Hegel's Hand

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com The doctrine of the living Constitution has survived Wilson to do great damage. If not the father of the doctrine, he was certainly its most influential expositor. One can see the dead hand of Wilson at work, for example, in popular opinion represented by Thurgood Marshall's perverse bicentennial lecture on the Constitution. In the debate between Lincoln and Douglas on the meaning of the Declaration, Marshall takes the side of Douglas, and, almost unbelievably, that of Roger Taney in the Dred Scott decision. The doctrine also lives on in the jurisprudence of such members of the Supreme Court as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, as Paul Mirengoff and I tried to show in "From Hegel to Wilson to Breyer" (to which I contributed the Wilson quotes and Paul supplied the brainpower). Pestritto persuasively demonstrates the impact of Wilson’s political writings on the development of the administrative state, the state to which Hegel's historicism is organically linked.