The Constitution in 2020 is a long overdue effort by progressive legal scholars to articulate their vision of the Constitution. Modeled after the Constitution in 2000, a document produced in the Reagan Justice Department that shaped the direction of conservative legal thought, the book is timely and engaging.

It provides a wonderful introduction to progressive legal thought for law students and lay people alike. The chapters are very accessible, and clearer than your typical law review article -- this is definitely a book written for the general public, not for constitutional scholars. And the essays cover the whole gamut of legal issues, from first amendment rights to social and economic rights to citizenship issues.

Moreover, the book pulls together essays from the leading progressive thinkers of our time. If any ideas are likely to shape the progressive legal agenda for years to come, it is those of the contributors to this volume.

This collection of essays will be extremely valuable for people interested in learning more about progressive legal thought.

Nowhere will you find so much progressive-minded legal brainpower accumulated in such a short, readable volume. Many of the top law professors in the country combine here to produce a vision--albeit one in pieces--of the Constitution not subsumed to the Reagan Justice Department's political mission, as ours has been in the past 30 years.

This book's premise is interesting - gather the country's top liberal constitutional law experts and write a book (originally a conference) on how progressives would interpret the Constitution. I consider myself somewhat a progressive budding comparative constitutional law scholar, so the book fit some of my ideological biases. However, I'm much more concerned about good scholarship and sound arguments, and in that respect this book didn't meet my expectations. I found some of the articles too short to really address the topic at hand, and therefore shallow. Others barely concealed their liberal bias, which in turn affected their reasoning by focusing on the goal and not the means. The authors seem to argue their views based on unrealistic notions of what constitutes "progressive."

For example, in my own field of comparative law, Vick Jackson (unarguably the world's leading scholar in comparative constitutional law), argues that U.S. courts should be allowed to refer to foreign law (a proposition with which I agree). In doing so, she rationalizes that progressives should support such a goal because they believe that it is "better to know more than to know less" - as if all conservatives were ignoramuses who disdained knowledge. Knowing more is one thing, but the debate around the use of foreign law concerns HOW that knowledge is used. While some Republican politicians may be ignoramuses, I don't think anybody could accuse John Roberts of that crime. Another of her arguments is that the judiciary is under attack when judges are restricted in their use of foreign law. This ignores the fact that Congress does have a constitutional right to determine what constitutes law and restrict the judiciary's jurisdiction. At most, Jackson's claim constitutes fear-mongering. Rather, the real debate over the use of foreign law is 1) whether U.S. judges can and will ever understand it well enough to apply it (something I frankly don't think will happen since U.S. judges know U.S. law), and 2) whether using foreign law circumvents the democratic process and imposes foreign norms on U.S. citizens. I think there are responsible ways to use foreign law, Jackson's article doesn't address this nuance.

I had expected more from the country's top constitutional law scholars. Maybe they didn't treat these articles seriously and this isn't their best works. Admittedly, I haven't yet read all the articles, just the subjects I'm interested in. Nonetheless, I'd only recommend this book to beginners in this field. If you already are familiar with these issues, this book will be too simplistic.