The Constitution as Political Structure

Over the last forty years both modern constitutional scholarship and Supreme Court constitutional doctrine have concentrated on the analysis of rights, while issues of constitutional law related to the structure of government have been largely ignored. The irony of this interpretive emphasis is that the Constitution itself contains relatively little dealing with rights. Rather, it is primarily a blueprint for the establishment of a complex form of federal-democratic structure. This work is the only scholarly attempt to emphasize the central role served by the structural portions of the Constitution. Redish argues that these structural values were designed to provide the foundation in which our rights-based system may flourish, and that judicial abandonment of these structural values threatens the very basis of American political theory.