Indirect constitutional discourse: a comment on Meese. | CU Experts

Overview

Part of a special section on the Constitution under President Bill Clinton. A commentary on Alan J. Meese's “Bakke Betrayed,” which appears in this issue. The writer discusses Meese's claim that the approach used by the Clinton administration in the Bakke case prevents political dialogue on Supreme Court rulings. Although he agrees with Meese, he contends that such a strategy produces another recognizable form of dialogue, one full of confusion and hypocrisy but an amazingly central and well established part of the practice of the judicial review itself. Moreover, he contends that the more justices see their intellectualized interpretations of the Constitution as supremely decisive, the more likely they are to foster these comparatively non-intellectualized forms of debate.