Planting living constitutionalism seeds in the federal judiciary

President-elect Obama has named Lisa Brown has his Staff Secretary. A lawyer who served as counsel to Vice President Gore in the late 1990s, Ms. Brown was most recently the Executive Director of the American Constitution Society.

ACS is a non-partisan educational organization that promotes a progressive view of the U.S. Constitution and the fundamental values it expresses. Although it shouldn't be described in simple terms of "not the Federalist Society," in truth it was formed to produce scholarship opposed to that produced by professors and judges writing from a constitutional originalist perspective. ACS seeks to challenge their conclusions at conferences and in the academy as flawed constitutional arguments. ACS's ultimate goal, as I see it, is two-fold: first, to maintain living constitutionalism scholarship in law school classrooms; and second, to train law students to get to be like-minded judges, and have them appointed as federal judges.

It's not a conspiracy; it's a long-term plan from people who sincerely believe that conservative and libertarian interpretation of the Constitution is deeply flawed from its initial precepts and has no place in our Republic. It's a plan to plant living constitutionalism seeds in the federal judiciary.

In the short term, it means we won't have to hear anyone suggest Robert Bork for the Supreme Court again.

On a related note, dig the Constitutional Accountability Center and its Text & History Blog.