Abstract
Popular constitutionalists fear that our constitutional culture is becoming less popular. At the same time, these scholars often ignore key popular sources of constitutional meaning. Their accounts focus, instead, on the elite conflicts that give rise to constitutional change, particularly the ongoing debates between elected officials, movement leaders, and the Supreme Court. Although these studies are essential to understanding the pathways for promoting non-Article V constitutional change, they are "popular" only in the sense that they focus on non-judicial actors and politically salient controversies. The constitutional life of the average citizen is generally ignored. If legal scholars are serious about popular constitutionalism, they must move beyond these studies of elite discourse and examine how popular constitutional meaning is shaped "on the ground," once the most recent controversy fades and constitutional life returns to normal. While many scholars have already turned their attention to how legal culture absorbs new constitutional settlements, this Article fills a key gap in the relevant literature by examining how changes to constitutional meaning become part of our popular constitutional fabric-a process I call "constitutional absorption." To that end, this Article focuses on an important pathway that has been largely ignored by legal scholars-civic education. ...
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2010
Recommended Citation
Thomas Donnelly, A Popular Approach to Popular Constitutionalism: The First Amendment, Civic Education, and Constitutional Change, 28 Quinnipiac L. Rev. 321 (2010).
Included in
Constitutional Law Commons, First Amendment Commons, Supreme Court of the United States Commons
