Pioneers and Police: Archetypes in Constitutional Law Scholarship

Increasingly I am coming to believe that much scholarship in constitutional law, at least as respects commentary about contemporary controversies, may be characterized as the opposition of pioneers and police.

The pioneers see the Constitution as essentially limitless territory meant for exploration. Like the explorers of the Age of Discovery, they believe that what they bring to new shores--their values, aspirations, ideals, and other political and cultural desiderata--is more important than what they find. The role of pioneering scholarship is to articulate these desiderata and attempt to explain how they actually represent an improved--indeed, an ever-improving--topography of the constitutional territory. But part of their role is also to elude and outfox the police, with whom they disagree fundamentally in perspective and disposition.

The police see the Constitution largely as mapped terrain--their terrain. True, a few points on the map are not well known--unsettled outposts to which few people travel. But the general geographical metes and bounds are fixed and have been established for years. The role of policing scholarship is to study and gain expertise about that map. Whatever desiderata the police bring to their office they are disposed to locate in the historical map itself. But their role is also to prevent the pioneers from fulfilling their own projects--to monitor the pioneers' new map-making and to disrupt it at those strategic moments when the police believe it to be improper, unwise, or worse.

Of course there are all kinds of scholarship in constitutional law that are not captured by these archetypes. But when it comes to the large body of scholarship that attempts to intervene in some contemporary controversy, the metaphor holds up tolerably well.