Constitutional Constraints

Abstract

The main ambition of "Constitutional Constraints" is to open up the subject of constitutional constraints on government officials, including Presidents and Supreme Court Justices, as a topic for discussion within the field of Constitutional Theory. The subject has so far received little comprehensive discussion in the law reviews, in part because of a division between scholarly approaches that treat constitutional law as a system of norms and political scientific theories that portray judges and other officials as constrained maximizers of personal goals or preferences. This Article attempts to incorporate the central insights of both approaches and to identify the important, frequently unappreciated ways in which they frequently reinforce on another.