Professor Aziz Rana (Cornell Law) has reviewed
America's Forgotten Constitutions for the
Texas Law Review. A snippet of that review:
The book is a remarkable feat of excavation, one that offers a much-needed corrective to the conventional histories of American constitutionalism—histories that deemphasize the vitality and importance of popular suspicion toward the federal Constitution. It thus enriches—quite dramatically—the current literature on contemporary constitutional opposition by implicitly placing today’s critics within a long-standing American struggle over the compatibility between existing institutional arrangements and classic principles of popular sovereignty, self-government, and self- authorization.... According to Tsai, the discursive tradition of American constitutionalism has been marked by many simultaneous projects of constitution writing. The Framers may have “unleashed” notions of popular sovereignty and written constitutionalism, but they could hardly control its direction in the hands of ordinary citizens.
The entire review can be found
here.
