ABSTRACT
Mark Tushnet is one of the leading figures in a movement known as critical legal studies (CLS). CLS has criticized both liberal and conservative approaches to the law and has advocated that constitutional theory be more self-critical and more aware of the social and economic contexts in which law is practiced and interpreted. "Liberal" constitutional theory explains how constitutional restraints on government action can promote liberty in a democracy. Government power would be limited by establishing a system of protected individual rights. Now, the government would be limited not only by the risk of rebellion if it threatened to return people to a situation no better than the state of nature, but also by the individual rights that people reserved to themselves when they created the government. Constitutional scholars would have to confront the puzzle of Felix Frankfurter's character—gracious and generous to his law clerks, mean-spirited when speaking of some of his colleagues—to understand constitutional law itself.
