The Forest and the Trees in Constitutional Law

Abstract

The pride of selecting a good catchy title, before you have actually sketched out the lecture, is a pride that goeth before a fall. My earliest discovered difficulty - and I imagine you will agree that it is enough difficulty for one effort - has been that while I can see how over-long, over-loving attention to the trees one-by-one might narrow and confine one's view of the forest, I have been unable, after some considerable trial, to see how you can look at the forest without looking at the trees. Some pretty big mistakes, in writing and talking about law, have come from trying to describe the forest without bothering too much about the trees. Have we here to do with a tragic predicament, one of the innumerable facets of original sin? Maybe, but since we have to go on living, despite original sin, I shall live as best I can with this title; I have buttered my bread, now let me lie in it. I hope my title may at least have some of the thing called "heuristic value" - that last refuge of inept titles as of inapt hypotheses.