Common-Law Constitutionalism, the Constitutional Common Law, and the Validity of the Individual Mandate

The paper proceeds as follows. Part I describes the constitutional common law and its interactions with common-law constitutionalism. Part II uses the fight over the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its so-called "individual mandate" as a case study to flesh out the core differences between common-law constitutionalism and constitutional common law. Part III argues that a viable justification for a living constitution needs to embrace and defend the courts' essentially political nature, confronting head-on the (skyscraper) originalists' sense that courts should never do politics.