Politics Book Review Vol. New York University Press, 1998. Reviewed by Mark A. Graber, University of Maryland at College Park.
Fashionable scholars claim to be unfashionable.
To claim otherwise would not be fashionable. In fact, the text is primarily devoted to refining the theory of constitutional argument laid out in the early works of Ronald Dworkin, hardly a radical project. Still, Matters of Principle is written with an unfashionable rigor that make that book far more interesting and worthy of study than recent tomes produced by celebrity constitutional theorists. The answers are internally correct because they can be deduced from the basic moral commitments of American constitutionalism. Whether these answers follow from more universal moral standards, Matters of Principle asserts, is not relevant to legal argument.