The Lasting Legacy of Henry Monaghan

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Posted in: Constitutional Law

Columbia Law Professor Henry P. Monaghan died last week at the age of 90. Although not widely known outside the legal academy, Monaghan was a towering figure within it. In an essay on my blog to accompany this column, I am publishing a personal remembrance of Henry (as I knew him), who was my colleague from 1995 to 2008 and whom I was proud to call a friend. For an overview of his life and career, readers may also wish to read the official remembrance on the Columbia Law School website.

In this column, I shall focus on two of Monaghan’s most influential articles with the aim of showing how his work remains at the center of key constitutional controversies. Although I disagree with important elements of much of what Monaghan wrote, I recognize the power of his scholarship. The Supreme Court could (and almost certainly will) do worse than to learn from Monaghan’s work.

Precedent Versus Originalism

In various writings and speeches, the late Justice Antonin Scalia defended his preferred mode of constitutional interpretation—originalism—against the charge that it could not account for the longstanding and indispensable practice of stare decisis, which gives effect to precedents even if they are wrongly decided, unless there is a truly compelling reason to overrule them. Scalia conceded that giving precedential effect to nonoriginalist or otherwise wrong (by his lights) decisions was inconsistent with originalism, but, he frequently said, honoring precedent is a departure from any theory of constitutional interpretation.

Yet, on close examination, that answer won’t wash, for reasons that Monaghan set out in a powerful article in the 1988 Columbia Law Review: Stare Decisis and Constitutional Adjudication. Monaghan’s starting point was not far from Scalia’s. He too equated the Constitution’s contemporary meaning with its original meaning. But unlike Scalia, Monaghan recognized that the compelling grounds for giving effect even to wrongly decided precedents could not be so easily cabined. In his conclusion, he suggested that the same sorts of considerations that lead to adherence to decisions that misconstrued or disregarded the constitutional text’s original meaning will sometimes appropriately lead to new decisions that depart from the original understanding. To justify stare decisis is thus to substantially undermine originalism.

Especially in the four years since conservatives gained a supermajority, the Roberts Court has not been shy about overturning precedent. Thus, readers may wonder how Monaghan’s insights remain relevant. Today’s self-described originalists need not be troubled by the implications of stare decisis for the authority of the original meaning because they do not adhere to stare decisis. Or so the objection goes.

Yet this perspective is warped by the selection bias of a Supreme Court that takes cases for the purpose of making—or sometimes unmaking—law. The Court does not reexamine the mine run of precedents, many of which might prove to be mistaken by the contemporary Court’s lights if they did. Even after the Court has upset decades-old precedents involving abortion, affirmative action, church-state separation, gun control, voting, and more, the core of constitutional doctrine remains stable. Re-reading Monaghan’s article, its description of the body of constitutional law as rooted in stare decisis even more so than in original meaning remains broadly true. Accordingly, Monaghan’s core point remains salient as a critique of the current Court.

The Constitution’s Many Imperfections

Next, consider Monaghan’s 1981 article in the N.Y.U. Law Review: Our Perfect Constitution. The title was intentionally ironic. Monaghan did not believe the Constitution was perfect. Far from it. His chief contention was that many of his contemporaries, especially in the academy, proceeded on the assumption that it was.

But wait. Did anyone really think the Constitution perfect? After all, the Senate and the Electoral College over-represent rural states. The Constitution exhibits xenophobia in limiting the presidency to natural born citizens. By contrast with many national constitutions of more recent vintage, it does not contain economic, social, and cultural rights, such as housing and education. Surely no serious person believes the Constitution perfect.

Yet Monaghan’s argument was not directed at a straw man. He acknowledged that the targets of his critique did not believe the Constitution to be literally perfect. He used the metaphor of a perfect constitution to describe the following proposition that, he thought, too many of the academic commentators of the era believed: “properly construed, the constitution guarantees against the political order most equality and autonomy values which the commentators think a twentieth century Western liberal democratic government ought to guarantee to its citizens.

More than anything, Our Perfect Constitution was a critique of the enthusiasm for finding rights like contraception and abortion in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Monaghan thought that the scholars he was critiquing must have at least tacitly endorsed the perfection proposition because, construed in accordance with original intent (which he regarded as the touchstone), the Constitution would not yield the rights they found in it.

At a superficial level, the Roberts Court’s conservative supermajority would seem likely to endorse Monaghan’s argument. In overruling Roe v. Wade and in their rhetoric more broadly, the most conservative Justices have heaped particular scorn on the concept of “substantive due process” that was in the bullseye for Monaghan as well. And like Monaghan, they are avowed originalists.

Viewed in broader perspective, however, the Roberts Court has repeated the very sins that so irked Monaghan. His fundamental contention was that neither commentators nor jurists should assume that the Constitution contains just those rights they think a good constitution should contain. Yet that is exactly what the conservatives on the Roberts Court are up to.

Contemporary conservatives object to race-based affirmative action, campaign finance regulation, church-state separation, and gun control. And lo and behold, the Roberts Court has discovered that the Constitution, properly construed, bans race-based affirmative action, much campaign finance regulation, and many gun control measures. Meanwhile, government support for religion that would have been deemed constitutionally forbidden under the Establishment Clause a generation ago is now deemed constitutionally required under the Free Exercise Clause.

To be sure, unlike some of the liberal scholars whom Monaghan criticized for departing from original meaning, the conservatives on the Roberts Court claim fealty to original meaning. But it is only a claim. One can examine the problem at the retail level—as in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent from the Court’s 2023 affirmative action ruling. There, she showed that the Reconstruction Congress that proposed the Fourteenth Amendment surely did not mean thereby to forbid what we now call affirmative action.

One can also make the point at the wholesale level. How likely is it that the original meaning of the First, Second, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments would just happen to coincide perfectly with the ideological druthers of the conservative Justices on the Supreme Court? Such a remarkable coincidence can only be explained by the hypothesis that the Roberts Court supermajority believes—or pretends—that the Constitution is, by their lights, perfect.

With respect to that view and others, the Justices would be well served by the kind of skepticism, honesty, and integrity that characterized the scholarship of Henry Monaghan.

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