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How can religious liberty be guaranteed in societies where religion pervades everyday life? In The Wheel of Law, Gary Jacobsohn addresses this dilemma by examining the constitutional development of secularism in India within an unprecedented cross-national framework that includes Israel and the United States. He argues that a country’s particular constitutional theory and practice must be understood within its social and political context. The experience of India, where religious life is in profound tension with secular democratic commitment, offers a valuable perspective not only on questions of jurisprudence and political theory arising in countries where religion permeates the fabric of society, but also on the broader task of ensuring religious liberty in constitutional polities.

Jacobsohn argues that a constitution acquires an identity through experience--from a mix of the political aspirations and commitments that express a nation's past and the desire to transcend that past. It is changeable but resistant to its own destruction, and manifests itself in various ways.

The concept of the constitutional revolution has become ubiquitous, but it is applied to all manner of things that are unlike each other in notable ways. It has been generously applied to events in such far-flung places as South Africa, Eastern Europe, Great Britain, India, Canada, Iran, Israel, and the United States. Despite its oxymoronic character, it has the potential to illuminate a much-vexed subject of scholarly inquiry. This article seeks to sharpen conceptual clarity in the way we depict constitutional change, specifically that species of change that entails significant breaks or departures in the workings of the constitutional order.

Much of contemporary constitutional theory underestimates the disharmonies within and disharmonies of constitutional orders. This article examines the dissonance characterizing constitutional identity that is present either in the disjunction between a constitution and the social order within which it functions, or between commitments internal to the document itself. From very early on, American framing of rights has revealed a tension between individual and collective meanings, between rights of persons and rights of the people. This article explores the manifestation of this tension in the evolution of the vexing concept of unenumerated rights. While expressive of the particularities of the American constitutional experience, the story illustrates a broader developmental process that is endemic to the constitutional condition.

Constitutional theorists have had relatively little to say about the identity of what they study. This article addresses this inattention with a philosophical and comparative exploration of the concept of constitutional identity. Without such attention, a major preoccupation of theorists—constitutional change—will continue to be inadequately considered. The argument is advanced that there are attributes of a constitution that allow us to identify it as such, and that there is a dialogical process of identity formation that enables us to determine the specific identity of any given constitution. Representing a mix of aspirations and commitments expressive of a nation's past, constitutional identity also evolves in ongoing political and interpretive activities occurring in courts, legislatures, and other public and private domains. Conceptual possibilities of constitutional identity are, herein, pursued in two constitutional settings—India and Ireland—that highlight its distinctive features.

Ultimately, the goal of constitutional theory is to attain understanding of what it means to be governed by something called a constitution. But the variability in what that something is cannot help but strike even the most casual observer. The differences on display-in text, but more importantly in practice-are mainly attributable to the diversity of social and political life around the world. A sensible reaction to this diversity is to counsel caution in the assimilation of foreign materials into the indigenous constitutional matrix of one's country. The widely held assumption that a constitution is rooted in the way of life of a given society creates an understandable predisposition to resist the temptations of legal transplantation.

How should we understand the connection between a constitution and the social order within which it is situated? Accustomed as we are to identifying constitutionalism with written limits on power, a reasonable response would be to see a predominantly preservative role in the relationship of the first to the second. Thus the institutions that provide order to a society—for example, church, property, family—should be protected from hostile acts threatening to their essential continuity. Moreover, the framing of governing charters is not likely to culminate in a document antagonistic to the very societal structures of stability that provide ballast

Constitutions may be viewed as instruments through which “a nation goes about defining itself.”¹ This is often attempted in preambles—but in other parts as well—wherein all manner of noble intentions are detailed in lofty and inspiring prose. However genuine may have been the intentions of the authors of this kind of language, experience leads us to anticipate a substantial disconnect between word and deed as constitutional development unfolds. But if our response to this nearly certain story line is to abandon the idea that constitutions have significant expressive value, we may be asking language to bear more weight