Falsehoods Not Intended to Deceive: Popular Sovereignty and Higher Law
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“Any discussion of the political laws of the United States has to begin with the dogma of popular sovereignty,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America.1 But what meaning does the phrase “popular soverignty” hace in practice as opposed to dogma? perhaps it has no pragmatic meaning at all and is merely, as Richard Henry Dana suggested, part of “the metaphysics of popular government.”2 For enlightenment on these questions, one may turn to a series of lectures on “The Living Constitution” delivered by the eminent legal scholar Bruce Ackerman at Harvard Law School in 2006.3