State Constitutional Law: Doing the Right Thing

Abstract

Fifteen years after a prominent American jurist urged a revitalization of state constitutional law, a somewhat less prominent American legal scholar announced that state constitutional law was "a vast wasteland of confusing, conflicting, and essentially unintelligible pronouncements."' In the two years since that pessimistic pronouncement, scholars have debated with renewed fervor the appropriate role that state courts, and state constitutions, should play in our federalist system. My own view is that this debate is a waste of ink.