Michigan Law Review Volume 94 Issue 6 1996 Post Constitutionalism Lawrence Lessig Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr Part of the First Amendment Commons, and the Law and Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Lawrence Lessig, Post Constitutionalism, 94 MICH. L. REV. 1422 (1996). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol94/iss6/4 This Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Michigan Law Review at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Michigan Law Review by an authorized editor of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. POST CONSTITUTIONALISM Lawrence Lessig* CONSTITUTIONAL DOMAINS: DEMOCRACY, COMMUNITY, MANAGEMENT. By Robert C. Post. Cambridge: Harvard Univer sity Press. 1995. Pp. ix, 463. $45. INTRODUCTION There's one First Amendment, not a collection of first amend ments. This one First Amendment has just fourteen words touching free speech and freedom of the press, not a code of provisions, each applying differently in separate spheres of social life. These four teen words about speech and the press speak to us directly - with apparent simplicity, limiting the sovereign's powers in ways plainly established. Yet out of this one amendment, out of these fourteen words, out of this simplicity, constitutional law has generated an enormous complexity. No single principle explains its contours; no simple set of ideas describes its reach. There is none of the tidiness of the constitutional text - none of its directness. We live in an age when this complexity has a certain cost.