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In his 1928 book The Paradoxes of Legal
Science, then-judge, and later Supreme Court justice,
Benjamin Cardozo wrote that rather than defining
“due process of lawâ€â€”a critical concept in constitutional
law—courts “leave it to be ‘pricked out’ by a process
of inclusion and exclusion in individual cases. . . .
It is all very well to go on pricking the lines,†he observed,
“but the time must come when we shall do
prudently to look them over, and see whether they
make a pattern or a medley of scraps and patches.â€
This book originated as a series of columns in
Boston Review written between 2010 and 2013. Some
of the columns addressed individual cases then pending
before or recently decided by the Supreme Court.Others covered broader questions of interpretive
method or the Court’s role as an institution. But
taken together, they go beyond pricking the lines to
lay out a coherent approach to thinking about constitutional
law and the Court’s role in our democracy
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