Learning About Constitutional Law With Star Wars

An anonymous reader writes: In an upcoming paper (PDF) for the Michigan Law Review, scholar Cass Sunstein draws on Star Wars to make a couple key points about how constitutional law evolves. He writes, "Human beings often see coherence and planned design when neither exists. This is so in movies, literature, history, economics, and psychoanalysis—and constitutional law. Contrary to the repeated claims of George Lucas, its principal author, the Star Wars series was hardly planned in advance; it involved a great deal of improvisation and surprise, even to Lucas himself. Serendipity and happenstance, sometimes in the forms of eruptions of new thinking, play a pervasive and overlooked role in the creative imagination, certainly in single-authored works, and even more in multi-authored ones extending over time. ... The misdescription appears to respond to a serious human need for sense-making and pattern-finding, but it is a significant obstacle to understanding and critical reflection. Whether Jedi or Sith, many authors of constitutional law are a lot like the author of Star Wars, disguising the essential nature of their own creative processes."

Comments

Re:Don't bring up that "e" word

[Anonymous Coward]

The 17th Amendment was a response to some seriously corrupt shenanigans, but I'm not sure it was the right response.
The worst things that have happened to our federal system have come through the 14th, 16th, and 17th Amendments.
Individual Americans were never supposed to have a direct relationship with the Federal government; it was formed as a union of states, not of people.
I don't know how to fix this, but I think it should be fixed.

Re:What?

[funwithBSD]

Villainized, sure.

But the hard facts are Communists make the Nazi's look like punters.

Mao: 70 Million
Pol Pot: 3 Million
North Korea: 1.5 Million
Stalin/Russia: 61 Million

Nazi's? 20 million in the various Concentration Camps and starvation campaigns. They do get "points" for being so efficient and doing it in such a short time I guess.