The Unbearable Lightness of Tea Leaves: Constitutional Political Economy in Court

Frank Michelman offers a critical discussion of the sense—if any—in which Fishkin and Forbath’s argument is a constitutional argument. He carefully teases out some different senses in which such an argument makes claims about the Constitution in court. He asks whether Fishkin and Forbath are essentially opening the door to an unraveling of the New Deal settlement, and a return of what Holmes called “economic theory” to the work of the courts. And finally, he questions why the argument contains much talk of the Constitution, but relatively little talk of constitutional rights.