The Founding Fathers, Pop Culture, and Constitutional Law: Who's Your Daddy?

This book applies innovative interpretive strategies drawn from cultural studies to a perennial question of law and politics: what role do the founding fathers play in legitimizing contemporary judicial review? Rather than offering yet another theory that attempts to legitimize either judicial activism or restraint, the work uses narrative analysis, popular culture, parody, and queer theory to better understand and to reconstitute the traditional relationship between fatherhood and judicial review. Unlike traditional, top-down public law analyses that focus on elite decision making by courts, legislatures, or executives, this volume explores the representation of law and legitimacy in various sites of popular culture. To this end, soap operas, romance novels, tabloid newspapers, reality television, and coming out narratives provide alternative ways to understand the relationship between paternal power and law from the bottom upInfusing traditional studies of judicial review with interpretive strategies drawn from cultural studies promises to provide a perspective about law and social change that differs significantly in form and content from the usual fare in contemporary constitutional discourse. Narrative analysis, popular culture, parody, and queer theory provide the tools to challenge the dominance of elite constitutional interpretation, to appropriate and reformulate the terms of the mainstream debate, and to identify a populist basis upon which to fundamentally alter contemporary constitutional discourse. In this manner, constitutional discourse can begin to be transformed from a dreary parsing of scholarly and juristic argot into a vibrant discussion with points of access and understanding for all.