As his book’s subtitle indicates, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, maintains that America’s survival is “threatened” by the very charter under which the country has been governed (with occasional amendments) for 236 years. In No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, Chemerinsky radicalizes the thesis of his previous anti-originalism manifesto. There, he had dismissed the enterprise of interpreting the Constitution according to the text’s original meaning, rather than on the basis of judges’ current estimation of the dictates of justice, as “a dangerous fallacy.”
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