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The Invisible Constitution (Inalienable Rights) ReviewAh, the Internet, where a stray dog can bark and yap at a king. Tribe is an eminence grise of constitutional law, but this book doesn't reflect very positively on him: it's lazy, repetitive, and haphazardly organized. One suspects that it was an interesting 90 minute lecture before it was padded out to book length.The first 25% of the text is dedicated to telling you how great the book is going to be when you finally get to it. I read it so you don't have to: skip this part.
The middle 50% of the book advances the argument that there are principles and rules generally agreed to be of constitutional force even though they appear nowhere in the actual text of the Constitution. For example, it's widely believed that the First Amendment to the Constitution prevents states from unduly restricting citizens' right to free speech. But the Amendment doesn't really say that; the text applies this restriction only to the U.S. Congress. The extension to the states is implicit.
Unfortunately, that's about as far as the argument goes. Evidently, the existence of an "invisible Constitution" is still something of a disputed issue among constitutional scholars, and in this book Tribe is more concerned with establishing a strong case for the existence of SOME "invisible Constitution" than he is with outlining what that constitutional "dark matter" might contain.
It's hard not to sympathize with his reticence. Any substantive claim about the content of the "invisible Constitution" would probably open more cans of worms than could be comfortably digested in one book. So, he's limited to a handful of airtight examples, none of which seem particularly important or enlightening. After all, they are all "settled constitutional law" that "everyone knows"; that's Tribe's point.
But Laurence, you had me at hello. Are there really people (scholars, no less) who conceive the Constitution to be a perfect document with no loose ends, rough edges, gaps, errors, or ambiguities? Surely some lacunae are to be expected. Does anyone seriously argue otherwise?
Tribe himself seems to be pacing, Tiger-like, behind the bars of his own narrow argument. I had the sense that he longed to break out and sink his teeth into some real meat, such as the construction of privacy rights or the constitutional issues surrounding gay marriage. But alas, that's a feast for another day. No meat for Tribe, or for you.
The final 25% of the book bounds off cheerfully into the realm of performance art. It consists of a series of six metaphorical viewpoints on the Constitution accompanied by full-color sketches in what appears to be magic marker. One by one, the "geometric," "geodesic," "global," "geological," "gravitational," and "gyroscopic" Weltanschauungen take to the stage to dance and play like the instruments in Britten's "A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra." These sections are actually quite interesting, but they clash a bit with Tribe's turgid and professorial prose, and the relationship of the models to the "invisible constitution" isn't entirely clear.
All of these models attempt to intuit "what the Constitution is trying to accomplish," so they're potentially informative regarding unwritten aspects of the document. But their implications go so far beyond the domain of the "invisible Constitution" as Tribe defines it that they don't seem directly relevant to his argument.The Invisible Constitution (Inalienable Rights) Overview
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