Senator Obama's Constitution: Bending Time and Space
by Ryan Sager
Mon, 26 Mar 2007 at 9:35 AM
updated Mon, 26 Mar 2007 at 9:35 AM
Today, my colleague Gary Shapiro, a brilliant legal mind in his own right, puts forward a story to which I've been looking forward ever since I first caught wind of it.
Back in 1989, a year before he would become the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Senator Obama of Illinois was credited for editorial and/or research assistance on an article in the review titled, "The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn From Modern Physics," authored by noted legal scholar Laurence Tribe.
Exactly what this means about Mr. Obama's views of the Constitution is wide open to debate, but it would at least seem to point in a certain direction...
And that direction is directly away from any reliance on the actual text of the Constitution to determine its meaning.
As Gary writes:
Mr. Tribe writes that "the interconnectedness of legal events" requires "abandoning any notion that the ‘objective' picture of the legal universe is the one seen from the vantage point of those who make legal decisions." The article cites Harvard legal philosopher John Rawls's "veil of ignorance" to the effect that fairness means looking at things from the view of "those on the bottom of the social ladder."
This is, of course, how many of the court's existing liberals treat the Constitution already.
But, in the words of Princeton University's professor of jurisprudence Robert George: "Oy vey."
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