Deliberation (2006), and has published articles on moral, political, and legal philosophy in journals such as Utilitas, The Journal of Philosophy, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 
Richard A. Epstein is James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law and a director of the John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago. He has been the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution since 2000 and a visiting law professor at New York University Law School since 2007. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Senior Fellow of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago Medical School. He has served as editor of the Journal of Legal Studies and the Journal of Law and Economics, and is the author of numerous books, including Cases and Materials on Torts (9th ed., 2008), Supreme Neglect: How to Revive Constitutional Protection for Private Property (2008), Overdose: How Excessive Government Regulation Stifles Pharmaceutical Innovation (2006), and Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism (2003). 

WHAT ARE CONSTITUTIONS, AND WHAT SHOULD (AND CAN) THEY DO? 

By Larry Alexander. 

1. Introduction. 
A constitution is, as Article VI of the United States Constitution declares, the fundamental law of the land, supreme as a legal matter over any other nonconstitutional law. But that almost banal statement raises a number of theoretically vexed issues. What is law? How is constitutional law to be distinguished from nonconstitutional law? How do morality and moral rights fit into the picture? And what are the implications of the answers to these questions for questions regarding how and by whom constitutions should be interpreted? These are the issues that I shall address. 
I proceed as follows: In Section II, I take up law's principal function of settling controversies over what we are morally obligated to do. In Section III, I relate law's settlement function to the role of constitutional law. In particular, I discuss how constitutional law is distinguished from ordinary law. I also discuss the role of constitutions in establishing basic governmental structures and enforcing certain moral rights. In Section IV, I address the topic of constitutional interpretation, and in Section V the topic of judicial review. Finally, in Section VI, I discuss constitutional change, both change that occurs through a constitution's own rules for amendments and change that is the product of constitutional misinterpretations and revolutions. 
2. Law and the Settlement of Moral Controversy. 
What is the principal function of law -all law? I would argue, and have argued, that law's principal function is to settle what we are obligated to do. More precisely, law's principal function is to settle what our moral obligations are that are properly subject to coercive enforcement. Even if we were all motivated to fulfill our enforceable moral obligations, our disagreements about what those obligations are and what they entail in particular situations would produce huge moral costs