Toward a Revisionist History of the Supreme Court (original) (raw)

I. INTRODUCTION T he bicentennial year provoked a reconsideration of not only the era of the framing but of constitutional history as a whole. 1 At one point I thought that I might participate in that effort by writing a history of the Supreme Court, updating Robert McCloskey's classic book in light of recent scholarship. 2 It turned out that that project was too daunting for me. There was too much material to assimilate before I could feel comfortable in trying to present or even develop a history of the Supreme Court. This essay is, therefore, only a sketch of a revisionist history of the Supreme Court. It is extremely abstract, eliminates a lot of detail and