Summary :
In his 1928 book The Paradoxes of Legal Science, then-judge, and later Supreme Court justice, Benjamin Cardozo wrote that rather than defining “due process of law”—a critical concept in constitutional law—courts “leave it to be ‘pricked out’ by a process of inclusion and exclusion in individual cases. . . . It is all very well to go on pricking the lines,” he observed, “but the time must come when we shall do prudently to look them over, and see whether they make a pattern or a medley of scraps and patches.” This book originated as a series of columns in Boston Review written between 2010 and 2013. Some of the columns addressed individual cases then pending before or recently decided by the Supreme Court.Others covered broader questions of interpretive method or the Court’s role as an institution. But taken together, they go beyond pricking the lines to lay out a coherent approach to thinking about constitutional law and the Court’s role in our democracy