaments on the text. They are the ways a people give concrete form to political excellence and pass it on. They tell us how we have actually governed, worshiped, punished, protected, and persuaded and in so doing they bind citizens to one another.
Marc DeGirolami is the St. John Henry Newman Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Law and the Human Person at The Catholic University of America. He previously taught at St. John’s University and was a Visiting Fellow in Princeton’s James Madison Program. A former federal clerk and Assistant District Attorney, he is the author of The Tragedy of Religious Freedom and a leading scholar of constitutional theory, religious liberty, and tradition in American law.
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