Democracy and Legal Change

Melissa Schwartzberg is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, New York. She received a PhD in politics from New York University in 2002 and an AB from Washington University in St Louis in classics and political science in 1996. From 2002 through 2006, she was Assistant Professor of Political Science at the George Washington University, Washington DC. She has published articles on law and political theory in journals including the American Political Science Review and Political Studies.

"This important book marks the emergence of a powerful new voice in democratic theory. In Democracy and Legal Change Melissa Schwartzberg celebrates the ‘pragmatic experimentalism’ embodied in democratic politics with its attendant virtues - a capacity for legal and political innovation, a self-conscious fallibilism, an embrace of pluralism, and a commitment to deliberative processes. She addresses the recurrent anxieties that this experimentalism generates and warns us to resist the resulting temptation to inoculate or immunize laws from democratic revision. The great political danger, Schwartzberg insists, resides not in our democratic practices and institutions, but in the predictable efforts of relatively advantaged political individuals or groups to manipulate our anxieties to their own advantage, thereby subverting political commitments we hold dear. This is a robust defense of democratic politics for perilous times." James Johnson, University of Rochester

• 1. Introduction: explaining legal change and entrenchment; 2. Innovation and democracy: legal change in ancient Athens; 3. Law reform in seventeenth-century England; 4. Fallibility and foundations in the American constitution; 5. Protecting democracy and dignity in post-war Germany; 6. Conclusion: defending democracy against entrenchment.