''Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution'' is a 2005 book by

United States Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...

Justice

Stephen Breyer Stephen Gerald Breyer ( ; born August 15, 1938) is a retired American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994 until his retirement in 2022. He was nominated by President Bill Clinton, and rep ...

. The general theme of the book is that Supreme Court justices should, when dealing with

constitutional A constitution is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organisation or other type of entity and commonly determine how that entity is to be governed. When these prin ...

issues, keep "active liberty" in mind, which Justice Breyer defines as the right of the citizenry of the country to participate in government. Breyer's thesis is commonly viewed as a liberal response to

originalism In the context of United States law, originalism is a theory of constitutional interpretation that asserts that all statements in the Constitution must be interpreted based on the original understanding "at the time it was adopted". This conc ...

, a view espoused by

Justice Antonin Scalia Antonin Gregory Scalia (; March 11, 1936 – February 13, 2016) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectua ...

Background

''Active Liberty'' is based on the Tanner Lectures on Human Values that Breyer delivered at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...

in November 2004.

Reception

In a review of ''Active Liberty'', Pierre Rosanvallon said that Breyer's arguments are convincing but they would be benefit from being "more firmly grounded if he had also touched on the Constitution's textual vagueness". Richard A. Posner of the

University of Chicago Law School The University of Chicago Law School is the law school of the University of Chicago, a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. It is consistently ranked among the best and most prestigious law schools in the world, and has many dis ...

negatively reviewed the book, stating that, despite the merits of the book as a short and accessible but influential contribution to constitutional debate, is it not convincing to him.

References

External links

Tanner Lecture 2004
2005 non-fiction books Works by Stephen Breyer Books written by justices of the United States Supreme Court {{US-poli-book-stub