Where Do Constitutional Modalities Come From?
This article seeks to shed light on one of the most vexing and important problems in constitutional law and theory: how courts interpret the Constitution. Part I of the article begins by recounting the major theories of how courts should interpret the Constitution. Part I then explains why many scholars agree that Philip Bobbitt’s modal approach has best addressed this problem. According to this approach, courts and lawyers use six modalities or methods to interpret the Constitution. Part I concludes by pointing out that Bobbitt’s framework, though helpful, fails in two respects: it fails to explain where these modalities come from and it fails to explain how courts resolve modal conflicts (i.e., cases involving conflicts between two methods of interpreting the Constitution). Here, we come to a central purpose of my article, to fill in these two holes in Bobbitt’s framework. To the best of my knowledge, there is only one other article that takes on this task, an article by Ian Bartrum
