ABSTRACT
Recent debates about constitutional interpretation have focused on whether the Constitution has a determinate meaning and on who should be given the power to decide what that meaning is. The focus on the meaning of the Constitution has, according to Robin L. West, eclipsed the discussion of the Constitution's value. Interpretive constitutional debate over the last few decades has centered on two apparently linked questions: whether the Constitution can be given a determinate meaning, and whether the institution of judicial review can be justified within the basic assumptions of liberalism. This difference between progressives and liberals largely accounts for the degree of conflict between their respective analyses and goals. From a purely strategic perspective then, there may simply be no gain and considerable cost from the positivist insistence on separating the constitutional "is" from the constitutional "ought". The Constitution is simply not amenable to the gradualist, piecemeal, liberal reform that positivism facilitates.
