2023: First Place, Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice
Prisoner of the Book: The Living Constitution and Borges’ Book of Sand
by Ana Van Liedekerke
Winner, Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice (2023)
Abstract:
This paper uses Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Book of Sand (1975) to examine the aversion of Constitutional originalists in the United States to the idea of the Constitution as a living text. Contrasting Justice Antonin Scalia’s rhetoric of magic as used to denounce the “living Constitution” with Justice William J. Brennan’s conception of an originalist Constitution as a ghost terrorizing the present, the paper asks what vision of the text these metaphors construct, and how they make the Constitution of the other into a “nightmarish” object.
Keywords: Law and literature, living Constitution, Originalism, Constitutional theory, (Constitutional) rhetoric.
About the author:
Ana Van Liedekerke is a PhD student at the Institute of Philosophy at KU Leuven in Belgium. Ana studies the intersection of narratology and constitutional theory. Her dissertation, funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders, investigates the textual agency of constitutions, emphasizing the power of texts to constitute democratic communities. She earned a Masters of Philosophy and Western Literature at KU Leuven, and she has held visiting positions at King’s College London, Stellenbosch University, and Yale University.