Self-Historicism

Abstract

Among the contributors to this symposium, I may be the person with the longest acquaintance with Sandy Levinson. I want to begin, therefore, with a recollection of the period of my earliest contacts with Sandy - a recollection that, as I hope to show, has some bearing on some of the aspects of Sandy's work that most interest me . . . I use these examples to introduce an argument connected to Sandy's longstanding interest in historical memory. The casebook of which he is a co-author is organized historically-relentlessly so, I would put it, to the point where I personally would find it quite difficult to teach from. I take the implicit argument of the casebook to be that students cannot understand constitutional law, even contemporary constitutional law, without reflecting on the historical circumstances in which constitutional doctrine was articulated.