VOLUME 125 DECEMBER 2011 NUMBER 2 © 2011 by The Harvard Law Review Association ARTICLES THE ANTICANON Jamal Greene CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................ 380 I. DEFINING THE ANTICANON ............................................................................................ 385 II. DEFENDING THE ANTICANON ........................................................................................ 404 A. The Anticanon’s Errors..................................................................................................... 405 1. Dred Scott v. Sandford ............................................................................................... 406 2. Plessy v. Ferguson ...................................................................................................... 412 3. Lochner v. New York ................................................................................................... 417 4. Korematsu v. United States ....................................................................................... 422 B. A Shadow Anticanon ........................................................................................................ 427 III. RECONSTRUCTING THE ANTICANON ............................................................................ 434 A. Historicism ........................................................................................................................ 435 1. Dred Scott .................................................................................................................... 436 2. Plessy ............................................................................................................................. 442 3. Lochner ......................................................................................................................... 446 4. Korematsu ..................................................................................................................... 456 B. Theory ................................................................................................................................. 460 IV. SHAPING THE ANTICANON ............................................................................................... 466 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................. 474 379 THE ANTICANON Jamal Greene∗ Argument from the “anticanon,” the set of cases whose central propositions all legitimate decisions must refute, has become a persistent but curious feature of American constitutional law. These cases, Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Lochner v. New York, and Korematsu v. United States, are consistently cited in Supreme Court opinions, in constitutional law casebooks, and at confirmation hearings as prime examples of weak constitutional analysis. Upon reflection, however, anticanonical cases do not involve unusually bad reasoning, nor are they uniquely morally repugnant. Rather, these cases are held out as examples for reasons external to conventional constitutional argument. This Article substantiates that claim and explores those reasons. I argue that anticanonical cases achieve their status through historical happenstance, and that subsequent interpretive communities’ use of the anticanon as a rhetorical resource reaffirms that status. That use is enabled by at least three features of anticanonical cases: their incomplete theorization, their amenability to traditional forms of legal argumentation, and their resonance with constitutive ethical propositions that have achieved consensus. I argue that it is vital for law professors in particular to be conscious of the various ways in which the anticanon is used — for example, to dispel dissensus about or sanitize the Constitution — that we may better decide if and when those uses are justified. INTRODUCTION t is a curious feature of American constitutional law that the project Iof identifying the Supreme Court’s worst decisions is not solely a normative one. There is a stock answer to the question, not adduced by anyone’s reflective legal opinion but rather preselected by the broader legal and political culture. We know these cases by their peti- tioners: Dred Scott,1 Plessy,2 Lochner,3 and Korematsu.4 They are the American anticanon. Each case embodies a set of propositions that all legitimate constitutional decisions must be prepared to refute. Togeth- ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– ∗ Associate Professor of Law, Columbia Law School. This Article was enabled by the indis- pensable research assistance of Melissa Lerner, Caitlin Smith, Joanna Wright, Vishal Agraharkar, and Tejas Narechania. For helpful comments and suggestions, I thank Akhil Amar, Nicholas Bagley, David Bernstein, Justin Driver, Ariela Dubler, Robert Ferguson, Katherine Franke, Su- zanne Goldberg, Kent Greenawalt, Don Herzog, Bert Huang, Olati Johnson, Gerard Magliocca, Henry Monaghan, Elora Mukherjee, Anthony O’Rourke, Richard Primus, Judith Resnik, Barak Richman, Dan Rodriguez, Brad Snyder, Stephen Vladeck, Matthew Waxman, the editors of the Harvard Law Review, and participants at workshops at American University Washington College of Law, Columbia Law School, the University of Michigan Law School, and the University of Minnesota Law School. This Article benefited from the generous support of the Madsen Family Faculty Research Fund. 1 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857). 2 Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). 3 Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905). 4 Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944). 380 2011] THE ANTICANON 381 er, they map out the land mines of the American constitutional order, and thereby help to constitute that order: we are what we are not. The anticanon poses a distinct problem for teachers and students of constitutional law. Professional competence in law is established by one’s ability to distinguish strong from weak legal arguments and to predict how judges or other relevant legal actors might decide cases or resolve controversies. Most constitutional law courses identify a set of materials that students may draw from to perform these tasks with re- spect to constitutional cases: constitutional text, structure, and history; judicial and political precedent; and prudential or policy considera- tions.5 It is tempting to say that the anticanon constitutes those deci- sions in which the Court did an especially poor job of navigating and synthesizing these traditional materials, and anticanon Courts are fre- quently accused of just this error.6 As I will show, however, the status of a decision as anticanonical does not depend on the magnitude, or even the presence, of contemporaneous analytic errors by the deciding Court. Rather, it depends on the attitude the constitutional interpre- tive community takes toward the ethical propositions that the decision has come to represent, and the susceptibility of the decision to use as an antiprecedent. These factors might not relate to the decision’s in- ternal logic. A professor could explain anticanonical decisions through the lens of historicism, but she would not then be indoctrinating her students in the norms of professional legal practice; she would not be “doing” constitutional law. A parallel problem exists with respect to the constitutional canon, the set of decisions whose correctness participants in constitutional ar- gument must always assume. Brown v. Board of Education7 is the classic example of such a case: all legitimate constitutional decisions must be consistent with Brown’s rightness, and all credible theories of constitutional interpretation must accommodate the decision.8 And yet Brown was inconsistent with longstanding precedent,9 was in tension with the original expected application of the Fourteenth Amendment,10 was not compelled by the text of the Equal Protection Clause,11 and ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 5 See PHILIP BOBBITT, CONSTITUTIONAL FATE 3–119 (1982); Richard H. Fallon, Jr., A Constructivist Coherence Theory of Constitutional Interpretation, 100 HARV. L. REV. 1189, 1189– 90, 1194–1209 (1987). 6 See sources cited infra note 145. 7 347 U.S. 483 (1954). 8 See Louis Michael Seidman, Brown and Miranda, 80 CALIF. L. REV. 673, 675 (1992). 9 See Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927); Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). 10 Michael J. Klarman, Brown, Originalism, and Constitutional Theory: A Response to Profes- sor McConnell, 81 VA. L. REV. 1881, 1884–1914 (1995). 11 See Brown, 347 U.S. at 492 (referring to “findings below that the Negro and white schools involved have been equalized, or are being equalized, with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifi- cations and salaries of teachers, and other ‘tangible’ factors”). 382 HARVARD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 125:379 has required a Herculean effort — one well beyond the Court’s compe- tence — to implement comprehensively.12 Justifying Brown in the face of all that bad news requires reaching somewhat beyond the tradition- al tools of constitutional argument. Still, constitutional law professors persevere, and few these days find Brown a hard sell. I will argue, though, that the presence of anticanonical decisions in textbooks, in syllabi, and as decisional precedents poses a more acute problem for constitutional lawyers. All but the stingiest formalist ac- cept that constitutional law is not simply constructed