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Religion and the Practices of Popular Constitutionalism: Sarah Gordon's The Spirit of the Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Joshua Dubler
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Abstract

Sarah Gordon'sThe Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010) details the advent, beginning in the 1940s, of a “new constitutional world” pertaining to the religion clauses. By focusing on case studies, Gordon's narrative history shows the emergence, maturation, and waning of a rich historical moment in which religiously motivated popular constitutionalists had a profound impact on how the Constitution was technically interpreted by the courts. Shifting perspectives from history to ethnography, the essay synthesizes Gordon's stories to yield an anatomy of “religious” popular constitutionalism as it appears in Gordon's book and conjectures at what it might look like if we left court records behind.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , Fall 2011 , pp. 1062 - 1088
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2011 

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