One of my old law professors, Mike Klarman, gave a lecture at Johns Hopkins a couple of weeks ago, “A Skeptical View of Constitution Worship.” Here’s the text.

Klarman’s view is that the Constitution doesn’t matter as much in our political values as we think it does. He makes four points:

(1) The Framers’ constitution, to a large degree, represented values we should abhor or at least reject today.

(2) There are parts of the Constitution with which we are still stuck today even though we would never freely choose them and they are impossible to defend based on contemporary values.

(3) For the most part, the Constitution is irrelevant to the current political design of our nation.

(4) The rights protections we do enjoy today, the importance of which I do not minimize, are mostly a function of political and social mores, which have dramatically evolved over time and owe relatively little to courts using the Constitution to protect them.

Here is Klarman’s thesis in a nutshell:

I wouldn’t say the Court never stands up for unpopular rights and unpopular groups, but it rarely does so, and never in the face of overwhelming public opposition.

The main reason for this is that the Justices are too much a part of contemporary culture and the present historical moment to even imagine taking positions contrary to that of dominant public opinion.

The whole thing is worth reading, if you’re interested.