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:Seriously?

[funwithBSD]

Of course it is not all thought out!

That is why we have Amendments and the Supreme Court.

The other side of the coin is "living document" where we change the meaning of the words to fit the current times.

I am much more in favor of using the tools given to us to change the Constitution vrs changing it's meaning based on current interpretation.

That "precedence" concept of common law should not apply to the Constitution, which is not "written in stone" but should be difficult to change to avoid repeats of Prohibition. The fact that Prohibition is one of the few "flip flops" in the Constitution shows that it works pretty well.